In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll learn how to create a popular "punch through image" effect, often seen in sports and movie advertising (and weekly store flyers announcing their "incredible knock out prices!"), as if a person or object has punched a hole right through the page or image. There's quite a few steps involved in the tutorial, but as usual, they're all very simple. As we make our way through it, we'll cover some interesting techniques like converting layer styles to actual layers so we can apply filters to them, moving drop shadows around just by dragging them, and using layer groups to move multiple layers at once! We'll be using Photoshop CS5 here but any recent version of Photoshop will work.


submitted: 5 years and 3159 days ago

In this Photoshop CS5 tutorial, we learn how to download photos from your digital camera to your computer using Adobe Bridge CS5. Included and installed with every copy of Photoshop CS5, whether you purchased it on its own or as part of one of Adobe's Creative Suite 5 packages, is a separate companion program known as Bridge CS5, a "digital asset manager" that lets us easily locate, manage and organize our ever-growing collection of images. Of course, it helps if we have some images to manage, which is also where Bridge comes in, as it lets us quickly select and download photos from our digital camera or memory card to the computer!


submitted: 5 years and 3168 days ago

In a previous tutorial, we looked at how to move photos between Photoshop documents, an absolutely essential skill for blending photos together since we need both images to be inside the same document before we can do anything interesting with them. In that tutorial, we covered three simple ways to move photos - "drag and drop", the Duplicate Layer command, and "copy and paste" - that work with all versions of Photoshop. In Photoshop CS4, though, Adobe made some rather big changes to Photoshop's interface by introducing tabbed document windows. The classic floating document windows that have been part of Photoshop since forever are still around, but Adobe has been making a big push lately to create a consistent looking interface across all of its products so that anyone who's comfortable with using Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or any Creative Suite program can jump right into any of the other programs and feel at least somewhat familiar with it.


submitted: 5 years and 3168 days ago

With its amazing ability to blend photos together in so many interesting ways, Photoshop's creative potential is truly limited only by our own skills and imagination. But if you're new to Photoshop, blending even two images together can seem like an impossible task because Photoshop opens each new image in its own separate, independent document, and the only way to blend images together is if they're all inside the same document. Fortunately, moving photos from one document into another is easy, as we're about to see! In this tutorial, we'll look at three common ways to move photos between documents that work with any version of Photoshop, so it makes no difference which version you're using. If you're using Photoshop CS4 or CS5, you'll want to read the next tutorial as well, as it looks at a potentially confusing change that Adobe made to the interface - tabbed documents - and how to move photos between them. For now, we'll focus only on ways that everyone can use.


submitted: 5 years and 3168 days ago

In this Photoshop photo effects tutorial, we'll learn how to add complex colorizing effects to images using custom gradients! Specifically, we'll look at the Gradient Map image adjustment and how it allows us to apply different colors to different brightness levels in the image. We'll see how easy it is to create our own custom gradients in Photoshop so we can colorize our images with any colors we choose. As always, we'll be using the adjustment layer version of the Gradient Map so we avoid making any changes to the original photo, and so we can easily adjust the intensity of the effect when we're done!


submitted: 5 years and 3189 days ago

In this Photoshop tutorial we'll learn how layer blend modes make it easy to add a popular lens flare effect to a photo without making any permanent changes to our image. We'll start by adding the lens flare normally to position it exactly where we want it, then we'll undo the effect, add a new layer, re-apply the lens flare instantly using a handy keyboard shortcut, and finally, we'll blend the lens flare into the image using one of Photoshop's most common and widely used blend modes.


submitted: 5 years and 3189 days ago

In this Photoshop photo retouching tutorial, we'll learn a very simple technique for changing someone's eye color in a photo using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer! Of course, there's no shortage of ways to change colors in an image with Photoshop, but whether you know which color you want to use or just want to play around and experiment, a Hue/Saturation image adjustment makes changing eye color easy, fast and fun!


submitted: 5 years and 3189 days ago

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at how to reduce the appearance of noise in an image, including luminance noise, color noise and even jpeg artifacts, all using the Reduce Noise filter, first introduced in Photoshop CS2 (which means you'll need at least CS2 to follow along). Notice that the name of the filter is Reduce Noise, not Remove Noise. As powerful as Photoshop is, there's still no way to take a noisy image and clean it up completely, at least not without removing most of the detail in the image along with it. Any time we shoot in low light, use high ISO settings, or leave the expensive dSLR at home because the compact camera is easier to carry, there's a good chance we'll be dealing with noise. Fortunately, while we can't remove it completely, Photoshop's Reduce Noise filter still does a good job of reducing noise without sacrificing important image detail. Let's see how it works.


submitted: 5 years and 3189 days ago

In this Photoshop effects tutorial, we'll learn how to create a colorized grid design! We'll use Photoshop's guides and rulers to set up the initial spacing, then a couple of rarely used selection tools to convert the guides into an actual grid. We'll learn how to easily select random squares in the grid and colorize them with adjustment layers and blend modes, and finally, how to color and adjust the appearance of the grid itself! I'll be using Photoshop CS5 throughout the tutorial, but any recent version will work.


submitted: 5 years and 3200 days ago

The Color Replacement Tool is not the most professional way to change colors in an image and won't always give you the results you need, but it usually works well for simple tasks and it's such an easy tool to use that it's worth giving it a try before moving on to more advanced and time consuming methods.


submitted: 5 years and 3222 days ago