Jeffco Blog » Software Tips

Making Reflected Patterns with Photoshop Smart Objects

jeffco — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:00:42 +0000

Making Patterns with Photoshop Smart Objects

#1 In this case, I’m going to start with a simple blank document, and I chose 640×640 pixels. I’ve shown the rulers and changed them to show it as a percentage instead of pixels or inches.

#2 I started by dragging guides from the ruler to the middle (50%) both vertically and horizontally. Having the rulers set for percent makes it easy so the guides snap to 50% by default. This will allow us to center our shape very easily.

#3 So I’ve gone and made a circle, since it seems an obvious shape to create a repeating pattern on. I used the shape tool and chose a circle. I started drawing from where the guides meet, the very center of the document, and held the shift key so the shape is a perfect circle, and held the alt key, so it would draw outward from the very center. You don’t need to do that, you can draw it anywhere and just center it using the alignment palette.

#4 Making a circle or shape of any kind with the shape tool means it starts out as a vector object, and since I want to draw on it, that won’t do, so go to the layers palette and convert the circle layer to a raster object (Rasterize Layer).

#5 A white object on a white background is rather unimpressive so I made the background layer a light grey, just so we could see the circle. It’s also about this point that I realized I would have been much better off doing this as a video rather than screen-caps, but what the heck we’re well into it by now…

#6 Since, Smart Objects is in the title, we might as well make us a smart object! A smart object is a file within a file in Photoshop. They’re great for making one item that can be updated and updating several other versions of the same thing, and that’s what we’re going to do here. We start by selecting the layer we drew the circle on and from the layer palette (or just right clicking the layer the circle’s on) we can choose Convert to Smart Object. Go ahead and do that and you’ll see that the icon on the layer palette changes to show a new icon designating it as a Smart Object. Once you have a smart object, if you want to make a change, you need to double-click it to open up the contents of the Smart Object as a new files, then when you save it and close it, it will update the content in the main document you created it in.

#7 I’ll explain more about that later, but for now let’s move on and see Smart Objects in action. In this example, I’m making a circle that is made up of four quarters which repeat and reflect. In order to do this, we need to duplicate our smart object three times (so there’s four total). You can just drag the Smart Object layer down to the new layer icon on the layer palette and it will make copies of our Smart Object layer. Now, if we update one, all four will have the same update. We could try that by double clicking one layer and making a change (and it would update all four) but really, since it’s four layers on top of one another, we wouldn’t see anything anyway. But, let’s make a change anyway, just to try out our Smart Object…

#8 Double click one of the Smart Object layers and you’ll see that it opens up the contents in a new Photoshop document and it’s only the circle (no background). It still has the guides so we can basically keep our drawing to one of the quarters of the circle, your choice, it won’t matter. I started with a line that will reflect on itself, but when you start you may just want to play and see what you get. The more you do of this, the more you’ll be able to predict what the result will be and what you need to do and the spaces you need to fill.

#9 When you save and close your Smart Object file that opened in front of your original document, Photoshop will do a little thinking then update the original file (with the grey background) with what we drew in the pop-up. Completely unimpressive to update one document which looks virtually identical to the first, but remember we have four copies of that layer, and now it’s time to manipulate them.

#10 With four identical quarters of our circle, we know we’ll need to do some transforming of our layers. Leave one untouched, transform one by choosing Transform>Flip Horizontal, then one Transform>Flip Horizontal then Transform>Flip Vertical, then one just Transform>Flip Vertical. This should put one quarter of the original circle into each of the quarter of the original document. We could prove it if we could see it, but we can’t not quite yet. Next step…

#11 In order to see the work we’ve done repeating the quarters, we need to switch our blend mode of the layers from Normal to Multiple. Well, we need to switch the top three to multiply, so we can see through all three down to and including the fourth. Select each layer separately and switch to multiply and you’ll see that the quarters will reveal themselves…

#12 In this example, it’s a pretty simple repeat and resulting pattern, but once you have a handle on that, remember that you can go back and update your Smart Object by double clicking on the layer in the layers palette and add, change or erase what you have. Try it!

#13 Adding more lines and saving the opened file updates the main file with more lines that now repeat in all four corners. I personally can’t wait until processors and Photoshop are able to handle updating Smart Objects from within the original file, but that may take a while, especially when you consider there really aren’t any limits on size or complexity of Smart Objects. Smart Objects can be repeated over and over, duplicated, broken and repeated, nested, all kinds of fun tricks that I hope to elaborate on in future examples.

#14 Still not satisfied? Keep clicking the Smart Object layer and opening it up and making changes. You can’t break it, just keep trying to visualize what you’re creating and see how it actually ends up. The more you play with it, the more sense it will make, and hopefully the more possibilities it will suggest to you.

#15 So here’s my simple repeating pattern, created from a basic circle, repeated as four, and flipped and repeated onto the same space and revealed by changing the layer mode. This simple idea can be expanded into really complex patterns and shapes, but hopefully this will open the door to you trying new and interesting things for yourself!

Previewing Video in OS-X

jeffco — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:19:37 +0000

Regain the ability to scrub through video which was lost in the latest Mac upgrade.

When I got the new version of the mac OS, I noticed that they switched to a Flash style video preview, which works great but got rid of the ability for you to just grab the slider at the bottom and drag to quickly check what the content of the video was. And for a lot of videos with only black or quiet beginnings, it meant a lot of time wasted playing to get to a point where you could recognize what the subject of the video. Well, the solution is simple, just open Quick Look, a new feature in 10.5. And there’s a shortcut, the spacebar, so you don’t have to right click anything. Highlight whatever video you want to preview and hit the spacebar to have full access, and full-size to boot! Might not affect too many people, but it’s a handy little tip which will save me lots of time waiting for the preview to play…

Scanning Hints

jeffco — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:26:25 +0000

Recently I was asked for some scanning recommendations, and then also having just purchased Lightroom and trying to reign in my photo collection, I thought I might have some useful insights for anyone looking to scan their old photos into their digital collections.

So it seems I’ve been here before. Going through all of my old photos from decades gone by, wondering how best to capture them and save them so I don’t have to do this again (and in case I ever have that option taken away from me). This time, the purchase of Adobe’s photo development and cataloging software Lightroom lead me to try to, once again, bring all my photos under one room, collected in one place, with all the best digital versions available of each shot. Needless to say most collections can’t stand up to that kind of scrutiny without some desire to improve or upgrade the system you have. And mine is no exception.

Even though I’d scanned all of these photos before, standards change and some files get misplaced. For this reason, I decided to rescan many of the prints I’d scanned before. Isn’t that a lot of work? Well, it’s not insignificant, but technology improvements and better understanding of processes and software are making it worthwhile for me.

For one thing, though I have all of these photos already, I’m scanning at a higher resolution this time. I’m scanning everything at 100% but 600 dpi as opposed to previous 300 dpi scans. Is this necessary? Not likely, it’s more than I’ll use, but the increase in HD size, and also the introduction of cheap enlargement printing and photobooks make having the larger resolution worth considering so that enlargements can print well at a larger range of sizes.

Also, now that lightroom and Photoshop include RAW-light development options for jpgs and other file types with greater control and often with non-destructive options, it makes it well worth considering as future software developments become available. I for one (along with most) “ruined” more than my share of scans with the over-use of the Shadows and Highlights filter in Photoshop. Thanks to Lightroom, I can still make the same tweaks without throwing away that original data, so that in two years when they come out with the next great thing, I hopefully won’t have to do this all over again (since the photos will likely continue to degrade in their own imperceptible way.

And not that I needed to rescan for this, but keywords and metadata in general has improved considerably and makes having a new, fresh collection worth drooling over as well.

A few words about the scan process. While I’m a big fan of using TWAIN import for scanner within Photoshop for day to day and single run scans, I’m sat back and thought about the process for large run scanning endeavors. Using Photoshop to get the images into the computer is an additional step and a wasteful one. For this round, I’m using scanner software (in this case Epson) to handle the capture and also naming and saving. It’s a real time saver. I can set the scanner software up to capture the image based on my presets and save the file out, eliminating the tedious process of saving and naming files and even much of my participation at all, other than setting the photos on the scanner bed.

And there’s another time saver. While most scanner software allows you to preview the bed and select what you’ll be scanning, I forego that and just sort of break the bed into three zones and set the scanner to scan each of those three with the settings I want. It’s hugely inefficient in that it scans a 4×6 photo with 2 inches border all around it, but the speed of doing that and then cropping it off, is far superior to re-previewing every time. It might not be for all scanners, but if you haven’t tried it, give it your own tests. It might save you a ton of time.

I’ve defaulted the scanning software to save the files as tiffs, that way I can open them after in Photoshop and crop and straighten them without worrying about the slow (of fast) degradation of jpgs. Once I have all the kinks worked out, and before I bring them into lightroom, I’ll run a Photoshop script (Image processor) on the whole batch of them to convert them to the highest quality jpg. Doing it once will maintain quality, and still drop the file size significantly.

In Photoshop (while they’re still tiffs), I tend to use the lens distort filter on them all, and use the straighten tool to draw the top of the photo edge to straighten the scans so they can be cropped easily. I know there are lots of automated options as well, but given a handful of keyboard shortcuts and actions, I find this way works fastest for me, then a quick Auto Colour filter for anything photographed before the 2000s, or anything on a cheaper camera, and I’m off to the races. I usually follow up the auto colour with a quick fade, Edit>Fade and drop the effect somewhere between 33 and 77, that’s just my taste, and that’ll put it in an acceptable range, that can be worked with later in Lightroom or RAW filtering. The less pixel editing the better though, because, remember, we’re shifting to non-desctructive options in Lightroom. I should probably scrap the whole Auto-colour thing and say I do it all in Lightroom, but I’d be lying. Some of the worst images definitely get the pre-Lightroom bump from me.

Definitely look into actions and keyboard shortcuts if you haven’t already. I find it far faster to hit an F5 or F6 to rotate my photos than any menu command or mouse maneuver. And if you hope to conquer a box of 800 photos in a day as I am doing, it’s an absolute necessity.

So that’s it. I’m sure I’ve forgotten (or taken for granted) many steps, tips and timesavers, but I thought it might be useful to put some of the steps down in case any of it saves you some time. It’s so important to be able to save your images in a worth and useful format, so the better job you do, the better off you are. Oh, and as someone who’s going through a lot of photos from the 20′s and 30′s with all kinds of people no one recognizes anymore, let me make a plea for future generations: When you add keywords, use people’s full names, including possibly maiden names in brackets for women in some cases. More information captured now, means less work, and greater appreciation in the future.

Sorry it wasn’t succinct, but hopefully it all made sense. Happy scanning.

Awakening A Frozen iPod

jeffco — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:12:14 +0000

Directly from the Apple website, a tip which helped me awaken my iPod without having to wait until the battery died… Doesn’t happen often, but hard to know what to do if it does. Here’s a tip from the Apple website (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61705) if your ipod freezes:

To reset an iPod with a Click Wheel, including:
• Fifth Generation iPod (also known as iPod with video)
• iPod nano (Second Generation)
• iPod nano
• iPod with color display (iPod photo)
• iPod (Click Wheel)
• iPod mini
• iPod mini (Second Generation)

1. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.)

2. Press and hold the Menu and Center (Select) buttons simultaneously until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.

Tip: If you are having difficulty resetting your iPod, set it on a flat surface. Make sure the finger pressing the Select button is not touching any part of the click wheel. Also make sure that you are pressing the Menu button toward the outside of the click wheel, and not near the center.
If the above steps did not work, try connecting iPod to a power adapter and plug the power adapter into an electrical outlet, or connect iPod to your computer. Make sure the computer is turned on and isn’t set to go to sleep.

Railroad Track Brush in Illustrator

jeffco — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 03:30:16 +0000

An example of the railroad track brush in Illustrator.

I needed a brush for drawing railway tracks in Illustrator and couldn’t find one, so I had to create one. Download this brush to draw railway tracks in Illustrator. You never know, you might have a use for it…

Railroad Track Brush [zipped]

To use the brush, open the Illustrator file and open the Brushes palette to apply the brush style to any lines you draw. Adjust the scale of the brush pattern accordingly.

Be sure to check out all of the templates that are already online on the Templates page of the Jeffco site.

The Logic of Blurring and Focus

jeffco — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:59:51 +0000

The hows and whys of a blur. I wouldn’t think it needed explaining, but apparently it does.
As I was retouching photos for my brother’s wedding, I came across this photo in which the photographer started (?) blurring the photo in the background to soften the focus and give the foreground more prominence. Good theory, but it’s missing some basic logic, the logic of blurring and focus. (I’ll give the photographer benefit of the doubt and assume the work was incomplete, but given that this is the final format in which the image was provided, with no original to work with, it posed a bit of a problem. So let me say it again: Rules number 1, 2, and 3 or photo retouching are NEVER SAVE OVER YOUR ORIGINALS!)

Okay, so here’s the image in question

The "original" after having been blurred by the Photographer.

So what’s wrong? Well, the problem here is that someone has gone ahead and carefully outlined the foreground person and plates and dessert, which is good, inverted the selection so that only the background is affected, but then used a simple gaussian blur on the remaining selection. This not only blurs the background image, but you’ll notice around the outline of the person, the plates, and the desserts, a halo of colour bleeds out from the foreground elements onto the background. This of course defies logic. When you see the world, things in the foreground inhabit a different plane than things in the background. Things further away, not being the object of focus, tend to look blurry because we’re focussed on the foreground. What should have happened to this image would have been if the person working on it had used that initial selection they made to copy that foreground content onto a new layer, then basically paint out the foreground in the background and then blur that. The effect would be a realistic blurring of background elements without disrupting the foreground.

Here’s a rough diagram of what I mean. In the left hand example, is the effect achieved with the above example. Blurring the selection of the background without separating the background content causes a halo around foreground objects because gaussian blur samples from surrounding pixels, inside the selection or not (the blur spreads only to the selection, but pixels which make up the final selected blur come from outside the selection as well). This leaves foreground smudging into the background and gives off the tell-tale halo. On the right, we see what happens if the foreground is separated from the background, even if only roughly, and then the background is blurred, and no resultant halo.

Comparing what's actually being blurred.

Now ideally I’d have liked to have started with the original, and not had to reverse engineer and remove the halo that way, but sometimes we don’t get a choice. But here’s the result I think I’m happy with. (I darkened it as well to further de-emphasize the background, and hopefully cover up more of the sloppiness). At least now it doesn’t make me cringe like the above copy did.

A revised version, attempting to correct the blur to a more realistic effect.

Bitmap and Vector Graphics Explained

jeffco — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:26:24 +0000

A nice article about bitmap vs vector graphics. I wish a couple of the people I work with would read this…

http://www.photoshopsupport.com/shoptalk/vectors-and-bitmaps.html

Aqua Button Graphic Styles

jeffco — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:14:40 +0000

Graphic styles for Chris to make aqua buttons.

I made these Graphic styles for Chris to make aqua buttons. There are styles for over and pressed. Download and load them into CS2 to try them out.
aqua-tastic.asl.zip

Actionscript: Simple Preloader

jeffco — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 15:57:07 +0000

Some basic actionscript to count the percentage of the flash file loaded, and hold in frame until done.
So, to create a simple preloader in Flash, make a keyframe in frame 2 and put a stop action on it so the Flash holds there. (It has to be frame 2. I always use the first frame to define variables or other basic information which will be used throughout the flash file).

In the second frame, create a movie clip and add the following actionscript onto it:

onClipEvent (load){
total = int(_root.getBytesTotal()/1000)+”Kbs”;
}
onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
_root.download = int(_root.getBytesLoaded()/1000)+”Kbs of “+ total; //Divided by 1000 to show Kbs
_root.percent = int(_root.getBytesLoaded()/_root.getBytesTotal()*100)+” %”; //percentage of download complete
if((_root.getBytesLoaded()/_root.getBytesTotal()*100)>99){ // If the percentage loaded=100, go to the next frame, after the stop command
_root.nextFrame();
}
}

The “onClipEvent (load)” command defines the total size of the flash file to be downloaded.

The “onClipEvent (enterFrame)” defines several variables. First, _root.download which shows the total amount of Kbs which have been downloaded at that point (because it’s an enter frame command, it constantly updates the total percent). Second, _root.percent gets an integer (no decimals) of the percent of the file that has been downloaded. Lastly, the looped percentages are checked, and if the percentage is greater than 99 (i.e. 100), the frame moves to the next one, past the stop command which held the preloader in place while the file was being downloaded>

Now, this is just the basic code. Feel free to play around and build it up as elaborately or as simply as you want. You can make you movie clip be some kind of bar or countdown, and you can use any of these variables (or variants of them) to control position, colour, or size at will using simple actionscript commands. For now though, this will get you the basic numbers and setup which holds your framehead in place until the content is fully loaded.

More Blog Changes, Software Tips Added

jeffco — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 18:30:37 +0000

Bear with me as a few bumps occur with the addition of a Software Tips sister blog.

I’ve added another blog with lots of my favourite software tips. I’ve got lots more to add and I will as I have time. I know not all will appeal to a large segment of the population, but I know some of you will really enjoy them. Plus I tend to answer lots of questions and suggest lots of tips to folks anyway so they might as well be written down where everyone who wants to can read them. They are attempting to get people to think of new things and try new things, not just save time or be more productive (not that those are bad reasons) but hopefully you’ll try some and see if some don’t inspire you to try something new. We’re living in an opportunity of creativy unequalled in history (IMHO) where the means to create and express yourself are all around you and more accessible than ever. Hopefully maybe some of these tips will help motivate you to take advantage of that.

I’ve had people ask me if I’m not afraid that giving away my secrets for free devalue me as a designer and trainer. Watching “Truth or Dare” probably doesn’t qualify you to be Madonna. So no, I’m not worried. These are the tiniest tips of the iceberg. I’ve devoured Aldus magazine from the earliest days and spent more time in all of these programs than anyone I know, by far. Tips are great, but nothing beats practice and experience. Nothing. No books, no tips, no training. Those things help, and are very necessary as well in some cases, but you gotta put in the time before you can understand it all. Am I worried writing a few tips down will close the gap? No, not really. And besides, what good is knowing something if you can’t share with people who are interested?