You might think that that isn’t much space. I disagree. Considering almost all monitors coming out now are pretty much all widescreen. While most screens are labeled as “widescreen” they don’t have true widescreen resolutions. On true widescreens you loose even more vertical space how ever you do get more horizontal space. The physical layout of the screen makes the potential to see less of the images you are editing.

So as you can tell the Mac Version is actually Lacking compared to the Windows version.

What do you think?

I plan on writing an article later why you might want to do this but since you are here you most likely already know why one would want to to create a mask from a color channel.

Quick Answer:

You can hold down the CTRL and clicking on the Color Channel. Go back to the Image and make a mask from the selection.

In depth tutorial

Anyways let’s get down to it:

1. Open Photoshop and the photo you want work on.
2. You want to make sure layers is visible. If you don’t see it in the sidebar hit “F7”.
3. Make sure you only have one layer.
4. Make a copy of that layer by hitting “ctrl+J”.
5. In the layer you just made click the channels tab. Currently you should be on the layers tab.
6. You will most likely see 4 channels. RGB, Red, Green and Blue. Each Channel can be selected by the displayed shortcut. For example red is: “Ctrl+3”
7. You will notice the picture turn to grey scale.
8. Holding down the “Ctrl” key click on the Red Channel. This will make a selection of ONLY the red channel.
9. You will need to go back to the Layers Tab from the current Channel tab. Click it now.
10. At the bottom of the layers box there are a few different Icons. There is a “link” then “FX” and then a “Circle in a box” icon. This is the “add layer mask” button. Click it.
11. You picture will no longer be grey. You should now have a mask that looked identical to the grey scale image.

After a few google searches I was told that my original hunch was correct about the filters menu. A few more searches revealed that someone could not get their plug-ins working under the 64bit version of Photoshop. Was I running the 64bit version?

I made sure Photoshop was closed and I went to the START menu and found the Photoshop App (32bit). I ran the program and went to filter menu. Sure enough the plug-ins were there.

Note – The reason why I said make sure that “Photoshop” was closed was If you had Photoshop 64bit open and clicked on the 32bit version, it would just bring the existing 64Bit Photoshop window to the foreground.

So if you find that some of your filters are not showing up in Photoshop make sure you are running the 32bit version before getting worried.

1.) First Open the picture that you want to work on.

2.) Make sure Actions window is viewable. If it isn’t you can open it by going to Window file meu, and selecting actions

3.) Click on the Folder Icon at the bottom of the Actions window. Create a new action set. Name it Skin

4.) Click on the new action icon and create a new action called “Skin Softening”.

5.) Click on the Record button. Photoshop will now record EVERY action you do. Don’t mess up!

6.) Hit Ctrl+j to copy layer

7.) Click on Filters Menu

8.) Click on Convert to smart filter

9.) Click on Filter Menu

10.) Click on “Blur” then “Surface Blur”

11.) Select radius of 3 pixel and a threshold of 15 levels

12.) Click Filter and select “Noise”. Then click “Add Noise…”

13.) Pick 2% for the amount, Gaussian and Monochromatic

14.) You will now need to make a mask from the red channel.

15.) Click on the channels section.

16.) Hold down “Ctrl” and click the red channel. This will select everything in the red channel

17.) Click back to the layers section

18.) Click the layer mask icon to make a mask based on the red channel

19.) You can now click the “Stop” button in the “Actions” section.

Now that you have the action most of the work is now done for you. You can apply the action to any other picture you want to soften the skin. You can REALLY make the picture pop by:

1.) Holding down the “ALT” key and clicking on the mask layer you created. This will show the mask in grey scale.

2.) Using a black brush blacken out the eyes and hair as you still want those parts to be crisp. The person will kind of look like a zombie

3.) If you find at any time that there is not enough skin softening you can always click on the noise and blur layers and change the amount. I normally keep the setting the same but I adjust the “opacity” amount by click on the icon at the far right of the layer.

1. Copy the picture you are working on to a new layer using CTRL+J
2. Rename the new layer to “Soft”
3. Go up to “Filter” Menu
4. Click Other
5. Click “High Pass”
6. Adjust the sharpening mask just a bit so that the thinks like the eye outlines are there and maybe a bit of skin details
7. Click Ok
8. Remove the color in the shark mask by going into “Image” drop down
9. Click Adjustments
10. Click “Hue/Saturation”
11. Take the saturation glider and move it left to “–100%”
12. Click Ok
13. Still working on the Highpass layer Click on the Layers Tab and select a new blend mode
14. Select “Soft Light” or “Overlay”. Softlight usually works best.
15. You will notice that the screen is no longer grey and your picture looks a bit crisper.

Now I am going to stop right here. You have probably looked back up at the title and said “I thought this tutorial was on smoothing the skin not sharpening the detail!”. Stick with me. We need to inverse the sharpening.

1. Hit the shortcut “Ctrl+i”. This will now smooth out the picture instead of sharpening things

You will notice things like the skin look great. Pores and blemishes are not so apparent. Things like the eyes and the hair are not crisp enough. To resolve this we will use the color range selection tool to select mostly just the skin. To access the “color range” tool go to:

1. Select Drop down
2. Color Range…
3. Click on the skin with the eye dropper
4. Select “localized Color Clusters”
5. You will need to experiment but you will most likely need to decrease your range quite a bit and the fuzziness should be about 34%.
6. Click the “+ Eye Dropper” button.
7. Click on the skin areas. If you are finding that it is selecting too much at a time decrease the range value.
8. Make sure to only click on the skin. Do not click on the hair, eyes, mouth or the contour of the nose.
9. Click on the the “- Eye Dropper”. Click on any hair or other features other then skin that might have been selected.
10. Click "OK”
11. There should be a selection created on the picture
12. Click on the “add layer mask” button right beside the “FX Layer” button

This will have create a pretty good starting location for your mask. The next few steps will be making sure all the area’s that you don’t want softened are completely black. You might need to “whiten” the areas that might need more softening.

1. Make sure you are still on the Mask of the “Soft” layer.
2. Make sure that your brush colors are black and then white.
3. Click on the brush tool
4. Make sure that the front color is black
5. Make sure that your brush opacity is at 100%
6. Using your brush go over the hair and the eyes.
7. Use a large brush for the hair
8. Use a smaller brush for the eyes and other detail work.
9. Switch the forground color to white
10. Switch the opacity of the brush to 60%
11. Go over the skin to make sure all of it is selected. Avoid the outer area of the nose and mouth.
12. You should now have a good mask.
13. Check to see if the skin is soft enough

If the skin is still not soft enough there is some other techniques you can use now that you have a good starting point.

1. Click the Background layer
2. Hit “Ctrl + J”
3. Move the newly created layer to the top of the layers.
4. Rename the newly created layer to “Soft 2”
5. On “Soft 2” we need to apply the “High pass again”. See above how to do that.
6. It remembers your last selection.
7. Bump up the number quite a bit higher like 4.8 pixels.
8. Click Ok
9. Again remove saturation like we did before.
10. Click “Ctrl+i” to inverse the picture.
11. On the layer tab select “Blend Mode” and select “Softlight”. If you use overlay instead of “Softlight” it will make the softening even more apparent.
12. While holding down “Ctrl + Alt” grab the mask from the “Soft” layer and drag it onto the the layer you were just working on.
13. Both layers should now have the exact same mask layer.
14. Only the skin should have the second softening effect applied to it.

I usually at this point like to group all the layers except for the original layer. To do this:

1. click on “soft” layer.
2. Holding down the shift key click the top most layer.
3. Hit “Ctrl+G” to group them.

If the softening is too much click on the group opacity slider and take it down a bit. Play with it till you think the results are perfect.

Photoshop brushes must be installed by manually copying/installing them. The location of the “manual install” directory for Photoshop brushes is located here:

• C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Presets\Brushes

Hope this article helped you install your brush into Photoshop CS4.

Hmmm… Maybe if I search for it I might have better luck. Using the amazing search in Windows 7 I typed “Camera Raw”.

“There it is!” I thought! I must not have installed it when installign Cs4 Suite. I clicked on the x64 version because I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit edition.

No Go. It said I must add Photoraw from the install routine! Being sure I had originally installed everything at setup I thought maybe if I just double click on the RAW file Photoshop will automatically open Camera Raw.

I shot a picture in RAW and then tried opening the picture on my machine. The raw extension is “.CR2”.

The file opened without a peep and opened in Camera Raw. Does anyone know how to open Camera Raw just by it’s self? After looking into thing a bit further other people have only been able to open Camera Raw this way as well.

Here’s there rule:

1. M and Y should be the same, with a little higher percentage of yellow
2. C is 1/5 to 1/3 the amount of the Y and M numbers
3. There should be 0 K (Black)

Here’s the picture I was talking about. While this picture looks pretty nice, the Magenta and yellow is a bit lacking. Because these colors are low this gives the skin a much cooler and less natural feel. Here’s the picture and it’s readings.

Using the curve panel you will need to increase the Magenta and Yellow. You will also need to decrease the Cyan. Open the curves box. Right now the C/M ratio is about 42% which is out of the 20%->30% ratio I talked about earlier.

Here’s the green channel after editing:

Here’s the blue channel after editing

Here’s the red channel after editing:

By doing this we have now created a much more natural skin tone color on Micah’s face!

Now let’s do the math:

1. The Cyan is 10%. That is approx. 1/3 the value of the Magenta and Yellow.
2. Yellow and Magenta are basically the same.
3. Yellow is a tiny bit higher then the Magenta.
4. There is no black in the skin.

Here’s another example with just a before and after:

In my next article I will go over how to make sure someone with a darker skin tone has accurate colors in a picture.

Photoshop skills covered:

1. Quickselection tool
2. Layer Masks
3. Layer FX

The first thing I need you to do is to head over to http://twitter.com. You will notice the header looks something similar to this:

We are going to take just the logo leaving just a tiny bit of the blue around the logo. A good way of doing this is just taking a screen capture and using the lasso tool. You should end up with something that looks like this:

Click on the zoom tool and zoom in on logo so that it is around 400%. Next you are going to want to select the “Quick Selection tool”. This Photoshop tool is located in the same section as the magic wand tool.

Now that you have the “Quick Selection Tool” selected you are going to click all around the twitter font (Logo). It should have done a good job of selecting the outside info like this:

Select “Inverse” or for you shortcut freaks “Shift+CTRL+I”.

Now that the logo is the only thing selected we are going down to the layers section and make a new mask for the logo layer. The mask layer button is the dark square with a white hole in the middle.

Once you have don this you are going to create a mask for the layer. Now if you haven’t ever used a Photoshop mask it is very much like a mask that you would put on a Halloween. You are able to cover up most of the layer but you are allowed to let certain parts to be seen. Because we have the logo selected, we are going to mask everything but the logo. The great thing about masks is that they are non-destructive!

Once you apply the mask you will see something very similar to this:

Notice all the dotted edging on the logo? Let’s clean it up using the advanced Mask Edge tool. Listen carefully because this was one of the hard things I found to master when I first started using masks. In the screenshot bellow you can see the original picture (orange) and the second section (yellow) is the button for the mask. You have to click the mask section of the layer before you will be able to use the mask tools.

Once you do that you will notice that the options are no longer grey.

You are going to need to click the “mask edge…” button. You are going to want to play around with the settings until you get something that looks like this:

My settings I chose were:

The next thing you want to do is to apply a shadow to the layer. This will make things look really nice. To add a shadow layer you must click back on the picture instead of the mask in the layers section.

Once you have don that at the bottom of the layers section hit the “FX” button and choose “drop shadow”.

Once you’ve done that you are going to want to make sure the logo looks something similar to this:

The settings I used to get this shadow were:

Now you can unlock your background which is just white by selecting the layer and then double clicking on it. You can now use the twitter logo with almost background on your website!

Recap – Here’s the original:

Here are some examples:

Bonus points to anyone who can guess what was used for the background portion of the last three pictures.