Welcome to another posting of Quick Tip Mondays! This week I will talk about creating Depth of Field in your work. One of the definitions for Depth of Field is “the distance between the nearest and the furthest objects that give an image judged to be in focus in a camera.” What you would want to do in Photoshop is go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur, from there you are able to select the radius of your blur. There isn’t a perfect number, you’ll have to move the bar until you get something you like. Once you have found it, you can delete parts of that layer so certain parts of your image is in focus. Give it a shot and if you need some more help, feel free to drop a comment!

Gaussian Blur in the menu

Selecting the radius

Erasing bits and pieces

Welcome to another posting of Quick Tip Mondays! This week I will be going over the “Refine Edge” tool. Not many people know about this feature, but it will change their entire workflow once they do! According to the Adobe website, “The Refine Edge option improves the quality of selection edges, letting you extract objects with ease. You can also use Refine Edge options to refine a layer mask.” I use this feature quite often as most of my pieces contain stocks that need to be extracted. Combine this feature with different methods for extracting such as pen tool, color range, magic wand, etc. You can create precise selections. I hope this tip is useful to you, please leave a link to your work if you used this feature!

Using refine edge to create a precise selection of the flower.

Most designers will eventually have to extract an image from some sort of background. Many of them who are inexperienced will do this step incorrectly and this will harm their work immensely. Having a solid extracted image will increase believability in their work. In Photoshop, there are many ways to do one thing. I have stumbled across a method that not many know of and that is using Color Range and it can be found under the “Select” tab at the top. What this method does is select a shade of color and select anything with the same hue, this makes extracting images on solid backgrounds a lot easier. How it works is after selecting “color range” you will be given an “eyedropper” tool to select the color and from there you adjust the “fuzziness” level to create the selection. To get an even more accurate selection you can combine this method with “refine edge” which I will explain in detail later on.

Using the “color range” method to extract the flower from the background.

Hey guys,

As you may know, you can never stop learning. A lot of designers look at many different things for inspiration, sometimes you get that creative block and need to see other people’s work. A website / blog I like to check out is called From Up North, it has categorized artworks from all over the web. It’s a great resource to check out!

Tutorials can be a useful tool that most people will use in order to learn new tips and tricks. But a lot of mistakes that people will make is following them exactly as written. By doing this, they don’t get to experiment. Tutorials are great, but if you take what you learn and apply them to new projects or combine them with other tricks, the results can be very rewarding! I hope to write about the tricks and techniques I use so you can see how I design.

Welcome to The NMDL Blog Network. I am a student of the New Media Drivers License at Michigan State University. I will be blogging here soon, please check back.