9 Use the Dodge tool to add highlights to the bridge of the nose, the cheeks, above the lip area, the lower lip, the chin, and the eyes. Merge the two layers together to form a solid. 10 Apply a Lighting Effect following the specifications below. 11 Here we have the finished piece. Technical Support Forum : http://vietdown.org/vbb/index.php MAKING MEDALS IN PHOTOSHOP by Colin Smith Hi all, I've been quiet for a few weeks because I have been traveling in Italy. Speaking of travel, a lot of people have been traveling to Salt Lake City for the Winter Olympics. You may not have had a chance to go to Utah, but you will be able to take a medal home with you. I am going to show you how to create a medal here We are going to create a medal for the fictitious "snow bike" category in the fictitious 2001 Olympics, sorry purists :) Begin with a blank canvas at 72ppi and RGB mode. Import your art onto a separate layer. I used the font "webdings" here with the letter "b" which happens to be a bicycle. Using the elliptical marquee tool draw a circle around the bike. Create a new layer and fill it with the default copper gradient. Add some type. "2001 Salt Lake City." Lets wrap the text to the circle. On the toolbar, click the warp text tool. Choose arc and adjust the bend to suit. Tip: You can drag the text to a different position while this tool is active. Here is the result so far. Lets make the Olympic rings. Create a new layer and using the elliptical marquee tool make a circle. Hold the shift key to constrain to a perfect circle. Edit>Stroke Use a 2 pixel black stroke to create a ring. Now here is a great tip to duplicate the rings: Press Ctrl/Cmd+Click the layer thumbnail to load the ring as a selection. Press the alt/option key and click on the ring and drag a copy. Do this 3 more times to create all 5 Olympic rings. Position everything and add the word "Olympic" in a suitable font. Merge the bicycle and "2001 Salt Lake City" text. Filter>blur>gaussian blur Run a 1.1 pixel Gaussian blur, this will cause these elements to blend more smoothly with the coin. The result Ok prep time over. Lets make this puppy pop! Start with the bike layer. Double click the layer name to open the layer styles box. Copy the settings from the bevel box. Don't forget to change the gloss contour. Choose a color overlay and select orange as the color. Its beginning to take shape. Copy the layer style to all the layers. You can do this by just clicking on the word "Effects" and dragging it to any layer you want and the effect will be duplicated. Here is our medal with the layer style applied to all layers. Lastly we will modify the style on the coin surface to produce a realistic result. Double click the word "effects" to open the dialog box again. Make these changes to the bevels setting. Add a default drop shadow. To get a nice shimmer, apply the satin effect. Here is our finished medal. I hope this weeks article inspires you to create all kinds of medals and coins. Technical Support Forum : http://vietdown.org/vbb/index.php Making Photograph Adjustments Using New Adjustment Layer Jacquelin Vanderwood 1 I'll show you how to use New Adjustment Layer in this tutorial. As you can see from the screenshot below, New Adjustment Layer is located under Layer. 2 The New Adjustment Layer feature allows you to create adjustments to your photo or artwork one layer at a time. When you select, in this instance Levels, you are asked to name the layer and would you like to Group With Previous Layer. I most always check this box. You can color the layer and give it a transparency factor using Mode. You can also specify it's opacity. Go ahead and select Levels for this demonstration. 3 Immediately the Levels dialogue box appears allowing you to specify Channels and Input and Output levels. 4 After I have made adjustments in Levels and press OK, you can see in the Layers palette that a new indented layer has appeared. You can hide this layer or change it's transparency mode, plus reduce it's opacity. 5 The first photo below is with the Levels layer hidden. The second photo is with the Levels layer unhidden. 6 He re is the same photo with the Levels layer set at Exclusion. 7 I have a applied a Hue/Saturation New Adjustment Layer to the photo. See how it also is indented. Here is the effect of the two New Adjustment Layers applied to our photo. You can keep going and going and making adjustment layers this way, changing their transparency mode, etc. It's an easy and economical way to make changes to your photo or artwork while maintaining the integrity of the original piece. Technical Support Forum : http://vietdown.org/vbb/index.php MAKING TEXT LOOK SHARPER ON YOUR WEBPAGE By Colin Smith There are a few little tricks that will help your text look a bit sharper on your webpages, especially at smaller sizes. Resizing When resampling blocks of text, there is an option that you may not have noticed, that will help you achieve sharper results. This is particularly useful when you have scanned in blocks of text or line art. When we go to resize the image, Bicubic resampling is the default option. This works best for most images. Here is the result on our text. Try it again, this time choose bilinear resampling Notice how much sharper the text is? The second trick is for small text and is tracking, or kerning. This means the spacing between letters. Here is a line of text with standard tracking. In the tracking box, increase the amount to 20 See how much more legible the text is. Look at a road sign and you will notice that the tracking is set very wide. That is why you can read them from a distance. Here is a line of text with the crisp anti-alising, kind of blurry. Photoshop 7 ships with a new level called Sharp, notice the difference? I hope these little tips will help you to produce webpages with sharper, easier to read text. Technical Support Forum : http://vietdown.org/vbb/index.php Making Your Photos Worthy of Framing Jacquelin Vanderwood 1 Let's make a photo into a piece of art that is worthy to be framed. Below is the undoctored version of the photo I'll use for this tutorial. 2 I first want to start by adjusting the quality of the colors so I start with Levels and move the center arrow over to .66. As you can see, there is now more color to work with. 3 I then apply Curves to brighten and darken areas of color. 4 I used Color Balance to adjust the color structure of the photo. Initially I selected Midtones and made the adjustments on the sliders. 5 I then clicked on Shadows and made some more adjustments on the sliders. 6 And finally I selected Highlights to tweak the lighter areas of the picture. 7 Here is the result so far. Looks a lot better. . finished piece. Technical Support Forum : http://vietdown.org/vbb/index.php MAKING MEDALS IN PHOTOSHOP by Colin Smith Hi all, I've been quiet for a few weeks because I have been traveling. is an option that you may not have noticed, that will help you achieve sharper results. This is particularly useful when you have scanned in blocks of text or line art. When we go to resize. from a distance. Here is a line of text with the crisp anti-alising, kind of blurry. Photoshop 7 ships with a new level called Sharp, notice the difference? I hope these little