Faux Tilt-Shift Effect from Simon Abrams on Vimeo.

I deal mostly in Flash and in photography, so I filed this nugget of information far away in the back of my mind. It wasn’t long before I was presented with a challenge that this feature solved handily. I was at work (at Deutsch, my 9-to-5), when a producer came up to me in a panic. Apparently, some copy in an intro video for a site we were building for Alzheimer’s sufferers and their caregivers needed to be edited, but we didn’t have the source After Effects files in-house (the video was produced by a motion graphics firm), and even if we did, we didn’t have an AE guru on hand to make the changes.

Photoshop made short work of editing the text on this video file

I was about to tell the already distraught producer that being an After Effects neophyte, I couldn’t help her, when I remembered Photoshop CS4. I opened the video file in Photoshop, and after copying  a clean section of the background texture onto a new layer, inserting a few keyframes and new text layers here and there, I had the finished, re-exported video file done in less than an hour. The producer was happy, money and time were saved, and the site is now live at exelonpatch.com.

It was all incredibly easy, and I’ll give a more detailed walkthrough of exactly how I did this in a future tutorial.

How many times have you wanted to put guides at the precise horizontal and vertical centers of your Photoshop document? There are a couple of ways you could go about this. One of the slickest is to select New Guide from the View menu, and enter the pixel location of the guides numerically. That’s great if you’re a math whiz (which I’m not), or handy with a calculator (which I am).

The next best way is to enter the values as a percentage - to place the guides in the center of your document, enter “50%” in the numerical text field and the guide will be dropped precisely at the halfway mark of your image. Do this twice - once for a horizontal guide, and again for a vertical guide, and you’re all set.

To make this even more streamlined, I had the lightbulb moment of making an action of that, which you could optionally assign a keyboard shortcut to for the ultimate in speedy guide-making.

[Update: Whoops - this action has a glitch - I need to figure that one out, and I’ll re-post it. Stay tuned…]

Because I love you, I’ve already saved out this action, which you can download here.

Bonus: Included in this set of actions are two other actions I use frequently when working with Flash. The first one duplicates the selected layer(s) or layer set(s) into a new document, and trims away all of the transparent background. This is my preferred way of importing bitmap elements from Photoshop into Flash.

The second action is a variation of this, the only difference being that it doesn’t trim the document. This leaves you with a new document that’s exactly the same pixel size as the original file.

Almost Stepped in It by Goro Fujita

I stumbled across German artist Goro Fujita’s blog Chapter 56, which is full of amazing paintings, drawings, sketches and tutorials. His style is whimsical and humorous, and often features robots or other fantastical creatures interacting with the natural world. Check it out at www.area-56.de.

In this demo, I show you how to use Photoshop CS4 Extended's new advanced 3D capabilities to recreate the very cool graphic Apple uses on their iPhone SDK page.

Resources:

Metallic Layer Style

Apple's iPhone Developer page