Not Using Layers. Is That Even An Option?

A buddy of mine is an artist.  A real artist, with paints and brushes and canvas and an easel and everything.  He's not exactly a dabbler.  Between his "collection" and his personal work he just sold one painting and went out and bought himself a new car.  The guy's pretty serious. He's been represented by some big name galleries and his personal paintings fetch four and five figure prices.  The reason I bring him up is that he once asked a fellow giving an Adobe Photoshop (PS) class if he always used Layers.  The guy looked at him like he was from another planet and simply said "yes".  My friend is a physical artist.  He has only one "Layer" to use.  The canvas before him.  The paint goes on in "layers", but "the Background Layer" never changes.  Here's something from YouTube showing someone producing an entire image digitally using only one Layer.  Obviously, it can be done.  I can't, but others can.  If I didn't have dozens of Layers, hidden behind multiple (and nested) Smart Objects, I doubt I'd be doing much more than making stick figures.  I've included a screen shot of the Layers Pallet for today's image.  Check it out by hitting the "Read More".
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Making Your Own Brushes In Photoshop

A friend was checking out a few of my recent images and asked how the backgrounds were made.  Just flip down through the last couple of posts (you might have to dig down four or five) to see what he was looking at.  I explained that the backgrounds came from Brushes made from shots of clouds I had taken.   To get the effect you see in the images, cloud brushes are just about the ideal thing to use.  Clouds aren’t solid.  Clouds have texture.  Clouds are readily available.  If there aren’t any today, look out the window tomorrow.  Sooner or later you find some interesting clouds.  I keep Folders of clouds.  I Keyword every cloud image so I can pull them up quickly in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (any version).  I pop them into scenes that have bald skies and I use them to make Brushes for creative backgrounds.  Clouds are useful little suckers.  Today’s (main) image is a Brush I made this morning to be able to capture the steps to make a cloud Brush.  To follow along, hit the “Read More”.
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Wednesday Q&A - Saving Files to Lightroom

I gave a class last spring and saw one of the attendees the other day.  He said "ya gotta clear something up for me".  In the class I had taken an image from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 (after going as far as I could initially) over to Adobe Photoshop CS5.  There I played with adding a couple Layers, added a couple pieces from other images and generally messed with the shot.  When I was done there, I wanted to do other things back in LR3.  The part the fellow wanted clarification on was how I saved it.  That took me back a little and I asked "what do you mean"?  He explained that he "always" does a Save As rather than just plain Save.  I asked him to tell me why he did that.  That's when I saw why he wanted some explanation.  His justification for using Save As was that he wanted to preserve his original image.  Take a look at today's image.  It's the same shot, four different ways.  The original is on the upper left.  The other three have had one, two and three trips over to PS CS5 and back.  Each time, a simple Save was used, yet there are now four files that show up in LR3.  (It also applies to Adobe Bridge.)  To find out what's going on, hit the "Read More".

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We're Starting A Course For Those New To Photoshop

We've been asked several times if the gallery could teach a course in Photoshop. The simplest way to do a class would be to do it online. So, that's what we're going to do. This will be a free class and will start with the most basic things to know about Photoshop. We'll try to make all the assignments "doable" in either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. One of the better things we'll try to do is to make each post a complete tutorial on how to accomplish "something". We'll go through the tools that are important to understand to get something done. We'll go through the workarounds and pitfalls that a tool might present. When we discuss something like layer masks we'll explain how to do it in Photoshop and how to workaround masks in Elements. The classes will be once a week. We'll start next week, on Wednesday and continue once a week, every Wednesday. That way, anyone interested taking part will have some time to work through the assignment. Once you've finished you interpretation of the week's assignment you can email you solution as a PSD file. It's the old "show your work" thing we all went through in any number of math classes. Everyone will get an individual response and one solution will be featured in the discussion once the lesson is closed.


The first assignment is right here. Take three objects and make a collage. It can be three letters, as shown here, or three pictures, or three pieces of clip art. Any three objects. The premise is to make them overlap. Send your solutions (in the full PSD file format) to tom@kayviewgallery.com . This first assignment is only to gage the level of those interested in the class. Thanks, it should be fun. Read more!