Digital Art & Photography

Packt Publishing specialises amd focuses on IT related books and ebooks. They are currently offering exclusive discount for certain open source books. This offer will only be for a limited period estimated to last until the end of this month (July). For more details click here: Packt Books special discount page.

For Creatives and digital art enthusiasts, they have discount for books about Inkscape and Blender 3D. Inkscape is a free althernative to commercial Illustration software such as Adobe Illustrator, Coreldraw and Freehand. Blender 3D is a free alternative to commercial 3d modelling, rendering and animation applications such as 3DS Max.

The open source related books on offers include:

1. Inkscape 0.48 Essentials for Web Designers
2. Blender 2.5 Lighting and Rendering
3. Drupal 7
4. Drupal 7 module development
5. Php Jquery Cookbook
6. Php 5 Social Networking
7. Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook
8. wxPython 2.8 Application Development Cookbook
9. NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook
10. TYPO3 Templates
11. JBoss AS 5 Performance Tuning

Packt publishing company supports the Open Source community and movement. When Packt Publishing sells a book written for an Open Source project, they will pay a royalty directly to that project. Support them for a good cause.

This is a Photoplus graphic tutorial. The procedure is also applicable to Photoshop as well. Photoplus is a powerful photo image editor from Serif that is less expensive that rival programs. There is also a free version of Photoplus call SE.

In this tutorial we will look into how a metallic effect can be achieved.

1. Open the image in Photoplus.

2. Select the part where the metallic effect are to be added. There are a variety of select tools in Photoplus for this job. A good one is the polygon select tool. In the example below, the Magic Wand tool is used.

3. Go to the menu bar >>Image>> Adjust Curves. This will open the Curve editor.

4.  Add new points on the curve and tweak the curve as show below.

You will now notice that the object has taken on a metallic look.

That is all for the 2D graphic tutorial. Hope that it is easy enough to follow. More 2D tutorials (for GIMP and Photoplus) are on this website.

Photoplus is a useful yet affordable image and photo editing software. Its tools are quite similar to that of Photoshop.

Do you know that you can actually export the image created in Photoplus as CMYK?
What is CMYK? It is a standard color model used for certain type of color printing. It refers to the four types of colour inks used for the process. These colours are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. K represents the black colour.

Photoplus allows the user to export PDF as CMYK.

Here are the steps required to do that in Photoplus.

1. At the menu, go to File >> Publish as PDF. This will open up the Publish PDF dialog box.

2. In the dialog box there are 2 tabs, namely General and Security.

3. Under the General Tab, there is a Colour management section.

4. At the Output colour space, there are 2 options, namely RGB and CMYK. Select CMYK.

5. If you are sending to professional printing, you might want to include the other Prepress Marks such as Crop Marks.

6. Click OK and the PDF file will be created.

That is all for this Photoplus tips.

This is a Serif Photoplus tutorial. Photoplus is a comprehensive image editor that allows the user to replace colour in the image for interesting effects.

Replacing colour in Photoplus is very similar to the way that is done in Photoshop.

Firstly, using an appropriate selection method selection the area that include the colors to be replaced.

Next go to Menu Bar. Select Image >> Adjust >> Replace Colour. This will open up the replace colour option window. This is as shown below. To see  the selected range, check ‘Show selection’.

Using the eye dropper tool select the colour to be replace. The eye dropper (+) tool allow more colour to be included in the range. The eye dropper (-) tool will remove picked colour from the range. Use the Tolerance slide to control the range of neighbouring colour. The selected areas will be displayed as white regions.

Once the selected region is more or less there, one can move the Hue slider to make colour replacement. That way, we can visually see the changes taking place. When can still continue to make refinement by using the eye dropper (+) tool to include more colour to be replace. Likewise, the eye dropper (-) tool can be used to exclude some selection area. All the changes will be reflected in real time for very nice feedback.

Below show a colour replacement that was very quickly done in a matter of minutes.

In the world of image editing, Photoshop is the most dominant software. However, it is also quite expensive. Fortunately there are more affordable alternatives.

A very good alternative is Photoplus X series image editors. The latest versions of Photoplus allows a photographer to work with the RAW file format. Unlike formats such as JPEG, RAW format is superior and essential for high quality colour tuning and editing.

You may be thinking since there are already free image editors such as GIMP and Paint.NET out in the world, why will I need paid ones. Photoplus has an intuitive and very easy to understand interface. Additionally, with Photoplus, you can create stunning HDR images.

If you already know how to use Photoshop or even GIMP, Photoplus will be very easy to pick up. This is because the workflow and tools are very similar. It does not have all the tools of Photoshop. However, Photoplus is much more affordable and contains the essential tools and more.