Category: Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

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Photoshop Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Destructive and Non-Destructive Editing in Photoshop

If you’ve spent any time in the Photoshop groups, you’ve surely been shamed once or twice for “destructive editing.” Well, if not, then, if you’re doing these destructive practices, they were thinking of shaming you!

Here’s a rundown of what’s what:

DestructiveNon-Destructive
Making an adjustment through a menu commandUsing an Adjustment Layer
Erasing part of your image layerUsing a Layer Mask
Painting on your image layerPainting on another layer over your image
Cloning onto your image layer“Use all layers” cloning onto a new layer
Using Dodge, Burn, Sponge, Healing Tool, or Patch on the image layer Using one of these tools on a Merged Visibles layer
Applying a Filter to your imageFiltering a duplicated layer of your image
Flattening your imageMaking a Merged Visibles layer

A Merged Visibles Layer is a shortcut I came up with. I don’t know if anyone else is doing them now.

What you do is to make all the layers visible that you want in this new layer. Anything you don’t want visible, turn off the visibility eye. In the Layers palette, click the top-most of your visible layers.

Now hold Ctrl-Alt-Shift and type E. (Note: some of my tutorials refer to CAS-NE or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N-E. You used to need the N. Now PS automatically puts the merged visibles onto its own layer.)

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement WordPress

All New Tutorial on Vector and Raster Files

I have just posted a much-improved redo of my “What’s the Vector, Victor?” Tutorial. This one goes into much more depth with file types and how to save each type of file. There have actually been new developments while I was away, so I got to learn new things. I went down many different rabbit holes! The tutorial is here!

Everything is coming along on my website. I continue to be amazed at how far I’ve come in such a short time. In recent days, I’ve done more work on my Photoshop Resource Links adding more links as I discover them. Today and yesterday, I found six new links to great sites which taught me about file types!

I have learned, at last, how to actually use a reusable block in WordPress! You convert it to a regular block. That’s done by clicking the thing next to the block at the top.

I learned about groups of blocks. And I now have a template of a group of blocks that I can summon up for new tutorials!

WordPress still remains a pretty complicated and fiddly thing. And the page size seems enormous. But it’s what all the cool people are doing now, so here we are!

I’m exploring the notion of teaching at one of the many online schools that have cropped up while I was sleeping. I surely wish that I could be part of a school that, if not accredited, was at least known to be good. I do know that there are many out there who are professing to be good teachers who just are not.

And I just found another rabbit hole — LinkedIn. This is all stuff that wasn’t even a thing when I went away.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement WordPress

New Head-Swapping Tutorial Announced

Yes! I’ve written a new tutorial! This one is on head-swapping, but it really involves more than just a head. It’s quite a piece of work, if I do say so myself. In this tutorial, I take parts out of four photos, each of which has a problem, and I make one decent portrait of the whole family. This tutorial can be found at this link.

One thing that’s different about this one is that it’s more of a show-off tutorial, because the student’s photos will almost certainly have issues that are different from those in my photo.

A couple of resources that helped me today:

Web Page Word Counter

View Post

Creating and using a Reusable Block in WordPress

In other news, damage of our RV is still being estimated. This doesn’t excite me much.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Tutorial is out now!

I got creative this morning, and made you an all new Photoshop tutorial! This one is Breaking out of a Frame, and features this beautiful dog, Rhett, who belongs to a friend from one of my FB groups.

Click my picture at the right to see Rhett in all his beautiful glory, as he jumps right out of the picture in this gallery.

In other news, our beautiful saguaro cactus which adorned our yard for probably 37 years before we even got here, fell down in a stiff wind on Saturday night. I cried. Our landscaper Jose took it the rest of the way out yesterday. $400.

Other than that, and the fact that it’s hellishly hot, things are fine here. Well, there is the mysterious water in the garage, but it has stopped for the time being, so we’re hopeful that it… healed itself?

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Video Tutorial: Pearly Button

I just finished and uploaded another video tutorial: Creating a Pearly Button in Photoshop. I’m still working on fine-tuning, and there’s still much to be learned about the inner workings of Camtasia, but I’ll get there.

I also figured out how to upload to YouTube. Most people are searching YouTube for tutorials, so it’s where all the cool people are these days.

I did a bit of art!

It remains idiotically hot here. If I ever say anything like “I’d like to stay in Sun Lakes this summer,” I want you to just shoot me.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Arvee

Today we went up to Anthem RV to take some measurements and see what we could DO to the new RV. You didn’t think that we’d take it just “as is,” did you? We are just going to do some little things for now, like adding soap dispensers and changing out the faucets. Janee always has to change out the faucets.

We also drove it! I started by nearly landing us in the drainage ditch on the way out of the parking lot! Sheesh. I don’t believe that this one will be as terrifying as the last pusher I had was — the ’06 Holiday Rambler Ambassador. This one actually has a turning radius. We turned it around in 4 lanes.

Sigh. I feel like I want to do some work, but I’m just tired today. Wanna see my videos I made yesterday?

Placing Anchor points around to create a path
Editing the path to better fit the logo

Ok so now I’m on fire! I just uploaded a whole tutorial: Basic Shapes 1. It’s now online for your viewing pleasure. Click the beautiful graphic to the right to see my new video!

Basic Shapes
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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

I got Camtasia! Is it contagious?

Can Janee-video-tutorials be far behind? The very cool thing is that TechSmith actually remembered me from 14 years ago! If you search YouTube for myjanee, you can still see the 4 short tutorial clips I made back in ’06. I just have to get over this sort of shyness that I seem to have now.

I have Camtasia installed, my headset installed, my Photoshop open, and I’m ready to do a test video. And I’m nervous….

And, it turns out, with good reason! You know how sometimes you have a day when nothing works on the first try? Well, I’m having one of those. And Camtasia is not working for me yet. I am thinking that it’s my version that’s very old and I have to buy the upgrade. Trying to get answers on the forums…. ugh.

This comes after I spent an hour on the phone trying to get hold of the AZ DMV about a registration refund. Finally a most helpful woman got me taken care of, so that worked. Well, maybe I’ll try that upgrade and see if I can make it work.

Grrrr…. and, in yet another chapter of “Golly, nothing is working today,” I updated Camtasia, made what seems like an ok video, and… can’t get it to upload to YouTube.

Ok, I finally made it work! Woo hoo! Time to quit! But here’s the link with the two videos embedded! Copying a Logo in Photoshop

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement Travel Tales

New Photoshop Pen Tool Tutorial

I’ve been busy, busy! Today I finally finished my all-new Pen Tools in Photoshop Tutorial! In this one, I go through some detail with how to use the Pen tools and why anyone would want to do that in the first place.

I take you through such riveting projects as creating my feather to the right and making this flourish as you see below.

I just love doing vector graphics, and should probably take another dive into Illustrator, but not today.

And Jack and I bought an RV yesterday. We had sold our 2019 View the day before. It was just too small for us. We did like the beds in back, but, once we got out of bed, it was a fail. We decided that we just need more space for all 3 of us.

We found a 2019 slightly used Pace Arrow 33D in Anthem, went to see it, and loved it. They’re doing some little projects for us: adding solar panels, installing window awnings, putting in a washer/dryer. We will be picking it up in 2 weeks. Here are some teaser pics of it:

Jodie became instantly well when we went and got her a new bag of food. We’re still feeding Pro Plan Savor, which she LOVES, but that was just a bad bag. I emailed Purina, but got no answer. We had been feeding her puppy food, and it was suggested in my Standard Poodle FB group that she should be on adult, so we switched.

We also had her groomed yesterday and, so far, knock wood, she’s doing fine. Recall that she had gotten sick the day after her grooming every time we have taken her to her first groomer. We took her to a different groomer this time. If you have a reason to want to know what groomer we are now patronizing, email me.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Opal Text Tutorial for Photoshop

Opal Text in Photoshop

Yeah! I’ve completed and published an all-new Photoshop tutorial to create Opal Text. I’m kinda loving it! I include some exciting tips for techniques that I’ll bet you have not seen.

So what’s next? Thinking. I’m still working on my Gallery pages, of course. And I can always create new art for that.

Jodie’s still not quite herself. Pepto seems to have cured her tummy issue, but she still isn’t interested in her food. I hope she didn’t read that posting in the Poodle group about how the people feed their poodle turkey with broth and Green Giant vegetables. A picky dog is not what I signed up for, and I’m not going to cave to that. She won’t starve.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Text in Photoshop: a fun new tutorial!

I posted a new tutorial yesterday! This is a bigger piece of work than many of my tutorials. This one took the better part of two days to put together. And I learned new things about Photoshop along the way. The new tutorial is called “Text in Photoshop.”

In this tutorial, I cover all the basics of text in Photoshop: sizing, color, font, subscript, special characters. I also go into text on a path and images in text — Postcard Text. Good stuff!

At this point I have 29 all-new-for-2020 tutorials. As far as I know, nobody has found them yet. The index of all of these tutorials can be found at THIS LINK.

Thinking about other things to teach. It seems, from looking at the work put out on the PS groups on Facebook, that many people don’t get the whole look-at-it notion when it comes to creating art. If you want the hat on her head to look real, it must cast shadows. A card propped up on a desk will not have a shadow that looks like a drop shadow. Maybe I’ll look at a way to teach this.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Create a Zoom Trail in Photoshop

I have just posted another NEW Tutorial! This one is on creating a Zoom Trail in Photoshop. This is a modern improvement on a piece I wrote for a book I co-authored in 2002.

https://myjanee.com/new/photoshop_tutorials/sigbrush/This was a book that had barely made its first run off the press when the publisher went out of business. I got paid, but, other than the author copies and a few others, I don’t think that it ever saw the light of day. Shame, because there’s some good stuff in there. I have reproduced some of my other effects from the book in my tutorials like Burned Paper, Hot Hammered Text, Swoosh Text, and Wood.

I’m also working laboriously on updating my extensive Photoshop Resource Links. At one time, this was an invaluable source of Photoshop information, but people move on, give up their sites, new sites come online, new media appear out of nowhere, and pages like mine go out of date. But I’m fixing it.

If you’re reading this and you have a *relevant* site that you’d like for me to consider adding to my listing, please email me. I do not do reciprocal links, but rather curate my list so that the links are of interest to my readers.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Animation in Photoshop: a NEW Tutorial

Yes! I’ve posted a new tutorial on creating an animation in Photoshop. It’s all of the fun you have come to expect from a Janee-tutorial .. and more! Have a look at what you can make:

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Two New Photoshop Tutorials!!

I just posted two all-new Photoshop Tutorials! I did another photo retouching tutorial, the one linked from the picture at the right. I’m calling it (oh-so-clever!) Photo Fixing 2.

Photo Fixing 2

In the other tutorial, I go through 5 ways to remove a subject from its background. It’s called Remove Any Background.

We go through removing all sorts of objects from all sorts of backgrounds. Below are some examples:

And the AC is still working!

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Stunning Colored Pencil Effect in Photoshop

I know! You were wondering if you could use Photoshop (or Elements) to make a photo look like it was drawn with colored pencil, right? Well, have I got a tutorial for you!

Before

It’s HERE and it’s for beginners and YOU, if you want to have some fun playing with photos.

After

Today is supposed to be the hottest day of the year. In PHX, they are expecting 117. Here in Sun Lakes, it’s usually substantially cooler, more like Tucson, or even a degree or two less. I don’t know what the official temp is now, but this morning at 5 am, when we left for our walk, it was already 89.

I came up with another idea for a shirt:

Better a quarantine coif
than a Covid cough!
Stay HOME!

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Photos into Art

Today was fun! I finished two tutorials and did some other art along the way. I know that it’s vain to think that this is cool, but.. Ok, I’ve never been accused of being not vain. This is my Porcelain Effect which I developed back in .. well, the beginning of this millennium, anyway.

Before

And I posted this tutorial I’m calling, optimistically, Photo Fixing 1.

After

This is a bit of Photos > Art I did today. I was sort of going to try the Porcelain Effect on these Coneflowers, but came across this instead. Do click the photo to see it bigger. I used Find Edges and Divide mode on the duplicated layer. I think it looks like a colored pencil drawing. I should now try doing this in actual colored pencil and see if I can make it look like Photoshop! LOL

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

A Transparent Capsule Tutorial and other Wowza Effects

I’m learning all manner of new things today! I wrote some custom CSS to enlarge the area of my page that’s being used. Thank you WordPress for Beginners! Seriously, if you’re struggling to learn WordPress, I urge you to go right there and search around. Their Facebook group is great, too. These guys have given me back my life, and I’m not exaggerating at all.

I did an upgrade to my first tutorial — not its first upgrade, but the biggest! That tutorial is my Transparent Capsule. Friends, I’m back in it!

I’m starting to think about goals beyond just “get myself up-to-date with the software” and “upgrade my tutorials.” I’m starting to think again about my Community– getting it going, having Challenges, and upgrading my class materials. I’m not so hopelessly far off.

This is a little effect I was playing with yesterday. It’s done with iterative transformations, a topic that has enchanted me since long before it was cool. I wrote about this in a magazine in 2002 and I will teach it again in my Starting With a Blank Canvas class.

I’m wondering if this would be a good tutorial for the “go search youtube” people.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Sticky Note (Post It) Tutorial!

I am off to a roaring start today, having gotten one of my tutorials completely rewritten and published! It’s my Sticky Note tutorial. I also made a Shading Brush tut which is linked from there and from my ever-growing Tutorial Index.

It’s so hot today that it feels like you’re just going to catch on fire. It was 90 already when we left to go walking at 5:30. We are nearly always very gone at this time of year, though, and I pray that this is the last summer we don’t have any choice in the matter.

Ok off to lunch! Jodie’s getting restless. Here’s a pic of her just the other day, as she turned 8 months! She climbs this rock every morning. It used to be a big deal — like a real climb. But now it’s nothing for her.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Custom Shapes Tutorial: Brand New!

Yup! We’re actually going to have tacos today!

I worked hard today for several hours and got exactly ONE tutorial rewritten. It’s far better than its predecessor and it’s here. In it, I create a butterfly shape from a photo, make it into a Vector Mask, and save it as a Custom Shape.

I am really enjoying exploring this stuff, learning more, and getting creative with my writing. I do hope that someone someday reads it.

I’ve been pondering the question of my own relevance. I’ve decided that I’m relevant as long as I’m still alive and creating. All I have to do is to pinpoint and reach my audience. I’ve done that before; I’ll do it again. But, this time, it must be different, because the communication media are so different.

In 2007, I didn’t even have a smartphone. I don’t think that e-books were even a thing. There was no such thing as “social media,” except for ICQ, IRC, and Usenet groups. I did most of my communication in those days through Usenet and my own bulletin board hosted on my site. I know that I will be handling my website communication through a Facebook group and email, of course. I hardly ever even look at email anymore, though, because it’s gotten so taken over by garbage.

I’m thinking about other concepts. I’m 63. The majority of my audience before was people at least as old as me, though I had some 30-somethings and even people in their 20’s. Would “Photoshop for Geezers” be a catchy thing? How about “Photoshop for Grown-ups?”

Or maybe age isn’t that big a deal. I just know that I’m not going to try to compete with the “look what I can do” YouTube videos. Ugh. I just can’t imagine anyone learns well from that kind of thing.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Dogs Leap for Joy at Watercolor Effect in Photoshop

Action! I made a Photoshop Action to reproduce my own Watercolor Effect. Woot! Not only that, but it works. I’m working on the poodle portraiture for the poodle groups, and I’m having lots of fun, learning new things, and coming out with some artwork that people are enjoying.

These are the ones I’ve done so far, and I’m going to keep on doing them, as long as it’s fun. Click to enlarge them. It’s going to help me with the drudgery part to have this watercolor action at the ready!

I got the tutorial written up, too, but haven’t advertised it yet. It’s HERE.

We got the refrigerator fixed yesterday! It did turn out to be the compressor, and, while the part was covered under warranty, the labor for it was $700. Yeah. Now we get to buy all new stuff to fill it. I’m not a huge fan of a packed fridge, so maybe it won’t have to be quite so full this time.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Poodles in Action

So today I chose my 14 favorites. I asked these people then for permission to use their photo, and, from these, I’m going to choose a few to do this effect and write it up. I’m tickled by this result and I am thinking about how much this reminds me of my Art Challenge. Still thinking about how to do that this time around…

I got this idea for a tutorial, and so I wanted a dog in action. I went onto 2 of my poodle groups and told them what I was doing. And got over 160 pictures from people from all over the world!

On Saturday, Jack noticed a bit of water leaking from the ice/water dispenser on our fridge. He took the ice thing out of there and it seemed to stop. On Sunday, of course, we awoke to everything warm in the fridge. Ugh. Phone calls and appointments and food into the garbage.

Thankfully, we don’t travel heavy in the refrigerated food department. We probably had just a couple hundred bucks worth of food, once you add in the mayo and ketchup. But waah! Guy’s coming out tomorrow. There’s some kind of class action going against LG for their compressors.

It’s another hot day today. We’re talking about taking a trip into the mountains, but, evidently, everyone else is doing the same thing, because all the campgrounds are full for the foreseeable future.