Preventing color shift when adjusting levels.

Quite often you will see a slight color shift when making level adjustments. This is most noticeable in skin color. To correct this problem follow these steps:

1. Open the image you want to work on.

2. Make a new adjustment layer by right clicking on the “Create new Fill or Adjustment Layer” icon and selecting “levels”.

3. Make the level adjustments on your image.

4. The tip is to now set the blending mode to Luminosity. This removes any color shift caused by the level adjustments.

Shift back and forth between the luminosity and normal blending modes and you will see the difference it makes.

Lawrence

Making a dashed line in Photoshop

I recently had a need to make a bunch of dashed line for a flow chart I made in Photoshop. Seeing there are no dashed lines available I did a little research and found a way that solved my problem.

As with everything else in Photoshop, there are probably a dozen different ways to draw dashed lines, but this one worked for me.

Here are the steps to draw a dashed line.

1. Start by making a new document that is 1 pixel high by 10 pixels wide.

2. With the pencil tool set for a size of one pixel, fill in all the pixels of the new document except for the two end pixels.

3. Select the whole document (Ctrl + A).

4. Click Edit/Define Pattern.

5. Name the pattern “dashed line”.

6. To draw a dashed line chose the “Rectangular Marquee” tool.

7. Make a selection that is 1 pixel high by the length you want your dashed line.

8. Click Edit/Fill.

9. Select your “dashed line from the Custom Patterns and press OK.

If you want a vertical dashed line, you can just rotate the line you just made, or you can rotate the image you made in step 8 and save it as a vertical dashed line pattern.

Once you have made the pattern, you only need to use steps 6 through 9 to make a dashed line.

Here is a challenge for you. Can you come up with other methods, that are possibly better, of making a dashed line in Photoshop?

Lawrence

Fill Shape on Transparent Layer

If you are working on a file that has transparent layers that contain a block, and you want to change the color of the block only, here is a quick tip that shows you how to do it.

The normal way to fill a layer with the foreground color with a keyboard shortcut is to press alt+delete. However, this will fill the complete layer, not just the block on the layer.

To fill the block only, just add the shift key to the above shortcut. By pressing shift+alt+delete, you will fill just the box. If you want to fill the box with the background color, press shift+ctrl+delete.

There are other methods of achieving this such as locking the transparent layer, but I think this method is quicker.

Lawrence

Global Lighting

If you use a lot of drop shadows on photos, text, etc. on different layers, the Global Lighting feature is a handy way to keep your light source coming from the same direction in all layers. You can also change the direction of light angle of the drop shadow on all layers at the same time.

To use Global Lighting, click on the “Use Global Lighting” check box in the Drop Shadow Layer Style on each layer.

Then go to Layer/Layer Style/Global Light. This will bring up a dialog box in which you can change the light angle for all the different layers with only one control.

If you leave any of the “Use Global Lighting” check boxs in the Drop Shadow Layer Style on each layer unchecked, the lighting angle will not change on that layer.

Lawrence

Make a precisely sized text box.

In some applications you may be forced to put your text into a precisely sized layout on an image. Here are the steps to accomplish this:

1. Open the image on which you are going to add the text.

2. Make all the text settings such as font, style, size, color, etc. before going on to the next step.

3. Click on the Type Tool.

4. Move your cursor to the position in the image where you want the upper left corner of the box .

5. Hold down the Alt key and click the mouse button on the point you want for the upper left corner.

6. A “Paragraph Text Size box will pop-up. Fill in the width and height of the box you want, and click on
“OK”.

7. Type you text and it will wrap within the box dimensions you have established.

Lawrence