To start things of, let’s see where you find the patch tool. The patch tool is found in the tools palette, it is possible that at first glance you’ll only see the “spot healing brush tool”, which is the default value of this particular tools suite. By holding your mouse down over the spot healing brush tool, you’ll see the patch tool as the third choice in the little tools menu that pop up.

The short cut key is “J”, and here’s another very quick but useful tip: If you have a tool with several sub-tools, holding down the shift key, followed by the corresponding short cut key (shift + J in our example) - you can quickly switch between the tools in the tools suite.

So now on to the fundamental questions; what is the patch tool, and what can it be used for? The patch tool works similar to the clone stamp tool, where you’re able to sample an area of an image and apply it on top of the area you’d like to ‘correct’.

In our sample image, we see a woman that has some kind of black eye (more like blue and red!) underneath her eye. So what we’d like to do is of course eliminate this using the magic of the patch tool.

The patch tool works very similar to the lasso tool when starting off. All you have to do is make a selection by clicking and dragging out an area around the area you’d like to fix. You can also use the lasso tool to make your selection, if you do use the lasso tool to make your selection, make sure you go back to the patch tool for the next steps.

When you’ve made your selection using either the patch tool or the lasso tool, all you have to do is drag outward from starting inside the selection. Drag outwards to an area that you want the sample area to be. So in this case, we of course want the blemish area to look similar to the skin area. The awesome thing with the patch tool is that you always get to see a preview of the area you’d like to patch your selection with. Nifty.

Now drag-n-drop; What should have happened now is that it has sampled our area and applied the corrections on top of your original selected area. To fix other smaller areas, you can either use the clone stamp tool, or use the patch tool again. The blemish is completely gone, and it took around a minute!

So if you’re working on an image were there’s a much larger black eye/blemish and the clone stamp tool might not be the best option, check out the patch tool and practice!

Open your picture on Photoshop and first thing you want to do is open up your logo like a in a dpi format. A pdf dialogue box will open up and your will be prompted to choose your logo. A resolution of 72 dpi is fine for the purposes of this tutorial.

Once you have your logo open you will need to use the laso tool in order to extract the silhouette version-that is the plain version with no graphics or skins-of your logo in order to turn it into its watermarked version.

Once you select hit the “V” button which will extract it and then simply drag and drop it on your Photoshop window on the right top corner. Moving on grab your layers panel and ctrl+click the thumbnail of your logo and click on the pads tab of your layers panel, that is the third tab. Then you want to click on the 5th from left, icon on the bottom toolbar of you pads tab that is the convert action to path button.

Once you hit that it will convert your action into a workpath, save that. Now you are free to delete the layer with the logo!

In case you are confused what we just did is creating a workpath that consist only of the shape of our logo with no fill at all! This would look like this.

Grab your actions panel from the top menu->Actions. We are now going to create an automated task that you record and then apply on every one of your pictures saving you a lot of time.

Click on New Action on the Action Panel and name the action you are about to record, we will name this Watermark. Once done hit the record button on your Actions Panel making sure you have the Watermark actions selected.

1. First thing you want to do is on the actions panel right click and on the pop up menu hit insert path.
2. Create a new layer and on this new layer paste the action path your created earlier with your logo.
3. Fill that new layer with any colour you want and deselect that layer.
4. Select layer one on your layers panel and hit Drop Shadow->Screenmode to give our logo some depth. Choose the colour of you shadow white if you want to give it an outer glow.
5. Set the opacity to 9 and the distance to 0 and the spread to 11 and the size to around 15.
6. Go to blending options of your Layer Styles panel and on the advanced blending box we are going to set the filter glow opacity to 0 and hit ok. This will leave only the outside halo of our logo while the fill will remain blank see-through like.

Now the only thing that is left to do is go to your Photoshop’s top toolbar and hit Select -> Select All and select the entire image in order to align our logo to the entire image.

So we go to Layer-> Align Layer to Selection Vertical Edges and then Layer -> Align Layer to Selection Horizontal Edges which will move our logo to the centre of any photo we want to work on and Ctrl+D to deselect and stop recording and your watermark action is ready!

Try applying the same watermark action to any other photo and you immediately get your watermarked logo right in the middle of your image.

This is an excellent timesaver as it involves several time consuming steps as shown that you probably dont want to go over and over again when processing a lot of photos. Try to see how effectively it works for you!

Click any shape you want. Make for instance a circle, remember to hold down shift to make a perfect shaped circle. You can use any colour you want for this tutorial. Once you have this, look in your layer palette, right click the image you created and select “layer transparency”. Create a new layer without deselecting, go to select -> modify -> contract -> contract by 3 pixels.

Now, in select a darker colour than the one you have for your shape (as mentioned, you can use any colour for this one). Now switch to the gradient tool and use gradient to transparent. You can either go up or down over your picture, it’s probably easier and wiser to go up. This will add the volume to the shape you created.

Once you have this, deselect (ctrl+d) - now do the same thing all over again. Right click on the first image, select layer transparency, create a new layer - put this layer on top. Then select the marquee tool, but make sure to use the elliptical marquee tool, the third option is to select “subtract from selection”. This will make sure that it’s going to subtract anything you’re going to select instead of adding it. Then go to Select -> Modify -> Contract by 5 pixels.

To make it smoother, we’ll right click on the selection, while holding the lasso tool - use feather and 10 pixels. Fill this with white (or any brighter colour from the one you chose originally), using the paint bucket as you normally would.

When we have the base for this, we’ll create a new layer - select the elliptical marquee tool again and set white as your foreground colour. Then create a circle on top of your shape. It’s easier to make a circle, but it could really be any shape - oval or so would also work in this example. As the white is the foreground colour, set foreground to transparent using the gradient tool and go from up to down over your shape.

Once we have this done, it’s more or less finished - all we have to do now is link the layer by selecting them and then select “merge linked” from the layers palette.

And that’s it really! You’ve now created a glass effect to your circle.

You can also spice this up by adding a glass reflection. You’d then duplicate the layer and flip it upside down, set the opacity to 50% or so, and then use the erase tool (again using opacity maximum 60%). That’d make the final result look something like this instead.