Photoshop: Using Defringe

Here’s a quick tip which is very useful for those occasions when you want to make a fairly complicated selection in Photoshop.

This came about when an estate agent client of mine found it necessary to replace all of his skies with a clear blue sky but was having trouble selecting branches and foliage. Here’s the original image:

1. First go to Select> Color Range… and click inside the sky to select it. Adjust the fuzziness slider to suit your needs.

2. Now open your replacement sky picture and past it into the document. I’ve used this image:

3. This will create a new layer. Unlock the background layer and move it on top of the pasted in layer. At the moment, the selection is not looking pretty. This is where Defringing the layer can help. This command can be found in Layer> Matting> Defringe... Make sure nothing is selected and then adjust the settings to suit your needs. You may have to undo a couple of times to get things right. Here's before defringing:

4.  And here’s the after:

It's still far from perfect but here's where a bit of jiggery-pokery comes in handy. Select the layer (command or control-click the layer thumbnail) and then use the eyedropper tool to sample a colour from the branches. Now get yourself a brush, set the opacity to about 50%, reduce the hardness and begin painting over the rough areas. Only the selected branches will be affected.

5. And here’s the end result. If you didn't know that the sky had been changed you would be hard-pressed to spot it.

InDesign: Nested Style Sheets

Hello everyone on this lovely Summer’s day. This evening, in a wine-soaked stupor,  I’m going to be taking a look at one of InDesign’s most powerful and juiciest features. Nested styles appeared back in InDesign CS2 and I, for one, was excited by the possibilities of being able to nominate character styles to appear in any order or position in a paragraph. But then that's the kind of guy I am...

The following exercise is a real-world problem that I had to find a solution to a couple of years ago while working for a fairly big-name magazine in London. What the designers wanted was to have a paragraph style that began and ended with one line of a particular character style. At the time we were using QuarkXpress (sshhhssshhh!), which meant that we were had no choice but to manually apply character styles in a kind of hit-and-miss manner until we achieved the results we wanted. It worked – after a fashion – but InDesign, naturally, presents the more elegant solution. Read on...

1. For this exercise I’ve created a very simple A4 page with a two-column grid.



2. The next step is to create an equally basic body copy style. In this case I’ve named it ‘body copy’. No prizes for originality.



3. Now create a character style. In this case I’ve called it ‘ Red Intro’. It’s a very simple 12pt Arial Black, coloured red.



4. Next you have to create another character style that is identical to the ‘Body copy’ paragraph style. I’ve unimaginatively named it ‘body copy’. I hope that this isn’t confusing you.



5. Now we create a nested style. Alt-click the new button in the paragraph styles palette and head over to the Drop caps and nested styles pane. What I’ve basically created here is a ‘Red Intro’ sandwich.

In other words I have the ‘Red Intro’ character style applied to the next End Nested Style character; this is followed by the body copy character style applied to the next anything (it really doesn’t matter what you apply this to because you’re not really going to apply it, if you see what I mean). Finally, I have the ‘ Red Intro’ character style applied to another End Nested Style character.



6. The end result of this is that once you’ve applied the character style you only need to go to the Type menu and choose Type> Insert Special Character> Other> End Nested Style Here where you want the first ‘Red Intro’ style to end. And then you choose the same command at the place you want the Body Copy Style to end. And if you’ve done it correctly, this is what you get:

Illustrator: Dark Side Of The Moon

Hello out there.

Once again I’m going to have to offer my most sincere apologies for the somewhat sporadic nature of these little tutorials of ine. It’s probably not much of an excuse but I really have been very, very busy lately.

What with family business and far too much work, I’ve been finding it very hard to spare the time to maintain this blog. But I promise, I really do promise, that I’m going to try and men my ways. Watch this space!

Apart from that I’d like to thank all the people who continue to tune in. We’ve now reached the 10,000 hit mark. Which I think is amazing given the short amount of time that I’ve been running this blog.

For today’s exercise I’m going to be doing another album cover. So many people seemed to enjoy my recreation of Queen’s Jazz album cover that I’m going to attempt the granddaddy of them all: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. This is a simple enough looking design – a triangle with a rainbow running through it. However, if you’re going to be able to do it correctly there is no option but to do a little trickery with opacity masks and blends.

So here we go... Have fun – and as always your comments are very welcome.

1. We’re going to have to be pretty organised with this. For this reason we’re going to create two layers – one for the Black background and one for the prism. So begin by creating an A4 document and selecting the Rectangle Tool. Single-click on the artboard and create a square that is 375pt x 375pt. Use the Align Palette to align the object to the centre of the artboard (as you know I always do). Double click Layer 1 and call it ‘Background’. Now lock this layer.



2. Create a new layer and call it Working Layer. Select the Polygon tool and single-click on the artboard. Create a three sided polygon (i.e. a prism) with a radius of 68.5. Position this prism at 301 pt on the X axis and 416 pt on the Y axis (you can use the control panel or the Transform palette to do this). Fill the Prism with white and remove the stroke.


3. What we have to do next is actually quite complex, but also rather simple. We need to have the prism fading from white to turquoise to transparent. We achieve this by first of all copying the prism (this is most important that you do this, I can’t emphasise this enough) then heading over to the Transparency palette and from the palette menu selecting Show Options and then Make Opacity Mask. Now select the second of the two squares that appear in the Transparency palette (the black one) and hit Apple-F (Paste in Front). You are now working on the opacity mask rather than the object itself.

4. Now select Effect> Stylize> Feather... Turn on Preview and use the up and down arrows to feather the prism something like this:


5. In the Transparency palette turn off Clip and invert the mask. Now go to the Appearance palette and double-click on ‘Feather’. Now adjust the feathering so that it looks like this:


6. In the Transparency palette select the first of the two squares to exit from opacity mask mode. We’re starting to get there now. In the Layers palette expand the Working Layer and make a copy of the the prism by dragging the sub-layer on to the New button. In the Tools palette make sure that the Fill is in the foreground and then choose or create a turquoise colour from the Swatches palette. You now have two prisms, one white and one turquoise. The turquoise prism is sitting bang on top of the white prism.




7. We now have to create the illusion that the white of the underlying prism is fading into the turquoise prism. To do this go to Effect> Stylize> Feather and feather the turquoise prism so that it looks like this:



8. Now go back to the transparency palette and select the second of the two square to re-enter opacity mask mode. Go to the Appearance palette and once again double-click on Feather and and then adjust the feathering of the opacity mask so that it looks like this:



9. We have now achieved the effect of white fading into turquoise and then into transparent; and we couldn’t have done it without opacity masks. Exit the Opacity mask by clicking on the first of the two squares in the Transparency palette, That’s the hard part over. Phew!

10. Now lock the Working Layer and create a new layer called Rainbow. Hit Apple-F to paste in front the prism that you created ages ago (remember I said that it was important that you copied the prism?). Use the Line tool to draw two lines of approximately this size and location. Make sure that both lines generously overlap bothe prism and the edge of the black background.



11.Now draw yourself a rectangle that overlaps the two lines, as below:



12. Select the blend tool and – one at a time – click on the two lines. You’ll get a blend that forms and looks something like this:



13. Double click on the Blend tool and set the spacing to 5 specified steps. Your rainbow will now look like this:



14. Select the rainbow blend and go to Object> Blend> Expand. Now Bring out the Pathfinder Palette and select the white prism, the blend and the small rectangle and hit Divide.

15. If you’ve done this correctly the end result will look like this:



16. Ungroup the divided objects, delete the bits you don’t want and then fill the rainbow segments with the colours of your choice. Like this:



17. Now hit Apple-F once again to paste the prism in front. Use the Pen tool to add and remove points until you get an object that looks like this:




18. Copy this object and hit Apple-F again to you-know-what. Now use the Direct Selection tool to move the two points on the right of the object over to the left of the black square on the Background layer. As follows:



19. Now Select the white object in the middle of the prism and use the transparency palette to knock back the opacity.



All done... How difficult was that? Any questions – and I realise that there may be quite a few – please drop me a line. Hope you had fun doing this.

Until next time...

Photoshop: The sky's the limit

Hi everyone, 

For today's exercise I'm going to be using a vector mask in combination with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to radically alter the colour of a sky.

We're all familiar with masks in Photoshop, but some of you may never have used a vector mask. They are ideal for quickly masking out sharply defined edges, such as those of a building. Here's how they work…

1. I took this picture in New York a few years ago. It's the sort of picture that many of us find ourselves taking in built up areas. Let's see if we can spruce it up a little by making the sky a little more dynamic.

2. The first thing to do is to create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Do this by clicking on the little CND icon at the foot of the Layers palette and choosing from the list. Next select 'Blues' from the pop-up menu in the ensuing dialogue box. Click in the blue of the sky and an eye-dropper icon will appear enabling you to fine tune the areas of the sky that you wish to change. Now drag the Hue and Saturation sliders until you get the colour that you want.



3. As is usual when creating an adjustment layer, a layer mask is automatically created. For the majority of the time this is perfectly adequate for masking purposes. However, in an image like this one, creating straight edges with a brush would prove difficult. Instead, we're going to mask out the building by creating a vector mask. Do this by clicking on the Add Vector Mask button at the foot of the layers palette. Now choose the pen tool and begin drawing around the building. As you draw, the red of the sky will begin to appear.



4. Draw around the building carefully to complete the mask. Close the path by clicking on the original anchor point that you drew. Hit Apple-H to hide the mask so that you can get a better look at what you have done.



5. Now you're at liberty to adjust the colour of the skies however you like. You do this by double clicking on the leftmost icon in the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and changing the settings. How about green skies?



6. Or an electric blue? The sky's the limit... (aaargghhh!!)

Illustrator: A few custom shape requests

Hit there

I'm responding to a couple of requests today, so the following exercises are probably going to be a little too simple for a lot of people. Sorry.

The first request was from a pupil in London. She wanted to produce an object with only one rounded corner. Should be simple, shouldn't it? But try as she might, she couldn't do it. Illustrator, you see, ain't Freehand, I'm afraid. And even though Adobe have paid good money to purchase the venerable vector old timer from Macromedia, the ability to customise rounded corners independently is a feature that is yet to be added to Illustrator's fairly substantial toolset. 

So here we go:

1. Create a square or rectangle and centre it to the artboard (as I always do). Now copy the object for later use and go to Effect> Stylize> Rounded corners... Turn on preview and use the up and down arrows to intuitively round the corners.

2. Click OK and then head over to Object> Expand Appearance, as ever very important this one. Now hit Apple-F to paste the copied object in front of the rounded corner. Reduce the height and then bring out the Pathfinder palette. With both objects selected alt-click the Add To Shape Area button. Half way there already...



3. Now hit Apple-F to paste in front again. This time reduce the width of the pasted object. Now repeat the same process with the Pathfinder palette.



4. Task completed. If you feel like tidying things up you might use the Pen tool to clean up the spare anchor points that have been created.




Now for the second exercise. I don't know what you would call this particular shape, if a name exists for it at all. This was requested by someone who contacted me from Thailand. Hello there if you're watching.

1. Start with another square or rectangle. This time head over to Object> Envelope Distort> Make With Warp... Choose the Arc Upper shape and round off the object to your liking.



2. Go to Object> Expand. Now draw a vertical line with the Line Tool and align both objects to the centre of the artboard.




3. Now select both objects and hit Divide in the Pathfinder palette. Ungroup the resultant objects and delete the one you don't require.

I don't quite know what exactly you would use this shape for, but this is what was requested.

Once again, sorry for the simplicity of today's outing. I'll make sure that the next one makes you sweat a little.

Illustrator: Create a dart board

Hello there, for today's long overdue exercise I'm going to be creating a dartboard. Why? Why not?

1. Create a new document and select the Polar Grid tool (one of my favourite tools, actually). Now single-click on the artboard and make the width and height of the grid 355pt. You need to specify 6 Concentric Dividers (that's how many there are in a dartboard) and 20 Radial Dividers (why? Because a dartboard has 20 numbers). Click ok and go and make yourself a cup of tea. Align the Polar Grid object to the centre of the artboard, vertically and horizontally (you should know by now that I always do this).

2. Here's watcha get:



3. Now tear off the Group Selection tool and the Scale tool. Move them close to the potential dart board for easy access. Use the Group Selection tool to select the second concentric circle. Then double-click on the Scale tool and take the uniform value down to 90%.



4. Now use the Group Selection tool to select the fourth concentric circle and double-click on the Scale tool to scale it down to 84%.



5. Repeat this process again. Choose the sixth concentric circle and scale it down to 29%.



6. Finally, scale the seventh concentric circle down again by 29%.



7. Now you need to rotate the entire dart board. Click away to deselect then select the dart board with the Selection tool. Select the Rotate tool and double-click it. Set the rotate value to 45º.



8. Now we need to colour the dart board. To do this I'm going to turn the dart board into a Live Paint object. Go to the Object> Live Paint> Make. Now select the Live Paint Bucket tool and then choose a black coloured swatch. Begin dragging as below:



9. Continue dragging to paint...



10. Don't worry if you make mistakes (like I have)...



11. Get yourself a red swatch and carefully colour in the doubles and trebles...



12. Now use a white swatch, like this:



13. Finally, get yourself a green swatch to complete your dose of Live Painting. I like this feature, it saves so much time.



14. Now zoom into the bullseye. Draw yourself a circle and colour it red. Align this circle to the centre of the artboard.



15. Now for some numbers. Fit the page to the window (Apple-0) and then use the Type tool to create the number 20. I've use Myriad Pro 29 pt, but you can obviously use whatever takes your fancy. Make sure the type is centrally aligned, then move it into position and align to the centre horizontally.



16. Select the Rotate tool and hold down the alt key and click in the centre of the dart board. Key in 18º for the value and hit Copy. Finally hit Apple-D 18 times to repeat this transformation.



17. You end up with a very high scoring dart board.



18. If you're not happy with this you'll have to do a little donkey work. Use the Type tool to manually change the numbers.



19. Still more drudgery. You're going to have to use the Rotate tool to manually straighten all the numbers. Just select each number one by one and double-click on the Rotate tool; use the up and down arrows to straighten the numbers, What a drag...

...Well done! You're there! You did well!

Creative Suite: Selecting Type

You'll have to excuse me if the following tips are a little too simplistic for you, or you already know them. Not only do they apply to the entire Creative Suite, they also apply to any program out there.

The reason I'm publishing these tips is that I know for a fact that if you don't already know them they will make your life a whole lot easier. Proof of this comes from the reaction I usually get from a good 70% of people that I train in any software, be it InDesign, Illustrator, Quark or whatever. Many people are generally shocked that it’s so easy to select type. You may be too, but if you already know this you'll wonder why I'm wasting everybody’s time.

Selecting type

There are many ways of doing this, of course. The vast majority of people simply insert their cursor into the text and drag, taking care not to pick up any stray spaces at the beginning or end of the selection. Others do the clever thing: they hit Apple-left arrow to select a word, or Apple-down arrow to select a paragraph. All well and good, but here’s the best way of doing it:

Two clicks of the mouse to select a word

Three clicks of the mouse to select a line.

Four clicks of the mouse to select a paragraph

Five clicks of the mouse to select all words (including any over-set type)

Double-click on a word and then drag (keeping the mouse held down) to select a range of type that starts and ends anywhere within a paragraph

(Indesign Only) Position your cursor anywhere within the type and hit Shift-Apple-Home to select all the type from that point upwards. Hit Shift-Apple-End to select all the type from that point downwards

(QuarkXpress Only) Position your cursor anywhere within the type and hit Apple-alt-shift-up arrow to select all the type from that point upwards. Hit Apple-alt-shift-down arrow to select all the type from that point downwards

Apologies once again if all this is old news for you. And double apologies if I've offended any Adobe acolytes by mentioning QuarkXpress. But what the hell... Those guys need help :-)