How to Remove Skin Highlights With Photoshop

It's not uncommon to have a portrait with areas that are over exposed. 

Today, I'm going to show you how you to remove skin highlight using Photoshop. It's not uncommon to have a portrait with areas that are over exposed. But fortunately that's an easy correction inside of Photoshop. In this image the model has some skin highlights and we want to go ahead and get rid of them. To get rid of them we're going to use something called the burn tool. The burn tool is located underneath the dodge tool here inside the tools panel, the dodge tool is this black lollipop looking tool. If you click and hold down you will see the burn tool. With the burn tool selected, up towards the top in the options bar, you can choose a brush size and then you can choose what you want to modify, shadows, mid tones or highlights. In this case, we're going to go with highlights. The exposure setting is essentially the tool's sensitivity. I will leave it set to 50%. There are no right answers here and honestly you are probably going to have to experiment. I'm going to go ahead and increase the brush size a little bit by using the right bracket key on the keyboard. Then I'm going to click and drag down this highlight. Now as I do that you will see that the modification was a little too intense. So I'm going to go ahead and undo that, command Z or control Z and we're going to drag the exposure slider to the left so the tool is a little less dramatic. Then you can come in and click and drag on those highlights to remove them.

How to Fix Skin Tone in Photoshop

Fixing skin tone in Photoshop is something that you can do with a wide variety of built in tools, like filters.

Today, I'm going to explain how to adjust skin tone in Photoshop. Now this could take a lifetime to master. It's a very complicated process depending on the skin tone and how much it varies, how clear the image is that you're adjusting, how clear the image will be or how fine the resolution when you eventually print or display your image. These are all variables. If you have a low res image it may be easier and that's what we're going to be working with today. I'm going to do a very basic example of how to adjust skin tone or reduce blemishes and things like that. And then more detailed just require really just more finesse. So this is the basics. Let's take a picture of myself and I have this scratch on my forehead. I also have red eye and things in this picture. We'll skip past that for a second and just focus on this blemish right here which was a scratch I had at the time. First thing you want to do is zoom in night and tight. And if you zoom in too much you start to kind of lose it in the other colors but just enough so that you can still see where it is and go over here to use my favorite tool which is the healing brush tool. And select the size that you would like. I'm actually using a good size right now which is 12. You're going to hold down option and click to a good point of skin, a good uniform point of skin that's sort of far away from that area but not too far because you want it to be roughly the same. And then just actually click and slide across. The healing brush tools actually just make that point of skin just like the other. So like the clear portion that you selected. You can do this multiple times if you'd like and make sure that it sort of more natural looking because sometimes if you just use a swipe you can see the swipe mark. And then when you zoom out as you can see the scratch is gone. So that's how to edit skin tone in Photoshop for adjusting blemishes and different skin variation in photos that you may be using. I hope you enjoyed. Thanks.

How Do I Make a Blend in Photoshop?

Making a blend in Photoshop is something that you can very easily do with a built in tool.

Today, I'm going to explain a little bit about how to make a blend in Photoshop. Lots of different reasons you want to blend, if you have two different colors that you'd like to sort of limit the contrast of those colors you can blend them. If there are things like skin tone differences that you'd like to blend, that's another way of blending so there are lots of different options, very robust program, lots of different ways to go about this. I'm going to explain a little bit about it and hopefully that will sum things up for you. So let's take our blank background here and let's say that we want to create a gradient going across the background to sort of make it just, you know, look more appealing. One great way to do that is to click on your gradient tool which is here. You can click on the colors up here and that will give you this gradient editor. You can select this box and then this box will allow you to select a color that you like. And you can choose through here. So let's say we start with blue and we want to go to a lighter blue so we'll choose this box, select the color again and just choose somewhere down here, that's more teal, let's go like here, that's good. Okay so now you can see we have this gradient that's sort of formed here. You can adjust the smoothness, so we have good smoothness in there, we'll click okay, and the type of gradient that you like to create is there. You'd basically just click on the screen and drag and you'll see the way the color gets laid out. This is a little heavy, it's a little dark color so let's undo it and just go back in the opposite direction and you can see that it works that way as well and now it's a lighter color where the text is. There are other blending options which involve using the healing brush tool which is here. You can play around with that as well as the smudge tool, here's a smudge tool. If you just select that you can just grab some of the graphic and just sort of smear it across and again there are many different options but you can play around with it. Those are some. So that's basically how to blend different colors and create blending in Photoshop. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope that helps. Thanks a lot.

How to Export Animation in Photoshop CS5

Exporting animation in Photoshop CS5 will require you to do so in a very specific file format.

Today, I'm going to show you how to take an animation from Photoshop and export it for use in other things. So lots of reason why you would want to do this. You obviously are editing the animation in Photoshop or creating it in Photoshop. And you want it to go somewhere else. You want it to be a video or a GIF or something. So like an animated moving GIF. So I'll show you the ways to do that. So right here I've created a simple animation just a picture of me. And the animation is basically it dances across the screen, really it just walks. So what we would do is go into file, go down to export. And render video. This will allow you to make a movie file if you'd like to make a movie you can select the file. The folder obviously where it exports. The different type of movie that you'd like it to be. You can select your settings et cetera. That's one way. You would hit render when you have completed that. It very, it takes a long time to process so I'm not going to click render. But that's the way you would do that. The next way is to simply go to save to web and devices. And then we can click OK. And then we can select GIF from the drop down here. And if we save it as a GIF it will actually just take the different animation slides and create an animated GIF out of it. So those are the different ways to export animation from Photoshop and be able to use them in different mediums. I hope you enjoy. Thanks.

How Do I Give Photoshop More Memory?

Giving Photoshop more memory will involve closing other running programs on your computer.

I'm going to tell you basically how to give Photoshop more RAM in a sense. We're going to free up free used RAM in your computer so that Photoshop can then use it to run more efficiently. When you're creating a Photoshop document, editing photos, things like that, you tend to create lots of different layers, and comes, it becomes sort of RAM intensive, and starts sucking up energy, we need to give it more. So I'm going to show you how to do that in some simple steps. So let's take the picture that I have here. A picture of me, I've created a little graphic there, it's very basic, I just want to walk through a couple of steps that you would do to sort of simplify things and make your RAM run more efficiently. So, if we have lots of layers that don't necessarily need to be separate layers, you want to combine them. First easy step is just, you select the layer, hold down shift, select another layer, and combine them, and command+ e will combine them. Another thing is if you have shapes, random shapes that are still not rasterized, you'll want to rasterized those shapes, so I have this star here, or another way to do that is to merge down into a different, into a different layer, but let's rasterized this layer. Now it's still its own, but it's much less sort of big, it's much less of a, a RAM hog now. So, and if we take other files that let's say have some, let's say they have some effects on them, like the shadow, right? If we have a shadow effect, you want to try and get rid of all the effects, and just merge them down into actual images. So if you had lots of layers that had effects like this one now has on it, you would want to select that, and go to right-click, and do merge down into a different layer that, so now it would combine the images. The graphic is still there, the effect is still there, but it no longer is an effect that's sort of intensive, holding all the information that doesn't need to be in there, which are all the other things other than the graphic itself. Other things that you can do, very important, most important I would say in the whole process is close out other programs. You have Excel open, shut it down. Power Point shut it down. Just close out all of your other programs. If you want Photoshop to run efficiently, only have Photoshop open. And so those are the basic steps to sort of, you know, freeing up the RAM that you could have using for Photoshop by closing out other things and making Photoshop more efficient. I hope that helped thanks.

How to Slim Down Models in Photoshop

Today I'm going to show you how to slim down a model in Adobe Photoshop. And that may be a little bit of an overstatement. This is a very, very complicated process. I'm going to show you the basic way, one basic way, to sort of get started with it, and then I'll talk through a little bit about what else you'll need to do. So, let's take an image that I have here. Here I am wearing a suit, and sort of tapered in here, but let's say I really want to look really model-y and get that hour glass figure on my, on my body here. So, let's first zoom in. We're going to use the magnet, magnetic lasso tool, just to make this process quick. Make sure you get a good, a good crop, normally, to do any edits, magnetic lasso's only good for usually the bigger, less precise stuff, but we'll take the area that we want to slim down. Then I'm going to go to the grow function. So I'm going to go to modify, or actually, let's do expand, and add about 12 pixels to it, that will be good. So now we're, we're using the right dimensions that you can see the cuts are here but we're expanded, and now I'm going to go into filter, blur, I'm sorry, distort, and then use the pinch function. So that's filter, distort, pinch, and let's just do, yeah, let's do like 50, just as an example. Okay. And as you can see, it shrunk down my midsection a little bit. That's sort of created a little bit of that slimming down model. So, let's undo it so that you can see the original, and there's back to the original, and real quick, there's the next one. So it was a slight change, but you can see that the midsection is shrunk down. The pinch function is one good way to sort of shrink everything together. You'll also need to use either some blurring, or some other tone effects on the edge because the pinch function does tend to leave some things on the sides. But that's basically how to slim down a model in Adobe Photoshop, and make thing seem just more, more thin with that model approach, or that model look. I hope you enjoyed thanks.

How to Wrap Text in Photoshop

Hi, I'm HD Trailer. Today, I'm going to show you how to wrap text in a Photoshop document. So if you have lots of texts and you want that text to be conformed within a certain area, as you type in Photoshop it tends to just continue across the page. You'll want that text to wrap back down so that it fits in a certain area, you can create a box for that and I'll show you. So in this area we have a large sentence here, it stretches pretty much across the page. Let's say we wanted to limit the sentence to just half the page what we'd do is just select your text tool and then click within the image and you see this box on the outside, you can grab the outside of that box and just drag it down, squeeze it in and as you can see the text wraps within that box. Photoshop will automatically enable you to wrap the text if you simply change the size of the box. And that's basically it. You can click out and your text will be saved as a wrapped text image. So that's how to wrap the text in Adobe Photoshop. It's helpful if you want to condense information to one part of the page or you know if you'd like it to live in a certain area for whatever reason and have words sort of you know, following a downward motion as opposed to across the page. My name is HD Trailer. I hope that helped. Thanks.