This technique is very useful in general. For example you can use it for blending objects into a background or for making a grungy text font.

Watch below or in high quality.

Below are some examples I’ve made previously.

I thought this idea was too good to let slip away into obscurity, so here it is and here’s one way to do it in Photoshop.

As you can see in the image, they have used balloons to outline the negative space in the shape of the OXO Tower. The design is simple, light and colourful and I really like it. The easiest way I can see to do this in Photoshop is to use a brush and play with the scatter and size settings.

To start off, I’ve created a balloon shape. This was done by drawing a circle with the Ellipse Tool, selecting the two middle points and moving them up a bit to make a balloon shape. Then I drew a little knot in the end and combined that with the balloon. Finally, I drew a bit of ribbon tied on the end using the Pen Tool. It took less time to create than it did to write this sentence, actually. But if you like, you can download the balloon Custom Shape, balloon AI vector or just go right ahead and get the balloon brush shape.

Next, I flattened the layers (ALT+L+F) and made it into a brush shape (ALT+E+B). It’s good to have the shape as a decent size, so it doesn’t get too blurry or pixilated at different sizes as a brush, so mine is about 800px tall.

Now, you’ll want something to be in the negative space so that the brush shape (balloons in this case) have something to form around. I happen to have a hot air balloon shape handy, which seems appropriate enough, so I’ll use that.

To set this up, I’ve created a blank canvas and have my hot air balloon shape in a new layer and have set it to slightly darker than white (so I can see the outline) and have a white background. I’ve also put a slight radial gradient on the background to make it show up a bit more.

With that set up, it’s back to the brush. Select the brush tool and go to the brushes palette. The newly created balloon brush should be at the bottom.

Brush Tip Shape
Depending on the size of the document, you will need to adjust your balloon size. The balloons look best far apart, so set that quite high. I’ve done about 300%

Shape Dynamics
If you’re fortunate enough to have a graphics tablet, then you can have size jitter at 100% and control it with the pen pressure. Otherwise, you can set it to fade or just manually adjust the brush size using the [ and ] keys. It’s a good idea to set a minimum diameter so you don’t get lots of tiny 1px balloons. I’ve chosen about 20%. To give the balloons a bit more of a natural look, adjust the Angle Jitter – not too much though, unless you want them going in all directions. I’ve also set the brush to Flip X Jitter so they’re not all facing the same way (Y Jitter will flip them upside down).

Scattering
To add to the natural, random look of the balloons, adjust the Scatter slider to your liking. 100% is good for me.

Color Dynamics
Finally, colour dynamics will adjust the colour of the balloons. I’ve set foreground/background jitter to 100% – this way, the balloons will be set to a colour somewhere between the colours you have chosen in the palette.

Other Dynamics
You might also like to adjust the opacity of the brush to make the balloons slightly transparent.

Now, we can finally paint some balloons! To start off with, it’s good to get some smaller balloons around the shape of the object (hot air balloon in this case). Set the foreground/background colours to black and white (press D) and paint around the shape until you’re happy with it.

Once you have a rough outline, you can go nuts – fill the entire canvas with balloons if you like! Keep in mind that it does tend to look better with some white space.

A moment ago I said to set the colours to black and white. This wasn’t to depress you or deprive you of colours – just the opposite. We can now do my patented (not really) Gradient Map trick.

Make a new Gradient Map Adjustment Layer and start scrolling through the gradients and seeing how they look – you might like one of the colour schemes. Personally, I’d like it to be lighter and brighter, so I set the Gradient Map layer to Soft Light. This will keep the background light while embiggening the balloons with colour. The default Photoshop gradients are okay, but there are some really nice ones in “Pastels” and “Simple” or you can even go to Colourlovers and get some from there.

Here are a couple of quick examples of what I came up with (Click to view 1600x1200px versions).

If you make something yourself using this method, let me know in the comments – I’d love to see what you create.

When I started using Lightroom, I thought it would be very handy to be able to import all my Camera Raw presets into the developing room. Afterall, I’ve spent the past couple of years developing them and they’re the same options as far as I could see. Wrong.

I thought it would be a matter of copy and pasting the files from the Camera Raw folder into the Lightroom one. Which is what I initially tried. It didn’t work. So I saved a setting from Lightroom, had a look back in the folder and it has some strange .LRTEMPLATE file to store the settings.

Not sure who thought that was a good idea. It’s probably just the same Camera Raw .XMP file but with some changes to make .XMP unreadable.

As far as I can tell, the following is the only way to import the Camera Raw settings into Lightroom (at the time of writing).

Essentially, we need to get a bunch of photos, apply one preset to each photo, click done to save the XMP sidecar file, then open those files with Lightroom, go to Develop on each one (it will read the sidecar files with your Camera Raw settings) and click the plus sign to save as a Lightroom preset.

It shouldn’t take very long, depending on the number of presets you have. Personally, I had about 25 Camera Raw presets that I use and tweak further for my photos. I’m not sure if that’s a lot or not. Took me about 10 minutes to go through them all and make the Lightroom files.

Step by step

Open Photoshop and import a Raw photo, then go and check to see how many preset files you have. You’ll need to open the same number of files to apply one preset to each.

Cancel Camera Raw and go and select the number of raw files you need. In my case it was about 25. Import them into Camera Raw (don’t worry – we’re not going to be opening them all with Photoshop)

Now select the first photo, then go to the presets tab and select the first preset. Then select the second photo, apply second preset and so on, until you have one preset for each photo. Shouldn’t take too long.

When you’re done, press the Done button – not the okay button which will open all the photos in Photoshop (which, if you have a fairly slow computer like mine, could take ages). Pressing the Done button simply writes the sidecar file with the settings.

Close Photoshop and open Lightroom. Go to the folder where those Raw files and sidecar files are saved. Select the first photo and Press D to go to the develop section.

The photo should look pretty much the same as in Camera Raw (if it doesn’t, wait a few seconds for Lightroom to read the sidecar file and apply the settings).

Now click on the little plus sign to save a preset. It’s not really well labeled. I thought the plus sign would grow and shrink that palette when i first saw it.

Give it a name or a number – done. Your first preset has been created. Now, press the right arrow key to move to the next photo. Again, click the plus sign, name it, and so on through the folder.

Before too long you should have all the presets saved into Lightroom’s own strange little .LRTEMPLATE preset files.

Short video I made showing how to change the little My Computer icon from the default Desktop type computer into a laptop/notebook in Windows Vista.

Basically:

• In the Control Panel, search “icon” then click “Show or hide common icons on the desktop” (You’ll need to be in the default Vista control panel, rather than the Classic style in order to search)
• Click on “Computer” and select change icon
• Scroll until you see the laptop (should be two columns to the right)

The back story to this is that I bought a laptop around October 2007, before I came to London. When I first got it and was finding my way around Vista for the first time, I saw the My Computer icon was a desktop one. I thought at the time I should change it to a laptop but pretty much instantly forgot about it.

Earlier this year, my brother bought his own laptop, inevitably with Vista as well. One of his first comments when playing with it was, “can you change the icon to a laptop?” This prompted my memory and I decided to find out how. I found this thread where “Transfer” explains how it is done. Being a visual person I decided to make a short video tutorial for other visually minded people.