Elly Williams’ Weblog

While trying to do something else entirely, I just discovered that, in Photoshop, holding the alt key while moving a layer around creates a copy of the layer.

I learnt how to create your own Batch Operations in Photoshop yesterday.

I used this Batch Operations Tutorial from Slightly Remarkable. It’s incredibly easy.

Open one of the pictures in Photoshop, and begin recording an Action (it’s basically the Adobe term for “macro”). You should be able to hit the “Actions” tab in your History/Actions/Tool Presets window to see the default Actions that come with Photoshop. All you have to do from there is hit the circle (record), [record the actions you want repeated], and then hit the square (stop) in the Actions window. Now that you’ve recorded the action, you can tell Photoshop to open a large number of images, run the specified Action, save the images (or copy them as changed to a new directory), and close them, all automatically.

And it means cropping 120 images takes 5 minutes instead of 5 hours.

Here’s a clever little technique I discovered/made up for creating Lichtenstein style images from other images using Photoshop.

1. This technique works best with bold images – it really doesn’t work well with faces – I chose a picture of a big shiny motorbike.
   
2. The first thing you need to do is Duplicate layer

   You can either do this via the Layers menu, or by right clicking on the correct layer in the Layer Palette (If you don’t have the Layers Palette go to Windows > Layers)

3. Hide this new layer (click on the eye next to it in the Layer Palette) – you won’t need it for a bit



4. To create the pixels you need to use the Colour Halftone Filter: (Filter > Pixelate> Colour Halftone.

   The size you want your dots to be will depend on your image – for this image I used 4 pixels, but if that doesn’t work, try something else.

You want all your screen angles at 45 degrees.

5. Turn the duplicate layer back on again.



6. To create the lines you need to use the Find Edges Filter: (Filter > Stylize > Find Edges.)

   The lines this creates will probably be multi coloured – we want black lines.

7. The first thing to do is Desaturate: (Image > Adjustments > Desaturate) – This will make the lines shades of grey.
8. Then adjust Brigtness and Contrast (Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast)

   You need to put the Contrast up to Full (100) then play around with the Brightness slider until you get clean lines. Where this point is will depend on your image.

9. Finally, set the Layer Style to Darken

And Voila