Because the Clone Stamp's function is to subtly replace one area of pixels with another, you don't need its brush tip to be shaped like a rubber duck, for example! However you can use the Brush Preset picker to arm yourself with a variety of creatively-shaped brushes, should your project require them. Working smarter with the Brush Preset picker means maximising its potential. If you're not already familiar with this interface.



There are few things worse than having hundreds of cool brushes gone in an instant. It's happened to me on one occasion where my hard drive fried out and I didn't save all my customized Photoshop stuff. So I'm going to help you avoid any tragedies and tell you how to save your brushes. Once you've got an amount of brushes made (I personally like to create 'sets' of brushes that all kind of work together, or just happened to fit my mood that day!), go to 'Edit' then choose 'Preset Manager'. A window with all your current brushes will pop up. You can click on each little square individually. What you're going to want to do is shift+right click on the series of brushes you want to save. Once you've done that, click on 'Save Set', give the set a name and save it to your computer (of course these brush files are what you're going to want to back up!). There, you're done!

The basics of Photoshop are relatively easy to pick up, but can seem a bit of a mystery when you first come to the program, thanks to its somewhat unintuitive interface and lack of simple tutorials. Photoshop is basically made up of four areas: the menu bar, at the top, the toolbar just below it, the toolbox on the left and the palettes on the right. The menu bar and toolbox always stay the same, as they contain the different modes and options that you can choose, but the toolbar changes depending on context. The palettes are there to show the current status of your image, including the history of all the actions you have used and a thumbnail overview of how the 'big picture' currently looks.

Photoshop, Adobe's digital photo editing and graphic design powerhouse, is capable of creating professional quality logos and designs that will allow you to compete with professional designers for graphic design business. There are many software applications available that advertise the ability to produce high quality graphics and logos. These applications can range in price from $30.00 and up. The problem with many of these applications is that they use pre designed templates which the user pieces together to form logos that really are not that original and sometimes appear a little generic.

Do you have old photographs that are faded, worn out, crinkled or even torn? Of course you do, everyone does. Many of these photos are likely very old family photographs that are simply irreplaceable should something happen to them. In the past it was very expensive and time consuming to have old damaged photographed restored. It usually required a photo restoration expert and sometimes the results were not really that great. Digital imaging, and more specifically Adobe Photoshop, has revolutionized the process of renewing and restoring old photographs. It is amazing the results you can achieve with Photoshop. Old and damaged, even torn, photographs can be restored and renewed to their original colors and vitality using the tools available in Photoshop.

The Caledonian Digital website is user friendly and offers extensive information relating to the services provided, as well as providing recent articles on various aspects of digital photography, and links to sources of hardware, software, and reference material for photo restoration enthusiasts.For additional information on the launch of Caledonian Digital's new hassle free photo restoration and enhancement service contact Charlie Templeton or visit www.caledoniandigital.co.uk.

The tools we use in Photoshop are levels, curves and saturation for changing contrasts; and, color balance to bring the image back to the way the natural eye would see the color. Here is what we tell our photographers in the Handbook of Reuters Journalism... Photoshop is a highly sophisticated image manipulation programme. We use only a tiny part of its potential capability to format our pictures, crop and size them and balance the tone and colour. For us it is a presentational tool.The rules are - no additions or deletions, no misleading the viewer by manipulation of the tonal and colour balance to disguise elements of an image or to change the context. Photoshop is a powerful image processing program with many more tools to help photographers produce the best quality image they can for the type of photography they do.