One of our readers posed a question to me yesterday and I thought that I would share the answer with all of you. The reader had been scanning scrapbook pages and wanted to know how they could separate the scanned pages into individual pictures. There are hundreds of ways to do this, however, I would like to show you how I would accomplish something like it. Plus, I have a free program suggestion, which makes this tutorial that much better!

The first thing we need to do is download a free program called Paint.Net. This is a pretty nifty program. Here is a little blurb from their website to give you a little background on the program.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design  project  mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the  Microsoft Paint  software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool.

Once you have the program downloaded and installed on your computer, open up an image. In this tutorial, I am going to copy a piece of a picture and paste it into a new picture. Let’s say, for example, I want to cut my picture out below and make a thumbnail of my head.

If you look on the left side of the screen, there is a floating toolbar. Here, you will find lots of really cool tools you can use to edit your picture. Let’s find the “rectangle select” tool. You can see it highlighted in the image below.

Click the “rectangle Select” tool. Click and drag over the area of the picture that you would like to cut out. In the image below, you can see where I highlighted the area around my face.

In this tutorial, I don’t want to crop this picture because that would affect the original image, which I want to keep as-is. What I want to do is create a new image from the selected area above. To do this, I need to copy the selected area. Click the edit menu, as pictured below, and select copy from the menu.

Now, here is the really cool part. Let’s click the “New”  button in the upper left corner of the screen. Paint.Net actually recognizes the size of the image that you copied onto the clipboard. Notice in the picture below, there is a dialog box that pops up with image size already filled in.

Once you click OK, there will be a blank picture perfectly sized for the image that is on the clipboard. Now, all you have to do is go to edit and click paste, as pictured below.

There you have it! The selected area from the original picture is now a separate picture. I will point out that if you look in the top right corner of the screen, there are thumbnail images that show you all the images you have open. See the image below for an example.

Paint.Net is one of the easiest image editors I have ever used. I hope to do more tutorials soon. It has a lot of the functionality of Photoshop, but it also is intuitive for people used to using Microsoft products. Since it’s free, you can’t beat the price.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions. It’s always nice to hear from our readers. Please take a moment to share us with your friends as well.

In web designing, it is very much necessary for designers to be creative and use different techniques to attract a viewer, and we have seen most websites using animated GIF images to drive attention. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at the Photoshop animation feature which can be used to create animated GIF image.

Note: In this tutorial, I am using Photoshop CS 5

Final Preview

Here’s a final preview of what you will be creating -

Step One:

Draw the outline (circumference) of a circle, like the one shown below.

Step Two:

Using the Polygon Lasso tool, slice a part of the circle. In other words, create an arc. You should obtain the following shape:

Once done, delete the rest of the circle. We don’t need it anymore.

Step 3:

Create three additional copies of the arc (i.e., by duplicating it) by pressing Ctrl + J. Arrange the four arcs in such a way, that it appears like a (broken) circle. Go to Edit > Transform > Rotate 180/90 CW/90 CCW

Step 4:

The steps from here are quite tricky and confusing. Hence, the rest of this tutorial is shown in the video below:

I hope you have followed the tutorial carefully and  accomplished  the end result. After you saved the file, make sure you open it in the browser to view it.

High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) is a photography technique that is achieved by shooting two or more standard photographs, taken at different exposure levels, and then merging them together into an HDR image. The merging of these photos can be done with the help of photo editing tools such as Photoshop and Photomatix.

HDR can create extremely beautiful pictures that highlight the viewer’s perspectives, which can make the picture, look more realistic.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create or transform your pictures into HDR by tuning them with the help of Adobe Photoshop. Unlike the actual HDR technique, this Photoshop trick will require only a single JPEG image. You don’t have to shoot into RAW images or take multiple photos.

Note: In this tutorial, I’m using Photoshop CS5 (CS4 compatible), so there might be a few changes with regard to menu options if you are working with CS3 or lesser.

You may also be interested in the following  related posts:

• Understanding Long Exposure Photography and the Technique Involved
• [Tutorial] Long Exposure Photography: Writing Your Name
• Speeding Up Things with Time-lapse Photography
• How It’s Made Camera Lenses [Video]
• Stunning and Inspiring Macro Photography

End Result

Step 1

Open the image that you want to convert to HDR

Step 2

Go to Image -> Adjustments and click on Shadow/Highlights. Set the Shadow and Highlights to 45-50%

Step 3

Now, duplicate the layer by pressing Ctrl + J on PC. Desaturate the duplicated layer by pressing Shit + Ctrl + U (Or Image -> Adjustments and click on Desaturate). After that, change the layer blending to Hard Light

Step 4

You’re almost there. Now to make the picture look more realistic, let’s add extra colors to it. Duplicate the base (original) layer again, and move it on top of the other layers as shown below.

Next, go to Filter -> Blur and select Gaussian Blur, and set the Radius to around 35 pixels. Now, change the layer blending to Soft Light.

Step 5

You’re done. If you’re not satisfied with the effect, then you can redo the above steps to give your image a strong effect.

P.S. The image used in  demonstrating  this  tutorial  was shot by me sometime back. I request you to link back to my Flickr page or this tutorial if in case you are using it elsewhere.

GIMP does not behave like Adobe Photoshop but we can sure make it look like Photoshop! That will help Adobe Photoshop users switch between GIMP and Photoshop easily and provide for an easier user-interface.

The default GIMP layout is loathed by many given how misplaced the different windows appear. The utility panels will be unified from GIMP 2.8 but until then, we will have separate windows for each panel.

However, this YouTube video shows a cool tweak to make your GIMP appear like Photoshop. Enjoy.

On one hand, when the whole Internet is going crazy about the new feature of  ”Content Aware Fill” in the latest Photoshop available with Adobe CS5, Gimp, which has had this feature, is remaining quiet.

The latest feature in Photoshop was demoed by Photoshop product manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes. You can see the  Content Aware Fill preview video on Youtube. Basically, with this new feature, we can remove an object from an image safely. Photoshop will automatically create a background with a suitable fill.

Apart from that Photoshop features many new selection technologies and texture generation algorithms. According to the countdown on the homepage, the release is due 19 days from now.

Resynthesizer in Gimp has had this feature from a long time. Add the Gimp resynthesizer to your Gimp with the command:

sudo apt-get install gimp-resynthesizer

Joey at OMG!Ubuntu has posted images of how well this feature works in Gimp. The object removed here is a tree which is definitely harder to remove than regular shapes.

(Via: OMG!Ubuntu)

Have you ever wondered whether the oh-so-impeccable images that you see in posters and magazines are real? Many of these perfect shots have been retouched, or “airbrushed” using Photoshop before being unveiled for the whole world to see. However, sometimes these manual manipulations go a little too far. This post will be taking you through some of the worst Photoshop disasters in recent times.

Disaster #10: Head or pelvis? Which is smaller? I dare not hope for either.

Disaster #9: Whose arm is it anyway? Julianne Moore may have lost her clothes but she sure has made up for it with a very flexible right arm, not to mention the perfect legs.

Disaster #8: Talk about entwined legs!

Disaster #7: What happened to all the water?

Disaster #6: Who said that working out was the only way you could get a six-pack?

Disaster #5: Looks like it was a bad hair day.

Disaster #4: Warning! Do not splash into unknown waters. You may have your face transplanted.

Disaster #3: Talk about generating crowds!

Disaster #2: Oh, you have to crane your neck to spot this one!

Disaster #1: And finally, at the top (or in this case, bottom) of the list we have: Two sunsets for the price of one! Can there be a better holiday package?

These were only a few of them. Know of more Photoshop disasters? Let us know!

[pictures from Photoshop Disasters]

The hugely popular Photoshop.com app for iPhone is now be available Worldwide in the iTunes app store. The nifty iPhone/iTouch app has been downloaded over 3 million times since it’s launch (our coverage of 1 million downloads) in US and Canada. With the worldwide release we expect it to notch up a few millions more in near short time.

For more information on the App, visit the Photoshop mobile page. You can download the app by searching for Photoshopin the App Store.

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone Available Worldwide [Adobe Blogs]

Adobe has released a Photoshop.com app for Android devices. It is similar to the Photoshop.com app for iPhone and allows Android users to perform basic editing of images. In addition to that, you can also upload all the photos to your Photoshop.com account.

Download Photoshop App for Android

When you click a photo in this digital age, a lot of information gets saved, it’s not only the light that you have captured. Almost all digital cameras these days save extra information with your pictures. This extra information gives details about the type of camera used, exposure provided, focal length, white balance, shutter speed, aperture and several other tidbits about the picture taken. This information is called EXIF data which stands for Exchangeable Image File Format.

The EXIF data also contains the RAW conversion settings, stored when a photographers digitally process their pictures. These RAW conversion settings can contain details such as brightness, contrast, vignettes, white balance, temperature and several other options that can totally transform the images. So, if you copy this data from one picture to another, you can actually, in some way, give the second picture a similar look’ like the first one.

Using this idea, photographer and web developer Joe Smalley created an easy to use tool that will allow you to give a particular look’ to a picture, sourcing the EXIF data from a Flickr photograph. This is how he explains the process:

After quickly getting tired of copying settings across manually, I developed a tool which will output a Lightroom or Photoshop preset file based on the metadata found for that Flickr photo. Simply enter the full URL of the photo into the tool below and you’re away!

It is limited to photos which have metadata publicly available. Also custom point tone curve information isn’t converted- as the Flickr metadata page unfortunately doesn’t show all it.

The tool can be used to create dramatic transformations of pictures. If the look of the downloaded preset doesn’t suit the picture well, you can always tweak each individual setting manually.

Note: If the preset downloads as plain text or in a txt file, simply change its extension/save it as .LRtemplate (for Lightroom) or .ACR (for photoshop)

Convert Flickr Metadata to Lightroom/Photoshop presets

It has hardly been 10 days since Adobe released the Photoshop.com app for iPhone, and the app has already clocked over 1 million downloads.

Not just that, it has also reached the #1 position in the free apps section of the App store. And to add to that, this app is not even available in global markets yet, and can only be downloaded in US and Canada.

Have you downloaded the Photoshop.com App? What has your experience been with it? Do let us know through your comments.