Getting Intimate with Corel Painter IXWritten by Ariel Velasco
If you are artistically inclined and would like to create breathtaking digital artworks, then new Corel Painter IX is a must-have software for you. This new version of Painter series offers increased speed, stability, and performance and several new creative tools all suited for digital artist in you.Speed has always been a factor in selecting a graphic program and with that fact in mind, Corel Painter IX has been endowed with brushes that can go up to ten times faster than version VIII. This is an important feature that all designers are sure to be grateful of. A new Rotate/Flip command for canvas has been added with customizable shortcut keys function that is sure to help speed up your work. An enhancement to brush tracker feature is present called "Iterative save.” This is comparable to Adobe Photoshop’s layer comp feature. Users can now use a "snap to path" painting tool that can really add some speed to drawing while using shapes, and paths. There is new category of natural media brushes, called Artists' Oils, which act more like traditional oil paints enabling digital artist create artworks in manner that natural painters make theirs. With textured surfaces, brushes, and tools, you can mimic painting and drawing with chalk, pastels, watercolors, oils, crayons, pencil, felt pens, ink, and more.
| | How to Work with Light and Dark Edges in PhotoshopWritten by Lala C. Ballatan
Want your images to have effects that’ll make it stand out more and show up well on every background tones? With Photoshop, you could achieve these effects for your images by its features that work on light and dark edges. These allow you to work on bringing out best edges of your image – lighten or darken it, anyway you please to match on background tones and make it stand out more. Through highlighting edges of your photo, you also highlight its details. The method of unsharp mask and others like difference of Gaussians increase change in brightness close to each step. This technique’s standard version adds a bright halo along bright edge of step and a dark halo along dark edge. Depending on what effect you’d like for your image, there are advantages in just using one or other. Using both may not do very much to improve your image, though. There are several advantages of using any of effects for edges on real images. One is that it reduces interference between steps or detail and haloes from other, nearby steps. Another thing, light or dark haloes make other features of image stand out better from background. Start doing this effect on your images using Photoshop by following several procedures: 1st step is duplicate layer holding image 2nd step - apply conventional unsharp mask 3rd step - set layer blending mode to “Darken” or “Lighten”. However, you must understand that this only works for 8 bit per channel images – those that can be put into layers but it could function also on 16 bit per channel pictures with Optipix plug-in that allows direct selection of dark or light edges.
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