On screen, the colors of pixels are a mix of red, green and blue values. A fourth value, opacity, controls how pixels blend with pixels laid over them. In image-editing programs such as Photoshop, changing the opacity of a layer is straightforward: Setting a layer to 50% opacity makes all of its pixels half-visible. If the situation calls for variable visibility, then layer masks are the answer.
Today I had the chance to work outside. It was a sunny afternoon, a bit warm, but not bad in the shade. After a minute I felt something on my arm—tree sap. The tree was dripping! On me! On my MacBook screen!
I got away, but not before receiving a few ill-placed droplets. Fortunately, I knew the drill. As a public service, here’s my recipe for cleaning a sappy screen.
The angle gradient tool is an overlooked gem tucked away in Photoshop’s toolbar. Often passed over for its more popular sibling, the linear gradient tool, angle gradients create clockwise blends of color around the point a user clicks. The angle gradients create clockwise blends of color around the point a user clicks. Most people stop there. But when combined with other techniques and some creativity, the angled gradient has some surprising uses.
Photoshop may be popular, but does it save the best web images? I compared it to Acorn and Pixelmator 1.5.1 to find out.
Photoshop’s Curves has long been associated with making images brighter or darker. But few people know that it can also change color with greater degrees of control than the Hue/Saturation or Color Balance controls. From slight selection changes to creating great duotones, Curves is a powerful tool to master… if you’re willing to practice.
In searching for interesting patterns, designers sometimes pass over basic shapes in favor of more complex geometrics. But simpler is often better. The trick is to pay attention more to how shapes interact than to how a shape looks on its own. The concepts are simple, but the choices are endless.