A question that comes up quite frequently in my Photoshop classes is “What’s wrong with my colour picker? I’m not getting the usual palette.” Or words to that affect. By default the Photoshop colour picker looks like this:

However, you may find that one day, out of the blue, your colour picker looks more like this:

There is an easy fix. Inside the colour picker, try clicking on the radio buttons H, S, B, R, G, B and you’ll see how the colour picker changes. By clicking on H (which stands for Hue) you’ll find yourself with the old familiar picker.

If you’re working with a number of images in Photoshop and want to compare them all at the same size, here’s a quick tip on how to do it.

1. With multiple photographs or illustrations open in Photoshop, choose Window > Arrange > Tile.

2. To see all of the tiled images to be displayed at the same level of magnification, hold down the Shift key, select the Zoom tool, zoom in on one of the images, and voila! All the other tiled images will jump to that same magnification.

I find this is a great time saver when comparing several images and like the versatility of using the Zoom tool to get to the exact magnification I want. Another way to get this functionality is to choose Window > Arrange > Match Zoom.

I haven’t put up any Photoshop tutorials for a while but now is as good a time as any. During the week I was showing my class some retouching and repairing techniques and one of the features that has been added to Photoshop in recent times is the Content Aware Fill. This is an extremely useful tool for photographers who want to quickly and easily remove something from a photograph without getting into using the stamp clone or healing and patch tools. Demonstrating this function generally gets at least one “oooh” from the class because it works so quickly and does a fantastic job removing objects from a photograph and replacing them (very convincingly) with a fill that matches the rest of the photograph. Here’s how to do it.

1. Open your image in Photoshop. I’m using a photograph of my beloved in the sand dunes. For the purposes of demonstration, let’s say I want to remove him from the picture.

   

2. It’s always a good idea to make changes on a separate layer, so press Ctrl + J / Cmd + J to duplicate your original layer. The original photo is now safe on the background and you can edit on the new layer.
3. Draw a selection around the object that you want to remove. For this picture, I used the Lasso Tool (L) and drew a loose Selection around him.

   

4. Choose Edit > Fill.

In the Fill dialog box, choose Content-Aware from the Use menu, and click OK. The selection changes to match the area around it.

And as if by magic … he’s gone. And importantly the background has been filled in nicely for us.

5. Press Ctrl + D / Cmd + D to deselect and that’s it.

You’ll definitely find there is a bit of trial and error with this tool, but when it works, it works really well.

Is this something you’ve used before in Photoshop?

Joe Bluhm is an incredibly talented illustrator and caricaturist. In this video (which is 1 of 4 – the links to the other 3 appear at the end of the clip), Joe talks through a digital art piece he created based on the favourite actors of Wes Anderson (who directed The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore). This particular video focuses on the Bill Murray caricature and we can see how he sketches and paints digitally in Photoshop.

Visit Joe Bluhm’s blog (Rejects) for tips and tutorials and his main website to see some wonderful caricatures and inspiring illustration work. There are more video tutorials on his podcast site, although it hasn’t been updated for a while.

On a somewhat related note, this is my own attempt at a Bill Murray caricature. This was done in Photoshop and Corel Painter. It started mainly as a photo manipulation of Bill Murray and continued on from there and turned into quite a cartoony affect.

Hello again! I haven’t posted here for a while and feel it’s time to get back on the saddle again. Thanks to everyone who has visited over the last few months. I’ve been keeping a very low profile online and have spent much of the last two months breathing in and out, living in the “Now” and smelling the roses : )

Here’s four Photoshop tutorials I posted on Sitepoint during August that you might find useful.

How to use content aware fill to remove unwanted objects

Change colours in Photoshop with the Hue Blend mode

How to manipulate images using Puppet Warp in Photoshop CS5

How to use channels to make a selection and create a silhouette

This is from an article I wrote for PhotographyBB magazine – the best photography magazine on the web! It’s a technique you can use to gather together a number of your shots with a common theme and present them in a nice grid format. The idea is to do some close cropping on the images so they are all the same shape.

1. The first thing you need to do is to sort through your photographs and choose nine images that you want to use in your poster. It doesn’t matter if the pictures are in Portrait or Landscape orientation because you will be cropping them into squares.

2. In Photoshop, choose File > New. From the Preset dropdown box, choose International Paper and from the Size dialog box, choose A4. We want to create a poster for printing leave the Resolution at 300 pixels. Click OK.

3. Open up your nine images (ideally related to each other in some way). I’m using nine pictures I took of my friends’ beautiful daughter in her cot. They’re not brilliant pictures by any means but by putting them together as a group on a grid they make a nice impact.

4. Click back on your main document to make it active. Choose View > Show, and choose Grid. An alignment grid will appear over your blank document. The grid consists of “big” boxes with 16 smaller boxes inside them. You’ll use this to line up your nine images but it will be removed before printing out your poster.

5. Switch to the first photo you want to place on your grid. You can use the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) to make a selection in each of your photographs. When you’ve selected the Rectangular Marquee tool, hold down the Shift key and drag out a perfectly square selection of the part of the image that you want to appear on your poster.

6. Press V to select the Move tool and drag your photo onto your grid document. Depending on the size of your original, you might find that when you drag it over, it may appear really large or really small. You’ll need to scale it to fit on the grid with your eight other photos.

7. Press Ctrl + T (windows) or Cmd + T (Mac) to bring up Free Transform. Hold down the Shift key then grab the bottom-right corner point and drag inward to scale your photo in size. Drag the handles until your photo is three big squares high and three big squares wide. With the transform handles still in place, put the cursor inside the handles and drag the photo so it is two small squares from the left and one big square from the top. Press Enter/Return to commit the transformation.

8. Choose the second photo you want to appear on the grid from the Window menu and with the Rectangular Marquee tool selected, press-and-hold the Shift key, and drag a perfectly square selection around the focal point of your image. Switch to the Move tool again, click within the selected area, and drag-and-drop it onto your grid document.

9. Now here’s a small time-saving tip. Since you’ve already used Free Transform to scale the first photo, you can now take advantage of “Transform Again.” Just press Shift + Ctrl + T (windows) or Shift + Cmd + T (Mac) and the exact same resizing that was applied to the previous photo will be applied to this one. Press Enter/Return to commit your transformation. Use the Move tool to position this photo to the right of your first photo, with just one small grid square separating them.

10. Repeat the process with the remaining seven photos, lining them up as you go. Separate each row of images by one small box.

11. You can get rid of the grid now that all the images are lined up. Choose View > Show > Grid.

12. Now to add some text to your poster at the bottom. I used a sans-serif font called Century Gothic.

And that completes the poster.

An optional step you might like to take is to convert all the images to black and white.

In the Layers palette, select the top layer (not the text layer) then click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Choose Channel Mixer from the drop down menu. Make sure the Preview check box is checked, then when the dialog appears, turn on the Monochrome checkbox.

Use the Red, Green and Blue sliders to change how the images look. When you get the black and white effect you like, click OK.

That completes the black and white poster.