Photoshop

So the other day I get an email asking how to map the image of a circuit board onto a human face. An interesting though slightly unusual request, it's definitely not the oddest email I've ever gotten. Turns out, this is a really useful and easy technique and now that you know what to look for, you'll see it used in ad campaigns all across the country.

To illustrate the effect properly, I trotted over to istockphoto and purchased a photo of a circuit board and a face: a "Scary Frustrated Man Face" to be exact, just to spice things up a bit.

Make your text look like it's been around the block... or two! Call it weathered, grungy, or distressed, or what have you, the secret to creating this quick and easy effect is the same: All you need is a layer mask and one of the nifty artistic brushes already built into our beloved copy of Photoshop.

While at Photoshop World in Miami recently, I picked up a super quick method of drawing the eye to the heart of an image. By using a filter you've probably never heard of, you can produce an effect that truly beautifies a portrait, and looks like something you'd get from a real portrait studio (Olan Mills, anyone?).

Thanks to Marc Rizzolo for asking about keyboard shortcuts, and thus giving me the idea to post a few of my favorites from Photoshop and Elements. The terrific thing is that most of these apply to all Adobe apps. Gotta love that!

And if these shortcuts don't light your fire, I'm going to show you how to make Photoshop build you a web page of *all* of them... all by itself. Here we go:

I'm feeling pretty feisty today: I'm going to try to convince you to use *several* steps to perform a technique that technically requires only one. Impossible you say? Could be, but I'm gonna give it a shot.

The technique I'm talking about is converting a color image into grayscale. Yes you could simply choose Image > Mode > Grayscale and be done with it; but, what's that my Daddy always said? "You get what you pay for, Lesa Kaye!"

I took a picture of a gorgeous Stingray not long ago at the Corvette Museum in Kentucky. The shot turned out beautifully, though, what if I wanted to change the car color to something else? It'd be easy enough if the turquoise was solid, but the car is shiny and contains reflections. You'd think making this car a bright purple would be a time-consuming and frustratingly tedious job. Not so my friends. I'm going to show you a quick and easy way to make this car any color I want, all the while preserving the reflections, plus the gray Stingray logo and air intake vents.