1. Adding Texture in Photoshop Without Affecting Colour.

    Since Zac Gorman asked,

    1) Scan your paper or other piece of whatever you intend to use as “texture”.

    2) Adjust levels etc. as necessary. Get it looking nice and even (assuming this is the effect you want).

    3) Run the “High Pass” Photoshop Filter on that flattened image. Find it under FILTER > OTHER > HIGH PASS

    3b) Tweak High Pass parameters as necessary. Get it just right and you win a stuffed Finn from Adventure Time.

    4) Layer that High-Passed image above the layers you want to affect.

    5) Set that layer’s Blend Mode to “Overlay”.

    Voila. Hopefully the High Pass filter sucked out the essence of the texture you want to use. (If not, figure out another way.) Since the High Pass-ed image is mostly 50% grey, setting it to “Overlay” doesn’t mess with your image’s colour too much because I guess that’s how Overlay works. Shrug?

  2. Photoshop and Dual Monitors: a Great Tip!

    Seems like a lot of people I know run a Cintiq off an iMac. I’m lucky enough to have such a setup. The problem? When painting on the Cintiq, I had been wasting all that real estate on the iMac. It would be full of iTunes and Firefox and Adium and a bunch of other horrible distractions.

    NOT ANYMORE.

    I caught friend and co-worker Shyh Chai using the following trick, and it’s gonna change my dual-monitor habits for the better. FOREVER.

    I’m talking about Photoshop’s “New Window for…” feature. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? If not, this is what it does: you open up a document. In the “Window” menu, under “Arrange”, you’ll find an item called “New Window for [DocumentName]”. Click that, and Photoshop makes a new, second window that shows the same document as the one you have open. You can work on either and see the results in both windows.

    What I do now is drag one window to each monitor and full-screen them both. On my Cintiq, I can dig down and noodle about and paint and draw. I leave the full, zoomed-out view on the second monitor. Not only do I get to easily view the entire canvas (very handy for keeping things in perspective), but it blocks out my browser and other apps and my distracting Christina Hendricks desktop pictures.

    VICTORY. CHALK ONE UP FOR PRODUCTIVITY.