Photoshop Ninja » Techniques – Other

Automation and scripting in Photoshop

Photoshop Ninja — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:25:20 +0000

Photoshop actions are a very powerful feature of Photoshop that are used in production situations throughout the world. If you have never used them before – they are basically a list of comands that you can record (and change after) and play back again.

A simple example is resizing an image to certain dimensions and applying a filter then saving it in a certain folder – imagine if you had to do this on 500 images? Well, with Photohop actions you can record once – go to File>Automate>Batch and set-up as required. You click ok, go make a cup of coffee and get yourself a slice of cake, come back and continue working on that InDesign or Illustrator arrtwork whilst Photoshop happily churns through your images in the background as fast as it can!

However, you can if needs be go even further than that with AppleScript, JavaScript or VBScript. This really is the realms of advanced automation and is way beyond the scope of this post to explain! Photoshop Ninja is about pushing pixels, not lines of code, but if you really want to take automation to the next nevel you can get the documentation below:

Adobe Photoshop CS4 scripting documentation

Adobe Photoshop CS3 scripting documentation

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Creating a Photoshop custom shape

Photoshop Ninja — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:11:04 +0000

Custom shapes are a very powerful feature in Photoshop, which brings true vector path artwork to Photoshop.

Custom shapes are actually made up of vector paths and points, meaning that they are not made of pixels. They can be scaled and distorted without any loss in quality.

You may have used the built-in custom shapes already, but the real power is the ability to create your own custom shapes and sets of custom shapes.

It’s really easy to create your own custom shapes-you either:

- Create a vector shape with the pen tool, highlight the path and select edit>create custom shape preset.

- Create your vector path shape in Illustrator, then copy and paste the path into Photoshop (when given the option choose ‘paste as path’ or ‘paste as custom shape’, then repeat the step above… easy huh!

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Getting vector versions of logos

Photoshop Ninja — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:01:06 +0000

To ensure you get the highest quality output possible you should always ensure you get vector versions of logos – not bitmap images – here’s a few tricks old and new to help you out!

Many of us have spent a-lot of time painstakingly recreating logos in vector artwork (usually in Illustrator), often due to the client not having access to proper logo artwork (but they have this great 10k JPEG that got off the website – that’s ok for you right?!). Sorry client – I hate to tell you this but that 150 pixel wide, highly compressed image is NOT going to look too pretty when printed, especially on that 20ft banner you just briefed me on!

Firstly, there are some great vector logo resources on the Internet – but they can be a little hit and miss and generally seem to contain larger global brands – but they are a good place to start to try and find vector logo artwork:

Brands Of The World

Web Chantier Logo Portal

No luck here – not to worry… I’ve got a couple more tricks up my sleeve yet to save that 2 hour logo redraw!

The next step is an obvious one, but maybe not so obvious to some! Open up Google and start searching for things like ‘ vector logo’ or ‘ EPS’ – sometimes companies will provide hidden away areas of their sites that hold logo resources. If you can’t get access, try using the Google cached version – you may get in the back door that way!

Still no luck – ok we need to get a bit more clever then! This is a little trick I discovered years ago when Illustrator started getting friendly with the PDF file format.Open up Google and start searching for things like ‘ PDF’, ‘ Company Report’, ‘’ job application, ‘ press release’ – you can start to get the idea right? Often, design agencies are engadged to produce things like company reports and they will almost always use the vector version of the logo. Download the PDF, flick through the pages and see if you can locate the logo you want in the document. This can take a-little time, but it’s worth it in the long-run, especially with complex logos.

Once you have located a PDF with your logo in, zoom right in – 500% or more… does the logo still have clean lines or is it going pixelated? If it’s going pixelated that means it’s a bitmap version of the logo and is no good… onto the next PDF! Once you have located a PDF with a VECTOR version of you logo in, remember the page it is on in the PDF and then simply open the PDF in Adobe Illustrator. You will be given a choice of which page you wish to open – put in the page with the logo on.

Then simply seperate out the vector artwork for the logo from the rest of the document (outlines view is VERY usefull for this!) – I find it best to copy it into a new document to ensure you are not carring any strange spot colours and layers into future artwork. Check over the colours and save it down as an EPS or Illustrator document – there wasn’t that easier than redrawing it!!

If you can only find your logo in a Flash movie – don’t panic! Locate the Flash movie in the source code of the web page (view source) and directly copy the link and paste it into your browser. Now save this file and open it in Flash – it is probably vector, which means you can copy and paste it straight into Illustrator! If you are getting stuck with the Flash thing, one other technique is to print the Flash movie as a PDF and then open that in Illustrator… where there is a will, there is a way!

This is not really stealing – if you are producing a legitimate piece of design work that features a company logo I’m sure they would want to ensure that it is produced at the very highest quality. This technique SHOULD NOT be used to produce any sort of counterfit goods or to steal logo’s you don’t have the rights to use.

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Keeping your images sharp when resizing down large images

Photoshop Ninja — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:39:13 +0000

An often missing element of creating top quality images in Photoshop is sharpening. This is even more important when you are resizing very large images down to much smaller versions, in particular in the range of less than 25% original size. You will certainly find yourself in this situation if you are resizing images for the Internet from high resolution print quality images.

If I am having to resize images this much, I will tend to do it in two or three stages. Resizing straight down to the small size will result in a loss of sharpness that is difficult to get back. So I would resize to around 50% of the final desired size and run the image through the Unsharp Mask filter at quite low levels – around 50% amount, 0.5 pixels, 0 threshold, usually applying this filter twice. I will then resize down to the final size, and run it through Unsharp Mask again.

Sure, when you resize the image you can use the ’sharpen’ option, but I prefer to have more control over my sharpening… and you should too! Just be careful not to apply too much Unsharp Mask as you can get unsightly halo’s appearing around areas of high contrast in your image. The best way is to use the ‘Lab Convert’ technique as outlined in this tip.

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Take control of the Photoshop polygon lasso tool today!

Photoshop Ninja — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:15:15 +0000

I don’t really use the polygon lasso tool very often, preferring to use paths to make selections from because they are more precise. However, it does have it’s uses – so check out this tip to take complete control over this Photoshop tool!

The polygon lasso tool has it’s uses, but it is sometimes quite awkward to simply draw uniform angled lines with.

Simply hold down shift to make a perfectly straight line as you draw – and if you move the mouse up or down from the original drawing position whilst holding down shift, it will draw in 30 degree increments – sometimes very useful!

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