Unlocking the Background in Photoshop

Series Summary

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for photo editing today. It is a program that gives users the power to manipulate colors and effects, layer parts of images in stacks, adjust balances and global characteristics with precision, and clean up or completely revision photographs. Photoshop offers unique features and effects, though some argue that it does not replicate natural media as closely as other painting programs. Despite the criticisms, Photoshop is also the standard program for artists outside photography who create images from scratch. The recent rise of digital painting is popular in fantasy and commercial art. Anyone with a computer and determination can learn Photoshop and reproduce the same quality art exhibited in magazines, comics, and web literature... although, as the purists will remind us, it still takes artistic talent.

In this free Photoshop tutorial video series, professional photographer Julio Costilla teaches you how to use the warp tool to make a folded piece of paper. Julio covers all the steps to turn a flat image into something that looks like a rolled photograph. You will learn to use colors, filters, layers effects, and more. Using Photoshop CS3 can be daunting without these visual tutorials, covering the marquis and other selection tools, gradients, and transparency settings.

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photo Shop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Inc and, I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Alright, so we?re going to begin this tutorial with the clip about opening a document and then unlocking the background and, were going to be using to work tool on this little tutorial here. We?re going to open. Now I'm going to show you what I'm going to do. I'm going to do something kind of like what I have right here, the church picture. I'm going to show you how to make that. I'm going to show you how to make the tape, I 'm going to show you how to make that curl, and how to make it look realistic. So, first of all, I 'm going to file open and you want to open up your document. And now hit the "f" key to bring this into a full frame and, now you want to unlock the background by clicking right here. Double click and, name that master. So, that's the master copy. If you want to hit control "j", you can actually hide this bottom one and work on this copied layer, that way you'll always have this bottom one over here for reference just in case you mess up. So, now that we have this image alone by itself what we want to do is, we want to actually shrink the image just a little bit. Hit commander control "t" on PC, and you want to drag in just like I just did. So were going to work with the image of that size. So were going to click the check mark and, now we have ourselves image to work with and, were going to move on to the next part of this tutorial."