ANYONE COULD HELP ME! SKILLED TRADESMEN RESCUE THE PHOTOSHOP INFANT!

DW
Posted By
Derek W Brown
Sep 21, 2003
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269
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I have recently purchased a seemingly advanced book on photoshop 6. (I also own 7). The book is entitled Special Edition using Adobe Photoshop 6 by Richard Lynch. He knows how to work but falls short in the area of explanation. I have already worked and reworked some sections of the classroom in a book I should mention. I have a two fold problem. 1st, I am trying to work with highlighting and shadowing, butons specifically, and I am attempting to make one from an image of my wife’s wonderfully attractive face. I am asked to make an alpha channel and I am stopped short of my goal. The alpha channel, created as a new channel, only displays black and will not allow me to apply the emboss filter to the channel. 2ndly, I am trying to create images that look hand drawn by pencil. Any ideas for a beginner?
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Y
YrbkMgr
Sep 21, 2003
Derek,

I am not familiar with the book so the following may be of limited value.

Alpha channels can be thought of as Saved Selections. You make a selection, say with the rectangular marquee tool, then you save the selection. There are a few ways to save a selection, but the easiest for beginners is from the menu. Selection|Save Selection… you will be prompted to give the selection a name. Giving it a name and pressing OK will produce an alpha channel in the Channels Palette.

The fact that your alpha channel is all black indicates that everything in the image is selected – that is, the marching ants are around the entire image, instead of your intended selection. So I suspect that somewhere along the line, you may have missed a part instructing you to make a selection first – but I don’t know for sure.

Since I am not familiar with the book, this may help. Draw a rectangle with the rectangular marquee tool. Then Select|Save Selection… from the menu and name it. Then press OK. Look in the channels palette. The newly created alpha channel will have a black box where you have drawn the rectangle with your marquee tool.

As far as pencil sketches, there’s the manual way and the reasonably automated way. There have been many actions created to do this, and many, many, tutorials. You might have better luck doing a google search on "Pencil Sketch Photoshop Tutorial".

Peace,
Tony
DW
Derek W Brown
Sep 21, 2003
Thanks Tony. Everyone here always helps. I love photoshop like a father loves his son, or a god his creation. Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in a day.
SV
Stephen Van Court
Sep 21, 2003
Look for the "Photoshop 7 Quickstart Guide" from Peachpit Press. I have found their books on Adobe software to be very helpful. Reading the manuals that come with the software will do little more than drive you mad.
PH
Photo Help
Sep 22, 2003
<http://www.phong.com/tutorials/>

For the pencil look at the "Artistic" and "Sketch" filters. There are several tutorials online to get a "pencil like" effect, but 99% of the time it doesn’t work as well as you would like. There are some 3rd party plug-ins that do a much better job. Unfortunately the good ones come with a price to match the quality of the output.

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