PK Pixels

Creating a Dotted line in Photoshop.

// March 6th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop makes the CG Artists Life easier, but not all the time…. Sometime a simple task like making a dotted line in photoshop is not that much simpler as it should be.  But that does not mean its that much difficult, its easier just follow the tutorial.

Open the Photoshop document where you want to place the dotted line

Select the Brush tool, shortcut is ‘B’

Open the Brushes Palette( Window –> Brushes, or F5)

Click the Brush Presets and select the Brush with some hard edges. You can select the Square brushes or Rounded on the bases of your need.

Dotted Line - 1

After you selected the brush type Click the “Brush tip shape”, Now here you can can see spacing slider, Slide it a value greater than 100%, in example i set it to 200%. You can also set the diameter and hardness of the brush here. You can see the Preview of the brush at the bottom

Dotted Line -2

Now go to your document again and select the color of the line and then hold down the shift button and Click and drag to draw the dotted line. ( by holding down shift you can draw Straight lines)

If its not giving a desired look, Do it again and this time play with spacing, Hardness, Diameter and the shape of the brush to make a desired look..

There are also many other options available here under the Brushes palette..Do explore them.

Have a good day…

A solution to solve blured edges problem in Photoshop.

// February 19th, 2008 // No Comments » // 3ds Max, Adobe Photoshop

This is not a complete tutorial, but its just a small tip witch is extremely useful in designing process.

As most of you know photoshop is not a Vector Graphics tool, so sometime we get some weired problem like a draw a rectangle shape and its edges are not sharp as they should be.  Or you draw a shape and its got blurred edges.

The solution is that just do not use the shapes where they are not necessary..for example if you want to draw a rectangle as background dont use shape rather use the Marquee Tool and the fill it with the color on new layer.

Another solution is that if shapes really makes your work easier do Rasterize them in your design. A common problem could be that if made a shape by using pen toll and given a stroke to it. Some edges get distorted ….That could be solved by Just Hold down the Ctrl Key and Click the shape layer. The outer border of the shape should get selected. Now Make a new layer and go to Select—> Modify —> Contract, and do a contract it 1px. and now fill the design with the color you want.

In this way the shape edges are sharp rather to use it as the Vector mask.

Well i hope that suggestion is useful.

Thanks

CMYK to pantone color conversion in Photoshop

// February 7th, 2008 // 13 Comments » // Adobe Photoshop

hi visitors some days i come across a project in which my client ask me to convert their logo in Pantone colors. So i thought why not to add a tutorial on how to do that in photoshop.

1- First open your image, if its in psd format then you should flat it.
2- Convert it to CMYK if it is not.
3- Duplicate your image and rename it, in my case its “design_pantone”
4- Go to its channel palette, you should see four channels there named as Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and black there.
5- Select Cyan,Magenta and yellow channel and delete them individually.There should only black channel left there.
6- Now Click on the new channel button as shown in the image below , a new channel named as alpha1 should be there.

CMYK to Pantone-1

7- Double Click on it and a channel option dialog box should appear.
8- Select the spot color from the option and Click the color to assign the new color.

CMYK to Pantone-2

Now For CMYK, we first select the Global value of Cyan color which is #00FFFF and then find the nearest pantone match of that color.

9- So enter the value #00FFFF in the dialog box
then click the color library button to access the nearest pantone color match, Photoshop will automatically select nearest pantone color.I use the same as photoshop selects but you can change that if you want.Click OK when you  are done.

CMYK to Pantone-3

10- Now you should see the pantone color in the name field, click OK again.

There should be a cyan tone over all the picture now.

11- Make sure you selected the current pantone color channel, now go to image menu and then select the apply image.

Apply image dialog box appears.

12- In source drop down select the orignal image in CMYK,  in my case that was design.
In layer there should be background
In Channel field select the Cyan channel.
blending should be set to normal.Opacity  100%
Click OK when you are done!.

CMYK to Pantone-4

Now you mapped the Cyan color to pantone, next you would repeat steps from 6-12 for mapping both the Magenta and then the yellow.

The Hex value for magenta is #FF00FF and Yellow is #FFFF00.

When you mapped all channels to Pantone…..You are done!

If you see big difference in the colors double click the channels and change pantone spot colors until you are satisfied from the result.

Save the file as PSD or DCS 2.0(eps)

At the end i want to say that this is just the one way i done my work because it gives you quite a control over the colors so you can adjust them by your self..

Thanks, Have a GOOD DAY !

Converting a selection to Vector based Shape

// January 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Adobe Photoshop

Just a tip on how to convert your current selection to a shape that also can be used in future as vector format.

Take the selection with your favorite method.

In my case i use the magic wand tool

After you took the selection go to path palette and press the little arrow on the top right corner, then select the “make work path”

enter the tolerance value 0.5, why..? because we want to maintain the original selection as much as possible…Note here that the value less than 0.5 is not acceptable.

Now your work path should be created..

Now go to the Edit menu and select “Define Custom shape”

Enter the name of desired shape and press OK

Now this shape is available under the Custom Shapes.

Just use it in the  way you want and enjoy.
 

From Black and White to Color in Photoshop

// September 3rd, 2007 // 9 Comments » // Adobe Photoshop

Today i am going to show how you can convert the old looking black and white image to color without any plugin in adobe photoshop 7.

Here is what u get after doing the tutorial

Click to enlarge

You can either download that image and start working as i do or you can take the image of your own choice and transform the tutorial according to that.

So lets get started

Open the image in photoshop.

Colorizing the SKIN.

We will first colorize the skin then hairs, eyes, eyebrows, teeth gums and shirt.

1-Click the new adjustment layer button below the layer panel and select the Hue and Saturation..

2-Check the colorize and preview check boxes on Hue and Saturation dialog box and then set the Hue=26, Saturation=90 and lightness=0.

3-Rename the adjustment layer to “skin” by double clicking the name on layer panel.

3-Go to edit menu and select the fill , then choose black under use dropdown and make sure blending mode is set to normal and opacity is 100%.

4-Select the brush tool and make sure the foreground color is set to white and background color is black.

5-Go and start painting the all the skin parts, this you have to do carefully, if some color spills on the other parts outside then do not worry just turn the foreground color to black and then brush the parts where the color is outside the skin.

Get some thing like the following image

Click to enlarge

6-make sure the adjustment layer is still in selection and then set the blending mode to color and set the opacity to 30%.
(Note you can set the opacity and mode according to your own need….Just play with it to see how it produces different effects.)

This is what i get after that

……woooow quite horrified but face and skin parts are looking good,

if u do not like the face color you can go to blending options of the adjustment layer and fill it with any color you want and set the opacity according to your own need but as for this specific tutorial i am not going to do that.

Colorizing the lips.

Select the original image layer in the layer panel, in my case as i did not but the image on a separate layer…so its background layer.

For colorizing the lips you can repeat the steps from 1 to 4 of above section, on step 2 i used these values for lips.
Hue=0, Saturation = 100, Lightness = 0.

Rename this adjustment layer to “lips”.

At step 6 set the blending mode again to color and set the opacity to 50% .

see the result by clicking the above image.

Colorizing the teeth gums and internal borders of the eyes.

Repeat all the steps above….The hue and saturation values are

Hue = 20, Saturation = 100, lightness = +53.

Blending mode = color, Opacity = 50%.

This time brush the tooth gums and the internal eyes border.

Colorizing the Hairs and eyebrows.

Repeat all the steps in sec1

Hue and saturation values are…

Hue = 29, saturation = 32, Lightness= +70.

Blending mode= color, opacity = 18%.

Tip: it useful to only color the thickest hairs no need to color the each hair.

Colorizing the eyes.

For eye i used following settings.

Hue= 49, Saturation = 25, Lightness = 0

Blending mode = Color, Opacity = 100%.

Colorizing the Hair Clip and Cloths.

Use any Color you like……

This is what i got finally.

Comment on how do you like this……..and ask if any help is needed.

Thanks..

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