Isolating and Colorizing A Black and White Photo

 

Being that Valentine’s Day is around the corner, this is the most recent of my Photoshop CS5 tutorials.  In this video, I cover how to remove the color from an image and isolate a specific object on the photo.  I also cover the steps on how to then change the object selected and transform either for more dramatic impact.  I also added a blur technique to the background in order to emphasize the red heart in the foreground.  The transformation of the heart to look like a Necco sweetheart candy as in the photo above was not covered in the video.

Photoshop CS5: Colorizing A Black and White Image or Photograph

As a fan of NFL football, (and as this blog post is being published, we are in the playoff season), I decided to include my armchair hobby by including this project in my latest tutorial.  Obviously, the techniques you will learn in this video tutorial can be applied to any black and white image you may be interested in  colorizing.

2 Additional Changes Youtube Has Made to Improve Small Business Video Marketing

Although there was a great uproar and outcry regarding  Youtube’s recent updates and changes, it seems those outcries are growing dimmer as small businesses are getting a net gain with Youtube’s redevelopment of their website.

In a previous blog post, I included a brief summary of Youtube’s new interface but I was hesitant to comment about the new changes internally since such a major change in navigation was putting a dent on how I was posting and editing my video tutorials.

The following is an example of my Youtube channel’s  new interface:

But as I mentioned earlier, those concerns are beginning to drift away since, as a matter of fact, YouTube has already made more of an effort to feature channels on search results pages for related keywords.   This is the key, make sure when you edit  your channel that you focus on using your main keyword phrase properly in your channel’s description , and you can get found even quicker!

Happy New Year: Gearing Up for 2012 Online Productivity

Well, most of us have rung in the New Year and are returning back to our work routines and are facing the ongoing challenges that having an online blog can pose.  What with many of the vast changes that have occurred in the  last few months in social media, video and other online sources the tasks can be daunting.

As a matter of fact, if the stats are correct, many small businesses haven’t launched their blogs and are therefore further behind the curve on getting their small business’ online marketing rolling.  My best advice is to get some general information on what needs to be done and get started, you can always refine the process as you develop new skills and you gain more traffic.  Don’t fall into the dreaded symptom of “paralysis through over-analysis”.

Youtube Gets a Slicker and Cooler Interface But Is It A Real Improvement?

As we get nearer to  the end of the year, and often many companies prepare by rolling new bells and whistles,  Youtube has rolled out a major overhaul on their design interface.  While it does look a lot sleeker and adds a host of options it will be interesting to see if this overhaul will actually enhance viewer experience.  It’s an interesting risk since Youtube has pulled away from it’s simple and clean interface.  The following video has a quick overview of the customization options that are now available.

This is Youtube’s new front page interface, of course with some of my own interface options, so the view may look different from your own.

Design wise the interface looks great but if you are already struggling to keep up with all the options available to you in developing your Youtube channel,  Youtube has just  upped the ante.  In fact there are mixed opinions on these new changes, and videos with access to script changes to revert back to the old interface are becoming readily available.  Even the video posted above has several thousand dislikes.

In my opinion, perhaps Youtube wasn’t forthcoming on how drastic the changes would be and have irritated their loyal users to say the least.  I will be tweaking and updating my own channel in the following weeks and checking under the hood, so to speak, on design changes.

Photoshop CS5: Photoshop Secrets and Tool Tips – Exploring the Pen Tool

This video tutorial is the third installment of  a summary and overview of  Adobe Photoshop CS5 photo editing tools for beginning and intermediate Photoshop users. The idea was to provide some additional tips and tricks that you don’t often get in typical Photoshop tutorials.  This tutorial is approximately 25 minutes in length and it’s main emphasis is on mastering the pen tool, a skill that is important in both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

Reminder: Prepare Your Marketing Materials for the Holidays!

Illustration by Vector Jungle

It’s that time of the year again, when suddenly you might find yourself gearing up for the upcoming Holidays with a slew of things to get done.  The first major holiday rolling around being, of course, Halloween.

Wikipedia defines Halloween, as…

“Halloween (or Hallowe’en) is an annual holiday observed on October 31, which commonly includes activities such as trick-or-treating, attending costume parties, carving jack-o’-lanterns, bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted attractions, playing pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.“

And what should these holiday celebrations mean to you as a small business owner? Only that you might want to work with your graphic designer to develop an ad campaign for any online or print collateral marketing that you might want to do in this holiday season. This way all graphic design and graphic elements are sourced and completed ahead of the holiday schedule.   Ideally, you should have this done at least one or two months before the holiday season rolls around but getting started sooner rather than later is your best bet.

Free Website Tool that Allows You to Create A Photo Realistic Tshirt Mockup

If you are looking for a free website that allows you to mockup a shirt without having to use Photoshop or know Photoshop layers, the  Shirtmockup.com site featured above might be the right choice for you.  This site allows you to create a simple mockup t-shirt with a jpeg image on a photo realistic tshirt for free without requiring advanced Photoshop skills.  You create the mockup online and you can download the image when you are finished.  It will however, have the company’s watermark on the lower left-hand corner.

If you want to purchase the photoshop layers templates that are featured in the lower half of the website (and also free of the company’s watermark), get ready to get out your bank card in order to purchase the template packages that are made available.  The Gomedia mock-up templates are high quality photoshop layers that come in a variety of men’s tshirts, women’s tshirts, hoodies and other apparel.

The following t-shirt mockup was made with one of these templates and is a logo design image previously created for a client for his music studio and featured in a couple of my Youtube videos.

Related Post:

3 Tips to Designing a T-shirt to Promote Your Business or Event

3 Tips to Designing a T-shirt to Promote Your Business or Event

Just like any other small business marketing efforts, you need to determine who your targeted audience is or will be when you decide to design or create a promotional t-shirt.

The following tips are a few points you might want to consider before you get started.

1)      Determine Your Target Audience and T-shirt Purpose. When deciding who your target audience is you will also want to determine where the t-shirt is going to be distributed, what the message is going to be and whether you are going to directly promote your logo or business in your t-shirt design.  Also when it comes to calculating your costs you might want to determine how many t-shirts you want printed in your initial run.  Most printers reduce the cost of the t-shirt based on how many t-shirts you want printed but you will need to evaluate or compare overall pricing between printers.

What Does A Graphic Designer Do?

The dictionary defines a graphic designer as one who specializes in the art or profession of visual communication that combines images, words, and ideas to convey information to an audience, especially to produce a specific effect. And while this is a  broad definition of what graphic designers do, I prefer the definition of a graphic designer as a person who specializes in visual communication by a skillful combination of text and pictures in advertisements, magazines, books, etc.for print, the web and other media.

The internet and the computerization of traditional design tools has vastly changed the skill set and job tasks of what a commercial graphic designer traditionally used to do.  The web has opened a whole new field in design that is suited specifically for this medium rather than traditional print media, although both skills sets are still used by many graphic designers.