I’m always preaching about the importance of non-destructive editing in Photoshop, and adjustment layers have to be one of my favourite features. In today’s quick tip tutorial, I want to show you a really simple technique for using the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to precisely control the colours in your photographs, illustrations and designs.

We’ll look at two different scenarios, and the slightly different techniques that can be used in each.

Scenario 1 – The Blue Dress

Okay, so here we have an image of a lovely young lady in an equally lovely blue dress. This photograph is by Jesse Therrien can can be found over at stock.xchng.

Here is our origianl image

Basically, all we want to do with this image is change the colour of the dress – and only the dress – from its current blue to a vibrant pink. Because there is really very little blue throughout the rest of the image, all we really need to do is focus on adjusting the cyan and blue values.

First, create a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

First, add a new adjustment layer

Then, in the drop down selection box, select Cyan to isolate that particular colour.

Isolate the Cyan colours

Now, adjust the hue properties as shown here:

Adjust the properties to match this

That pretty much does it. Now, I would just flip over from Cyan to Blue and adjust the properties as follows:

A slight adjustment for the blues

This extra step just fixes up some faint blue fringing around some of the edges of the design on the dress. And there you have it, a complete colour transformation:

The completed transformation

This technique is quick, super easy, and produces great results. Better yet, it’s entirely editable. You could go back and make the dress green or yellow or any other colour you might like!

Scenario 2 – The Red T

Okay, the first scenario was pretty easy, and that’s partly because we were working with an ideal photograph, where the colour we wanted to change was entirely isolated to the dress. But what about something like this photo by Carole Smith (aka mccheek), which I snagged from the Flickr Creative Commons?

Our original image

Let’s say we want to change the colour of the t-shirt from bright red to bright green. Go ahead and try the same technique that we used in scenario 1, by creating a simple Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and adjusting the hue for the colour red.

The entire image is effected

That’s a lovely shade of green that we’ve managed to get for the t-shirt itself, but the adjustment layer has also effected all of the reds in the woman’s skin and in the bricks of the wall behind her! It’s kind of a cool effect, but really not what we’re looking for.

Fortunately, we have a pretty awesome degree of control over colours through the layer mask that is automatically added to the adjustment layer when you create it. To take this control and use it to our own ends, we’re going to make use of some quick channel magic.

First, though, we’ll also need to adjust the Magentas (Hue: +103, Saturation: -8) and Yellows (Hue: +57, Saturation: 0) in the adjustment layer, just to round out the colour change.

Now, open up your channels palette and duplicate the green layer, which has the best contrast. Then, quickly adjust the brightness and contrast of channel, like this:

Adjust the brightness and contrast on this channel

Alright, now, with a large white brush just paint away all of the outside details.

Start brushing away the excess detail

Next, use a smaller brush to paint along the edges of the t-shirt itself.

Get in closer with a smaller brush for finer detail

That inner part beneath her left arm is pretty tough, though, as the shadows caused a bunch of the details to blend together. So, I’m going to trace that part of the t-shirt with the pen tool and make a selection.

Use the pen tool to make a selection

Then, simply invert the selection and paint down along the edge of the t-shirt to control the shape.

Brush away the edges, based on the selection

Lastly, paint out the jeans at the bottom and paint in the words on the shirt.

Brush away the jeans

Now, Command-Click (PC: Ctrl-Click) on our channel to create a selection from it. Turn the main RGB channel back on and select the layer mask on the Hue/Saturation layer in the layers palette. Then, simply fill the selection with black.

The basic isolation is now complete

That’s the main part. The rest is all just clean up. Using another soft brush at about 50% opacity, go to work on the layer mask, blending the hair until it looks right.

The finer bits of hair have been blended

The trick here is basically to work somewhat slowly, and just brush away most of the red until you get a nice natural look. What you don’t want to do, though, is paint with a heavy black brush. If you do that, the hair will start to take on an unnatural green tinge. You just want to brush enough that the red will disappear and a bit of the green will be added in, making it look like a natural bit of light reflecting off the now green shirt!

Lastly, there will invariably be some red fringing around the outside of the shirt itself. Again, just take a smaller, soft brush and work those edges carefully.

Polished up the edges

And there you have it. The shirt colour is completely changed, and blended nicely into the rest of the image, all using just a single adjustment layer and its layer mask. Even better, I can play with the settings in the adjustment layer and create an entirely different colour!

Another new colour by tweaking the adjustment layer

It’s a super flexible little technique that I hope you will find useful at some point. Also, I realize that I kind of blitzed through some of the channels stuff. If you’re not totally comfortable with creating isolations or extractions with channels, consider reading this article over on MyInkBlog. It’s a tutorial I recently had published, and which goes into quite a bit of detail about extracting with channels!

Conclusion

There are many other ways that you can use this technique, too. For instance, if you had a row of objects, where you wanted them to each have a different colour, you could create a separate Hue/Saturation adjustment for each object, and use the layer mask to force each adjustment to apply to the appropriate object.

Ultimately, though, it’s just a great little trick for making a subtle colour change to a photograph, illustration or design. What are your thoughts? Have you used this technique before, or something similar?

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Today’s Quick Tip is really quick. I’m going to show you how to give plain white text a really simple glossy treatment in Photoshop. This kind of effect is really popular in a lot of Web 2.0 type designs, and can also be useful when adding a bit of flair to a clean simple typeface for a logo or slogan.

So, let’s get started. First, we need a new document. I just created a 500px by 500px square document and filled the background with a dark teal colour. For a little extra depth, I added a black and white radial overlay, with the blending mode set to multiply and the transparency set to 24%.

Next, we need to add our text. For this example, I am just using the word “Simple”.

Add plain white text to your document

With the text layer selected in the Layers palette, add a new gradient overlay. This time, we want a linear gradient. The default should be black and white, so just double click the gradient bar to bring up a gradient dialogue box. Then click on the tiny black square and change the colour to a pale, pale blue (R: 174 / G: 203 / B: 205). Your text should now look like this.

A simple gradient adds a bit of depth

Hard to see a difference isn’t it? The blue colour is so pale that the transition from the white is just not that obvious. We can fix this, though, by adding a simple white border around the text. So, with the text layer still selected, we’re going to add another layer style. This time, we want to use a stroke. Set the colour to white, the thickness to 2 pixels and the position to inside. This last part is important because it helps to maintain the shape of the text. Strokes set to outside tend to round corners, which we don’t want to do to a font with this kind of nice sharp edges.

Adding a simple white stroke can help offset the gradient

Notice how the white of the stroke contrasts against the pale blue of the gradient, making it more obvious to the eye. So that’s two steps down. The next step is to add just a little extra depth with a subtle drop shadow. Again, with the text layer selected, add a new drop shadow style to the layer. Reduce the distance to 0, so that the shadow is evenly aligned behind the letters. Then set the spread to 5 and the distance to 7.

The final effect is "simple" but effective

The darkness of the shadow contrasts nicely against the white of our stroke style, creating a nice overall effect that adds just a subtle degree of depth, while the now more obvious gradient gives a nice simple sense of glossiness.

I told you this Quick Tip really would be quick. I also recognize that, to many experienced Photoshoppers, this must seem pretty rudimentary. However, I know that when I was first starting out with the program, this would have been quite a revelation, so hopefully this can be of some use to beginners. After all, it’s a really easy way to add just a little something extra to your text. Like I mentioned at the outset, it’s ideal for glossy Web 2.0 effects, for some logo or slogan work, or even just for headers on your website or in your printed materials.

Of course, you can use these same steps to achieve different effects by playing with the settings. Go ahead and play around. That’s one of the great benefits of layer styles – they are non-destructive and completely editable. Better yet, your text is completely editable too. Because we are just applying styles to the text layer, we can easily select our text and make changes, and see the effect instantly applied to whatever we type.

I hope you enjoyed this Quick Tip, and that you can find a use for it. See you next time!

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Today’s Quick Tip is going to deal with what might be one of the most popular element in contemporary design – the infamous sunburst. You can literally see this design element almost anywhere, like in this valentine themed vector from crestock.com.

This Valentine themed vector uses the sunburst effect

This element is so prevalent that you must have seen it used before, and an argument could be made that it is perhaps, a bit overused. However, be that as it may, we are going to place all discussions of whether or not the element has been bludgeoned to death, and focus instead on how it’s made.

I know a few people who use downloaded brushes to achieve this effect, and that’s a more than reasonable way to do it, but what if you wanted to make your own sunburst? Maybe you want a few different rays, or want to vary the width of the rays. This Quick Tip will show you how.

Step 1

For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to make a sunburst with 10 rays, all of equal size. To start, open up Photoshop and create a new document with the following settings.

Create a new document with these settings

We’re actually going to expand the document to a complete 1000px x 1000px square, but for this method, we want to start with only 50px in width.

Step 2

Now, select black as your foreground colour and press Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace) to fill the canvas.

Start with a single black stripe

This gives us a nice and simple stripe – the perfect starting point for our sunburst. Press Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A) to select the entire contents of the canvas and Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C) to copy the black bar to the clipboard.

Step 3

We are now going to create a pattern of 10 vertical stripes. First, select Image » Canvas Size from the menu. Set your unit type to pixels and increase the width to 150px. Also, make sure that your alignment is set to left-center, as show here:

Use the Canvas Size tool to increase the size of the canvas

The left hand alignment is important, since it will add an extra 100px onto the right hand side of the canvas. Of course, if you’re feeling rebellious, you can always work backwards and align everything to the right. Because we English speaking Westerners tend to read from left to right, I just naturally tend to do everything that way. Regardless, the result should look something like this:

Increase the width of the document by 100px

Step 4

Now, press Command-V (PC: Ctrl-V) to paste a copy of our original black bar into the document. It should be pasted as a new layer. Using the Move Tool, drag the new black bar to the right. It should snap nicely into place, giving you two black bars and one white bar, all of equal size.

From 1 strop to 2

Repeat steps 3 and 4, increasing the width of the document by 100px each time and creating a new black bar. Once you reach 950px, increase the canvas size by another 50px to complete the square.

10 vertical black stripes

Step 5

Now, flatten your layers (Layers » Flatten Image). This will compress all of your layers into a single image. We need to do this in order to apply the final filter, which will complete our sunburst effect.

Next, select Filter » Distort » Polar Coordinates from the menu. In the filter dialogue box, make sure that you select the Rectangle to Polar option (though feel free to preview the Polar to Rectangle option too, though doesn’t give us what were are looking for).

Use the Polar Coordinates filter

Press okay and we’re done. We now have a 1000px x 1000px sunburst with 10 equal sized rays.

The final product

From here, you can do any number of things. You can transform the ray into a brush, or you can export it to Illustrator and trace it into a cool vector element. You could also isolate the black rays by using any one of a number of techniques to knock out the white.

So there you have it. Feel free to experiment with this technique. You could try creating more rays (the Valentine vector above used 36), or varying the width of the rays, to create a really unique looking sunburst. Playing with this technique can really yield some really interesting results, and will help you get a better understanding of the Polar Coordinates filter.

Hope you found this Quick Tip useful. Happy tinkering.

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Today’s Quick Tip is a simple 7 step tutorial on how to create a really basic shape in Illustrator. When I say simple, I really do mean simple. I can run through these steps in about 2 minutes flat! Of course, if you’re reading and following along it will probably take you a bit longer than that, but it should still be a very simple process.

So, here we go.

Step 1

Create a new document of 1000px by 1000px. I use these dimensions because they are nice and even, and because it is really easy to find the center point, and important feature for what we’re going to be doing here.

Create a New Document

Step 2

Create a new circle, with a width of 500px and a height of 500px. Align this circle to the middle of the art board. You can either use the alignment tools or set the X and Y coordinates to 500px each (making sure that the reference point is set to the middle).

Creare a new circle shape and align it to the middle of the art board

Step 3

In order to create the teeth of the gear, we are going to create a star shape. First, select the star tool and click on the art board. Input the following settings and click OK.

Create a new star shape with these properties

Note that the number of points that we create on our star will be the same number of teeth that we will have on our gear. Feel free to vary this number to get more or fewer teeth.

Step 4

Once again, align the shape to the center of the art board. This will ensure that the star and the circle are perfectly lined up for step 5.

Align the star to the center of the art board

Step 5

Open the pathfinder palette. Select both the circle and the star, then click the unite button.

Use the unite tool to fuse the two shapes

This will fuse the two shapes together into a new shape, which looks more like a sun than either a circle or a star. It should like something like this:

Your new shape should look like this

Step 6

Now, create another circle, with a width of 700px by 700px, and align the circle to the center of the art board, just like we did before. We are going to be using this circle to trim off the tips of our “sun” in order to transform it into the desired gear.

Create a new circle

Step 7

With the new circle in front, select both it and our sun shape. Open the pathfinder palette (if it isn’t still open) and click the intersect button.

Select both shapes and use the intersect tool

The intersect tool will create a new shape based on the overlapping areas of our two selected shapes – in others words, the parts of the shape that intersect. I use this tool quite a bit less than I use unite and minus front, but it’s still a great tool to know.

That’s it! We’re all done. The result should be a gear like this:

Your finished gear should look like this

I promised it was simple. You can use this same technique to make all sorts of different gear shapes. Just vary the parameters of the three key shapes. I already mentioned that you can get more teeth on your gear by making more points on your star. Playing around with radius 1 and radius 2 will also get you different results, as will differing the size of the two circles.

So go on and create a whole collection of gears! Or, use the same techniques to play around with creating other, more complex types of shapes. Hope you found this Quick Tip useful!

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So, the other day, a friend of mine who likes to do a bit of work in Photoshop asked me a very simple question. Months ago, I showed him how to use adjustment layers to make non-destructive and completely editable adjustments to his Photoshop images. What he wanted to know, though – and what was driving him crazy as he tried to figure it out – was how to apply an adjustment layer to only a single other layer.

The answer to this question is simple, though not necessarily obvious. In this post I’m going to answer that question for you.

But first, why might we want to apply an adjustment to a single layer? Well take this image for example:

A simple, three layer composition

Here we have an image of a butterfly peacefully on a nice textured background. I made this quite simply by cutting the butterfly out of this stock photo, placing it over a texture and adding in a bit of shadow. The result is a three layer photoshop file.

Now, suppose that I want to change the colour of the butterfly. I can do this with safely with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I simply add the adjustment layer and play with the hue and saturation of the red and yellow channels. In this case, I am going to make the butterfly a teal colour. Unfortunately, when I create the adjustment layer, the default behavior is to apply it to everything beneath it. So, we end up with something like this:

Adjustment layer effects the entire document

The adjustment layer has changed the colour of the butterfly, which I want. But, it has also changed the colour of the background texture, which I don’t want.

To fix this, make sure that the adjustment layer is directly above the butterfly layer in the Layers pallet. Next, right click (or Control Click) on the adjustment layer and select Create Clipping Mask from the menu.

Select the Create Clipping Mask option

Instantly, the adjustment layer becomes applied only to the butterfly, leaving the background it’s natural colour:

Now the adjustment only effects the desired layer

See – I promised it would be simple. The problem that my friend ran into was that it’s just not obvious. I had the same problem when I was first learning the ropes in Photoshop. It would be much easier if they just called it “Apply to One Layer” or something like that, but the Clipping Mask functionality is much more extensive than that.

Anyhow, I hope this clears helps somebody out there. I know that my friend was certainly glad to learn this simple trick!

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