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Photoshop 4 Beginners - Brush Up Your Photoshop Skills - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

by Mike McNamee Published

LEARN YOUR CRAFT ON MASKS

The user will quite quickly come across a snag with 8-bit masks - they can 'band' quite easily. Banding is the effect in which a gradient of tones in a mask is separated into discrete bands. This can show itself as bands of colour in the final image. It is particularly prevalent when blur is applied to a mask or to an image and is a common flaw that has cost entrants dearly in The Societies' competitions. The user should, therefore, be ever-vigilant in looking out for the effect. There are two solutions, to work in 16-bit mode (which has a much larger number of discrete steps in the masks) or to add back noise in the brush. This is why there is a 'noise' check-box in the Brush Panel (the ninth item down the list). Bear in mind that switching from 8-bit to 16-bit half way through your retouch will not repair any existing banding, you have to start from scratch in 16-bit mode. You will have to drop back to 8-bit if you are going to press as InDesign does not recognise 16-bit images anyway: this too can bring issues, so stay alert!

Part of the fun of the Photoshop Brush Engine is the ability to do funky stuff with brushes. In the example shown, the brush is a complex shape of a single leaf plus a few outlying leaves. The foreground colour is set to pink, the background to turquoise. With the dynamics set to zero the foreground colour only is employed (pink). When the dynamics jitter is turned up the colour hue, saturation and brightness vary and, if set, so do the size of the paint marks, their scatter and their orientations.

BRUSH MAKING

Once a variety of settings have been tested and found satisfactory, it is possible (and desirable) to save a brush pre-set for continued use. Many retouch DVDs come with sets of brushes and many are available via the internet. If you Google for 'photoshop brushes' you get 1.5 million hits! Everybody, it seems wants to share their favourite brushes with the rest of the world. Brush sets are saved as .abr files and may be used to append or replace the existing brushes in the Brushes Panel.

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1st Published
last update 09/12/2022 14:57:48

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