easy blinking animation.

Today I'm going to show you how to animate images to make it look like your character is blinking, as seen in the following:
Animations are basically a bunch of still images looped together so it looks like something is moving. A nifty feature in Photoshop allows us to make animations.

Click on the image to see it in full-size. Remember this if you're squinting to read tiny text.

First of all I'm gonna open the image I want to animate in Photoshop.

I'll be using this image of Bill. Because of his thick black eyeliner it'll just make everything all the more easier to do.


Go to the layers palette, right click on your background layer and choose "Duplicate layer."


None of these settings really matter but I'll show you this box anyway so you know that you're doing it right. Click "OK."


Now you have an extra layer on top of your background layer that looks exactly like your background layer.

Select the brush tool. Go over by the top where it shows a preview of your brush and click the little arrow next to it. Now you can edit your brush.

You might have to use the eyedropper tool to get the right color, but here we can just use black. Make sure to pick a smaller brush so it'll be easier to color in the eyes. I used 15px.

Using the brush, paint over the eye area, but only do so half-way. Make sure you have your duplicate background layer selected.

Now Bill looks like he's on some pretty heavy drugs. Which is good, because it's exactly what we want!


Now repeat the previous steps, right clicking on your "background copy" layer and duplicating that, so you have a duplicate of your duplicate background layer duplicated.


Now fill in the rest of the eyes so they appear closed. Make sure you do this with utmost caution or else your computer just might implode. UTMOST. CAUTION.

Once you're finished with that, click on the "Window" button located in the top menu of the screen. Select "Animation." A little box will pop up that looks sort of like this:

Click on the little icon thingy with the arrow and two little lines in the right corner of the window. See, I circled it for you. You're welcome.


Select "Make frames from layers." Poof! Now all the layers you just made have turned into animation frames. Just like Disney World.


If you click the "play" button, it just looks sort of like Bill has a weird twitching problem. Let's fix that by making the animation look smoother. Select the second frame, which is the one where his eyes are half-closed. Drag the frame into the "Duplicate selected frames" button. It looks like a piece of paper with the corner folded up.


Take the layer that you just duplicated and drag it to the end of the animation.

Now if you play the animation, it looks like Bill has dry eye issues because he is blinking way too much! Now we have to fix that. Select the first frame.

Underneath the frame there are little words that say "# sec." This indicates the duration of the frame. If you click on the tiny arrow next to it, you can change how long the animation stays on that certain frame. Research indicates that humans blink once every five seconds. Screw that, we're just going to set it to "2."

Now go to the menu at the top again, and click "File > Save for Web & Devices" or just press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S on your keyboard.

ARGH! All these complicated things! What do they all mean? Yeah, it doesn't matter. Just pick "save" and save the image to your hard drive. Make sure you save it in a .gif format.

After uploading the image, this is our final result:

Animations tend to take more time to load, so use sparingly. However, you can use this effect to make some really cool icons and signatures. Hope this helps you!

cut the crap: the easy way.

Welcome to the first edition of Cut the Crap or Cutting shit out or whatever I decide to call it at the time.
We're going to start out with the easy stuff and go from there. So today we are going to use the magical magic wand tool to cut our favorite band members out of their original backgrounds so we can put them in my basement a whorehouse whatever backgrounds we decide to use!

This tutorial is aimed at beginners, as in the
"I have never touched this program in my life wtf does this button do etc etc" kind of people. If you already know what brushes are and want to just skip all the fluff about how to right-click on something and want to just know how to cut shit out from a background, click here to get to the good stuff.

Also, a warning: this tutorial contains tons of sarcasm and should not be taken too seriously.

Click on the image to see it in full-size. Remember this when you're squinting to read the tiny text.

So first we're going to look for an image online. I found this wonderfully dirty picture of Tom at Freheit images. When I clicked on it, it let me full view the picture, which makes my job a lot easier.


After right clicking on the image you want to use and clicking "copy," open Photoshop and go to File -> New.

The neat thing about Photoshop is that if you copy an image and then create a new image, it will have the dimensions of the image that you copied already plugged in. Isn't that totally rad?
So when you click "okay" you will get a blank image. Like this:

I know, it's already pretty exciting, isn't it?


Press CTRL+V or go to Edit -> Paste. Suddenly a really sexy German boy in need of a hot shower and some lovin' appears out of nowhere! See? Proof that Photoshop performs miracles on a daily basis.


Before we start our super-easy cutting out method, we're going to get rid of this watermark that I just happened to notice here.

First let's hide the background layer, because it's white as default and so is our background, and we need to be able to see what we're erasing. Go to the layers palette and find the background layer (here's a hint: it should be called "background") and click the little box on the left side with the picture of the eye in it. That little button toggles the layer's visibility. Once you click on it, you make it disappear!


Select the eraser tool. It doesn't matter what settings there are, really, but here's mine:

You'll want a big brush, so change the number under "Master Diameter" in order to increase or decrease the size. You can type in your own number in the textbox, or you can click on the little pointer doohickey and drag it left or right.

Now click on that pesky watermark and drag your cursor around to erase it. You'll notice that this weird gray checkered pattern appears, like this:

That only means that your background is now transparent, which is exactly what we want. If you happen to save an image while the background is transparent, it will appear see-through.

Now we're actually going to remove the background! Click on the Magic Wand tool. (If you can't see the magic wand tool, right click on the quick selection tool.) Click on your background and the entire thing will be outlined in a blinking dotted line. This means that whole area within the outline is selected.


Go to Edit -> Cut or press the DELETE key.


Where all your white background used to be is now all grey checkered, so everything is transparent except for Tom.

Press CTRL+D or go to Select -> Deselect. Now your selection is no more!


Wait a second, here. Do I spy a spot that's not gray-and-white checkered? That's okay, all you have to do is select the magic wand tool and click on that little spot, then repeat what you just did three seconds ago.


There. Now Tom is all by himself, and no longer has that white background to keep him company. But he feels a little lonely, I think. Let's put him in a background of our choice!

I found this really awesome and free-to-use grass picture from here. After I right clicked on it and copied it, I selected the original background layer and pressed CTRL+V to paste it as my new background. It pasted as it's very own layer.

It was slightly too big and disproportionate, so I resized it by going to Edit -> Transform -> Scale. But something was still "off" about it.


The lush green grass looked just a bit too bright for my very unsaturated Tomi. By going to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue and Saturation, and lowering the saturation level, I got it to match a little better.


And here's our finished project! I hope this tutorial has helped you, if you have any problems or questions feel free to leave a comment. I'd also love to see your own creations if you'd like to share those as well. :)

basics chapter one: learning the tools.

This is a tutorial for those who have never used Photoshop before and are just beginning.
When you first open up Photoshop, it should look a little something like this:

What are those weird little pictures in the left hand corner of the screen? That is the tool box! Here is a diagram of important tools that you will find useful during your Photoshopping ventures.


- The Move Tool is used to... well... move things. With the move tool you can move whatever you like anywhere you like within your workspace. To use it just click on what you want to move and drag it to the desired location, otherwise you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move things in pixel by pixel.
- The Selection Tool is used to select geometric shapes on your image. The rectangular selection tool makes square and rectangular selections. However, if you right click on the selection tool you will get a drop-down menu that looks like this:

The elliptical tool makes selections shaped in circles and ovals.
The single row tool selects in rows, and the single column tool selects in columns.
Pretty self explanatory.
But what happens when you want to make a selection that is not in a specific shape? Then you use...
- The Lasso Tool. The lasso tool allows you to make a freehand selection of your choice. Just click and drag, and the lasso tool will make an independent selection based on what you draw. Once you make a selection, that selection becomes unique. Then you can add certain effects, fill in with color, or delete entirely the part of the image you selected. I'll go more in depth another time.
If you right click on the lasso tool, you will see this drop down menu:

The polygonal lasso tool limits your selection to using straight lines, and a polygonal shape.
The magnetic lasso tool is a smart little tool that identifies the different colors and contrasts in your image and makes a selection based on that.
- The Quick Selection Tool makes fast and easy selections quite like the magnetic lasso tool, but less tediously and usually less efficiently. This tool only comes with Photoshop versions CS3 and later. Right click on the quick selection tool and get this menu:

The magic wand tool does the same, but instead this tool selects an entire area instead of smaller, expandable areas.
Click here for a demo of the quick selection tool vs. the magic wand too.
- The Crop Tool lets you crop your images smaller, helping to get trim off pesky corners or parts of an image that you don't want.
- The Eyedropper Tool is used to take colors from an image. When you click on the section of the image you want to take the color from, the color appears in your color palette.
- The Spot Healing Tool helps erase blemishes and imperfections by cloning areas of the image around the blemish and replacing them.
- The Brush Tool acts like a real life paintbrush- you can paint with it, or use preset brush shapes and pictures to create textures and patterns.
- The Clone Stamp Tool lets you duplicate parts of your image.
- The Eraser Tool is entirely self-explanatory: it lets you erase parts of your image.
- The Gradient Tool fills your image with gradients that you can customize with your liking. Right click and get this drop down menu:

The paint bucket tool fills using solid colors instead of gradients.
- The Blur Tool lets you soften specified areas of an image. Right click and get this drop down menu:

The sharpen tool is the exact opposite of the blur tool. Instead of softening the image it sharpens it.
The smudge tool smudges parts of the image.
- The Dodge Tool allows you to lighten areas of the image. Right click on the dodge tool and get this drop down menu:

The Burn tool darkens and saturates parts of an image.
The Sponge tool saturates and desaturates parts of an image.

Don't be afraid to play around with these tools to really see what they can do. If you make a mistake, just go to edit>undo or press Ctrl+Z!