Add A Photo Feeling To Your Images

This is a quick tutorial on how to add a Polaroid effect to your photos, we’ll start first by choosing an image for our project , You can use any picture you want . I chose to use an image I found in a quick search on Google images.

Step 1 : GETTING THE IMAGE READY

Browse to the image you want to use and open it in Photoshop. Now using the Rectangular Marque tool drag a selection around the image excluding some areas that might be unnecessary and try and let the selection have a ratio of 3:4 as much as possible , its important for the photo feeling of your image.

Now press Ctrl + J to create a new layer from the selection you made. Name the New layer “Photo” , Now go to the layer named background , press D on your keyboard to set the default foreground and background colors as Black and White and then press Ctrl + backspace to fill the layer with the background color (White)

STEP TWO : ADDING THE EFFECTS

Now click on the layer named “Photo” and double click at the far right end of the layer selected to open the layer style window , if that doesn’t work go to the Layer menu (Next to File , Edit , Image , etc … ) and choose layer style > stroke . Set the color of the stroke to white and the size to about 10 and choose the position as inside rather than outside or center. The changes will not be visible at first since you have a white background.

Go again to Layer style like we did in the previous step and now choose Drop Shadow , Keep the settings intact and raise the size to about 10 and the opacity to about 25 and click OK

STEP THREE : POSITIONING

Now press Ctrl + T to transform the layer a bit and position it just perfectly , this is all up to you at this stage , personally I just added a little rotation and reduced its size a bit and below you can see the final product

That’s it , a nice photo feeling to your digital images in a few quick steps and it won’t even take you more than a minute , you can use this to create all sorts of collages on your computer and maybe to create a cool looking wallpaper for your laptop !!

B For Brush Tool (Part 2)

Llast post I told you about some of the options you might find useful using the brush tool and today we will continue by talking a little bit about Scattering and Shape Dynamics among other options and we will learn how to create a brush

Lets start by pressing B on the keyboard to select the brush tool then open the Brushes palette by clicking on the icon indicated in the image below

When the Brushes palette opens you’ll see a list of different options you can use to further customize the behavior of your brushes , my two favorites are Scattering and Shape Dynamics

1-Scattering allows you to control and set the scattering of your brush using a number of options like Scatter , Scatter count and count jitter

2- Shape Dynamics allows you to control pen pressure for the brush tip and the rotation using Angle jitter among other options as well

3- Other Options include settings for Color Dynamics Texture, air Brush and other options as well, Mess around with the options and fiddle with the setting , experiment a little and you’ll find that a few tweaks can make you use brushes more efficiently

CREATING BRUSHES

We’ll start with something simple just to give you an idea , lets start by opening a new document , press Ctrl+N on your keyboard to open a new document 5x5 pixels with transparent background as shown below

Now zoom in till you can clearly see a square with 25 squares , it will be easier for us to draw now , select the pencil tool by clicking and holding the brush tool in the tools menu

Now using the pencil tool draw two lines passing through the centre (One horizontal and one vertical) to form a cross, make sure the size of tip if the pencil is only 1 px (Most of what applies to the brush applies to the pencil as well)

Now to create a brush from the shape we drew, Go Edit > Define Brush Preset , in the new window that pops up you can change the name of your brush , of course you’ll notice that the size of the brush is shown as 5px , this is because we chose the size of our document as 5 x 5 px …. Rename your brush “cross” and press OK

You have just created your first brush now lets go find it and use it , open a new document of any size , say 100 x 100 px and choose the Brush tool and then change the brush tape to the brush you just created , if you are finding it hard to find , switch to text only view and look for it by name , mess with it a bit , play with scattering options and shape dynamics

Photoshop is an exciting program that always has a new thing to teach you so you should always experiment and be curious , I hope this post was as helpful as I hoped it to be and I will be continuing this series next week as we see what the letter C on your keyboard does in Photoshop!!

One final note is something I have learned writing this post is that B selects any of the tools you have selected in the brush option and that includes wither of the pencil tool , the Brush tool or the color replacement tool , whatever you selected last will be selected again when you press B