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[♪♪] [Understanding Adobe Photoshop]
[♪♪] [Video #64 - Photo Effects]
Hi. My name is Rich Harrington,
and welcome to this edition of Understanding Adobe Photoshop.
Today we're going to combine a technology that isn't normally used for its intended purpose.
We're going to use layer styles or layer effects to affect photos.
It's a pretty cool technique that lets you quickly come up with a look for an image.
Here's how it works.
I've got a photo here, and the first step is to actually turn it into a layer,
so I need to double click and give it a name.
Once I'm happy with that, I can go ahead and call up the Styles panel.
There's lots of styles, and by default they do things like make buttons or text effects,
and I can clear that out.
You wouldn't normally think of them as being useful for photos.
However, if you click the submenu here,
you'll see that there is a category called Image Effects and Photographic Effects.
Let's open that up and try some of these out.
You see that it's modifying the image here with a nice vignette, a circular vignette.
What's really happening there is a gradient overlay on top.
That's an instant way to get a vignette without having to do any masking or deleting.
And we'll try some of these other ones out.
You see here we've got nice color effects and sepia tones
and some pretty cool things.
Some of these are a little abrupt for my liking, but I do like this one here, the faded photo.
If you want to try some other ones out, you can go ahead and click here
and try the Photographic Effects category
and you'll see some more to choose from.
That's a really nice sort of negative image or a good sepia tone,
and these are all pretty useful, some more than others, but you'll find them in here.
I've made my own set.
I want to show you how to load it, and then I'll teach you how we did it.
So if I click here, I could choose Load Styles
and navigate out to a folder that contains image styles.
Here we go. Photo Styles. Click OK.
Those get added. There they are.
And you see here we can try them out.
Lots of different options for creating, and I really like using this sort of burnt edge border.
There are some with textures in them and lots to choose from.
See?
So let's see how this works.
I'll go ahead and remove it and start from scratch.
I often use photographic textures in my photo styles,
so first thing is is find one, and you can open this up and choose Edit, Define Pattern.
There's lots of places to find patterns.
I've included some on the DVD-ROM with the book, Understanding Adobe Photoshop CS5.
You can also look at websites like TextureKing
or just do a search for free high resolution textures to locate some.
I'll give this a name. I'm going to call this Rough Canvas.
And click OK.
That is now loaded temporarily as a texture.
Let's come on over to the image here and start to add some layer styles.
We'll click the little FX, and I'll start with the texture overlay.
There it is, Pattern Overlay.
If I click this, we'll see there's the one I last used.
That works well. Let's change its blend mode to something like Soft Light.
That's nice and gentle, creating sort of a paper texture.
We can move that around.
We can scale it up or down as we see fit.
I kind of like that.
Or let's try something like luminosity.
Little bit rough. We'll soften that out with Screen.
And we just try these different modes until we find one we like.
I think Soft Light is a good one.
We can then start to add other combinations here.
I could do a gradient overlay, for example, and let's choose the black to white.
We'll set that to radial and we'll reverse it and just play with the scale.
That looks good.
And put it to Multiply mode. We'll drop out the whites, giving us a nice vignette effect.
Let's lower the opacity down a bit, and we get a darkening at the edges that works well.
If I want to, I could toss in a color overlay or any other sort of information.
I can go with a little bit of satin here to get some displacement
or just a general tint.
Let's go ahead and go with a nice sort of cool blue
and set that to Hue mode
or Color mode, which is a little more intense, but I think Hue is nicer
and we'll back off the opacity a bit.
So what I've come up with is this nice sort of icy, aged look,
and it works on this image or any other.
In order to store that, I need to come over here to the Styles panel
and just click in an empty swatch, and I can give that a name.
I'll call that Ice Blue.
And if I want to apply that to another image, piece of cake.
Let's just open up a recent file,
make sure it's a layer,
and click the Layer Style button.
There we have it. It's applied.
So very useful, very easy, and remember, you can quickly click through to different looks
to try them out.
These are a very fast way to audition different styles of color correction and color grading.
What I really like is how easy this is to unify a bunch of pictures.
So if you need to put a slideshow together really quick
or maybe you're doing a title sequence or something for a DVD menu,
this is a great, simple way to pull that off.
For Understanding Adobe Photoshop CS5, my name is Rich Harrington.
[♪♪] [For more resources visit: www.richardharringtonblog.com]
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