| Photoshop Tutorials » Tools » Channels |
If you have spent considerable time creating a selection, you owe it to yourself to save it. You never know when the gremlins are going to huff and puff and crash Photoshop to the ground! Just make sure that the selection is active, of course, and then choose Save Selection from the Select menu or click the ?Save selection as channel? icon at the bottom of the palette (Figure 3-7).
Masks and channels part2- This tutorial follows along as supporting activities for Chapter 6 of Classroom in a Book. Get it! Learn It! Live it!
Step 4: Click back on your shape layer in the layers palette. Go to Filter/Render/Lighting Effects and enter these settings.
When I say "color blind", I don't mean it has a little trouble distinguishing between certain shades of green and purple. I mean it's completely and totally blind when it comes to color. All Photoshop sees is black and white. Well, black, white, and a lot of shades of gray in between, but that's it. The world's most powerful image editor, an industry standard among photographers, designers, and virtually all creative professionals, capable of producing millions, even billions of colors has no idea what color is.
This should get those new to the program started on their way to a better understanding of Photoshop's Channels palette, and its functions in the program. Further experience will be gained by simply experimenting with them on your own.
Title: Using Halftone filter and channels photoshop technique Halftone Text effect Tips This latest tutorial in adobe photoshop has instructions to make or create halftone text effect using photoshop techniques like channel and halftone filter.
Photoshop tutorial - Winter Scene Learn how to create a winter scene to spice up your layout for the upcoming seasons!
The Technique I've chosen an image, (fig.01), with a great deal of color contrast. The parrot and branch stand out from the blue sky quite well. Switching to the Channels palette, we can see that, for this image, the Red Channel shows the upper half of the bird as being very bright while the rest of the image is made up of similar shades of gray. The Green and Blue Channels show a bit more contrast, especially the Blue one, which shows the sky as nearly white, (fig.02). For those who don't know, each Channel represents the amount of that color in the image. The brighter a particular pixel, the more of that color the pixel contains. Black areas contain little or none of that color. There is a neat little function, under the Image menu, that's been a part of Photoshop all along, but isn't used or even discussed very much, anymore. It's called Calculations. Opening the Calculations dialog, we see that we can choose any two channels and mix them using any of a variety of Blending modes. For this image, I chose to mix the Green and Blue Channels, using Linear Light as the Blending mode. I chose Linear Light because, in this instance, it gave the best results. Of course, each image will vary and you'll have to try them all to find the one that works for the image you're working on. On a side note, there are two new Blending options that are only available in Calculations. They are Add and Subtract and they do just what they say: add one channel to the other or subtract one channel from the other. You can, also, invert one channel or the other, (or both), to get different results. Hitting "OK", in the Calculations dialog, will create a new Channel, named Alpha 1, (fig.03). We can see that this new channel is black&white;, and high in contrast. A slight Levels adjustment, (under Image > Adjustments > Levels), bringing the black and white sliders in a little bit toward the center, (66, 1.0, 211) gets rid of the gray area in the sky above the bird. (fig.04). The mask is, at this point, almost ready. It needs to be cleaned up a little bit, though, so we should use the Paintbrush to paint out the leaves in the background with white and the leftover details in the bird and branch with black, (fig.05). At this point, go to Image > Adjustments > Invert to reverse the black and white areas of the image, (fig.06), and you're done. Click on the RGB Channel, which will select and make visible the RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) Channels, then hold Control (or OPT if you are using ...
SO WHAT CAN I DO WITH THESE SOFT SELECTIONS? Now that the mistery of Photoshop Channels are revealed, your question could be: how can I use these techniques in my ordinary photo retouching? Channels are a professional and extremely powerful tool for the creation of complex selection masks. Whenever you need to select something in your scene and you obtain no decent result with the standard tools (like lasso tool for example) probably Channels are the solution you were longing to see.
Before you start your work, it is better to increase your image: CTRL + zero or CTRL + Alt + zero (get 100%)
I'm not going to take you through how to mask with channels in great depth as there is already another tutorial covering this. What I will be doing is demonstrating how to use the calculations command to create a mask with less work brushing out a chosen channel. First you will need to take a copy of the blue channel (or which ever has the strongest shadows and outlines) by dragging the channel over the "create new channel" icon second from right in the channels window. Next invert the channel using ctrl+I.
As I did in the image at left to make a water reflection, the mask will only allow the image to show through in the area you had selected. The area outside the selection is masked off. In my image, I duplicated the sky layer, lowered the opacity so the original water would show though a bit and applied the mask. As in Step 11 above, I tinted the beach slightly.
Scenario: Imagine that you are working on a Photoshop project where you had to carefully select something. You took about 10 minutes to successfully select something. Then you worked in the selection for another 10 minutes and then you deselected only to realize that you forgot to apply a stroke (Edit > Stroke) to the image. What now? You'll have to spend another 10 minutes re-selecting.
1) Create a new Image in Photoshop with the following settings:
