PSIG News: March 2005 e-News
March 9, 2005

March Meeting

The March PSIG meeting will be held on Thursday March 17th, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at Voorhees High School in room 245. At the meeting, we will take a look at results from this month’s project. Additionally, there will be a question-and-answer session and we will continue to look at some of Scott Kelby’s “Down and Dirty Photoshop Tricks” training movies. Members are encouraged to bring their images, prints, and questions for discussion during the meeting.

March Project

This past month, Christo’s The Gates were in Central Park. For the March meeting, download this photo (gate_source.jpg, file size: 605KB) of a gate and give it a new look. Put it on the beach; in the forest; change the color, cover the path with snow–the only limits are your imagination (and Photoshop creativity!) Keep your final image no larger than 800 x 600 pixels at 72dpi. Bring a layered version (if applicable) and be ready to describe the techniques you used to achieve your final effect.

Out of Many Images, One

In February we looked at some options for stitching images. While Photoshop can do wonders, there are additional steps you can take to help get the right shots for assembly and specialized software that will help yield incredible results. Following are some resources and examples:

Caldwell Photographic has some articles, tutorial information and a great image gallery.

Max Lyons Digital Image Gallery on the TawbaWare site provides a great deal of information on assembling panoramic images as well as providing links to software.

Instead of stitching images together to get a large single image, check out the Gigapxl Project an amazing series of gigantic images taken with a custom camera made from bits and pieces of decommissioned Cold War hardware. Wired also has an article on this project.

Tips and Tricks

End Mouse-Click Frustration

Clicking exactly in the tiny fields of the Options Bar can really be a pain sometimes, especially if you’re trying to highlight a field, delete the current value, and type in a new one. Instead, just click on the field’s name and Photoshop will automatically highlight the entire field for you. Then you can just type in new values. This also works in many of Photoshop’s palettes, including the Character and Paragraph palettes.

Copy One Layer, Or Copy ‘em All

If you are working on a layered document and you make a selection and copy that selection, by default Photoshop copies only the information on your active layer. However, there may be times when you want to copy your selection as if the image was flattened (in other words, you want to copy everything on all visible layers). If that’s the case, press Shift-Command-C, and you will copy as if the image was flattened, not just on the active layer.