Tag: Freebie

This weeks Friday freebie is a little different as it’s not an action or an image but a Photoshop brush. Of course if you wanted to be technically correct it is an image or at least it started out as an image before I turned it into a brush.

This brush makes a line of sticky tape or Sellotape as we call it round here. It’s perfect for all your grungy projects, as a border round an image or in a composite image. Use your imagination and let me know if you found it useful.

You can download the brush from here:
https://www.gavtrain.com/free/Sticky-Tape-gavtrain.zip

It’s around 1mb in size so shouldn’t take too long to download. You can then unzip it and you’re ready to install it into Photoshop or Elements.
Please read the terms of use at the bottom of this post.

How to load the Brush
The quickest way to load a new brush is simply drag and drop the unzipped brush into Photoshop or Elements. Just make sure there are no other images open.

1) Download and unzip the file. You can save it anywhere as long as you can remember where that is.

2) Open Photoshop and go to Window – Brush Presets

3) Click the menu icon in the top right corner, it’s the one with a small down arrow and 4 little lines.

4) Click Load Brushes and find the unzipped file you downloaded

NOTE: Do not try and install the zipped file, it won’t work!

How to use the Brush
I know what you’re thinking… It’s a brush, so how hard can it be? The best advice I can give you is to make you paint with white as your foreground colour and paint each piece of tape on it’s on own layer. That way you can twist and resize the tape with Free Transform CTRL+T

Usual rules apply. The brush is © copyright Gavin Hoey 2012. You may use it for personal, non-commercial purposes only and please do not redistribute without permission. Thank you and enjoy

This weeks Friday freebie is my 4×4 template which is super simple to use and gives some pretty amazing results and all you need to get started is four great images and my 4×4 template.

You can download the free template from this link:
www.gavtrain.com/free/4×4-template.zip

Once you have it opened in either Photoshop or Elements you’ll see that there are four white rectangles. Each rectangle is a holder for a photo and each is in the ratio of 3:2 which is the same as most DSLR cameras.

How to use the template
To add your own photos, first select and copy the photo you want to add. Then jump over to the template, select a white rectangle with the magic want tool and choose Edit – Paste Into (Edit – Paste Special – Paste Into in Photoshop CS5 & CS6)

You can then resize the photo before pressing enter to committing to the change.

You’ll need two images in upright (portrait) format and two images in horizontal (landscape) format. The space for each photo is 4000 pixels on the longest edge, so if you’re using smaller images you might want to resize the template before starting.

Usual rules apply. The action is copyright Gavin Hoey 2012. You may use it for personal, non-commercial purposes only and please do not redistribute without permission. Thank you and enjoy

For this Friday Freebie I thought it would be fun to do another Photoshop Action. If you’re into Photoshop actions then you can still grab my sticker action from a few weeks back.

This week the action creates a kind of sketchy effect and although it will work on any image it’s best suited to photos with a strong, graphic subject matter. If you find the effect doesn’t work on one photo just grab another and try again.

At the end of the action you’ll get the option to give the contrast a bit of a kick. This can be a bit hit and miss so if don’t like the contrasty results just press CTRL+Z to undo it. Alternatively click Edit-Fade Brightness/Contrast as soon as the action finishes to blend the effect to any level from 0% to 100%.

You can download the action from here www.gavtrain.com/free/sketchy.zip

The action should work fine with Photoshop CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS6. I’ve also tested it with the brand new Elements 11 and it worked perfectly. Sorry it won‘t work on Elements 10 or before.

As you can see from the image below the effect is quite dramatic.

Usual rules apply. The action is copyright Gavin Hoey 2012. You may use it for personal, non-commercial purposes only and please do not redistribute without permission. Thank you and enjoy

As part of my talk to the digital Imaging group of the Royal Photographic Society last Sunday I set myself a mini challenge to photograph as many of the attendees as possible during the lunch break. It was a brilliant idea only marred by the fact I hadn’t anticipated that most people would be eating out.

None the less I managed to shoot around 40 portraits in under 30 minutes. That’s not bad but was less then half the audience.

The easy bit was processing the photos which, thanks to the power of Lightroom 4, I was able to do in just a few clicks.

Using Lightrooms sync option I demonstrated just how simple it is to apply the same effect on dozens of photos in one click.

If you fancy trying my Lightroom 4 settings then you can download my Soft Sepia Portrait from here:

www.gavtrain.com/free/soft-sepia-portrait.zip

It works best on a dark or black background.

Click to enlarge image

And if you’d like an idea of the lighting set up it was as my super simple single speedlight set up. You can get a fair idea of how it works by looking at this behind the scenes snap. The only difference is the white background was flipped over so I could use the black background.

Photo by Will www.willgenix.com