The Red Eye Tool in Photoshop removes the red eye in the flash photos. Earlier removing red eye was a task of creating adjustment layers, adding blur, modifying the saturation and so on. Removing red eye has been made very simple with the Red Eye tool.

1. Choose the RGB color mode.

2. In the toolbox, hold down the Spot Healing Brush Tool and from the fly out menu, choose Red Eye Tool.

3. Simple click in the red eye. If you are not satisfied with the results, change the following options;

Pupil Size: Increase or decrease the area affected by the Red Eye Tool.

Darken Amount: Increase or decrease the darkness of the correction.

Learn to create Rain Effect in Photoshop CS5, in this tutorial.

1. Launch Photoshop and open the picture over which you want to create the rain effect.

2. Create a new layer using the Layers palette (Window > Layers or F7). Choose the ‘New Layer’ icon (next to the bin icon) at the bottom of the palette.

3. Go to Filter > Render > Clouds. Then reduce the Opacity to 50.

NOTE: You can also convert the layer for Smart Filters (Filter > Convert for Smart Filters) in case you want to revert/modify the filters applied on the layer.

4. Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise. The Amount of noise will decide the intensity of rain. I will go with 75%, but feel free to experiment with the values. Choose ‘Gaussian Distribution’ and ‘Monochromatic’.

5. Next we will add motion by Filter > Blur > Motion Blur… Adjust the angle for the rain drops and distance as shown below or to values of your choice.

6. Lastly set the Blending mode of the layer to ‘Screen’. This is how our picture will look;

Wasn’t that absolutely simple. Create such cool rain effect in your art work and write to me about it.

When I was new to Photoshop, I went through a lot of tutorials to help me create a page curl effect. Back then it was considered a very cool effect and almost every website and graphic had a page curl effect. But most of the tutorials that showed how to achieve this effect were quite lengthy and I used to lose interest in reading the entire article. Why should one use unnecessary steps to create an effect when it can be done using few precise steps. Even though this does not apply to every effect in Photoshop, I found that true for the page curl effect.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a Page Curl effect in 5 easy steps.

Lets get started.

1. Launch Photoshop and open the picture/photograph on which you want to add the page curl effect. I am using the ‘Chrysanthemum’ picture from Windows Picture gallery.

2. Double click on the Background layer in the Layers palette to unlock it and create a new layer. Click OK in the New Layer dialog box, leaving the default settings unchanged.

3. Using the ‘Rectangular Marquee Tool’ draw a selection at one of the corners, where you want to curl the page.

4. Choose the gradient tool from the Toolbox, choose a black to white gradient and drag the gradient in inside-out direction of the selection. See below:

5. Now deselect the selection; Select > Deselect or Ctrl + D. Then go to Edit >Transform > Warp. You should be able to see a grid on the picture. Now drag the corner of the picture as shown below:

Click Enter to exit from Warp. This is what we get;

In one of our previous articles, Create a New Document Preset in Adobe Photoshop CS5, we learnt how to create a document preset and save it for future use. The other day, one of our users asked if he can import document presets onto another system that has Photoshop CS5 installed on it. The answer to the question is yes, it can be done.

All you have to do is locate ‘New Doc Sizes.psp’ under following paths:

For Mac OS X: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS5/Presets

For Windows XP: [Drive]:\Document and Settings\\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Adobe Photoshop CS5 Settings

For Windows Vista: [Drive]:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Adobe Photoshop CS5 Settings

For Windows 7: [Drive]:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Adobe Photoshop CS5 Settings

NOTE: In Windows, the ‘Application Data’ or the ‘AppData’ folders will be hidden. Enable them by choosing ‘Show hidden files and folders’ in the Folder Options or in your control panel (‘Folder options’ in the ‘View’ tab).

Else just go ahead and type in the folder name in the path.

TIP: You should be able to import the ‘Document Presets’ in the earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop as well (though I have not tried all the versions).

You can also import other presets that are found under the ‘Presets’ folder under this path;[Drive]:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\

The ‘Slice Tool’ in Photoshop is used to slice an image into sections. You may require to slice an image into multiple smaller images in various types of web design work. To give you an example, you may need to split up a map to elaborate on different regions to explain its geographical characteristics or slice up an image of human body to explain various organs. In this tutorial, we will learn how to use the Slice tool.

There are two tools; Slice tool and Slice Select Tool. The ‘Slice tool’ creates the slices while the ‘Slice Select Tool’ helps you select and edit existing slices. Both the Slice tools can be found under the Crop tool in the Toolbox.

Follow these steps to create and save slices;

1. Click and hold down the Crop tool in the Toolbox to open the fly out menu. Then choose the Slice tool.

2. Click and drag over the area of the image you wish to make into a slice. Then release the mouse button. Photoshop will automatically create the necessary number of slices with the active slice highlighted.

3. Use the Slice Select tool to move and/or resize the slices. To move a slice, highlight it and then drag it. To resize use the handles.

4. To save different slices, use the ‘Save for Web & Devices…’ option. In the ‘Save for Web & Devices…’ window, highlight the slice you want to save, choose the format and click on the Save button.

Photoshop’s Quick Mask Mode is one of the selection techniques. Unlike other selection tools like Marquees, quick mask mode is a smarter way to make selections. Let us explore how to use it.

1. To activate the Quick Mask Mode, click on icon at the bottom of the Toolbox or press ‘Q’ key.

NOTE: The icon will be used to toggle between the Standard and Quick Mask Mode. Similarly the key ‘Q’ will also help you toggle between both the modes.

2. Select the Brush tool and then start painting the area on the object that you want to select. The selection will be highlighted in semi-transparent red color as you start painting.

3. Since our flower is also red in color, the selection is not visible. So we would change the selection color in the Quick Mask Options. Double click on the Edit in Quick Mask Mode icon in the toolbox to open the ‘Quick Mask Options’ dialog box. (See below)

Click on the red color box under the section ‘Color’. Select an alternate color and click OK. You can also change the opacity if you like. We will see what the other two options do, later in the tutorial.

We changed the color to blue and this is how the selection looks now.

4. Then click on the ‘Edit in Standard Mode’ icon (now the icon acts as ‘Edit in Standard Mode’ icon) to switch back to or key in ‘Q’. The selection will now be visible as shown here:

Quick Mask Options:

Earlier we used the Quick Mask Options dialog box to change the appearance of the selection by changing its color. Let us see what each of these options does;

a. Masked Areas – When chosen, areas not highlighted (painted/marked with red or custom color) will be selected.

b. Selected Areas – When chosen, areas highlighted (painted/marked with red or custom color) will be selected.

c. Color box – Clicking on this box lets you choose a different color than red as the highlight color.

d. Opacity – Enter the value for the opacity of the mask color. Default value is 50% and 100% makes it completely opaque.

The ‘Eyedropper Tool (I)’ samples a color from an image to use this color as a new foreground or background color in your art work. Find the ‘Eyedropper Tool’ in the Toolbox.

To pick a color, place the Eyedropper over the color in the image you want to pick and click once. The color picked by the Eyedropper will appear as the Foreground color. To pick a Background color hold down the ALT key while selecting the color with the Eyedropper tool. Well you can always switch the Foreground and Background colors using the ‘Switch Foreground and Background Colors (X)’ option in the toolbox.

With the Eyedropper tool you can also sample colors from images opened using other applications than Photoshop. With the Eyedropper tool active, click anywhere on an open image in Photoshop and then drag the eyedropper to the image in other application.

You can also change the eyedropper cursor into a target to get an exact pixel of a picture.

Rotate Images

1. Image > Image Rotation.

NOTE: In earlier versions of Photoshop, you may find the command under Image > Rotate Canvas.

Rotation options:

a. 180° – Rotates the image by 180 degrees.

b. 90° – Rotates the image by 90 degrees clockwise.

c. 90° CCW – Rotates the image by 90 degrees anticlockwise.

d. Arbitrary – Rotates the image arbitrary by a custom angle value. Selecting this option will prompt the Rotate Canvas dialog box as shown below:

Enter a value for the angle and choose if that should be Clockwise (°CW) or anticlockwise (°CCW).

Flip Images

a. Flip Canvas Horizontal – Flips the image horizontally along the standing ‘Y’ axis. It interchanges the left and right parts of the image.

b. Flip Canvas Vertical – Flips the image vertically along the horizontal ‘X’ axis. It turns the image upside down.

You may need to create documents of sizes, that are not available in standard presets of Photoshop. In that case, you can create and save custom document size presets. In this tutorial, we will learn how to create custom presets and use them to create a new document in Photoshop CS5.

Follow these steps:

1. After launching Adobe Photoshop CS5, go to File > New. The New document window would be prompted as shown below:

2. Now set the dimensions and other settings for the new preset. As soon as you start enter new values, the Preset box shows ‘Custom’. For example, I will create a preset of 200 x 200 pixels, 300 ppi, RGB Color mode, transparent background with default advanced settings.

3. Click on ‘Save Preset…’ button. That will prompt you with the New Document Preset window (see below).

4. Now the name Photoshop suggested is 200 px x 200 px, which is a good name since it describes the dimensions of the preset. Click OK to exit. Our preset (200 px x 200 px) will now be listed under the Preset box in the New document window.

So next time you want to create a document of this size, select the preset in the New document window and click OK.

Some of our readers requested us to post some basic Photoshop tutorials along with the advanced ones. So this is my first basic Photoshop tutorial.

The first thing we do after launching Photoshop is to create a document or open one. In this tutorial we will learn how to create a new document in Photoshop using the options in the ‘New’ document window.

To create a new document, go to File > New.

NOTE: The above screenshot is taken from Photoshop CS5. Your ‘New’ document window may appear different than this if you have a different (lower) version.

Let us explore each of these options here;

Name: Enter a name for the document. Later when you save your document, it will be saved with this name, unless you want to rename it.

Preset: The drop down has different size preset options for the document.

Width and Height: The first boxes take the value for the width and height and the second drop down boxes help you choose the unit of measurement.

Resolution: Resolution is the number of pixels or dots per inch (ppi/dpi). The higher the resolution, higher the quality of graphic, but it also is larger in size. Most common setting is 72 ppi.

Color Mode: There are different color modes through which you can work in Photoshop. Choose one that is appropriate for the document (the purpose of the document).

Background contents: Select from white or background color (already chosen in the Toolbar) or a transparent background for the document.

Advanced Options:-

Color Profile: Lets you choose how your document’s color management should be. If you do not have knowledge about this, leave it as default.

Pixel Aspect Ratio: In simple language, Pixel Aspect ratio is a mathematical ratio that describes how the width of pixels in a digital image compares to their height. Choose any other from the drop down.

In addition to the OK and Cancel/Reset buttons, there is

Save Preset…: This button lets you save your current settings in the New document window as a preset, which you can use later. We will learn how to create presets in our next article.

Delete Preset…: Lets you delete a saved preset.

Device Central is used when creating content for a mobile device. Device Central is now included along with a number of Creative Suite 5 products. See more…

When necessary options are set, click OK to create the new document. The new document is visible in the workspace, you can now start creating your art work. When done, save the document (File > Save) as the default Photoshop file (.psd).