Learn Photoshop in 30 days - Part 3 Photoshop Express Prabhas Joshi prabhas@desdevpro.com http://www.desdevpro.com 28 August 2009 Photoshop Tutorial This new series will teach you the essential basics of Photoshop CS3 in 30 short, easy to follow tutorials. You require no prior knowledge of the software. Familiarity with Windows is assumed. Using Colors Before starting todays class, I want to ask you something- do u listen to music while doing photoshop. Well if you consider this question wierd, do think again- beacuse today I'll be moving over to using colors in Photoshop. Web Resource Over my time of discovering various artistic styles on the internet, I've discovered quite a lot of brilliant digital-artists whose works highly inspire me. One of them is an Australian designer named Rob Morris. Check out his site: Digital Mash I really like his clean style and use of shapes, use of color, crisp art. But coming back to the use of color in Photoshop, we'll see today how to manipulate colors and some other basic operations. But I wont go into the various color systems and other such complex things-don't want to scare you away! Let's start. 1] Fire up photoshop. Open a new document [1024px X 768px, white background] That looks pretty dull, doesnt it. We would wish that we could have a nice background in there instead of a plain off-white. So let's today make a nice beautiful background using lots of colors. Foreground & Background Every color you will be using will come under either foreground or background color. Foreground color is the main color used to draw or color with. Background color is the color which fills up the rest of the canvas. See the following image. 003_img1.gif Let's first learn to set the background and foreground colors. 2] Take a look @ the bottom right corner- we see 2 boxes aligned diagonally to each other. These are the two color selection swatches. 003_img2.gif 3] Click on the foreground color and choose any color from the color-picker that comes up. Color Picker The color picker is a tool used to choose color of any type. 003_img3.jpg As we can see, to choose any color, simply drag the mouse over that colored area and select a color. Also, going to the left increases the brightness while going from bottom to top increases the color-value or saturation. Getting confused about hue saturation and brightness- Click here to get a short intro on these stuff What is HSV? Good that you wanted to know more. So lets start, shall we?? Hue: is basically the shade of the color you want. Hue distinguishes a red from a blue from a Pink. Saturation: is the amount of color present. Saturation distinguishes a pale-red color from a deep red. Brightness: is the amount of white present in the color, or how light it is. It distinguishes a dark-gray from a white 003_img5.gif 4] Ok, so now I suppose that you've gathered enough skill to choose background and foreground colors. Now let us see how we use that colors. Here is a quick coloring technique. If you want to fill up a layer with the background/foreground color, use the "backspace" key. Ok, so here's what we do. Create a new layer [Or use a shortcut: ctrl+shift+Alt+N] Set any of the foreground/background color to your choice. Select the layer. [No real need of this- as when u create a new layer, it's selected by default] Press alt+backspace to fill this layer with the foreground color, and ctrl+backspace to fill that layer with background color. Take a look at the image: 003_img4.gif Using Key Combos Here I'll be showing you the use of shortcut keys and tools to do some mindblowing fast work. I'll be using Marquee tool [Don't work if you don't know about it- I'll tell you it's limited use] 2] Ctrl/Alt + Backspace 3] Color Picker [you get this by clicking on the background/foreground color] 4] shortcut: ctrl+shift+alt+N : to create a new layer 5] Some good sense of colors and color-combos Let's start. Shall we a) On the background layer, fill in a light yellow color [or any hue you like], but I'm using really light yellow [#e7e491]. That is: set background color to #e7e491 [you can type in the hex code in the color picker] and then press ctrl+backspace. img6.gif b) Create a new layer. Now pick up the selection tool from tool. Using this tool, we can create a selection marquee which allows us to fill only certain part of a layer with a certain color. Now using this tool, create a selection and fill it with any color by pressing alt+backspace. Take a look at what I did. img7.gif Got it? I hope. c) Now the procedure is to create different selections and fill it with different colors. Delete the last created layer. d) Create a new layer. Now Pick up the elliptical-selection tool [see pic below]. 003_img8.gif e) using the ellpitical marquee to create some marquee like this: 003_img9.gif f) Now press ctrl+shift+I to invert the present selection. 003_img10.gif g) Now, there's a little trick- select the selection-tool, and take it to the intersect with the selection mode: 003_img11.gif h) Now draw a rectangular marquee over the lower part of the previous selection 003_img12.gif i) I think you should get something like this 003_img13.gif j) Now, fill this selection up with some color- let's say white:[#ffffff] k) Having done that, make a few rectangular selections on 3 different selections and fill them with these colors color-left: fffb76 color-middle: #000000 color-right: #ffd200 Also, go to each layer and delete a thin rectangular strip of each color [goto layer, make a rectangular marquee selection and press delete]- such that it reveals a part of the original light-yellow layer. you'll get something like this: 003_img14.gif Thats it for today, tomorrow we'll complete this small tute and learn something more about colors.