
By Heather Dove
Online Editor
Being artistic doesn’t come easy for everyone. Long strokes of paint on a canvas or armed only by a pencil and a sketchbook, being creative can seem like a war zone.
Photoshop is the saving grace for anyone who is creative, but not necessarily artistic enough to do it themselves. With a few clicks of a button, you can manipulate images into completely new pieces of art. Even if you just want to mess around with your best friend by putting his head onto Eminem’s body, Photoshop will get the job done.
The best part is that anyone with a computer, time and a little imagination can become a Photoshop Ninja.
Starting in seventh grade, I’ve accumulated the knowledge that has qualified me to be dubbed a “Photoshop Ninja.” Self taught, I’ve gone through the pitfalls so you don’t have to. If there’s something you want to know how to do, comment below and ask me. If I don’t already know how to do it, I’ll find out for you — your own personal Chacha to the graphics world.
Ninja Lesson: Text Tools
First, you can find the text tool on the toolbar. It’s the giant “T”!
The above “Type!” has a size of 38, a Distance of 4, and a Spread 0.
To achieve this effect, look at my settings:
Working with Stroke is simple. The bigger you want the outline to be, the bigger you should make “Size”. To change the color, hit the box to the right of the word “Color”, and pick a new color.
However, I’ve put a border around the “Blend Mode”. By now, you may have noticed this option throughout all of the Layer Style options. Blend Mode in Layer Styles works the same as the blending mode of Layers. Just like you can set a layer to “Darken”, you can set your Layer Style to “Darken”.
For example, look how our text looks normally with this stroke effect:
Now, when we put the text on a purple background, and change our Blend Mode to “Darken”, the outline we added in gets darker.
4.) Finally, Gradient Overlays. Gradient overlays are handy for spreading a color scheme throughout a whole image, gradually going from one color to the next. Or, you can manipulate a gradient to instead have hard edges instead of the normal fade. A personal favorite feature of mine is that gradient presets usually come with a rainbow gradient. So, if you ever feel like slapping a rainbow onto something, you can avoid the pain of creating your own.
So, this time, check off “Gradient Overlay”.
You can change which gradient goes over your layer by clicking the arrow next to the gradient.
I chose the gradient rainbow option in the bottom left hand corner of the options. If you look at the rainbow gradient to the right of it, there appears to be white and gray squares in some areas. These white and gray boxes indicate in those areas, the gradient is transparent.
Here is the difference between the transparency and no transparency.
Transparency:
You can also change the Style. Originally, gradients are set to linear; however, if you mess around with the options, you can come up with some unique designs.