Creative forum

Creative Forum@ Talk to us! Send us your thoughts on anything Photoshop to PCR@imagine-publishing.co.uk with the subject header ‘Letters’. Alternatively, post your missives to Letters, Photoshop Creative, Imagine Publishing Ltd, Richmond House, 33 Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH2 6EW, UK

Let loose your image-editing troubles, triumphs or anything else you feel like sharing

your painting vision. Turn to page 40 where you can see how it’s possible to turn your hand at Dali’s style.

Battling the elements

I’m a Photoshop Elements user and wondered whether you’re planning on doing any Elements-specifi c tutorials. I have no intention of moving up to Photoshop proper, because Elements has all I need and more. I count myself as above a beginner level, so I’m looking for more challenging creative opportunities – will you be able to help out? Trevor Greene

We certainly will be able to help out. We’re aware that not everyone has the latest version of the Photoshop software and that there will also be quite a few of you running Photoshop Elements. We’ll make it clear if something is specifi c to a certain version and also off er alternative methods for any tools that aren’t available in Photoshop Elements. There will be the odd tutorial that you won’t be able to follow, but we’re not interested in running a CS2 clique, so there’ll be plenty to sink your teeth into.

Stroke of genius

Hello, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed following your Van Gogh tutorial (issue one). I’ve tried painting in Photoshop before and quickly given up and convinced myself that it can’t be done. I have a friend who is a Painter advocate and I think I had started to believe his ‘Photoshop can’t give realistic paint eff ects’ rhetoric! However I saw that tutorial and was interested to see how the tools can be manipulated to give a painted eff ect. I’ve started it and have just placed the houses and things seem to be going well so far! Are you going to do this type of tutorial in the future? Alan Thorne

t ip R e a d e r s’

Avoid banding

I do a lot of montage and collage work, mainly grouping together images of family and friends. I like to use gradients in my work, but was always disappointed by the printed results. I used to get problems with banding in gradient areas when I printed images out. Then someone told me that the Noise fi lter could help. Now whenever I use gradients, I go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise. Set 2 for the Amount, Gaussian for the Distribution and turn the Monochromatic checkbox on. At fi rst I thought my friend had gone mad because I could see some of the Noise, but this disappears once printed and all you have left is a beautifully smooth gradient. Carrie Harper

Each issue we will include a special digital painting tutorial where we show you how to re-create a famous painting or painting style. You’ll probably get fed up with listening to us talk about the huge amount of potential in the Photoshop software, but it really is impressive and digital painting is one facet of its functionality. It’s possible to achieve a huge variety of painting styles as well, not only using the dedicated painting tools, but by also twisting the other tools and techniques to fi t

Smart cookie

It’s good to see you covering Smart Objects (issue one) but I was a bit disappointed that you didn’t mention how they work with Illustrator. If you paste or place vector graphics from Illustrator CS2 into Photoshop CS2, you can scale them and also any edits you make to the pasted objects in Illustrator automatically update in Photoshop.

Doug Ray

We didn’t cover how Smart Objects work with the Illustrator software because we wanted to show how they give Photoshop users the fl exibility of vector but within the bitmap format. This is a pretty big deal because you get to scale photos without ending up with a pixellated mess. Obviously if you have Illustrator CS2, you can take Smart Objects even further.

Thanks for that tip Carrie, we’ve suff ered from gradient banding a couple of times too. In fact, you’ve inspired us to set up a regular tip corner. Send in your favourite tips and share your knowledge with others. See the contact box at the top of the page for how to get in touch.

Shorts

Photo fi nish

Do you think it’s worth me upgrading to Photoshop CS2? I’d call myself more of a digital photographer than a digital artist, so I don’t know whether there’s enough to keep my photographic needs occupied. Simon Hewell

You don’t say how much you edit your images. If it’s just cropping and small colour alterations, you probably don’t need to fl ash your cash just yet. But Photoshop CS2 does have a healthy raft of photo-specifi c tools, such as Smart Sharpen and the excellent Vanishing Point fi lter.

Manipulation madness

I really like it when I receive emails of funny photo manipulations – you know the sort of stuff – photos of people holding a cat the size of a house, that kind of thing. Where can I get more of this? Jeremy Humphreys

There are lots of websites where people send in photos they’ve manipulated. The best sites also set challenges where visitors upload images in response to a specifi c challenge or theme. Pay a visit to Worth 1000 www. worth1000.com for a good dose of imageediting gone mad..