As you may recall if you're a long-time reader (going back to the CreativeGuy blog days in 2005), I posted an article titled Color shifting and replacement in Photoshop covering the easiest way to change the color of objects in your image. It's an excellent and simple overview, which I re-posted here at TGM late last year.

Veerle also covered the tool in this blog post in 2006.

Well here we are in 2008, and video is all the rage these days, so here's the same color replacement tip in a video post over at Sebastian Sulinski's Design site.

This tool is often overlooked by most designers - though professional photographers are most like as attached to it as they are their favorite lens. Play around with it for a while, I think you'll begin to see how powerful the tool can be in no time.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range Imaging seems to be all the rage these days. HDRI is described as:

In image processing and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques.

Digital Photography School has a fantastic Introduction to HDR Imaging, covering the methods used to achieve the effect.

Photo by Wil Hybrid

One of my favorite effects for an image is the tilt-shift effect. It makes an ordinary image appear as though it is a miniature model, as the photo of Times Square in NY above shows.

Tilt-Shift Photography has a great tutorial to show you how to turn your image into a tilt-shift masterpiece, using just the tools built-in to Photoshop. Keep in mind that you want to give the impression of a miniature model. Miniature models are usually viewed from above so try and choose a photo with an elevated viewpoint.

If you've read this site for any amount of time, you know I love Photoshop brushes, especially grunge-style brushes. Today I came across two sets of grunge brushes by Aramisdream, and they're spectacular.

Download set one here.
Download set two here.

Uncompress the downloaded files and move the .abr files to your Photoshop/Presets/Brushes folder. Then load them into your brushes panel in Photoshop to use. They're all large, high-quality brushes and make perfect background textures for various projects.

With all the discussion of new Adobe CS4 betas, the release of Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com, you would think this would be enough. Well guess what, John Nack has posted an article on his blog covering the new Photoshop UI (user interface).

While not a drastic change, especially to Windows users, the move to a "single-window" interface may come to a shock to Mac users. We've been free of this constraint since day one.

Photoshop CS4 will sport an "application frame" – a window which contains both the interface elements such as toolbars, palettes and other clickable interface elements, as well as the document itself. You can click the image below to see a larger version of what I'm talking about.

Current Photoshop CS3 users can begin to get the idea now when they use the Maximized Screen Mode (hit the F key to switch to it), though it's still not the same. I'm not sure if I like the idea or not, but thankfully it appears that Adobe will make this an optional UI method, rather than the only option.

Also mentioned in the article is a very welcome addition, tabbed windows. If you use tabs in your browser rather than having multiple windows open, you'll love it in Photoshop. A split-screen view is also in the works to give you the ability to view more than one image side-by-side.

Abduzeedo has put together a list of 1000+ Free Photoshop Brushes complete with download links in a variety of styles, including grunge, abstract, modern and vector. You can take a look at the preview images and download them here.

There are more than a few ways to sharpen your digital images. With the release of Adobe Photoshop CS3 we were given Smart Sharpen, a new filter that makes sharpening easy. But I'm kind of old school, and I still like to use Unsharp Mask to sharpen my images.

Sharpening an image is essentially taking the part of an image where two colors meet and making the dark areas darker and the light areas lighter. The results are the appearance of a sharper image, and an image with more contrast.

As you can see in the image above, the highlights in the eyes, the details in the shirt collar, and the finer details of the hair are all brought out with just a little Unsharp Mask. However, as you can see by the areas around the ears, it's easy to go a little too far and end up with a halo effect.

When we open the Unsharp Mask filter dialog box, we have the opportunity to adjust how much darker those dark areas get, or how much lighter the light areas get, using the Amount setting. Adjust the Radius to enlarge or reduce the area around that color edge that the filter applies to. Be careful with this one, as you can really get some funkiness if you go too far. Threshold simply determines how much difference in the light and dark areas are necessary before sharpening is applied.

PhotographyJam offers some settings as basic starting points for Unsharp Mask. Take a quick look at them and print them out, they can save you a lot of mucking around later.

Remember that when you're sharpening images for newsprint, it's best to over-sharpen the image just a bit. This will produce crisp, high-contrast results when printing with low-quality newspapers. And don't forget that you can use the Sharpen Tool to sharpen specific areas of your image simply by painting on the areas of the image you want sharpened.

For more info on sharpening images, check out these informative pages:

• Advanced Photoshop Sharpening Techniques
• Pro Sharpening in Photoshop CS3 using Smart Filters
• Sharpening 101
• All Things Photography: Sharpen a Photo
• Unsharp Mask: How do you actually use that thing?
• (Almost) Everything You Wanted to Know about Sharpening in Photoshop but Were Afraid to Ask

Noupe has a list of 53 truly inspirational Photoshop and Illustrator effects that will surely soak-up hours of your time.

While many in the list are tutorials, some are links to other designer's portfolio of work, such as SugarRhyme.

While you're browsing the list, make sure you bookmark Noupe, as it's a great resource for Web developers and designers.

SitePoint is currently offering The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques, a 278 page e-book in unrestricted PDF format, available for download.

The book is filled with real-world Photoshop solutions for your next Web design project. The book is stuffed with full color illustrations for those who like to "see it" rather than "read it."

SitePoint, and the sponsor 99designs, is making the book available for download for the next 23 days only, so hurry over and grab your copy. You will have to provide a valid e-mail address to receive the links to the PDFs. There are two versions available, a low res version at 25.5MB and a high res version at over 60MB.

My good friend Ivan over at CreativeBits has an interesting post for laptop owners who use Adobe Photoshop. Check out Trackpad Gestures in Photoshop for a list of what he's found.

For the most part, I use a mouse. But it's great to know that when I'm on the road with my MacBookPro, these trackpad gestures are available - saving time and probably hand-cramps.

Creating fancy logos, title graphics and stylized type generally requires a lot of work. And depending on whether you use Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, you’re probably going to end up with layer upon layer of gradients, strokes and bevels.

Thankfully, Path Styler Pro 1.5 solves all those problems no matter which program you use, producing high-quality graphics with a noticeable ease of use.

Read my full review of Path Styler Pro at Macworld.com's Creative Notes blog.

Among the numerous resources that can be found over at CreativeBits are a set of image templates for identity design. These "blanks" are perfect for showing off your design ideas to clients.

There are around 200 images in 5 different categories available. The downloads are broken up by category and are anywhere between 7 and 17MB each.

You can download the templates here. The download links for each category are below the photos.

If you're running Photoshop Elements 6, you may have had an issue where none of the effects or layer styles would appear in the Effects palette if you're running under a non-admin account.

For most users, this won't be a problem. But if you work in a corporate environment, you may not have an admin account, in which
this post over at MacOSXHints will fix your problem. Of course, you probably need admin access in order to use this tip...

There are many ways to convert an image from color to black & white in Adobe Photoshop. I've posted tips before about this, but with Photoshop CS3, there's a dead-simple way to do it that produces great results, and offers you the ability to fine-tune your conversion.

Instead of simply selecting Image>Grayscale to convert your image to B&W, select Image>Adjustments>Black&White (Command + Option + Shift + B for you keyboard shortcut junkies).

In the resulting Black and White conversion dialog box, you'll be presented with the opportunity to adjust various colors in the conversion process. If you're familiar with how this works, you can adjust how each color in your image converts to gray. If that's a little more work than you wish to do, you can simply click on the image and move your cursor around to have Photoshop automatically adjust your image based on the sampled color.

As you can see in the image above, the normal Convert to Grayscale method produces a flat and quite dull image. Though this may work for some images, using the Black and White Adjustment allows you to to fine-tune your conversion to give you more contrast and retain more details in the image.

One of the more popular text effects to use in Adobe Photoshop is chrome text. You can search for hours to find the perfect Layer Style to make your job easy, but you may never find it.

Instead, try this Metal Text Tutorial over at PSGallery.co.uk. The tutorial is easy to follow and can produce fantastic results with a little experimentation. From personal experience, I've found that your results will vary widely depending on the font you choose to use. Some areas to play with are the bevel settings and variations. While the tutorial does give you exact settings to use, you will most likely find that they don't produce the desired effect on all fonts. Play around with them to get it to look the way you want.