articles/Photoshop/photoshopbeginners-page7
by Mike McNamee Published
In order to give the tablet a meaningful test it is important to carry out a real, creative masking task, using a wide variety of masks and masked adjustment layers. To this end we executed the shot shown over the page which is built from 36 layers and adjustment layers, and requires soft-edged masking to bring the waves around the various solid pieces of the structures. In almost all cases the graphics pen was used to paint masks at an Opacity of around 30%, a Flow of around 30% with both the Airbrush and Brush Scattering activated. The entire job was retouched in about four hours which was plenty of time to get a good feel of the Wacom. Overall we were impeded by the lack of Bluetooth on the main work-station and on our Dell laptop we had difficulty in maintaining the Bluetooth connection after Windows 7 had hibernated; it was necessary to delete the device and re-install it to get things working again. The Wacom was also used on a Macbook Pro where we were able to shift the tablet into vertical mode and create a seamless link between the laptop screen and a desktop screen, a facility which might find uses when laptops and projectors are combined.
Gry Garness. Beauty Retouching Techniques in Photoshop
You will have gathered from the preceding words that writing about the use of brushes, graphics tablets and retouching are rather difficult subjects to tackle. We reviewed Gry Garness' e-books on the subject in November 2008 and (for CS4) in September 2009. Both were excellent and we can look forward to the CS5 version in due course. But for those who are not bookish and learn better by seeing rather than reading, the DVD movie is a much better medium for study. So it was with some anticipation that we received the two-set DVD containing 13.5 hours of movies across 54 tutorials.
To do justice to such a wealth of experience and knowledge requires many days or even weeks of viewing but we managed to see enough of the content to get a good flavour. Some of the tutorials (such as Puppet Warp) apply only to CS5 but much of the content is independent of the Photoshop version and applies generally.
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