A great way to use Photoshop's Pen tool and Blurring filters, and make Adobe Photoshop. work harder for
image manipulation, painting and getting the most from your photos.

Don't forget layer blending to Perk up B&W Clip... Too many times we receive black and white art (whether clip art or otherwise) to use in a color publication -- but we don't have time to colorize or rebuild the art. . . Layer Blending & Soft Light to the rescue As I go through our "Introduction to Digital Graphics" course at JMU, the second semester class has shown the same reluctancy as the first to discover those layer blends. Obviously trying to teach a classroom of 22 computer stations how to use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Quark XPress in a single, short semester is tough. So I encourage everyone to test and play with all the various features of the programs which may not be obvious at first glance. So it's true with a simple and direct problem: you need a quick color treatment for black and white art. In this case the combining of two layer blends brings a 60-second revitalization to otherwise dull black and white. We had to use this technique for our "Information Model" article this month because the art was supplied scanned from a black and white book. At right you see an example of the raw art on a visible layer. It took no time at all to create a new layer, and fill it with our warm gold/orange. To that layer we applied the Soft Light blending mode. This almost hit the spot, but colorized the art just a bit too much. If we backed off the opacity of that layer, it introduced too much of the gray tonality -- making our colors "muddy." So we needed a second blending layer. Now we just dragged the original art to the "New Layer" button at the bottom of our layers palette, and then used a low tolerance Magic Wand (set to four colors) to select the white background and delete. Setting this new layer's blend mode to "Multiply" introduced a mixture of the black and gold color to a more "duotone" look -- introducing the more rich, dense blacks into the drawing -- blending them with the orange to become a nice, warm dark brown. In some areas the black wastoo strong -- so a quick slide down to 35% opacity filled the bill perfectly. All this was done in just a matter of minutes. Once the formula was proven, the other five pieces of art could be handled in exactly the same fashion making quick work of the art for the article. One more time saving trick: we started with the largest piece of art we had to deal with, and simply replaced the art layers with each successive piece of art. Since the layers are independent of the original art, the settings stayed the same and we only had to set the file up once. Each new version, was cropped, then Saved under its new name. Note the typography layer was for the opening of the article only. It was deleted for successive images. Try it out and see if you don't get some rather good results. 'til next time Side note: Some of you might notice something strange about our palette used in the illustrations above. Yup, you're right. This is all done in Photoshop version 3.5. Sure you can do exactly the same process, following the exact same steps in v4, v4.5, v5, v5.5, v6, v6.5 and v7. But each new version of Photoshop added lots of new gimmicks and noise thus making it slower and slower. Remember I said in the beginning that we needed the changes quickly. This is why I keep a version of 3.5 AND 6 on my computer at all times. Version 3.5 is much quicker for simple jobs -- I had this one done in nearly the time it takes 6 to load, and then save the file. Version 3.5 also supports the Gif89a format which still saves better GIF files than the later versions of Photoshop. Hmmmmmm. Photoshop Tips & Tricks _/_ Design Center Front Page _/_ Photographic Department

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