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New Features in CC: Miscellaneous

Lesson 26 from: Photoshop Mastery: Ultimate Mastery

Ben Willmore

New Features in CC: Miscellaneous

Lesson 26 from: Photoshop Mastery: Ultimate Mastery

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

26. New Features in CC: Miscellaneous

Lesson Info

New Features in CC: Miscellaneous

Let's look at other changes that they've made when you grab the crop tool and you pull out these edges first off up here in the upper left used to only have the choice of a ratio of within high, and you couldn't type in a resolution, but in photo shop cc, they added it where if you click on this pop up menu, you now again have the choice of with tightened resolution in old versions of federal shop. You always had that, but they took it away for a while. They put it back in, just say no when you type in a width and height here you can usually with most fields and photoshopped type in something like ten twenty four and then put two letters after to tell it what measurement system you want to use. You can use px for pixels warriors come in and say something like two and then I n for inches, or you can put mm for millimeters uh, that type of thing, but a lot. People just don't seem to be aware that you can put in different measurement systems, even though there's no visual clue as to the f...

act that that's available. If you want to convert between various measurement systems, just pressed the right mouse button when you're on top of one of these fields, so I can come over here and say, I would like to think about that instead of in inches. I'd like it to be millimetres, and you see how it did the conversion so it can say, hey, ten, twenty four pixels. Well, what is that in inches? It just ends up taking ten twenty four and it looks over here at the resolution to figure out how many inches that would be or if I find that I don't want any fields in there because I want to be able to freely crop my image. Danny shape. I want him clear button, and it should clear out the fields in therefore I should be able to get this cropping rectangle to any kind of shape I want what I'm in here. I can move outside of the cropping rectangle in rotate and what's. Nice is this now acts more like light room did in that instead of having the cropping rectangle rotate, ah, your image rotates in old versions when the image would stay stationary in the cropping rectangle would rotate you have to like turn your head to preview what the end result was going to be and when you try to crop it, it didn't like going beyond the edge of your image, but you notice here you see the checkerboard starting to appear where I'm able to rotate it further than usual to have it if it needs to add any space the top of my screen, you do have a check box called delete crop pixels if that is turned off, be careful because if you started off with a image that only had a background layer would say it's a jpeg file that you opened if you have that turned off it's going to suddenly take what used to be a background layer when you press return or enter, you're going to find that um you're no longer gonna have a background layer, it'll be called layer zero r layer one and then if you try to save the image, the jpeg file format doesn't know how to save layers it only knows how to save the background. So if you type command s usually it's going to bring up the save dialog box to ask you to use a different file format, so if you ever need a crop of bunch j pegs, one tip is grab that crop tool and make sure delete cropped pixels has turned on because then if you have a layer called background it'll still be called background when you're done they've made changes to actions in photo shop actions is an area that adobe doesn't mess with very often, but they did some very nice things with photo shop cc uh this will only be for those people that are used to using actions because we don't really have time for a kind of introduction actions so let's see what we come up with if I go to the window menu and choose actions, I'll get the actions panel I have a bunch of actions because I use actions all the time and the problem that I've had with actions in the past is they weren't overly intelligent it could remember what you've done to an image and reapply those steps but it wouldn't was not in the past able to analyze your picture in deviate from its normal path based on something in your picture, but now it can so what I'm going to do here is I'm gonna create a new folder full of actions and I'm just going to call this one now just just the ones I'm creating right now in within that I'm going to create a new action I want to show you one of the new features that it's ah has when I create an action hit record usually it's going to keep track of what I'm doing to my image but I can go to the side menu on my actions panel there's a new choice within here that is called insert conditional insert conditional let's say I'm going to create an action and what that action is going do is it's going to require me to have a selection active because what I wanted to do is I don't know you're suppose to select the general area around somebody's face and I'm going to apply some softening to the area where their faces but I don't want that action to be able to soften the entire photograph, so I need tohave it really have that selection active in orderto work? So what I could do here is in sort of conditional before I insert the conditional though I need to make the action itself whatever that actions going to do in this case I'm going to go to the filter menu I'm going to say camera filter and all I'm going to do is take the setting called clarity and move it to the left that's one thing you could do negative clarity to soften faces a click okay and that's all this action's going to be to begin with is just negative clarity with camera filter now I'm gonna trade a different action in fact let me name this one negative clarity and not going to create a new action in this one is going to say selection, then clarity hit record and before I do anything, I'm just going to go to the side menu this here and say in sort of conditional this pops up and I say, hey, if and this is the list of choices that I have ah, and I can tell it I can say if this document has a selection, then play the action called negative clarity if it doesn't have a, uh, selection in this case is going to do nothing because I haven't made an alternative, uh, choice in here, so I'll say, okay, so we have that if statement, what is you gonna send it over to the other action and play it? What I could have done a cz well is create an alternative action let's say I create a new action as well. I'll call this one no selection, and when I record this one all it's gonna be and so I go to the side menu and I'll say insert, stop, and I'll say that makes sense as faras what I'm telling you, I'll hit stop now if you go back to that if statement and double click on it, I can say if you're going, if this has a selection play, the action called clarity otherwise meaning if it doesn't have a selection play, the one called no selection click okay and his stop so now I don't have a selection active in my image if I hit the play button, it brings up the message that I told it to a display hit stop now I take the same action in this time if I do have a selection active, it will act differently I hit play and it just did it's feature I don't know if you could tell that it got softer in here or not, so the main thing is with a conditional we have the choice of having photoshopped analyzed the picture and look at any of these particular features to see if their current and if you want it to only do one of these two you can say if document has a selection, then play this else and you can just set this to none which means don't do anything just continue on with this action instead in so conditional lt's allow me to do a lot more to the image some of the choices we have available in here our landscape versus square so the opposite of landscape would be a portrait orientation in, so sometimes I'd create actions that prepare my photographs for my iphone because I find that if I have a photograph and I displayed on my iphone in the photo is close to the same aspect ratios of screen but not exactly the same it automatically crops the image to fill the screen and it annoys me because I look at all these photos and I know I precisely you know framed in my camera yet the iphones cropping them to fill the screen well I have it some actions that end up adding black space around the image to make every image that I load on my iphone the exact same aspect ratio as the screen but I need to do it separately for verticals than horizontal sze thie actions are different so I can go over here and say document is landscape if if the documents landscape then play and I'd have one action for the landscape orientation otherwise play the one that's for the portrait orientation and therefore can have it switch between them uh all sorts of things you can do if there's something that requires scene why came out you could say hey if it's an rgb mode automatically converted to seem like a as one step in your action and so oftentimes I have what I call subroutines which are just actions that do small little things put up warnings when I need selections or convert an image from one mode to another and in here one of these choices might end up triggering one of those subroutines uh actions can also record your tool movement in previous versions att least if you go back a little while it wasn't able to but now there's a choice on the side menu called allow tool recording so if you want to be able to use something like the paintbrush tool or retouching tool in the past you had to go around and do weird things like make a path on your image and then stroke the path with your painting tools were retouching tools, but now you just turn on an option on the side called allow tool recording it's just check box where once you have it turned on now your actions can incorporate painting our retouching and other tools so some nice additions to actions but things that it wouldn't be readily apparent so e v photo five five five would like to know can you export it action so that you could even use it on another computer? Yes you can what you need to do is go to the actions panel and it's not that you can export an individual action you can export a folder of actions if I click on a folder of actions and go to the side menu in the actions panel there is a choice within here called save actions and that's going to save the actions that are contained within this folder then if I were to give that resulting file to somebody else, if they double click on the file, it'll automatically load it although it's not going to tell them that they loaded it if you don't have the actions panel open, you'd never notice it happened but it would show up in your actions panel or you can manually go to the side menu and you're going to find the choice of load actions and you could point it out of file that you had saved previously so yes, you can do that. Thank you, sure all right, a couple other things there's one I don't have an example file for, but you should be aware that they have changed the way one of thie scharping filters works if you gotta sharpen there's a new choice under smart sharpen, they've just changed the way it works overall and if you happen to have an image that is grainy, you're going to find that this will do a better job to it if you go to the upper right corner there's a little gear icon that's there, and if I click on that gear I could there's a choice called use legacy that means work the old way. So if I turned that on, if you want to be able to compare what this does compared to what the old version would do, just turn on the use legacy check box and you'll see what it would look like with that turnoff use legacy and you'll see what the new version would do and when you have used legacy turned off, you'll find that you have a slider here when you're sharpen your image to reduce noise so if you end up with a noisy image, the problem is, when you sharpen an image that is noisy, the noise gets exaggerated and used to be that you had to go to unusual means when sharpening annoys the image, what you'd end up doing if you had a sharpie, if you had to sharpen a noisy image with older versions of photo shop is you would end up putting the radius setting really high like usually radius is one to buy one and a half, but you would put it up twenty, which is massively high, and then you would put the amount really low. Twenty and twenty is a good starting point, and what that would do is it would exaggerate the really prominent things that are in your photograph, but it wouldn't end up exaggerating the noise with this new version and the new smart, sharp and that's less necessary, because they added the reduce noise slider in here in by bringing it up, it's going to help to suppress the noise, that's in your image and not sharpen it is much so if I have that cranked up a little bit, we got some noise in this image. Let's, see if you can see a difference turn on used legacy. Do you see the noise being much more pronounced around those branches? Whereas if I turned legacy off so that we're using the new version and you see how that noise has suppressed a lot more it's more pronounced on this screen just the two of you in this room no on my screen, the noise is not all that noticeable, it is there, but when I turned legacy off, it is not I might need to bring up even higher, though uh to fully suppress it uh, other things that you can do now if you're going to end up using any shape tools if you go down to the shape tool, they haven't changed all of them, but they have changed the rounded corner rectangle in the normal rectangle tool also a few settings in the ellipse tool let's. Just look at one of those, which is the rounded corner rectangle tool when you choose a rounded corner rectangle tool the top your screen upper left you khun first choose if you want to create just some pixels is if you filled in that area a path or a shape that's not new, but if I have the set to shape in a click and drag on my image to create a rounded corner rectangle in older versions of photo shop, you could only define how rounded those corners are before you drew out the shape and if he didn't like it you choose, undo, change your settings and draw new rectangle if you didn't like it you choose undo, change the settings and draw out another rectangle until you like the settings you had now they have what they call live shape properties so right when I drew this out this little panel popped open for me and you see where it says live shape properties in with this we have things like the width in here uh that if I change the with setting you see that it just got smaller in the width I can just click on one of these I used up and down arrow keys to change them and when you click away from the field you'll see it update uh you have the x and the why which is the position so if it's off a little bit you should be able to change it and then click to another field and it will update the image and that also includes things like if you're adding a stroke around the edge the size of that stroke that's a little large for subject but the size of that stroke and what I like is down here in this particular area this is how rounded the corner czar and this little link symbol by default should be pushed in if you click on any one of these four fields here I can use the up arrow key or type in a number when I click away watch that rectangle you see the corners change because it before it was pretty much a pain too, really get the setting you wanted because you ended up having to make three or four five rectangles before you got the setting elect. Also, I find it's a little more versatile design wise in that you don't have to use the exact same setting on all four corners, so sometimes you want something a little bit more unique let's see what we could dio if I turn off the link symbol that's found in the middle to start off, then I can independently control how around all four corners are it's not that I often want one that's kind of lopsided, he could say, but sometimes what I like to do is take opposite corners and set them to zero, and by doing so, you see the shape that I'm ending up with. We got opposite corners rounded and opposite corners, sharp and sometimes that's interesting to create a shape like that for like a usin a logo or anything like that. But it's really nice that you can control this interactively rid of that layer, you'll find that the live settings are also available when used the rectangle tool if you just put down a rectangle to begin with after you've put down that rectangle you khun round the corners by just increasing these settings but you'll find that if you use other tools, sure, the ellipse tool you can put it in there and you have the lives setting so you can change the width and height, that kind of thing, but the other shape tools that are in here, like the polygon and the line tool, don't have that, and I really wish they did. I want to be able to go to the polygon tool, click and drag like this, and then over here choose how many sides I want on the polygon and have a change interactively but it's not there yet or what I could really use this with line tool, let me draw a line and then over here choose how wide is it? What kind of arrowhead is on it and all that without having to redraw too much? Haven't let me change it interactively, but it's a good first step to do it with the top three tools that are in here just you'll find that that's only going to be there only going to be useful if you're creating a shape player. So if you find you don't have those available, you probably have the setting and the upper left of your screen changed from shape to pixels that's just going to create a layer. That doesn't have any special qualities to it it's as if you grab the paint brush and painted that shape it the second you let go it thinks of it is permanently being applied so that's another one of the changes in photo shop cc it's the live shape properties when another thing related to that is if he end up creating a bunch of shapes let's just say I changed my foreground color too something I might want to use here and draw out a bunch of these each time I draw one out if you watch my layers panel, you'll find that I get a new layer if I wanted these to be all in the same layer you know instead of being separate instead of clicking and dragging to create a new one just hold on shift and then when you click and drag you should be adding it to the same layer but here's what's different if I go to the air o'toole in photo shop used to be that if I were to click on various shapes I had on ly do it between are on a single layer I couldn't have this shapes that are contained on more than one layer active at the same time but now I can do that which means that if I have a bunch of elements like a use for web design possibly I hideously come in here and if I wanted to change what the corners looked like, I can do it to all of them at once, even though they're on separate layers, whereas before I'd have to go in and edit every single one and even redraw those shapes if I wanted to change their corner qualities. So it's, kind of nice to be able to target his many of those shapes, as you'd like all right, other settings let's say that you have more than one computer, you have the computer you work on at work, and then you have a different computer at home. And so what you'd like to be able to do is if you end up creating let's, say, some swatches or some other kinds of settings within photoshopped, you'd like to use the same settings when you return home, and when you're done working at home at night and you return to your office, you want to be a ble teo again, get those settings back. Well, if you have photoshopped cc, part of the concept of the creative cloud is not just photoshopped button online kind of service that has features built into it. Well, if I go to my preferences in photo shop, ah, one of the settings in here is called sink settings and that's, new and photoshopped cc you, khun sink all of these choices that air here so if I'm at work and I wantto have any styles that I make swatches that I might even actions that I make, I wanna have those sent over to another computer that I use or let's say I don't even own a computer. It's ted, I own a copy of photo shop I've sink these settings and I'm going to go toe on someone else's office and use their computer. I could log in to my photo shop creative cloud account in sync my sightings to their machine to get all of these features. So here is where you control what is going to be sync and then click ok if I go to the photo shop menu your usual gonna find your user id listed right here that's part of your creative cloud set up and I can say sink my settings now and what that's going to dio is take the settings that around my machine, my actions, my swatches and all that it's up leading them to the internet to my adobe creative cloud account, and then I can go to a different computer in on that different computer. If I log in, I can come to the same menu in sync it again it's telling me right now that it's sinking and that it's using ah eight megs of nine uh when it's working there if I want to log into a different account because maybe the computer I got on somebody else was using, they have their settings on it. You could go to the help menu in the help menu here's where I could sign out so somebody else has logged in on this computer, they have their settings and they're on everything I could log out after I'm done logging out, I could go back to the help menu and it would say log in and I'd be able to type in my user name in my password to, uh, be able to access that stuff. Also in the lower left of your screen you will find an icon that is new, you see the icon right down there, that icon also allows you to sink your settings. So if I click on that, it would tell me my user name to make sure that it's me that's logged in instead of my buddy or coworker and it tells you when I last sync it so I can see if we're near current and if I say sink settings now, khun do so, and that way we can get our settings crossed multiple machines which is rather nice so for that though obviously we need to have photoshopped creative cloud and that's what gives us that cloud component there's also a choice where you get a free what's it called b hance subscription, and you can upload your images. This, too, that I personally haven't implemented that on mind. Actually, when I tried it gave me a rh messages, so I don't know if that's quite completely fleshed out, yet or not. S so it's, not something. I want a demo here, but it's something we're in the future. If you want to have your look, your portfolio online and things, that would be another one of the, uh, the choices you have. One last thing I want to show just because we've gone through quite a bit here is if you ever work with a complex document. One feature that I think is interesting and photoshopped, cc is if you find that your layers panel ever becomes too complex and you want to go in and maybe move some layers around and on lee, think about concentrate on particular layers, you can select a few layers in your layers panel, and then if you go to the, um ah, the select menu there's a choice in here, that's new it's called isolate layers just kind of weird. What isolate laters means it's just hide all the layers that I don't have selected right now, so I can concentrate on just those and therefore come in here and let's say these are text layers I could end up changing the text or I could end up clicking on these layers using the move tool in repositioning them and I don't have to be concerned about all the layers that are there and be distracted by it just know that you can tell when you're not looking at all your layers by looking at the top here layers panel that's where you going to find this little red light switch if you've ever isolated layers so you're not looking at all the layers that make up this document when you want to get back to normal, you can just click on that icon and it will get all your layers visible again so you just select multiple layers and if you want to just see those go up to your select menu, choose isolate layers and do that or if that's the last feature you used and you haven't messed with the settings at the top of your layers panel you can just select a few layers and then just turn on that switch a little check box like switch at the top and it'll just isolate him you don't have to go this select menu, so those are a lot of the new features that are available in photoshopped c c you're only going to get those features if you subscribed to the adobe creative cloud it's a new way of thinking about photo shop a ce far as not necessarily owning it instead, you're kind of renting it, and I hope adobe will end up adding more features that make it more worthwhile, because at the moment, if you on leone photoshopped it's, not the best deal in the world. If you own about three adobe products, let's, say your own photo shop illustrator and light room are photoshopped white room and maybe in designer something, then it's a pretty good deal in that you might end up spending less money, but you gain access to all the other programs in the creative cloud suite, but I really wish they would have been a little bit more aggressive with their pricing. My assumption is they might add more services to make it more and more worthwhile throughout the future, but I don't work there, so I don't really know you would like to sing a little lower price. I would have liked to see them be a little more aggressive for the photo shop on lee price because you don't, you can either subscribe to just better shop, or you can subscribe to the entire creative cloud where you get all the other programs, like indesign illustrator in a bunch more, but for just the photoshopped, the price is a little bit higher than I think would be nice to talk people into this new model. They should have made it a little more enticing.

Class Materials

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Ultimate Mastery Day 1 Images.zip
Ultimate Mastery Day 2 Images.zip
Ultimate Mastery Booklet.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

RDM Photography
 

I have always enjoyed watching any of Mr Willmore's courses, engaging and entertaining with a gentle professionalism, with a good pace of delivery for the target audience. What I so enjoy is that the underlying theory is 'correct' with obvious care and understanding of the terms used and this speaks volumes as to the instructor's commitment. I have always learnt something from these courses and this was no exception.

Jose A De Leon
 

This is by far the best investment I've made. Ben is a qreat teacher. I watch repeatedly the videos over and over until the concepts become second nature. Since I bought the complete bundle, I can go back when ever I want and watch again. My Photoshop skills have improved exponentially. I'm extremely happy I made this purchase.

Lemmi Kann
 

I just started to get familiar with Photoshop and know the basic. After watching just first three lessons I am totaly blown away - I can see how much far I can go with editing my photos, what possibilities I have. I edited some of my photos and they look way better now! Ben Willmore is excellent lector and I encourage the beginners to buy this class too. It's easy to understand and follow if you already know what is layer and mask.

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