Tutorial – Create A Vintage Looking Image With iPhoto For iPad
This tutorial will focus on taking a colour image and editing it, to create a retro looking black and white photo with a vignette.
Step 1) Load iPhoto on your iPad and choose a photo from the left-hand side scroll menu to edit – To select a photo, just tap on it.
Step 2) Once you have a photo to work with, tap the edit button which you will find at the top right of the screen.
Step 3) Once you have tapped on edit, a bar will appear at the bottom-left of the screen – Choose the last option on the right-hand side of the bar – This is the Effects button
Step 4) After you select Effects, a pop-up swatch book will appear, choose the Black & White option from this menu.
Step 5) With Black & White selected, a bar at the bottom of the screen will appear which represents different tones – Sliding your finger along the bar will adjust the lightness of your newly created monochrome image – Play with it, sliding backwards and forwards, until you are happy with the result.
Step 6) At the side of the bar which adjusts the Black & White effect, there are 3 more buttons – The first one will add a vignette to your photo – Vignettes are great if you want to draw attention to a specific part of an image.
Step 7) Select Vignette by tapping on it’s button – Now place 2 fingers on your image and use a pinching gesture to move the frame around, until you reach a desired look.
Step 8) If you are happy with your new image, tap on the share button to either send it to Twitter or Facebook, email it to a friend or simply save it to your Camera Roll.
There you have it, you have learned how to create a vintage looking image in just a few minutes.
Mac OS X Tip – Enable iTunes Track Notifications In The Dock
If your Mac is running Lion, there is a hidden feature that when enabled, will give you iTunes ‘Now Playing’ notifications in the dock.
With this notification, when a new song starts, a pop-up will appear in the dock, letting you know the artist and song title – After a few seconds it slowly fades away.
To enable this nice feature, you will need to open Terminal, which is located in Applications/Utilities (you can also search for Terminal in Spotlight and just select it from the drop-down).
Once you are in Terminal, paste in the following command: defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool YES and hit return.
Now you will need to restart the Dock for the notifications to work – To do this, paste the command: killall Dock in Terminal and tap return.
If at any point you want to disable the feature, follow the above steps, but replace YES with NO.
Tutorial – How To Record The Screen On Your Mac
Have you ever seen a video on YouTube showing a screen recording on a Mac and wondered how it’s done? Well wonder no more, as in this quick tutorial, we will learn how to record the screen on our Mac using QuickTime Player.
To use the screen recorder function explained in this tutorial, your Mac will need to be running OS X 10.6 or later.
Step 1) Go to your Applications folder and launch QuickTime Player – Alternatively you can select it using the Spotlight search function.
Step 2) Once loaded, click on File at the top of your screen – From the drop-down menu that appears, select New Screen Recording.
You will see the following Screen Recording pop-up in the left-hand corner of your screen.
Step 3) Click on the down arrow to the right of the Screen Recording pop-up – Once done, you will see these various options to choose from.
Step 4) If you want sound in your screen recording, choose to use the Built-in Input (Internal Microphone) – At the bottom of the menu, you will also have the opportunity to choose where on your Mac you want the screen recording saved to.
Step 5) Click on the centre red button to start recording your screen.
Step 6) Once you have finished recording, click once again on the centre red button to stop the recording.
Step 7) Your finished screen recording will open in QuickTime Player, where you can choose to watch it through and then use the share button to send your work to sites such as Facebook and YouTube.
Tutorial – Create A Facebook Timeline Cover With Instagram Photos
iPad Photoshop Touch Tutorial #4 – Painting With Effects
iPad Photoshop Touch Tutorial #3 – Creating A Pencil Sketch From An Image
In this latest Photoshop Touch for iPad tutorial, we will take an image and turn it into a cool pencil sketch – This effect will look particularly good on photos of landscapes, flowers and portraits.
Let’s get started:
iPad Photoshop Touch Tutorial #2 – How To Take An Image From A Photo And Blend It Into Another
In the 2nd of our Photoshop Touch for iPad tutorials, we will learn how to add an image from one photo and blend it into another. This is quite easy to do, it’s a lot of fun and comes in very handy – For example you might want to add a logo from one image onto an other, insert a relative into a family photo, or add a person onto a blank landscape. Let’s get to work.
Step 1) From the main menu, choose to Begin A Project and choose an image from one of the sources – For this tutorial we have chosen an image we would like to add a moon to.
Step 2) Once you have decided on the image you want to work with – Tap on the + button in the bottom right-hand corner and choose to add a Photo Layer. As you can see from the images, we have selected a photo of a moon in this new Photo Layer.
Step 3) Once you have your new image on top of your original photo, you can position it wherever you wish to. In our image we have placed the moon in the top right-hand corner.
Step 4) As you can see from the photos, the colours surrounding the moon, make it obvious that it has been added from another photo – To correct this, we need to use a Blending Mode. From the bottom right hand corner of the interface, tap on the icon that looks like 2 sheets of paper, it is next to the + icon. Now tap on Blend Mode and from the drop-down options that appear, choose Screen – This will take out the unwanted black colour from the 2nd image (in this case the moon) so that it blends in with the original image.
So there you have it, a quick and easy way to import an image from one photo and blend it into another. Give it a try!
OS X Tip – Customise Fields In Mail
If you are anything like me, when you compose an email using Mail on your Mac, the only fields you will regularly use are those for the address and subject.
I for one, hardly ever use the Cc and Bcc fields and have chosen to disable them. With Apple mail you can change which fields appear by clicking on Customize, which is located in the bottom left of the toolbar when you are in compose mail mode.
From the Customize menu that appears, you can enable or disable fields, add a drop down menu for choosing which of your accounts to send from, add a menu for signature options and one for priority mail.
Mac iPhoto Tutorial – How To Create A New Library
iPhoto is my favourite Mac app as I love taking and then editing photos – iPhoto does a great job of keeping all my photos organised, but the app does start to suffer if you have a large number of photos in your library. There are numerous symptoms that warn your library is getting just too big to work effectively – It may take a long time to open-up, scrolling through photos may become jerky and the app itself may regularly crash.
Don’t worry, there is a fix to the problems outlined above and it’s as simple as creating a new iPhoto library. There is no restriction on the number of iPhoto libraries you can have, so for instance, you could create new libraries for specific events. Making multiple libraries will help the app run smoother and take some of the pressure off your main iPhoto library.
So how do we create a new library?
Step 1) Make sure iPhoto is not running – You will not be able to create a new library if it is.
Step 2) Hold down the Alt key on your keyboard and double click on the iPhoto icon either in the Applications folder or from the dock. Keep the Alt key pressed down and a new screen will appear.
Step 3) A pop-up will appear showing your current library and giving you the option to create a new one. Click on the Create New button.
Step 4) You will now get the option to give your new library a name and be asked where you want to place it – The Pictures folder will be a good option.
That’s it, you have created a new iPhoto library!
To load the new library from now on, you will need to repeat steps two and three and choose your newly created library from the list. As a rule, iPhoto will always open the last library you were working in.
Having smaller libraries will make your iPhoto experience snappier and your photos easier to navigate.
iPad Photoshop Touch Tutorial – How To Add A Gradient And Text To An Image
Photoshop Touch is one of the most powerful photo-manipulation tools available for the iPad – Such is the wealth of features it offers, first-time users may find the user interface quite daunting and struggle to get to grips with how the app works.
Sure the app itself features tutorials, but some of these can be hard to follow, so being the friendly bunch we are, we wanted to simplify the learning curve and bring to you a series of quick and easy to learn tutorials.
In this 1st tutorial, we will learn how to add a Gradient with Text to an image.
Step 1)
From the app’s home page, tap-on Begin a Project.
Step 2)
Choose an image you want to work with.
Step 3)
Once you have an image selected, – Tap on the + icon on the right-hand side of the screen – A pop-up box will appear, tap-on Empty Layer.
Step 4)
On the left-hand side of the user interface, choose the Marque tool – Click on add and choose a section of the image where you wish to add a gradient – In this tutorial we have drawn a rectangular shape with the Marque tool at the bottom of the image.
Step 5) At the top of the screen now tap-on the & icon – From the pop-up that appears, choose Add Gradient. For this tutorial we decided on the blue and gold gradient.
Step 6) The gradient we decided on, is slightly harsh, so we need to change the opacity of it – We do this by clicking on the icon on the right-hand side of the screen which looks like 2 pieces of paper (next to the + icon) Once you have altered the opacity, it’s time to add text.
Step 7) Tap-on the & icon again at the top of the screen and select Add Text – From the text box that appears, you have full control of how your text looks, with different fonts and colours available. Once you have your text, drag-it down to the area where we added the Gradient.
Step 8) Now at the top of the screen, select the back arrow and tap on Save Project.
There you have it, you now know how to add a Gradient and Text to one of your images in Photoshop Touch.
