I’ll get anything worthwhile up on the site over the next couple of days.

Sometime you just want to do something a bit different with an image. In this example I’ll be using the same screen shot as the last post, a screen shot from the upcoming Call of Duty game. Here’s the original image:

Now all I’m going to do is add a graining effect to this image. To do this all I do is simply select the Filters menu at the top of the screen, the choose the sub menu, Texture and select Grain.

This will give you a screen with a few options where you can change the Intensity and Contrast on the grain if you wish to do so.









The outcome is shown below, a nice World War 2 game image with added grain effect.

Take this example. Here I have open a screen shot from the upcoming Call of Duty game. You can see that parts of the image are blocked by the tool bar and floating menu’s:

This can be all sorted out by pressing the Esc key, now we have a lovely clean view to alter our image:

To get the tools back we just hit Esc again and the menu’s come back. If you want to remove the floating menu’s with out removing the tool bar then just add Shift to the mix so Shift + Esc

These are some of the very basic ones and will work in most Windows bases applications:

Ctrl + Z - Undo
Ctrl + X - Cut
Ctrl + C - Copy
Ctrl + V - Paste

These use the 4 keys at the lower left of the keyboard, the cut copy and paste options work as tehy do in any other application, the Undo shortcut in Photoshop however, is a little different.

If you make a change in photoshop and the press the Ctrl + Z key, it will undo the change. If you press it again it will not undo the previous action but instead redo the last change. What it really does is toggle between the original and the change you made. That is a pretty useful tool when you are comparing two images but stepping back is always a great tool too and this can be done by using the shortcut key:

Ctrl + Alt + Z

By holding down the Alt key also you will be able to step back through the changes you have made. I’m sure there is a limit to how long this will work for but I have gone back through 20 changes on multiple occasions.

My name is Phil Benwell, I am a Uni student from the UK. I am not a graphic designer nor have a great flare for creativity. I do however need to develop some sort of graphical skills for the work I want to do in web design and eventually Wordpress theme generation.

I have just got a nice new digital camera and want to experiment with the photo’s making them look better after the shots are taken and then also do some trick photography where you can add in people to group shots and not be able to tell.

So that’s the aim of this site really, to give non creative people a chance at doing something creative with photoshop.