Lesson 12. Creating Special Effects

The huge assortment of filters available for Adobe Photoshop lets you transform ordinary images into extraordinary digital artwork. You can select filters that simulate a traditional artistic medium—a watercolor, pastel, or sketched effect—or you can choose from filters that blur, bend, wrap, sharpen, or fragment images. In addition to using filters to alter images, you can use adjustment layers and painting modes to vary the look of your artwork.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to do the following:

• Record and play back an action to automate a series of steps.

• Add guides to help you precisely place and align images.

• Save selections and load them as masks.

• Apply color effects only to unmasked areas of an image.

• Add an adjustment layer to make a color correction to a selection.

• Apply filters to selections to create various effects.

• Add layer styles to create editable special effects.

This lesson will take about 60 minutes to complete. The lesson is designed to be done in Adobe Photoshop, but information on using similar functionality in Adobe ImageReady is included where appropriate.

If needed, remove the previous lesson folder from your hard drive, and copy the Lesson 12 folder onto it. As you work on this lesson, you’ll overwrite the start files. If you need to restore the start files, copy them from the Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Classroom in a Book CD.