Add-O-Matic

The world's first and only add-on installer for Windows versions of Photoshop Elements, and now Lightroom too! Quickly and easily get all your extra goodies into Elements with a drag, a drop and GO!

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Handy Actions

Your Swiss Army Knife for Photoshop Elements - over 70 of the most-requested tools from Photoshop

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Photo Lab

Photo Lab offers 39 ways to enhance your images, from crisp B&W to soft dreamy effects to desaturated and sepia toning. Check it out!

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Fun Foto FX

Over 30 ways to play - Fun Foto FX creates the best effects for your images!

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Glam Photo

56 effects (yes, 56!) are in this self-installing effects pack. With the Glam Photo FX Pack, you can create a huge variety of glamourous looks for your photos (and they work well on landscapes, too!)

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Splitter

16 ways to slice, dice & chop your photos, from simple splits to more complex chops and slices to torn in half or split three ways. Splitter helps you create interesting display options for you photos!

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Framer

Framer offers 24 ways to create frames, borders, outlines and vignettes around your photos

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Sketchy Paint

Graffi's Sketchy Paint offers 28 paint, crayon, pencil, sketch & watercolor effects for Photoshop Elements!

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Tag Archives: brushes

Quick Tip: Erase Backgrounds Quickly With The Background Eraser Tool

Preview of Final Results

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Step 1: Chose an image to work with

Open a photo that you want to extract a background from in Photoshop. In this tutorial I’m going to use a scene of two trees and a blue sky as background, but you can use the same techniques applied here to a variety of images and situations.

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Step 2: How the tool works

Even though the name says “Background” eraser, this tool can actually be used to erase a lot more than that, and it works more as a “Color” eraser rather than a “Background” eraser. So to start off let’s select the tool. You can use the shortcut Shift+E to cycle through the erasers panel, or you can click on its button on the left panel.

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After selecting it, the options on your top panel will change, and your mouse will become a circle with a crosshair in the middle. The crosshair area is where we’re going to select the color that we want to erase, and everything else inside that circle that has that color will be erased. Right click anywhere in your image to open up the brush options for that tool.

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Remember to always keep the hardness high because soft edges may leave background artifacts behind. Change the size of the brush as needed, and keep the spacing fairly low (1~50%) so it creates a smooth continually erasing line when you are using the tool.

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In the top panel, chose the Sampling Once option, so we will only sample the color once and erase a big part of the image with it. Keep the Limits at Contiguous and the Tolerance at 50% for now.


Step 3: Start erasing

Click in a random part of the sky, hold the left mouse button, and drag the mouse around to erase.

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As you can see in the image above, we are not erasing the background between the leafs and branches, but that leads us to the “Limits” option of the Background Eraser Tool. Go to the top panel and change the Limit from Contiguous to Discontiguous. Now do the same thing we did before and let’s see what will be the result.

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As you can see, the Discontiguous option allow us to erase the background even in isolated areas, like in between the branches and leafs of our tree.


Step 4: A few more options

In my case, when I painted with the Tolerance at 50% (default), the ending result was pretty good, but don’t worry if something like this happens to you:

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If something like that does happen to you, it means that the color from the background is too similar to your subject, so you have to lower your Tolerance levels. If the color from the background is quite different from your subject (like in my case) you can set the Tolerance to higher levels to obtain better results. With the right Tolerance level you should get results like this:

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Step 5: More options!

If you tried changing the Tolerance levels but are still getting problems with the Background Eraser Tool erasing your subject, turn on the Protect Foreground Color option.

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This allows you to sample a foreground color (hold Alt/Opt to sample a color from your image) that Photoshop will not erase when using the Background Eraser Tool. Here’s an example of how this option works:

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Step 6: Different Background colors

After you used the Background Eraser Tool in your whole image for one color, you should have something like this:

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Even though my background was pretty much all blue, it has different tones of blue, and even some whites in it. To deal with that, you just have to sample a new color and repeat the process all over. You could also select the “Sampling Continous” option in the top panel:

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But I don’t recommend that because if you come too close to your subject (in this case the trees) you may sample their color by accident and end up erasing parts of the image that you didn’t wanted to erase. So just aim the crosshair of our mouse into another color and repeat the same process until our image is fully cleared.

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Step 7: Final step

After erasing the background you have two choices, you can either select the subject you just extracted and use it in a photo manipulation project, or you could replace the background you just deleted with something new to create a different image (that’s what we’re going to do). Download the sky gradient pack and chose the best one for your image. I chose to replace my old background with this blue sky:

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And this is the result:

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Final Results

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Tutorial by Guilherme Pejon

clip_image020Thanks for following this quick tip, I hope you incorporate this technique into your bag of tricks and that it makes your life easier from now on. Make sure you check my DeviantART and I’ll see you on another tutorial soon.

Guilherme Pejon

Freebie: 12 Large Bokeh Brushes

Bokeh Brush Preview

There are 12 color bokeh brushes. If you’re a SparkleStock member, you can pick from 18 bokeh brushes! They come in multiple sizes; 625, 1250, 2500, and 5000 pixels. In addition, you get them in pre-colored JPEG images to save you time. Drag and drop them into your document then set the blending mode to Screen or Linear Dodge – it’s that easy!

Large Bokeh

We recommend using these bokeh brushes with photos that have some sort of retro photo effect applied. Here are some photo effect tutorials we recommend:

These bokeh brushes work great with portraits. Paint with your brush and layer set to linear dodge using different colors. Combine it with some color lookup filters (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Lookup) to give it a photo retro effect. You can combine the Futurstic Bleak and Film Stock color lookups for the best results.

Download the Bokeh Brushes

12 Large Bokeh Brushes

 

Add-O-Matic is now in its 7th edition, starting way back for Photoshop Elements 5, and is still the most popular Elements utility available! 

New for Add-O-Matic 11: it now will put all your Lightroom presets away for you, too!
You can grab an Add-O-Matic fast-n-easy by clicking the button below:

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.
Buy Now 14.99 USD

Loving me some free brushes!

@photoshopweb: Splatter Plus – Photoshop bit.ly/ZyUG8q

Throw them at your add o matic and you’ll be in business, elements users!
Add-O-Matic is now in its 7th edition, starting way back for Photoshop Elements 5, and is still the most popular Elements utility available! 

New for Add-O-Matic 11: it now will put all your Lightroom presets away for you, too!
You can grab an Add-O-Matic fast-n-easy by clicking the button below:

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.
Buy Now 14.99 USD

Collection of nature-inspired brush sets

@photoshopweb: 10 Free Photoshop Brushes Inspired by Nature | SharedTutor … bit.ly/VxhHDh

Use Smoke Brushes for Custom Portraits

Freebie: 24 Abstract Bokeh Brushes

Bokeh Brushes Preview and Examples

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Download Bokeh Brushes

24 Abstract Bokeh Brushes

 

180 Abstract Bokeh Brushes

Add-O-Matic is now in its 7th edition, starting way back for Photoshop Elements 5, and is still the most popular Elements utility available! 

New for Add-O-Matic 11: it now will put all your Lightroom presets away for you, too!
You can grab an Add-O-Matic fast-n-easy by clicking the button below:

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.

 

Add-O-Matic 11 released!

My app for Elements, Add-O-Matic, is now in its newest edition – this newest version now offers support for Lightroom presets, too!

Add-O-Matic has been making life easier for Elements users since Elements 5, and now Lightroom users can take advantage of it too.  It’s especially simple if you use both Elements and LR – all your goodies and presets will be put away with a single click!

What?? It’s also 25% off for while??  Shut Up!   No, it’s true!

 

Freebie: 16 Photorealistic Explosion Brushes

Explosion Gradient Map

Use the included Gradient Map preset to easily colorize your explosion Photoshop brushes.

Wizard Fire

Shoe Fire


Instructions


Download Bokeh Brushes

16 Explosion Brushes

80 Explosion Brushes

 


Add-O-Matic is now in its 7th edition, starting way back for Photoshop Elements 5, and is still the most popular Elements utility available! 
New for Add-O-Matic 11: it now will put all your Lightroom presets away for you, too!
You can grab an Add-O-Matic fast-n-easy by clicking the button below:

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.
Buy Now 14.99 USD

Freebie: 20 Large Watercolor Splatter Brushes

Download this set of 20 high-res watercolor splatters courtesy of SparkleStock (http://www.sparklestock.com). This set contains 5000px brushes for Photoshop CS6 and 2500px brushes for Photoshop 7-CS5. If you’re a SparkleStock member, you can download the larger pack with 140 brushes.
Read more… 

Add-O-Matic is now in its 7th edition, starting way back for Photoshop Elements 5, and is still the most popular Elements utility available! 

New for Add-O-Matic 11: it now will put all your Lightroom presets away for you, too!
You can grab an Add-O-Matic fast-n-easy by clicking the button below:

By clicking the button below, I agree with the Terms & Conditions.
Buy Now 14.99 USD

Announcing Graffi’s Add-O-Matic 10!

An Automatic
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THE ONLY AUTOMATIC ADD-ONS INSTALLER FOR PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Windows XP / Vista / 7 Only)

Until November 15 2011, upgrade yours or try it for the first time and take 25% off with the coupon code AOMUPGR10

Having trouble trying to figure out where to put all your Photoshop Elements extras? Are you not sure where to store those actions, shapes, styles, plug-ins, presets, and all the other goodies you’ve accumulated? Does creating the necessary .xml files give you headaches?

Then Graffi’s Add-O-Matic is your best friend! It will do all the sorting for you – all you have to do is click and drag your extras into it, click the “Go!” button, and it will sort them and organize them and put them away for you, right where they belong in Photoshop Elements versions 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10 for Windows! Read more »