Photoshop Tutorial: 2013

Freebie: 12 Large Bokeh Brushes

If you liked our Lomo Light Leaks, then you'll love these large bokeh brushes by SparkleStock. They make it easy for you to add light-leak-like bokeh to your photos and come in both 5000px Photoshop brushes and JPEG images for your convenience. Try them out!

Bokeh Brush Preview

There are 12 color bokeh brushes. If you’re a SparkleStock member, you can pick from 18 bokeh brushes! They come in multiple sizes; 625, 1250, 2500, and 5000 pixels. In addition, you get them in pre-colored JPEG images to save you time. Drag and drop them into your document then set the blending mode to Screen or Linear Dodge – it’s that easy!3

We recommend using these bokeh brushes with photos that have some sort of retro photo effect applied. Here are some photo effect tutorials we recommend:

These bokeh brushes work great with portraits. Paint with your brush and layer set to linear dodge using different colors. Combine it with some color lookup filters (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Lookup) to give it a photo retro effect. You can combine the Futurstic Bleak and Film Stock color lookups for the best results.

by. David Yosia

Quick Tip: Erase Backgrounds Quickly With The Background Eraser Tool

Many people use complicated methods to erase backgrounds when they can do it much easier with the Background Eraser tool. It creates great results with its automatic edge detection and selection feathering. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the background eraser tool to erase the sky and replace it with another from a set of realistic sky gradients.
clip_image003

Step 1: Chose an image to work with

Open a photo that you want to extract a background from in Photoshop. In this tutorial I’m going to use a scene of two trees and a blue sky as background, but you can use the same techniques applied here to a variety of images and situations.

Step 2: How the tool works

Even though the name says “Background” eraser, this tool can actually be used to erase a lot more than that, and it works more as a “Color” eraser rather than a “Background” eraser. So to start off let’s select the tool. You can use the shortcut Shift+E to cycle through the erasers panel, or you can click on its button on the left panel.

After selecting it, the options on your top panel will change, and your mouse will become a circle with a crosshair in the middle. The crosshair area is where we’re going to select the color that we want to erase, and everything else inside that circle that has that color will be erased. Right click anywhere in your image to open up the brush options for that tool.

Remember to always keep the hardness high because soft edges may leave background artifacts behind. Change the size of the brush as needed, and keep the spacing fairly low (1~50%) so it creates a smoothcontinually erasing line when you are using the tool.

In the top panel, chose the Sampling Once option, so we will only sample the color once and erase a big part of the image with it. Keep the Limits at Contiguous and the Tolerance at 50% for now.

Step 3: Start erasing

Click in a random part of the sky, hold the left mouse button, and drag the mouse around to erase.

As you can see in the image above, we are not erasing the background between the leafs and branches, but that leads us to the “Limits” option of the Background Eraser Tool. Go to the top panel and change the Limit from Contiguous to Discontiguous. Now do the same thing we did before and let’s see what will be the result.

As you can see, the Discontiguous option allow us to erase the background even in isolated areas, like in between the branches and leafs of our tree.

Step 4: A few more options

In my case, when I painted with the Tolerance at 50% (default), the ending result was pretty good, but don’t worry if something like this happens to you:

If something like that does happen to you, it means that the color from the background is too similar to your subject, so you have to lower your Tolerance levels. If the color from the background is quite different from your subject (like in my case) you can set the Tolerance to higher levels to obtain better results. With the right Tolerance level you should get results like this:

Step 5: More options!

If you tried changing the Tolerance levels but are still getting problems with the Background Eraser Tool erasing your subject, turn on the Protect Foreground Color option.

This allows you to sample a foreground color (hold Alt/Opt to sample a color from your image) that Photoshop will not erase when using the Background Eraser Tool. Here’s an example of how this option works:

Step 6: Different Background colors

After you used the Background Eraser Tool in your whole image for one color, you should have something like this:

Even though my background was pretty much all blue, it has different tones of blue, and even some whites in it. To deal with that, you just have to sample a new color and repeat the process all over. You could also select the “Sampling Continous” option in the top panel:

But I don’t recommend that because if you come too close to your subject (in this case the trees) you may sample their color by accident and end up erasing parts of the image that you didn’t wanted to erase. So just aim the crosshair of our mouse into another color and repeat the same process until our image is fully cleared.

Step 7: Final step

After erasing the background you have two choices, you can either select the subject you just extracted and use it in a photo

manipulation project, or you could replace the background you just deleted with something new to create a different image (that’s what we’re going to do). Download

the sky gradient pack and chose the best one for your image. I chose to replace my old background with this blue sky:

And this is the result:

Final Results

by. David Yosia

Quick Tip: Easily Create Seamless Photo Textures You can Tile

Wonder how people create those tileable photo textures? Whether you're using it to create desktop wallpapers or website backgrounds, you'll find it easy to do with this Photoshop tutorial. Read this tutorial to learn how you can manipulate your photo to make it seamless/tileable.

Metal Panel Texture

Step 1

Open a photo that you want to turn into a texture. The easiest photos to use are the ones with the least lines, lens distortion, tilt, and differentiating colors. Here’s the photo that we’ll be using for this tutorial.Download the image and use it to follow this tutorial.

Step 2

First, we need to get rid of the barrel distortion and vignette. You can do this quickly and easily with the Lens Correction tool (Filter > Lens Correction). Your photo should have its original camera metadata for this to work its best. In the Lens Correction tool, Photoshop should auto-detect the settings and apply the correction for you. If it doesn’t work out, go into the Custom tab and adjust the settings manually.

Here’s our image with the lens correction applied. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough – we can fix the settings later.

Step 3

If your texture has lines that stretches from one side to the other, like the vertical lines in our photo, you’ll need to use the Adaptive Wide Angle filter to align them so that they are perfectly horizontal/vertical. In the dropdown menu, select Perspective as the correction method. While holding down the Shift key, draw correction lines over any lines in the photos. Ensure that they match perfectly. Click OK when you’re done.

Step 4

Select the Crop tool. In the options bar, checkmark the “Delete Cropped Pixels” option.

Crop the transparent areas out of the frame.

Step 5

Go to Image > Canvas Size. Set the width and height to 200 percent, anchor to top-right, then click OK.

You should now have a lot of area to work with. We’ll be extending the texture to cover these areas which will make your image dimensions around 4x larger.

Step 6

Duplicate the layer (Ctrl/Cmd+J) then go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. Use the Move tool to move the image to the top-right corner.

Merge the layers (Ctrl/Cmd+E) then duplicate the merged layers (Ctrl/Cmd+J). With the new layer selected, go to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical. Use the Move tool to move the image to the bottom edge. Press Ctrl/Cmd+E to merge the two layers.

by.David Yosia

How to Retouch and Airbrush Skin in Photoshop

Learn how to retouch skin professionally in Photoshop without making it look fake or blurry. In this Photoshop tutorial, you will learn how to reduce wrinkles and blemishes, airbrush skin naturally, dodge and burn, and more using all non-destructive editing techniques. Once you learn this, you can make everything from natural skin improvements to glamorous airbrushed skin used in advertising. To follow this tutorial, you’ll need Photoshop CS2 or newer.