by David Peters

Click on the Brustic to open the Brush Preset picker, and scroll down to see the default set of brushes. Towards the foot of the list of default brushes you'll find a variety of unusually-shaped brush tips, including brushes shaped like stars and blobs. Click on the picker's menu icon to access other, specialised sets of brushes. You can use the picker's menu to display a thumbnail of the brush stroke, or set it to show the brush tip and name. The numerical value indicates the brush's initial diameter in pixels. You can customise this to suit your requirements. When you select a new set of brushes, you can either replace the existing default set or append the new set to it so you can use both.

There are few things worse than having hundreds of cool brushes gone in an instant. It's happened to me on one occasion where my hard drive fried out and I didn't save all my customized Photoshop stuff. So I'm going to help you avoid any tragedies and tell you how to save your brushes. Once you've got an amount of brushes made (I personally like to create 'sets' of brushes that all kind of work together, or just happened to fit my mood that day!), go to 'Edit' then choose 'Preset Manager'. A window with all your current brushes will pop up. You can click on each little square individually. What you're going to want to do is shift+right click on the series of brushes you want to save. Once you've done that, click on 'Save Set', give the set a name and save it to your computer (of course these brush files are what you're going to want to back up!). There, you're done!

To demonstrate the way the interface changes as you use it, try selecting the type tool from the toolbox (the one that looks like a capital T). You will see straight away that the toolbar changes entirely to allow you to set font name, font size and so on. In the history palette, your use of the type tool will be added to your history, and a new layer will be created for your text and shown in the layers palette.

The problem with many of these applications is that they use pre designed templates which the user pieces together to form logos that really are not that original and sometimes appear a little generic. While these applications allow the user to quickly begin creating graphic designs and logos they often simply do not produce designs that are original and in demand by web design clients. If you take the time to learn adobe Photoshop there will be no limit to the logos and graphic designs you can put together. Although the interface can seem a little overwhelming at first, learning Photoshop is not difficult if you have the right tools and take the time to practice.

Do you have old photographs that are faded, worn out, crinkled or even torn? Of course you do, everyone does. Many of these photos are likely very old family photographs that are simply irreplaceable should something happen to them. In the past it was very expensive and time consuming to have old damaged photographed restored. It usually required a photo restoration expert and sometimes the results were not really that great. Digital imaging, and more specifically Adobe Photoshop, has revolutionized the process of renewing and restoring old photographs. It is amazing the results you can achieve with Photoshop. Old and damaged, even torn, photographs can be restored and renewed to their original colors and vitality using the tools available in Photoshop.

Customers get to proof their enhanced images in online private galleries, with web links, user names and passwords sent by e-mail, before deciding whether to purchase. Enhanced images are available for immediate download after secure online purchase through Roman Cart. No money up front and no obligation to buy -- that's how confident Caledonian Digital is in their ability to deliver.

The tools we use in Photoshop are levels, curves and saturation for changing contrasts; and, color balance to bring the image back to the way the natural eye would see the color. Here is what we tell our photographers in the Handbook of Reuters Journalism... Photoshop is a highly sophisticated image manipulation programme. We use only a tiny part of its potential capability to format our pictures, crop and size them and balance the tone and colour. For us it is a presentational tool.The rules are - no additions or deletions, no misleading the viewer by manipulation of the tonal and colour balance to disguise elements of an image or to change the context. Photoshop is a powerful image processing program with many more tools to help photographers produce the best quality image they can for the type of photography they do.

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