Design & Multimedia

Covers Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other graphics articles and tutorials.

How to Make Awesome-Looking Images for Your Website

22 January 2018 / Leave a Comment

Great images make a huge difference to the look and feel of your website. Whether it’s product photos, a headshot of your gorgeous self for your About page, or some inspirational images for your blog posts, eye-grabbing imagery will help your customers trust you and your business.

But we’re not all professional photographers, right? So how do you go about making these amazing pics? There are many fantastic stock photo libraries, of course, which are a great place to start. But sometimes you need to take your own photos. Even a stock photo might need some tweaking to work well on your site.

That’s why I wrote this guide to creating great images for your site! In it, you’ll learn:

How to choose an image-editing app that meets your needs
The best way to crop your images for maximum effect
Ways to tweak an image’s brightness, contrast, and colours to make it pop
A clever trick to make the subject of your photo stand out
How to reduce pesky noise in a photo to make it look cleaner and load faster, and
How to improve soft images with sharpening so that they look more pro.

Ready to get started? Let’s begin by choosing the perfect image editor for you!

Adobe Spark Lets You Create Stunning Business Visuals in Minutes

25 November 2016 / 4 Comments

Gorgeous-looking social media posts. Super-slick webpages. Professional promo videos. They’re all essential for promoting your business these days.

But how can you produce all this great stuff? You can pay a creative pro to make them, of course. If you’re on a budget, though, the chances are you’ll be making them yourself!

However, if you’re not that creative, or you’re super-busy (and let’s be honest, have you ever met a small business owner that isn’t super-busy?), then it’s hard work to produce all this amazing content to promote your products and services.

That’s where Adobe Spark comes in! Spark is a set of free apps that make it ridiculously quick and easy to create awesome-looking content.

Want to know more about Spark? Keep reading! By the time you’ve finished this article, you’ll know exactly what Spark is, how it works, and how it can help you to promote your business.

How to Make Gorgeous Video Intros with Keynote & iMovie

7 July 2016 / 2 Comments

Videos are a super-effective way to get your point across.

Whether it’s an explainer video for your business, a video course that teaches your expert skills, or a promo video for your latest product, videos really help to deliver your message.

But how should your video begin? You can just launch straight into the meat of the video, but often it’s nice to lead your viewers in gently with a short intro. The intro can explain what the video is about, and might include your logo and other info too.

Getting a professionally-made video intro can cost an arm and a leg, but there is a way to do it yourself on a budget — and you can get great results too! In this tutorial, I’ll show you how. All you need is a Mac, the Keynote & iMovie apps, and some free fonts, graphics, and music.

Getting to Know Photoshop’s Toolbox

4 June 2010 / Leave a Comment

One of the first things you encounter when you start using Photoshop is its toolbox. You use the toolbox to access all of Photoshop’s tools, letting you do anything from moving stuff around through to painting, filling with colour, creating text, and lots more.

The toolbox contains 28 icons and around 60 tools, and it can seem bewildering if you’re not used to it. Never fear — it all starts to make sense once you get to know your way around the various tools, and understand how they’re grouped together.

This tutorial gets you up to speed with the Photoshop toolbox, and each of the tools it contains. By the time you’ve finished reading it, you’ll be well on your way to working proficiently with the Photoshop toolbox, and you’ll have a good general understanding of all the tools in Photoshop too.

Let’s get started!

Using Photoshop’s Smart Filters

19 May 2010 / 4 Comments

Smart Filters, first introduced in Photoshop CS3, let you apply any of Photoshop’s filter effects to a layer non-destructively. This means that — unlike a regular filter — a Smart Filter doesn’t permanently alter the pixels in a layer.

Smart Filters give you a lot of creative freedom. For example, you can:

Toggle a Smart Filter on or off. Unlike a regular filter, where the effect is permanently applied, you can reverse the effect of a Smart Filter by just turning it off, or deleting it altogether. You can also easily compare an image with and without the filter effect by toggling the filter.
Go back and edit a Smart Filter’s settings at any time. Smart filters are totally re-editable. Want to make a Gaussian Blur effect more prominent after you’ve applied it? Just double-click the Smart Filter and increase its Radius value.
Easily mask off parts of a Smart Filter. This is my favourite Smart Filters feature. Each layer comes with its own filter mask, letting you selectively hide parts of a filter’s effect in the image by painting on the mask.
Apply blending options to Smart Filters. Just as with layers, you can give each Smart Filter its own blend mode and tweak its opacity.

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to do all of these things with Photoshop’s wonderful Smart Filters. Let’s get going!

Working with Smart Objects in Photoshop

14 April 2010 / Leave a Comment

Smart Objects are an often-overlooked, yet handy feature of Photoshop. Introduced in CS2, Smart Objects let you store all kinds of different image content within a single, layer-like object. A Smart Object can store:

Any number of Photoshop layers, including bitmap, type, shape, adjustment, and fill layers
Vector artwork created in Illustrator
An imported image file, including JPEGs, TIFFs, Illustrator files, and even PSD files

In effect, a Smart Object is like having a separate Photoshop or Illustrator document encapsulated in a layer.

Smart Objects sit in the Layers panel just like regular layers. In fact, you can treat a Smart Object much like a bitmap layer — for example, you can move it, resize it, apply layer effects to it, and so on.

When you want to edit the Smart Object’s original content, you just double-click the Smart Object’s thumbnail to open the embedded “document”, make your changes to the document in a separate window, and save. The Smart Object then updates to reflect your edits.

In this tutorial, you’ll look at:

The benefits of Smart Objects
Creating Smart Objects
Editing Smart Objects
Duplicating Smart Objects
Converting Smart Objects to regular layers

Adobe’s Jaw-Dropping Content-Aware Fill

24 March 2010 / 19 Comments

Just as Adobe gears up to launch version 5 of their Creative Suite, they drop this little bombshell on us — Content-Aware Fill:

Watch the video above to see what Content-Aware Fill can do. Removing the bits of trash and the tree is impressive enough, but wait till you see the road being removed at 3:53, and the extra sky and clouds appearing at 4:44! To paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, this technology is so advanced it’s almost like magic.

Okay, you’ve gotten over the initial “wow” factor and managed to close your mouth again. How does this tool work exactly?

Sharpen Your Photoshop Skills with Our New Book

11 December 2007 / Leave a Comment

From shape layers and adjustment layers through to layer comps, Smart Objects and layer masks, there’s a lot more to Photoshop layers than meets the eye. To really get the most out of Photoshop, you need to know these features inside-out, and that’s where the Photoshop CS3 Layers Bible comes in.

Written by Matt and Simon, ELATED’s in-house Photoshop experts, this book covers everything you need to know about layer techniques in Photoshop.

The book is published by Wiley, and is available online from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, as well as from all good book stores worldwide. To whet your appetite, here’s a chapter-by-chapter summary of what you’ll learn when you read the book.

Selecting Layers in Photoshop

16 July 2007 / 21 Comments

If you’ve used Photoshop for any length of time, you no doubt use layers fairly extensively. They’re a great way to compose a design, because they let you edit and move design elements independently of each other. (If you’re new to layers in Photoshop, take a look at our Introduction to layers tutorial.)

Of course, to edit and manipulate a layer, you need to select it. Sometimes you want to select more than one layer at once. And sometimes, if your document has lots of layers, you want to select a layer quickly by clicking it in the document window. This tutorial walks you through all these techniques, and more, and explores the myriad ways of selecting layers in Photoshop.

New Features in Photoshop CS3

3 April 2007 / Leave a Comment

If you’re a professional Web designer, chances are that you’ve used Photoshop at least once in your life. This impressive application, nearly 20 years old, is very much the industry standard for image editing and photo retouching, and is often the software of choice for the Web designer too.

The latest incarnation – Photoshop 10, or CS3 – is just around the corner; Adobe officially launched it last week, and it’s currently available for pre-order at the time of writing.

I’ve been playing with the CS3 beta for the last few months, and it’s certainly an impressive beast. Let’s take a look at the new, fun stuff that Adobe have added to their latest release, as well as areas that they’ve improved over CS2 and earlier versions.

Design & Multimedia

Footer

Contact Matt

Follow Matt