The Color Replacement Tool is often overlooked by many designers… mostly because it’s a relatively new tool, and partly because it’s somewhat hidden where you wouldn’t expect to find it. It’s not a terribly difficult tool to master, and using it once will show you how often you *could* use it. In Adobe Photoshop CS it is bundled with the Healing Brush tool (another tool many people tend to “forget to use”). In Photoshop CS2, Adobe decided that it needed to be moved next door to the Brush Tool (see image at right). No matter where you happen to find this little bugger, you’re going to love what it can do for you. Lets say you want to change the color of the shirt in a photo to better match your layout. Many folks would spend a lot of time making a mask or clipping path, create a new layer and paint a color over top of the shirt, then adjust the layer transparency settings. Still others would just use Selective Color under the Edit>Adjustments menu and hope that it didn’t alter the image too much. These and other methods work fine, of course, but take much more effort than is necessary. 
To use the Color Replacement tool, choose a color to make the shirt. Then click on the Color Replacement tool icon in the tool bar. Then you’ll need to make some quick adjustments in the Options Bar. First, click the Brush size icon and adjust your brush settings. You’ll want to use a larger brush with a soft edge. Be careful not to make the brush too large though, you want to keep some control. 
Second, make sure you select Contiguous from the Limits pop-up menu and you set the Mode to either Color or Hue. These are the three main adjustments that need to be made. You can also adjust the Tolerance, but try working with the tool a little first. Now comes the fun part. You should now see the round outline of your brush with a little crosshair, just start painting over the area you want to color shift, being careful not to let the crosshair touch any color you DON’T want to shift (if it touches any other color, it will shift that color as well). 
Now that you see how easy it is to use and how well it works, play with the color modes, tolerance settings, etc… I think you’ll find it to be quite a useful tool not only for changing colors completely, but simply color correcting them as well.
Category: Resources
Color management for digital artists
Color calibration is the biggest headache in the business, I personally don’t even calibrate my monitor anymore because I’ve found that the standard settings produce excellent results with the printers I use. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find the results that best suit you and the commercial printers you use. Peachpit Press has a brief but informative article on calibrating your monitor.
Creating your own distortion envelopes in Adobe Illustrator
Envelopes are what Adobe Illustrator calls the shapes you use to distort objects. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go to the Effects>Warp menu when you have an object selected. You can create your own Envelopes and use them on virtually any object in Illustrator other than graphs or guides. Here’s how: Select one or more objects on your page. Now go to the Object>Envelope Distort menu and select a method for distortion from the menu. Once applied, you can continue to the edit the original object, and you can edit, expand or delete the Envelope at any time you desire. The only thing you can’t do is edit an Envelope shape and the object in the Envelope at the same time.
The principals of design
A great article for mental masturbation is available from Digital Web Magazine covering the principals of design.
Sending large files via email
If you’ve ever had to send a large file via e-mail to a printer or publication at the last minute, only to realize that either your ISP, or the ISP of the person receiving the e-mail cannot send files as large as yours, you know how frustrating it can be. You could get your own domain name and post it on your site, but that seems like overkill. You could use FTP, but your run the risk of having to spend an hour on the phone explaining to some underpaid secretary how to use FTP on her 7 year old PC – not to mention you still need a site to upload it to. Enter YouSendIt. YouSendIt is a “remailer” service, and it’s totally free. You go to their site, upload your file to THEIR server and type a custom message. YouSendIt then sends the person you want the file to go to a simple text message with a link to the actual file that they can download via the Web. Since pretty much everyone on the planet is capable of clicking a link, it couldn’t be simpler. The file remains available for download for a short time, so the end user isn’t forced to download it immediately, though you don’t want them to wait too long, because the files are deleted after a set amount of time.
Free TV/Movie fonts at TypeNow
TypeNow offers fonts from your favorite TV shows, movies, music bands, video games, brand products and more. Remember, these font designs are **probably** trademarked, and should only be used for personal projects.
Illustrator Gradient Mesh tutorial
Life In Vector has a great tutorial on using the Gradient Mesh tool in Adobe Illustrator. It’s available on the download page, and is about a 1.3MB PDF file. You can also view some of the fantastic illustrations, like the car above, done completely in Illustrator.
Free stock photography at Absolute Vision
One of the many vital resources any designer makes use of is stock photography sites. We would all love to have the budget for a photoshoot on each job, but the reality is that 90% of the jobs out there have a budget more condusive to Royalty Free photos. The problem is, of course, that stock photos tend to get “old” quickly. You see the same photos being used everywhere. While I’m sure most designers know about Getty, Veer & Corbis, it’s the much smaller and specialized sites that can make or break your work – sites that don’t charge $500 for a single photo. The recent trend is going to the subscription model where you pay a flat fee per year for all the photos you want. One such site is AbsoluteVision which offers photos in the JPEG2000 format – which includes an alpha channel for “cutout” images, and custom drop/cast shadows for a realistic cutout photo. Did I also mention that AbsoluteVision offers a free photo download every week. You don’t even need to be a paying subscriber, just register and you’re off to build your own image library! My only “catch” is a warning to not go crazy with the royalty free photo use. Spend some time searching for just the right photo, with so many photo sites out there, I know you will eventually find it. Rushing through and picking a photo from the old PhotoDisc archives on Getty is a sure way to get people to laugh or ignore your 1970’s era photo in an add proclaiming how up-to-date your bank’s new secure deposit service is!