Now go ahead and make short swee

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Now go ahead and make short sweeps with the radial gradient tool. You can see on the layer mask the light grey parts; that is what we are masking. You are seeing red because I have the rubylith turned on (this is at the bottom of the channels palette because a layer mask has its own channel). The shortcut to view the rubylith is “\|” key on your keyboard.

If we used black here as foreground there would be a harsh difference between the drawing effect and the original..we want a slow easy blend.

If you want more light on the source image (which we could’ve adjust right away) you can use the Image: Adjustment: Levels command (Ctrl/Cmd “L”) if you want to make it permanent or create a levels adjustment layer with the background layer being selected first (so the adjustment layer goes right on top of it in the Layers Palette).

Now add some appropriate text. Can you guess the inspiration for this? The classic 80’s one hit wonder by ‘Aha’.

Grab your crop tool. We are now going to create a snapshot so go to the History palette. Creating a snapshot remembers all of the information in the document as this point in time. Click the camera. Now you can go ahead and crop the image and if you don’t like it you can always come back to the pre-cropped image!. Snapshots are unfortunately NOT saved with the document (Photoshop 9??) but don’t be afraid to use them.

Here you can see the new snapshot at the top of the History palette. Use your crop tool to make a selection. The darkened area is what you are going to ‘cut’. Just use it as shown if you’re new to the crop tool. When you have it on the area that you want to crop to just press Enter and the document will immediately be cropped.

You can use the crop tool immediately after you scan or import photos into Photoshop. You could even go through your photo collection in the file browser and go on a ‘cropping bonananza’. Just be careful though. Crops are permanent unless you save another copy of the picture.

Now create another snapshot in the History palette. This will record the cropped state of the document. Do that and then you can go ahead and make other adjustments which will then act like the normal history palette. You can now compare the different snapshots while you keep the document open.

Here is another something you can do to add to any image (look for more tutorials on this in the future). Browse your brush palette (only available when you are on the ‘B’rush tool. Adjust the spacing so they’re not so condensed. Make sure you create a new layer to paint the stars onto. Choose a foreground color to paint with. Remember that you can get this and 300 other .psd files from the iPSDirectory for free with the Photoshop Designer or Total Package.

There you go. This tutorial covered many different techniques and should have you a lot more comfortable with what you can do in Photoshop. Take some time to get to know your filters and feel free to experiment. Don’t forget you have blending modes too. Take on me. Take me on.