This tool can be found on the Healing tools. Click on the Healing tools icon but instead of an instant click, click and hold your cursor. After a moment you will see a fly over menu popping and at the bottom the Red Eye Tool. It is a super easy tool, simply hover your cursor over the red eye and click! What it does is sampling the colour around the red eye and replacing the red pupil with a matching natural colour, from the top toolbar menu you can set how dark you want the pupil colour to be, 50% is an average colour with 100% being super dark and 0% quite light.

On our example picture there is an unwanted piece of trash at the left of the image. We want to get rid of that but without giving the image a fake appearance.

What we need is the Clone Stamp tool, this will allow us to choose a sample from our image such as the grass in the background and paint that over another location on our image.

Once selected move your cursor to a clean area of your image near the item you want to remove and press and hold the alt key and click. Now that we have the sample we can begin painting over the unwanted item. As you paint using the Stamp Tool you will notice that the object is replaced with the pattern of the area you selected earlier. Every now and then you may need to reselect an area to use as pattern so that the result will not look very canonical.

With some practise and a little time you can easily perfect this method.

First go the top tool bar of your Photoshop UI and choose Image-> Image Size. A dialogue box will open and what you want to do is play around with the Width and Height boxes you can set these in centimetres, pixels and inches.

Tip! A width of about 200 pixels is as big as a thumbnail image, if you set the width to 200 you will notice that the height will change to 163, this is because the box constrait proportions is checked.

You can uncheck the Constraint Proportions box if you want to achieve a custom size for your image but keep in mind that this might distort your image.

First thing you want to do if you open a Jpeg in Camera Raw is to NOT open up the original Jpeg! So it is essential that you create a copy of your image by right clicking on your image on the Photoshop bridge preview and select Copy-Paste.

Now once you have your copied image ready what you want to do is open it on Camera Raw, so you do not want to double click on it as you would normally do as this will open it on Photoshop thus bypassing Camera Raw.

So what you want to do is again right click on your copied image and select the actual command named “Open in Camera Raw…” that will allow you to open your pictue on Camera for further processing.

One of the nice features specifically on CS3 is the fill light feature creating higher or lower exposure effects on the colouring of your image.

However we are going to focus on this tutorial on selectively colourizing. For this we will use the set of cool tools that Camera Raw has on the top of the right hand menu. You want to choose the little HSL zig-zag looking graphic icon as shown on the image below.

This will change the front panel to new settings that you can experiment with consisting of 3 new tabs.

From these 3 tabs choose the middle one named Saturation. If you take the Reds and Oranges sliders to the left what you get as result is knocking down the colours on the skin without any selections or masks or filters!

Similarly using the same panel if you want to emphasize the clothing of your model simply slide your Blues, Purples and Magentas sliders to the right!

Moving on the luminance tab if you move your reds slider to the right this turns your model’s lips whiter and brings forward the freckles and skin details. Playing around with the oranges you affect the dark of the skin as if you were playing around with the blacks and the whites using filters in a dark room.

What is really important when applying this tip is playing around and experimenting with all your available tabs and sliders. Turning back to the Normal view after playing around A bit what I have essentially done is collectively colourizing my image without applying any masking of filtering to it!

Once you are done with your settings you can choose either Open Image or Save Image from the bottom toolbar of your Camera Raw. Open Image will open it up on photoshop for further processing in more detail.

It is remarkable how time saving collective colourizing can be using this cool feature on your Photoshop!

For the purposes of this tutorial we will use a colour rich picture, a flower in this example. Load your image on photoshop and on the layers dialogue box got to the filter adjustment icon and select the invert adjustment option. This will invert flip the colours on your picture to the negative.

Then we will duplicate the same layer by clicking on the new layer and dragging and dropping on the layers dialogue panel. Now we are going to change the blending mode, always on the layers panel, through the drop down menu, on the second inverted copy to luminosity. This action will give you the effect of colour infrared film.

We will apply the same effect on another picture to better display the colour infrared type of effect.

Tip: How to create an Action macro on photoshop!
Its handy if you are using this effect often to create an action out of it following the steps:

1. Open up your actions palette
2. Click on the new action palette and name it
3. Click record and repeat once more the steps mentioned above to create the IR Filter effect.
4. Add an invert
5. Duplicate it
6. Change the invert’s blending mode in luminosity using the top drop down menu.
7. Stop the recording action.

Your Action is ready!

When you will want to apply it, just open a photo, click on your actions tab, select the action you just created and click Play! The action is performed in a macro-like fashion.

Starting off our tutorial we will need a close up picture like the one in our example. And by choosing the text tool we are typing something like “Treats”. Moving on we increase the fonts size and scale it proportionally to the main theme of the magazine cover.

When you will first type the Magazine title you will notice that it is hiding the main picture, however according to the industry best practises you want to the title to be floating behind the main picture. In order to do this we go to our layers menu and by dragging and dropping the Title Layer we move it under the picture layer so it is not hiding the picture at all.

Once you resolve the basic outline of your subject and title you will want to give your magazine cover some depth. In order to do this we click on Layer->Layer Style->Drop Shadow as shown on the Photoshop screenshot beneath.

We want to drop a shadow to our subject in order to create the depth illusion. The angle parameter on the Drop Shadow option sets the angle where we want the shadow to come from, by default that is 30 which means that the shadow will be dropping on the left side of our model.

Another useful parameter of the Photoshop Drop Shadow option is the Distance, which determines how wide the shadow will be. The higher this parameter the more wide the shadow and therefore the more depth we give to our subject.

Finally the size of the shadow decides how sharp the shadow in the end will be. Increase that in order for the shadow to be fading out instead of looking unnaturally cut out. Once done press ok and now you have given your subject a nice natural deep look.

On our next step we will look more into the optimal outline of our headers. If you look at any magazine cover you will notice that certain headlines stand out more than the rest by having biggest fonts. This is because they are meant to catch your eye and attract attention. It is directing you to the corresponding article inside the magazine.

Equally when you ll be designing your magazine cover you want to make some of your titles to stand out more than the rest.

Choose your text tool and try a striking colour like yellow to type in your main article. Use for this a bold fonts style like Arial Black and click on the Bold option to make them more prominent.

Make them smaller than your title and position them on the top left side of your magazine. You need to be careful when choosing your colour scheme so don’t choose similar looking colours for your background and fonts. For this reason we will change our background colour into something lighter.

Tip! When you use a font or a colour that blends in with the background its always good to use the drop shadow function to make it stand out more so even when they are matching exactly they will not blend too much.

Other quite important and basic features of a magazine cover are adding the barcode on the bottom right and the date at the top right of the front page. More over you don’t want to clutter your article titles too much.

Keeping these in mind within a good 30mins you should be able using these basic guidelines to create a magazine cover looking like this.

Try your own creations using this tutorial and create professional magazine covers!

A good way to extract the photo is by using the pen tool and zoom in by 400% and by fine tuning you can draw up the exact picture you want to extract.

A quicker way of doing this but also more sloppy is by going to filter -> extract where you will get an extract dialogue. By using the highlighter tool you can highlight the areas of the picture you want to extract.

Choose a relatively small brush size, approx 15 will give you fairly good results. Go for smaller brushes for more accuracy. Another point you want to keep in mind is the colour of the brush on your photoshop. Try to choose a colour different than your picture so it will be easier to distinguish it. Once you choose the brush size start drawing round the perimeter of your picture. For smaller details is advisable to choose smaller brush size. So you basically will draw and outline the perimeter and all the edges of your object. Insist on smaller details to get higher detail.

Tip! Fill in the inside non highlighted areas of your object with a solid blue colour. Use the fill tool on the left hand side of your photoshop interface for this. The result should look like this:

Use the preview tool on your right hand side to get an idea of what your picture is gonna look like when you extract it.

Even though at this stage it looks rather messy we can fix that by using the “history brush tool” that restores the original look of your image before you extract it.

To apply the history brush tool we need to fill in the background layer with a striking colour like red, and use this brush to restore the edges that got messy during the extraction.

In this example we are zooming in the finger of our object and apply the “history brush” to restore the original look of our edges.

The more you zoom the longer it will take but the more accurate your picture will look in the end.

Once you are done with smoothing out your edges we can begin with turning our picture into a statue.

1. The first thing we need to do is getting rid of the background colour by clicking on Image -> Adjustments -> Saturation and bring saturation all the way down to zero. This will take the colour out of your statue, turning into a greyish looking preview of your statue.

2. The next thing we need to take care of is the hair. Since hair give away the real life nature of your object. So we are gonna grey out the hair as well into the same shade as the rest of the stone looking statue. In order to lighten up the hair colour we are gonna use the Dodge Tool which is placed on the left hand sidebar of your photoshop interface. Just under the Fill Tool.

By clicking and dragging over the hair we notice straight away that the hair start lightening up. You can use the Dodge tool wherever else you have darker colour standing out in order to blend them in. Feel free to use bigger brush on your Dodge tool in order to evenly fade out large areas of your image.

3. Next step is to bring in some “noise”. In order to do that we are gonna go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise and start playing around with the amount of noise we wanna add. As a rule of thumb 4% should be enough for a statue looking image.

4. Last thing we are gonna do is use the Burn tool to add some shadows, which will give our statue a sense of depth by darkening up those areas where shadows would be. In short the areas that are hiding under the light. You may bring the brush size down a bit to add some shadow wrinkles on the clothes of your statue. Make some corrections if needed by using the dodge tool once again.

Finally choose an appropriate background and throw your statue on top of it and the result should look like this!

Try to find your own funny ways of applying this cool effect to play around with your Photoshop!

In order to make a new layer hit:
 Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E

Label the Merged Visible Layer by double-clicking its name in the Layers palette. Duplicate this Merged Visible Layer several times. The goal is to keep one Merged Visible Layer unfiltered, so only use filters on the ones that say “copy” in the name. Turn off all of the visibility eyes except the bottom Merged Visible Layer (the original) and the one right above it, which will become the first filter layer.

Apply a new Photoshop filter to this first filter layer. If it’s too pronounced, you can either use Fade (Edit > Fade) or you can just reduce that layer’s opacity. You can also change the layer’s blending mode, which marries the effect you just made with the layers below it (the Merged Visible Layer). Once you get this layer to your liking, label it with what you’ve done to it. Ideally you would put in the settings for the filter, especially if they are important to the result.

If you don’t remember your settings (and who does?) use Alt-Ctrl-F. This will bring back your last filter’s dialog box on your Photoshop. Remember those numbers and then click Cancel. If you want to add another filter effect, drag the next Merged Visible copy up to the top of the stack. Apply your filter and then use opacity or a blending mode to marry this with the effect you got before.

Fading a Filter

It is fun to tweak the settings of various filters and check the spectacular combined results as well. In Photoshop you will find the handy Fade Filter facility that controls the intensity of the filter’s effects. The fading filters are helpful in giving the required quantity of filter effect to your image or the selection. To access the fading filter feature you just choose Edit>>Fade or you can access by pressing Shift+Ctrl+F.

Tip: Use the preview option in Fade Filter facility that enables you to see the preview of your image which is different from original one.

Third Party filters

If you are not satisfied with the amount of the inbuilt filters in Photoshop; it allows you to obtain filters from outside. There are many filter development companies. A few leading filter companies are:

• Alienskin
• Andromeda software
• AutoFX Software
• Corel
• Extensis
• Flaming Pear
• Panopticum LLC

You can easily install these filters into your Photoshop environment. Many just need to be copied into the plugins directory of Photoshop whereas others require the installation of an application. Thankfully the latter usually come in packages with easy to understand guides. Check out our plugin directory for a list of available plugins.