I thought it would be interesting to see how hard it would be to achieve in Illustrator. With one small, free Illustrator script, it turns out it is quite easy.

The script we’ll need is “vary_hues” from wundes.com. Save the .js file on to your computer somewhere. It’s well worth checking out the other scripts too.

Step 1

Create a new document, choose the Rectangular Grid Tool and click on your canvas to open the options for the Grid Tool.

I chose the same width and height to keep the grid as a bunch of squares and have set the rows and columns to 10×10. Unless you’re going for a Mondrian style effect, leave the skew at 0% on each.

Step 2

You may notice at this point that the grid is just a rectangle with lines through it, rather than a bunch of individual squares.

To fix this, select the grid and open the Pathfinder palette. All you need to do now is click “Divide” and this will cut the grid up in to a bunch of squares for you.

To make it easier to see, fill the squares with a colour.

Step 3

Now we have a grid of squares, but it’s still all in a block. Ungroup the grid so you can select individual blocks – right click > ungroup or CTRL + SHIFT + G.

Now we can get some colour in to them.

Step 4

This is where the vary_hues script comes in to its own. Select all the squares and go to File > Scripts > Other Script, then browse to where ever you saved the vary_hues script.

When the dialog box comes up, enter 100 and click OK. 100 will ensure that there’s a wide variety of colours.

Step 5

The random colours will, most likely, look fairly ugly at the moment. The secret to the Gerhard Richter and “Yes” examples is that the colours aren’t completely random. So to get some order and harmony to the colours we’ll use the Live Color tool.

With the squares still selected, choose the Recolor Artwork button to open Live Color.

Step 6

This is where you can have some fun choosing colours. Click on the little grid button to open the swatches menu. This will give you a large selection of colour swatches to choose from. Art History > Pop Art works well, but experiment with others to see how it works.

The Pop Art colours will be applied to the squares, replacing the random colours with more harmonious and hopefully attractive colours.

The default Pop Art colours are a little dull, so let’s jump over to the Edit panel.

This will give you more control over the individual colours. The slider at the bottom (under the little sun icon) adjusts the brightness of the colour, so we’ll turn that up to make it a bit more vibrant. You can also grab and adjust individual colours on the palette to adjust them.

Click OK and you’re done!

That’s the basic idea covered, so hopefully it’s a useful starting point for some interesting designs. If you use it, I’d love to see what you come up with.

Occasionally for a print or website, you might require images with a white background. Usually these are easy to find, take or mask yourself, but for some things it can be more difficult.

Fire is one example. It would be very difficult to try and mask out flames from a fire photo using the pen tool or a brush, because of the organic shapes and indistinct edges.

As you will see in moment, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Using blend modes and layers, it’s very easy! So easy that I’ve turned it into an action which you can download at the end of the article if you so desire.

One

Take or find a photo of some fire (other images with a similar black background might work too – let me know in the comments if you’ve found something else on which this technique works!)

I started out with a rather nice Creative Commons licensed photo found here on Flickr.

Two

In Photoshop, you should have the default “background” layer. Duplicate it and call it something like “inverted”. Then, do just that – invert the image (CTRL + I)

Now set this “inverted” layer to the “Luminosity” blend mode.

As you can see, the whites of the fire have been dulled and it doesn’t really look very fiery. We’ll fix that in the next and final step.

Three

Duplicate the “background” layer again and drag it above the “inverted” layer. Rename it something like “Lighten”.

Finally, set this layer to the “lighten” blend mode and that’s it. You should have a nice white background on your fire photo.

Download the action

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.

This guide will be a (hopefully) simple guide to creating skins correctly for Launchy 2.0 based mostly on my own trial-and-error in making this Elegant Brit skin.

The 5 main skin files

Launchy skins are made up of 5 files.

1. alpha.png – is the main part of your skin and should contain all the colours, patterns, etc and have a transparent background. It should also have the areas for the input, output and icon removed (transparent).

2. background.png – will be the background for the input, output and icon areas and should contain nothing else. The rest of this image should be filled in red (255, 0, 0).

3. mask.png – should be based on your background.png, but with the red areas filled in white (making them transparent) and the input, output and icon areas being in black.

4. misc.txt – defines the areas for the input and output text, location of the icon, alternative suggestions area and the size of the above images (all the same size).

For example:

• input = 14,49,276,19 (input text where you will type the program you want. This box will start at 14 pixels from the left edge of the image and 49 pixels from the top. It will be 276 pixels wide and 19 tall)
• output = 14,14,276,20 (will be the title of the program selected. The box will start at 14 from the left and top and will be 276px wide and 20px tall)
• boundary = 0,0,311,83 (the overall image size of alpha.png and the others which are the same size. 311 being the width and 83 the height)
• icon = 264,9,32,32 (position of the icon for the selected program. 264px from the left, 9 from the top, in a 32x32px box)
• alternatives = 7,74,296,100 (location of the alternative suggestions box. 7 from the left, 74 from the top, 296px wide and 100px tall)

Some skins also define a few font related variables in this file because it is not possible in the qss file. These related to the path details in the drop down list:

dropPathColor = colour in RGB
dropPathFamily = font name
dropPathSize = font size
dropPathWeight = bold
dropPathItalics = italics

5. style.qss – is basically a CSS file and controls the fonts and borders for the skin.

<QLineEdit#input or output or alternatives>
font = font size and name
background-color = text background colour, including alpha value %
alternate-background-color = background colour for the alternative suggestions box
color: font colour
border-style = whether border is a solid line, dotted, dashes, etc. Borders are usually off
border-width = border size in pixels – usually 0, meaning off

Other files

author.txt – information about the skin such as title, author, date, version, etc.

Sometimes other skin features such as option button, close button and skinned scroll bar are included.

–

Thanks to sierra13 and this thread in particular on the Launchy SourceForge page.

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.

The photo I started with was okay, but nothing particularly interesting. The exposure was good, but the real scene was more dramatic. I’ve tried to recreate that scene the way I saw it. And, admittedly, enhance it to the way I wish I had seen it.

Step One – Shadows/Highlights

Duplicate the photo layer. Photoshop doesn’t yet have the ability to have Shadows/Highlights as an Adjustment Layer, so I like to keep a backup of the original photo for fine-tuning later on.

To give it a bit more of an HDR look (which is how our eyes see), I used the Shadows/Highlights tool . I kept the settings subtle to just bring a bit more detail into the clouds and to brighten the dark areas of the road and trees.

Step Two – Darken the Sky

Ensure your foreground colour is set to Black (press D to reset the colours to their Defaults)

Now add a Gradient Adjustment Layer . Set the gradient to “Foreground to Transparent”. I want the gradient to be going from black at the top to transparent at the bottom, so I’ve ticked “Reverse”.

Set this Adjustment Layer to Soft Light blend mode and now we have a nice dark sky. A similar effect could have been done by using a Graduated Filter on the camera when taking the photo, but a) I like the control and fine-tuning this offers and b) I don’t have a graduated filter (at least not one that fits my main lens).

Step Three – Super-Sharpen

Finally, to give the image more impact, I used some super-sharpening. My preferred method of sharpening (everyone seems to have their own way) is using the High Pass filter.

To use this, I needed to first flatten the image into a new layer above all the others (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E – a very useful shortcut!).

Then to Filters > Other (at the bottom) > High Pass. The amount depends on the size of your photo and the effect you want. A small number (0.5 or 1) is good for normal sharpening. But for this super-sharpening effect, I went with 50.

Now, you should have a mostly grayscale image with a bit of smudged colour. I prefer to keep it all grayscale, but sometimes the extra colour looks good. To remove the colour I use Ctrl+Shift+U.

Set this layer to Hard Light blend mode to see how it looks. Now, turn the layer off and on a few times to compare. The unsharpened version almost looks blurry by comparison! The difference is dramatic. Some people will like it, others might think it’s too much. You can (and I usually do) turn the opacity down to keep it subtle.

I don’t usually use that super-sharpening but for this photo it seemed to work well. The method also works well on more texture based photos.

In my original I used my vintage colour technique to adjust the colours further and tuned the opacity of layers to get it looking good to my eyes.

Hopefully this tutorial has given you a couple of new techniques to try out on your own photos. If you’ve used these techniques on one of your photos, I’d love to see what you have come up with – feel free to send me the link in the comments.

Click the icon to download the action. If you want to know what the action does, then read on.

How it works

Start off with the basic image

Add a Gradient Map adjustment layer

Choose the “Copper” gradient, which should be in the default set

Make sure you tick “Reverse” and “Dither”

Set the adjustment layer blend mode to “Soft Light”

That’s it! It results in a nice, slightly vintage look, which is subtle enough to not need any further adjusting, most of the time. Obviously it’s not suitable for every photo – it warms the colours, so if the photo is already quite warm (for example, an indoors photo, with no flash), then it will likely ruin the picture.

I have the action set to one of the function keys (F6), so I can quickly press that to see how the photo looks with the slight vintage colours.

Before looking at some more before and after shots, I suggest experimenting with Gradient Maps yourself. Load some of the other gradients that come with Photoshop and scroll through them with the arrow keys. The image should update in real-time so you can see how the different gradients look on the photo.

More examples

Video

High resolution version

Another GIMP tutorial. Based on the earlier Photoshop version showing how to get vintage colours using Curves. I’ve tried to recreate it almost exactly – even used the same photo.

The recording process went surpringly well in Ubuntu. I didn’t even need to take it into Vegas for editing. Just recorded with Xvidcap at 640x480px 30fps then added the music and fade out at the end with Avidemux.

And because I uploaded it at the full resolution, you can watch the video in high quality on Youtube if you add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL (Thanks Lifehacker).

Or you can just click here to view the high quality version.

A slight change of pace for me – a GIMP tutorial. I don’t use GIMP a lot but I’ve found a lot of my experience with Photoshop is transferable. This is one such case. In Photoshop I would have gone to Select > Color Range then used the selection as a layer mask.

In GIMP the process is similar. You just have to know where to look. Turns out it’s in Color > Color to Alpha. There you can choose a colour or use the eye dropper to sample from the image and that colour will be turned transparent.

This was all inspired by this work by the very talented Tordo on deviantART:

I was struck by the patterned sky and wanted to try it out on a photo. Since I was using Ubuntu at the time, I thought i’d see what GIMP could manage. Turns out, as described above, it managed rather well.

So today I decided to document the process in GIMP with a video tutorial. My first time recording a tutorial in Ubuntu, too – it went very smoothly. I might have to do more for GIMP in future.

Update

I’ve remade the tutorial with Photoshop. Same images and everything, just how you’d go about doing the same thing in Photoshop.