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The creative tutorial home of image wrangler, Lesa Snider.

Photoshop

Tips for Better Text, Pt. 2

Continuing with our exploration of making text look better (see node#272), today let's have a look at leading. Like kerning, leading is another trick page-layout gurus have had up their collective sleeves for eons, though for a lot of folks, the terminology is completely foreign. If you have ever put extra returns between lines of text to create space, or wondered how designers make lines of type appear all squashed together, then this tutorial is for you.

Before I show you how to adjust leading in Photoshop, let's define it.

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Blurry Background a la Lensbabies

How to recreate the effect of a popular new lens

One of the many cool digital SLR lenses on the market today are Lensbabies. It's a bendable lens, if you can imagine, that actually lets you control which area of the photo is in focus. Once you get the right angle, you lock the lens into place and snap your shot. It's very cool but since it's a proper lens, it carries a proper price. It's not outrageous, but at about $300 it's not what I'd call an impulse buy.

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The No-Name Photo Effect

I really tried hard to name today's tip, honestly I did. I know I've seen the effect, but I've never heard it referred to in a specific way. I thought of calling it High Contrast Greenish Tinge, or Gen X Extreme Photo Effect, or a number of other catchy titles that didn't quite gel. (Copy editors, being all the wiser, know better than to try and write something catchy and cute, because it will just sounds corny to everyone but themselves.)

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Tips for Better Text, Pt. 1

With so much time spent focusing on photo manipulation, I thought I'd spend a little time on text, and explore a very important option living deep inside the Character palette: kerning. Those of you skilled in the art of page-layout using Quark and InDesign know all about kerning, but did you know you can do it in Photoshop? Before I show you how, let's define this odd little word.

What the heck is kerning?

Simply put, kerning is tightening the space between letters. For example, note the distances between the letters circled in this screenshot.

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Lines of All Kinds

Sometimes it's the simplest stuff that proves most challenging.

Take drawing lines in Photoshop. Sounds easy enough, if Adobe hadn't buried the Line Tool (yes there is one). But what if you need a line with arrows? Did you know there's a tool for that too? Today I'll introduce you to Photoshop's hidden Line Tool and the secret to customizable arrows at either end. As a bonus, I'll show you how to draw those handy little red circles you see in some of my tutorial screen shots. As luck would have it, the steps are identical in Photoshop Elements.

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Cropping to the Rule of Thirds

Finding Photoshop's hidden cropping grid

Today I'm going to share with you a trick the pros use for composing truly visually pleasing photos. It's called the rule of thirds. It's a wonderful guideline to follow when composing a shot with your camera, and when cropping. If you're familiar with this rule already, you might be interested to know that there's a way to crop photos to this rule *perfectly* in Photoshop.

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Wrangling Web Graphics, Pt. 1

Tips for creating small web graphics

To JPEG, to GIF, to PNG... that is the question. Each time we create a web graphic, we engage in the "quality vs. file size" dance. To make nice and tidy, quick-loading web graphics, they need to be small in file size; however, making them small in file size reduces quality.

The trick lies in knowing which file format to use when to give you the best quality, and knowing a few tricks about each format to squeeze them down to size.

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Easy Clipping Groups

Place a photo inside text

Here's a fun, neat little effect that, surprisingly, doesn't seem too overdone. It's called creating a clipping group, and all it takes is an image and a word in which you want to bring that image through. The trick is in the placement of the text and image layers, and the holding down of a special modifier key to make the magic happen.

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Fall Leaf Photo Frame

There once was a photo of maple leaf. It was a lonely little leaf, until one fortuitous day when it came upon a photo of young lovers frolicking on the crisp, fall ground. The lonely leaf carefully measured its width, then scrutinized its height. The lonely leaf realized it was big enough to hold the young lovers, and thus offered itself up as a frame. The lovers were thrilled at being cradled inside such creativity and they all lived happily ever after. The End.

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Photoshop Brush Cursor

Last week I had the pleasure of catching one of my idols' sessions at PhotoPlus in New York City. Her name is Julienne Kost and when I grow up I want to be just like her. She's one of the best teachers on the instruction circuit and if you get a chance to catch one of her sessions, beg, steal or borrow to get yourself there.

Therefore, here's a little QuickTip plucked from her session which I believe you'll find most useful.

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