:: graffi’s rants & raves ::

Here’s an answer to another common question I receive from users:  “Where are the effects that I just installed?” Since all of the action sets in the Graffishop install themselves (and do it so quickly), some folks have trouble figuring out where they went. Each and every set installs itself in the Effects palette; more specifically, in the Photo Effects section of the Effects palette.

“So where is the Effects palette?” is often the next question.  Ok, first you need to open the Effects palette.  You can find it by clicking Window>Effects, or if you prefer to use the sidebar on the right side of the Elements workspace, it will appear as a palette there (I prefer to not use the sidebar:  it takes up too much real estate for my liking, so I drag my palettes out away from it so I can group them together and resize as needed, like in my screenshot below).

Once the palette is visible, click the third icon on top to show the Photo Effects section.  Once there, you can use the drop menu to navigate through the various effect sets that you have (note that the Add-O-Matic section won’t have any effects in it until you add some actions to it.  I have a lot of freebie one-off actions I post in my blog from time to time if you want to experiment with them):

Finally, another common question is “How do I use all of these things I just installed?“  For using the various actions and tools, there are numerous tutorials available all over the web (for example, Google “Photoshop Tutorial Channels”, and you’ll get a lot of articles and tutorials about using some of the Channels actions in Handy Actions;  Google “Using Layer Masks” for info on different ways to use the layer mask tools, etc.)

There are a few excellent online forums for help, too - I’m a member of a few, and the members there are very friendly and helpful:

Elements Village

Photoshop Creative Elements

Also, YouTube has a ton of video tutorials about Photoshop & Elements, and Flickr (including the Photoshop Elements Techniques group, among many others) has many groups for and about Photoshop Elements - check those out, too, for good, free resources!

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There’sjust so much crazy stuff you can do with channels that there really should be an entirely new set of actions devoted solely to them.  (Hmm,  note to self……. !)

*For the folks who have written me and asked about channels, I promise I haven’t forgotten you!  My “real” job has been very busy lately, and with so many other things going right now (end of the school year, several trips, baseball season starting…) I honestly haven’t had time to respond - please accept my apologies for my delinquency and accept these freebies as a peace token!

This set of three actions will invert, individually, the three channels in an regular RGB image (i.e., a photo from your digital camera).  They duplicate the image, flatten it, and create a duplicate layer to work on, allowing you quite a bit of flexibility in going further with blending modes, masks, isolations, blah blah blah.  As with most everything in Photoshop & Elements, the only real limits are your imagination and willingness to play!

Install them easily by just dragging them into the box on your Add-O-Matic v7 (or install them the old-fashioned, long way that takes forever and is so easy to mess up in so many different ways if you don’t have an AOM yet…!)

The original image for this sample is just above; there are samples for each of the actions below.  As you can see, they vary from a cool cross-processed look to an almost alien look to a wonderful 1970s-era snapshot that’s been stuck on the fridge just a little too long, and has faded from too much sunlight:

Have fun with them, and don’t be afraid to post some results to the Photoshop Elements Techniques Pool - love to see you there!

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Here’s an updated video (flash) on using the Graffishop and the Add-O-Matic.

Cheers!

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Oneof the many available freeware and shareware virus scanner utilities must have recently done an update…

I always know, because I receive emails along the lines of “Add-O-Matic used to work, but now it stopped“  or  “I tried to reinstall Handy Actions, but my scanner says it’s infected with a virus“.

The easiest way to get past these using your virus scanner (and I highly recommend using a virus scanner, even on the Graffi stuff!) is to add an exception to your protection.  It’s generally a pretty easy task - simply follow the directions in your application’s Help files.

I scan each download monthly using two of my favorite online resources:  VirusTotal  &  Kaspersky Online Virus Scan. Both allow you to upload a file and have it scanned (Kaspersky limits file size to 1Mb, however).  VirusTotal scans your upload using 40 different services, including Avast, AVG, McAffee & Norton/Symantec.  Each month, the Graffi utilities come back clean. In fact, I’ve never had a bad result, other than the AVG issue from a few months ago (read here). 

I ran a scan this morning, and I’m posting this month’s results here.  Click the screen shot above for the Kaspersky results, and you can have a look at the TotalVirus report by clicking here (46k PDF ).

Sometimes other things block the installers from starting, and these are almost always a result of other utilities running in the background on your system, More often than not, this problem is fixed by doing a system restart. Sometimes it gets more involved than that, however, and you’ll need to do a one-by-one task removal until you locate the blocking utility. Use your Task Manager for that process - there’s really no other way.

Finally, if you’re unsure as to whether your system will run the Action Packs in the Graffishop and / or Add-O-Matic v7, or if you just want to see how simple they all are to install, try the free Sampler Pack first.  It runs off the same internal engine as the regular action packs, and it  will quickly let you know if there’s a potential issue on your Windows system.

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Ithought this was extremely cool - so look for my take over in the Photoshop Elements Techniques Pool on Flickr -!  I’ll put it in the Pack of Lies pool, too….

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This question comes up pretty frequently, surprisingly.  The answer to the question “How do I add a font to Photoshop Elements so I can use it in the program?” is - you don’t add it to Elements (or Word, or Draw, or Gimp).  You add a font to your system, and then all of those programs can use it.

  Next question: “How do I add it to my system?“

How to install a font
Unzip the font files you have downloaded, then:

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Here’s a quick solution for getting the databases (Media & Thumbnail) databases rebuilt in Photoshop Elements 6 & 7.  It renames them for you and prompts you to restart Elements to complete the rebuild process.

This is usually a last resort, when items you’ve added that require the database to rebuild (particularly actions, styles & graphics) need a kick start to show up.  Please read the info in the utility for details -

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