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The Glyphs Panel & Shapes

Lesson 16 from: Photoshop and Lightroom Creative Cloud Additions in 2015

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

16. The Glyphs Panel & Shapes

Next Lesson: Blur Gallery Tools

Lesson Info

The Glyphs Panel & Shapes

Photo shops text capabilities have changed in one of the areas that have changed is if I use my text tool and I ever need any special character like the copyright symbol let's say we'll just looking down at my keyboard it's not easy to tell what key combination I would need the type in order to get the copyright symbol or the trademark symbol or any other kind of symbol like that? Well, now if I go to the window menu there's a choice called bliss and glitz have been in illustrator and in design in the past, but not in photo shop and if I choose glitz, this will show me all the special characters that are found in the particular typeface that I'm currently using and so I can bring it out like this and, um, you'll notice that some of these have a little dot in the corner and that means there's variations to that particular character like you might have it with the two dots above it. They called him lots lots, that type of thing that indicates that you have have some of those variations w...

ith that. If you want to insert any of these into your image, you know when you're typing, all you need to do is click on them so let's get our text tool here I think so I'm putting in a small value here to monogamy put a nice, large value, and so here I'd be typing in some taxed, and if I want one of these characters, if I double click on any one of these, it will insert it. So if you ever want to find, where is that copyright symbol, or where is some other symbol you might need to use? Open up the glitz panel here, and once you find what you're looking for, simply double click on it to have it inserted into that particular doc. First column my brain's not not you know what that'll be there's trademark here's restricted there we go copyright, but there you could find it, and so you can look here the entire font you can look at just currency, just numbers, just math symbols or really drill it down to aa a smaller subset of those, like, if I just wanna look at punctuation and find a weird punctuation symbol. Yes, so does that mean if you buy those bonds that have the extra fancy letters believed you'll be able to see them? If you don't know what you'd have to hit to get a particular character, you could go there tio to see what's available and double click on that once that you'd like to use, you just double click in succession to add a bunch of them if you click and hold in the corner of the glitz palette, where you find the little dot that's, where you'll see variations on whatever characters there, so if you click and hold, you'll see it and therefore you can't access the ones, the little dots over him and other things yes, was panel if there's something say, like the copyright symbol, use a lot, can you move it up to the top? Um, let's, see, I don't believe so, because there's no slot up there to put it, so not that I know of there's a chance that you can, but if so, it's something that I don't I personally don't need the cliffs panel much because I know that copyright is option g, an imac and that kind of stuff. So the ones that I use, uh, I already know how to access, and so there might be some little features in there that I'm not aware of, but I'm not certain how you do that. So since that's still copying, I'm going to get into a different feature. Lets see how can we create flames or trees in photo shop from scratch? If I go to the filter menu and into the filter menu is a choice called render an under render, we have the choice of tree. When I choose tree, we're going to get a dialogue box because there's lots of options for trees. Now you might think when when I need trees. Well, if you're an architect and you have a rendering of a building let's say it was done in a three d modeling program or you have a literal model that physical model you've made, you've taken a photograph of it, and now you want to populate it with trees. Uh, that type of thing, this could be useful. And so, with this let's, take a look at some of the things we can dio. First, you can choose what type of tree you would like to create and there's a huge list have what's available. And so let's come in here into to maybe, uh, pine tree or we can come over here and maybe do a young maple tree or a normal made tree will do a normal mabel. Then instead of just having a generic tree every one of these little leaves there on this tree as being generated by photoshopped it's. Not like this is a stock photo of a tree. This is a tree we can completely customize, so if you look at it and I want attack like it's, more like fall and the leaves are falling off I can lower this thing called leaves amount and I could make it look like a pathetic little tree that barely has any leaves at all you know it's getting to be fall or I could make it act like well it's fall but for some reason those leaves are really growing well and are huge even though it's not very many of them but all of these little variations khun b changed I'm going to show you a few of the settings that air in here I'm not going to show everyone because you know not everybody needs this but it can be fun uh branches height is how from the bottom of the tree up how soon to the branches start if I bring it way up do you see we have a really tall trunk before the branches start by bring it down they start my closer to the base branches thickness we can control so you can see them getting quite a bit thicker you khun randomize the shapes that air there there's all sorts of things you can do in here you can even go toe advanced and I have a whole bunch of things you can have it s o you have flat shading on the leaves compared to shadowed ones all that kind of stuff but if you ever do go in here and create any kind of creation you like you go to the top little pop up menu and there's a choice of saving it is a preset, and you can save and load your presets in. Therefore, that means you can search with google on the internet for other people that have spent the time messing with this to create presets that you might be able to download and install yourself. Now, if I click ok, we're going to end up with just a tree sitting in this document, but what if what I had was a picture and I needed tree of a specific size within that image? I'll choose undo what you can do is use the pen tool and create a path you just click in one spot and then clicking another and you'll make a path. Then you might want to create a new layer because the tree is going to be placed on whatever layers currently active, and so you probably wanted a separate layer from the image itself. You go to the filter menu and render your tree, and that will control the height of the main uh, what we've got trunk of the tree. How high does it go up? The tree itself will be taller than that line because the branches extend above the main part of the trunk, but if I click ok, you'll see that. In general it's that height except for the little branches that would extend beyond the main trunk if you want more than one, you'll have to apply the filter and more than once you might be thinking, well, I don't need to make trees though well, there are other things you can do with this that you might find to be more useful if I come down here and you is a shape tool because maybe I don't know how to use the pen tool I don't go to the shape tool on the right side top of my screen I can choose a custom shape and let's go in here and find one we'd like to use um let's see, my wife loves dogs so I like cats she likes dogs, I will she's the dog shape and since it's worse with the pencil I'm going to come up here and say I want a path a shape would be filled in with a solid color a path means just a like a placeholder that doesn't actually have any phil or stroke to it yet an outline and I can click here and drag and if it's opposition where he wanting that space barn in reposition now let's see if we can make something for karen we'll go to here to the filter menu in that path is active, we'll go down to render and I'm going to choose a tree now you're ever before we had a straight tree that went straight up and down. Now we have a tree where the branch is controlled. The shape of the trunk is controlled by that path. This might look kind of ridiculous, but let's, just bring our lief size down in our lief amount way down so looks more like a little pathetic tree and let's, see, we could start the branches at the very base. So there's, no empty part. And we could make our branch thickness little skinny. But we can do this where this could be your logo. This could be a heart shaped for valentine's day. This could be whatever you want, but you can get it to be in the shape of whatever path you want to me, that's. Not that exciting when it comes to a tree. But it is exciting that I can do it with fire, because the other choice we have under filter render is not just to make trees, but to make flames. Now, this is this needs to limit itself to three thousand pixels. This is a high resolution picture, so it can't show me the whole thing right now. If I wanted to be able to see the whole thing, this document would need to be smaller, because it's not really designed to be used for hi resolution print where you fill the entire sheet of paper so I'm going to make it so this image is a little smaller I'm going to make it about two thousand pixels or may fifteen hundred because it can all and create a preview of a certain size and I want to see if I can get it so it could get most of this so you make the path the passage path is active, I choose filter render flame and now it still won't be able to preview the whole thing because if you traced all the way around there would be more than three thousand pixels so you see this little part here that's empty it'll still render that when we're done just can't preview it and let's see what we can do with flames first we can make one flame that's simply shaped like that path and if I make the with skinny enough might start to see a little bit of it but I think one of these others is going to give us a better looking in result, I can do multiple flames along that path so looks kind of like somebody that does poi spinning you know the fires spinning and then we can control the length of the flame so are they combining together where they overlap or are they shorter with more of a gap between them? We control the width but this could be interesting for text if if you type in some tax make the text nice and big under the type menu there's a choice called convert two paths which means instead of being text that you can edit it will be a stiff used the pen tool the drawing and you need a path to use this feature you could then feed it that path that was originally created from text and haven't looking like flaming text let's look at a few of the options that are in here we have multiple flames in one direction which usually means straight up but we also have a setting called angle so we can control exactly what direction they go in we could instead have multiple flame's path directed which means the direction of the path is controlling where the flames are headed you could just randomly very the angle or we can have what it calls candlelight which means a flame in this general shape and then down the bottom here's our quality the higher the quality is the slower takes to actually produce the end result and so this can slow it down quite a bit but you can also do custom colors and all sorts of other things. The main thing is if you find exciting you like you want to be able to use it in the future, go to the top here and you can again save a preset loading or load presets. So if you know of anybody else that is aflame fanatic, they've probably spent time to make process. Why waste your time doing it? One that search for people that have these presets available you could download and use when I click ok, it will take it a while because I had it set too high quality and it will produce hopefully our flame. How do you load the presets if you get him online? If you go to the side menu that was in there, see it? It made it all the way around, even though the preview didn't go all the way around. But if I go back in there to filter, render flame and up here I choose load preset it's going to ask me where on the hard drive is the preset so pointed to wherever you downloaded the pre set from on your hard drive, maybe it's your downloads folder or wherever, and it will be a file that you can click on. And when you click open, it would load that present. So you just go in here and choose load preset and you tell it where on your hard drive is that present?

Class Materials

Bonus with Purchase

Ben Willmore - Class Handbook.pdf
Ben Willlmore - LayerComps Example.tif
Ben Willmore - Lightroon Dehaze Preset Pack.zip
Ben Willmore - DeHaze Preset Pack Quick Start Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

TimK
 

Got to "know" Ben during Photoshop Week and a few other courses. He has consistently been one of my favorite Photoshop instructors. He is extremely easy to follow, stays on point without being cold or boring, and is immensely knowledgeable on just about everything Photoshop. He does not disappoint in this fantastic in-depth review of some great new features in PhotoShop and Lightroom CC 2015 ... there are some real hidden gems in there for you. Ben polishes them up and serves them to you with extra info, insight, and pertinent examples. He goes the extra mile to answer questions and delve into related subjects without going off the rails. GREAT, GREAT course. Thanks Ben, and Creative Live! -Tim K.

Jose A De Leon
 

I just purchased this course today and it's wonderful. Ben is one of the best Photoshop instructors I've encountered. I had purchased the complete Mastery course and this one is a welcome addition since it covers new features. Even though Photoshop and Lightroom will continue to evolve, the basic techniques and tools used are basically the same, so I find myself going back to the mastery course if I hit a bump along the way. Ben's knowledge is second to none, but his true gift is the ability to transmit all that knowledge in bite size and understandable portions that are never boring. Someday I will have the privilege to know him personally, in the meantime I will continue to buy his courses as they come out. Such a wealth of information. Thanks Ben and CreativeLive!

Larry
 

Ben is a wealth of knowledge and covers the material beautifully. Highly recommend his workshops to others!

Student Work

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