:: workshop news & musings ::

Anew effect for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements users – another Lomo derivative effect. This action will adjust curves for the RGB, green & blue channels to increase contrast and really make your architecture and portrait photos pop.

  A few samples are here; feel free to leave a comment and add a link to any images you create with this action.

To the left is a street scene in Washington DC, snapped last summer.  The added contrast really makes the brick pop and the shadows darker. Converting this image to black and white (using one of the methods found in Portrait Lab) will result in a very nice print!

To the right is a shot from inside the National Portrait Gallery.  It works very well on interior shots, too. Tweaking the Gradient Map Adjustment Layer that the action creates allows you to increase the black and white effect, or you can substitute a different gradient for some colorizing effects, too.

---

---

Here’sa set of 21 layer styles that have been laying around the workshop for awhile.  There’s a variety of designs here that you can use on text, shapes, or anything else you add to your graphics.

For a full preview, click  the thumbnail.  It shows each of the layer styles applied to a shape and to text. There’s also a “null” style included that will remove all layer styles from the layer so you can try a different one.

To install them into Photoshop Elements, simply download and unzip the package, drag them into your Add-O-Matic Which does all the heavy lifting for you, and they’ll show up in your Effects palette in the Layer Styles section.  use the drop menu to navigate to “Graffi Styles”.

Enjoy!

---

---

Probablythe single most-sent email message I receive runs along these lines:

"Hey, Graffi:  I have Photoshop Elements x.x and I like the actions in your blog.   Where do I put them in Elements to make them work?"  (The second-most received message I get usually goes something like "Hey Graffi: I downloaded the actions from your blog and put them in Elements but they’re not showing up – what can I do?").

Of course, my answer is to use the Add-O-Matic, which will automatically sort and place – along with a generic thumbnail & the required .xml file – the actions so they appear in the Effects palette and the new Actions Player in Elements. At around $11, it really is the simplest solution for adding Actions, Shapes, Styles, Brushes, .8bf-format plug-ins, and many more esoteric items like Color Swatches and Curve shapes.

To use the AOM, download the add-ons you want to install, make sure you’ve unzipped them, and drag and drop the files into the gray box of the AOM interface. It will build the list for you, and when you click "GO!" it will sort & place all the items in just a matter of seconds:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you have Handy Actions, this Curves preset can be called after running the Curves action found there. You can use this preset to create an old faded snapshot look for your image.  It could be useful on scrap pages or ads, or anywhere you need a faded look to an image.

Add-O-Matic will accept Curves presets in version 8, so installing it to Elements is as simple as unzipping it to your desktop and dragging it into the AOM from there.  Then look for it in the drop menu of the Curves dialog:

To use it, first run Handy Actions’ Curves action, and select the preset. Then you can do additional tweaking of the overall curves, if desired (maybe an ‘S’ curve, or the “Inverted ‘S’ Curve” action).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’vecreated a set a of presets for the Channel Mixer  that can be added using your Add-O-Matic – just drag and drop them into the AOM and they’ll appear in the preset drop menu within the Channel Mixer dialog.

The Channel Mixer is a Photoshop Adjustment Layer that can be accessed using one of the actions available in Graffi’s Handy Actions.

Cheers!

---

---

Thisis a fast-n-easy technique to create a quick ad page background, or a scrap page background, or just a way to build a collage of your images. I can make the action for you, but how to use it is up to you!

It starts with the image you’d like to use for the start of your background.

Open your image in Elements and then press [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[U] to quickly desaturate it. You should have a black & white image in about two seconds! Run a subtle Gaussian Blur on this layer (Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur) to just make it a bit soft. I’m not giving any parameters here, because every image will require a different setting.

Next, press [D] on your keyboard to reset the default foreground and background colors to black & white. Create a new layer and press [Ctrl]+[Backspace] to quickly fill it with the background color (white). Reduce the opacity of this layer to about 75% or so, or until the background layer is subtle enough for your other images and text to show up over it.

Next, add your product image (we’ll pretend we’re making an advertisement) and any text or other elements you’d like, resizing and adjusting them as you go to get a nice look.

My advertisement for the Add-O-Matic v7 was made using this very simple trick.

You could also try using the Polaroid effect, from the Fun Foto FX action pack to create a pile of Polaroids on a background – there really is no limit to what you can make with just a few simple tricks & tools.

---

Many

Add-O-Matic users have written asking about how to change the default blue Add-O-Matic thumbnail into something a little more descriptive or indicative of what the effect actually produces.

Let me first explain why there’s a generic thumbnail in the first place: When a new effect is added to Photoshop Elements, Elements doesn’t have the slightest clue as to what the effect is or what the final result of running it should be. Therefore, a simple generic thumbnail is inserted as a placeholder, allowing the special Add-O-Matic category to display that there actually is an effect there, and it’s called “xxxx.atn”.

Replacing this generic thumbnail is doable, and I’ve finally gotten around to writing out the steps to accomplish it.

---

Before you start, though, ask yourself if you really want a new thumbnail or do you just want to see what the name of it is?

   If it’s the latter, there’s a very simple solution already available: click the mini-menu from the upper right corner of the Effects palette and toggle on the “Show Names” option.

The Effects palette will display a truncated name beneath each thumbnail in any of the sections of the Effects palette. That’s the quick 2-second approach!

---

For a more permanent solution, though, you might want to create a unique thumbnail indicative of the effect the action produces, and force a rebuild of Elements’ internal thumbnail database. Here’s how:

(Let me just state this for the lawyers out there:  if you do this, and you do something incorrectly and/or you don’t let your database rebuild and/or the database rebuilds, but your thumbnails are screwy and/or anything else funky happens to your installation of Elements, your computer, your network, your garage door opener, your microwave, or anything else, it isn’t my fault – consider yourselves warned!)

Now that that’s out of the way, it’s a pretty simple, albeit time-consuming, process:

1. Locate the action that you want to create a new thumbnail for, and get the exact name from the *.atn file you dragged into Add-O-Matic. (this is important!)
2. Create the image that you want to use as the thumbnail, save it in .png format, and name it exactly the same as the action (*.atn) file that it represents. For example, I recently uploaded an action here named  Retro 3D Text.atn.  I created an image using this action and saved it to my desktop, naming it Retro 3D Text.png 
3. Navigate to the folder where Elements keeps all actions, thumbnails,&  metadata files for all effects (*\Program Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\8.0\Photo Creations\photo effects) and drag your new thumbnail in, overwriting the .png file that already exists with the same name:  you want to replace it, right? So overwrite it!
4. Now you need to force Elements to see the new thumbnail.  That means you have to make Elements forget what the original thumbnail looked like. To do that, you need to delete the internal thumbnail database and make Elements build itself a new one.
5. Navigate to *\Program Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\8.0  and delete or rename the database file  called  ThumbDatabase.db3.  This is the information store that Elements uses to know what each and every thumbnail looks like, what file it references, and where it lives within your installation.
6. Start Elements. The database will rebuild itself, and it will take 20 minutes or more for it to go through the entire Elements catalog, locate thumbnails, figure out what they belong to,where they reside, and record all that information into a brand spanking new, bright & shiny thumbnail database file. You’ll see a progress bar that looks like this:

7. When your cursor stops flickering and it appears that the thumbnails are where they should be, close & restart Elements again just to lock everything in place.

---

Doing the steps above, I made a new thumbnail .png for the action I mentioned above, saved it to the photo effects directory, rebuilt the thumbnails database, and now my Add-O-Matic category displays the updated image:

I’ve also created an automated way to perform these steps, and I’m currently working on incorporating it into a future release of Add-O-Matic. I’m hesitant to bring it out into the light right now, though. Maybe I can be convinced – what’s a utility like this worth..?

---

Hey,
Graffi:"How do I add additional layer styles to Elements?”

I get messages like this at least once or twice a week or so. It’s not difficult (the easiest way of all is to get yourself a copy of the Add-O-Matic which does all of this stuff for you automatically), but if you want to do it yourself manually, there’s a few things to keep in mind to get things looking exactly the way you want.

Adding Layer Styles to Elements can be a bit tricky.  The .asl file needs to be placed in two separate folders, and for optimal display in the Effects palette, you should consider creating a new .xml file to tell Elements where and how to display them.

First, the two folders: Layer Styles (*.asl files) need to placed in two separate folders:

• *\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements #.#\Presets\Styles
• *\Program Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements#.#\Photo Creations\Layer Styles

Make sure hidden folders are visible to you (that’s been covered numerous times in numerous places, so I won’t reiterate it here).  You could call it done at this point, and you will have styles in place.

---

If you want to correctly display your styles in the Effects palette, you will need to create an .xml file.

Get started by opening your favorite text editor (Notepad will work nicely) and start adding a few lines of info. A basic .xml file will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<psecontent xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/PSEContent/1.0/">
<global>
<type value="style"></type>
<typecategory id="CatText Styles" value="Text Styles" localize="true"></typecategory>
</global>
</psecontent>

The above references a new layer style called “Text Styles”.  Here’s what this code does:

The first line lets Elements know what kind of encoding it uses (UTF-8, in this case, which is the flavor that Elements is fond of).

The next line tells Elements what kind of additional item is being added (PSEContent).

Next, what type of content (tell Elements it’s a “style”).

What category do you want to place this in (in other words, what name do you want to appear in the drop menu of the layer style section in the Effects palette”)  For this example, I want to call it “Text Styles”, so the category is CatText Styles and the value that appears in the drop menu is Text Styles”.

That’s it: save this file with the same name as the *.asl file it represents (my file is called “Text Styles.asl”, so this document will be saved as “Text Styles.metadata.xml” into the same ProgramData folder path as the .asl – does that make sense?)

---

You could go even further, naming and categorizing each style with a name and display location. This is for the newer .xml verson ussed in Elements 7 & 8 (although the simplified version above works just fine).

Check the code below to see the differences.  This .xml files names each style and places it in a specific place in the display:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<psecontent xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/PSEContent/2.0/"/>
<subscription value="free" />
<type value="style" />
<category value="$$$/content/category/type/TextStyles=Text Styles" />
<item id="1"> <name value= "$$$/content/styles/Alien=Alien" />
</item>
<item id="2"> <name value= "$$$/content/styles/Glassy=Glassy" />
</item>
<item id="3"> <name value= "$$$/content/styles/Gloss2=Gloss2" />
</item>
</PSEContent>

The above code names the first three items in my Text Styles.asl file so their names will display in the palette: “Alien”, “Glassy”  &  “Gloss2”.

Follow the examples, and use the template above to create your own .xml file. 

Or just grab an Add-O-Matic and let the work be done for you!

---