Tag: 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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My Day

New Art Galleries Posted! Crowds amazed!

Today I’m working on more site updates. And I’ve made some art! I created a new Gallery page yesterday, and today, the Gradations link is no longer “in progress.” It’s posted! I have some beautiful things up there for your viewing pleasure. Here are but a few:

I’ve also been working at tidying up more of my thousands of untidy HTML pages. I’m working. It’s working. I’m bringing my site up to where it needs to be!

I’m frankly amazing myself with how well I can actually fix HTML. Sometimes I’ll have to repost a page several times, before it works, but usually I get it on the first try!

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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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My Day

Photoshop Fun: a Pause Button

Today I did some fun little Photoshop foolery — nothing worth publishing, but fun nevertheless. Ok, if you insist, here’s what I made: It’s a Pause button. I copied one I found, but all these pixels are mine. I may write a tutorial for the process. It was fun to do.

Then, this afternoon, I worked on getting my Archive tutorials set up and ready to be archived. I’m not really sure how exactly I’m going to DO that, or what it means, how accessible they will be, etc.. What I did do was to improve the navigability in those pages and got rid of some obsolete stuff. Like my Bloomington address, for example.

Because this part of my site is in HTML and not in WordPress, I have to do some coding to update and change stuff. So .. ewww. I never learned html very well, so it intimidates me.

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My Day

Amazing Gradient Maps

I’m just doing some horsing around today and learning some new (to me) techniques. Also playing with old stuff I know and love.

Ok, can you tell which was the before and which the after? Pretty fair job, I say. And this led directly, of course, to these:

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My Day

I love these new icons!

Jack is working through my Elements class from way back when it was version 3. And this has me thinking about what I will need to do to get them into shape to have a new batch of students working on them. I’ll just say right now that I’m not ready to give myself a deadline.

First off, I wrote them all in WYSIWYG HTML, back when that was a thing. And I don’t know HTML much, except to copy/paste and just be a bit dangerous. I was a maniac with GoLive, which they discontinued back in the early aughts.

So I am thinking that, while my ideas are still very useful, relevant, novel, and fun, the screenshots need a bit of touch-up, which essentially means my redoing and reshooting all of the projects. And, since the formatting is html and not WordPress, … yeah. I’m going to be retyping everything.

Today I looked through my wealth of files, including my image files. I was looking for my raw work on my little Tip, Project, Question, and Digital Digression icons. I wanted to take the paths that I KNOW I made and recreate these images a bit bigger.

I couldn’t find them anywhere short of digging into my old hard drive and.. I don’t have that one anymore, since it was like 4 computers ago. I just made new ones, but I made the same as my original designs. I just love these:

Tip
Project
Question
Digital Digression
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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

Pulling your hair out because you can’t take out that background?

Today I worked hard, but I don’t have much to show for it. We started the day by having the AC service guy out to fix our broken capacitor. It was 86 when we got up this morning. Ugh. But it’s nice and cool now!

I spent much of the day working on a 5-part tutorial on removing backgrounds. It seems that that’s what 90% of the questions are about on the ps groups.

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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

Archived Tutorials and a New Index

I guess I’m not feeling the urgency to write new posts, since literally NOBODY is reading these. What I’ve been working on the last few days is getting a new Tutorial Index built. I have been working on deciding which of my old tutorials aren’t worth keeping active, which ones are fine as they are, which ones are good but need a complete rewrite, and which ones are good but just need some tweaking.

I’ve decided to have an Archive Vault where I’ll store the ones which I’m retiring. Twenty-one of my originals are going straight into said Vault, once I get it set up.

Today I learned how to get files from my HTML side of things into my WP side. It involved getting a plugin to handle my media files (Filebird) and then downloading the files from my c-panel to my computer and then dragging them into my new media folders. It’s not hard; it just took me a long time to figure out how to do it.

I’m categorizing my tutorials a little differently, according to what the results are. I’m using my titles from my Photoshop classes for categories. Yanno, next, after I’m all done with this, and I have my following built up a bit, I’m going to rewrite (as necessary) my class materials and get going with that. I wish I were close enough to set myself a date. I do well with deadlines.

I have found that I love writing. Well, I knew that right along, but I really have missed it. And now I’m thinking about the magazine and book gigs that I used to have. Sigh. I wonder if there even ARE magazines and books now.

All of the Photoshop groups that I’ve found that have “tutorials” are just people showcasing their showoff Photoshop videos. So they’re about “look what I can do,” rather than my approach: Look what YOU can do. One thing that really surprises me is how little the effects have changed — the artwork that people are doing now is really not that different from 2000. And the special effects that people want to know how to do are things that I wrote about in 2002.

Maybe my way is outmoded, but I just don’t think so. What I think is that these “tutorial” video people are just more adept at making videos than they are about writing or teaching, for that matter.

One thing I need to work on is my resumé for when I finally get ready to get out there for real. I feel a need to explain to this newer generation who I am and why I am relevant.

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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.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Photoshop Tutorial: Making a Signature Brush

I’m looking out at our lake though before the 9th green, just outside my window. Big news here is the heat. While we’re not breaking any records, we’re above average this week. Average for Phoenix right now is a staggering 106°! So I’m happy inside.

I did some good work yesterday, writing another tutorial: Making a Signature Brush.

Here’s my capstone image for this tutorial. Love it! I still haven’t worked the code for getting new visitors – or old ones back – to my site. I suppose that, someday, I’ll look back on this post and laugh. I hope so anyway.

Jodie’s back to doing great. We went on our normal walk with her and she did fine. Then she had a little runabout in the backyard with both of us. She loves that so much! Now she’s being my faithful co-worker right by my side napping.

I made this.