Photoshop Tips and Tricks for Beginners: Magnetic Lasso Tool

The Magic Wand is another selection tool, ideal for when you are working with a background that is more monotone and consistent (like a solid color or clear blue sky).

The Magic Wand tool is most often used to switch up backgrounds or large color blocks. To use it, choose the Magic Wand tool from the tools panel and click on the part of the image you want to select. Make sure that you toggled the “add to selection” option on the top bar (icon of two squares) so that you can move forward with switching up the colors and tones of your selection.

 

Photoshop: Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Change the Unit of Measurement

Change Measurement In Photoshop

A short and quick way to switch between units of measurements that you’re working with is to place your cursor on one of the rulers on your grid (press Ctrl + R to show or hide the rulers), and right click, then choose a new unit from the context menu. There you’ll find a wide variety of units, from centimeters to pixels, millimeters, points and even percents.

Photoshop: Tips and Tricks for Beginners

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Transform: Change the size of an image, rotate, flip or distort it!

Click Edit > then click Transform > and select the action you desire.

Or try these shortcuts to make life even easier:

Press Ctrl + T on your keyboard and a bounding box will then appear around the image, indicating transformation. This means you can now resize your image. The best way to do so is by placing the cursor on one of the rectangle corners of the box and then dragging the corner while holding the Shift key. When you’re finished just press Enter and you’re done.

To flip your image vertically or horizontally press Ctrl + T and then right click your mouse. A popup window will appear with a few options for rotating and flipping the image. Select the action you want and when you are done press Enter.

To distort or skew an image press Ctrl + T and then place the cursor on whichever corner you want to distort. Press Ctrl while holding your mouse down on whichever corner of the image you’re looking to morph and drag it down to your desired point, finally press Enter to activate.

 

Shoot Hazy and Ethereal Photos Using a Sandwich Bag and Colored Markers

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Photographer Jesse David McGrady has a super simple trick for adding a hazy, ethereal effect to your photographs: wrap a plastic sandwich bag around your lens. It sounds ridiculous and silly, but the results you get are actually quite nice!

First, find yourself a sandwich bag — those thing plastic bags that you carry sandwiches around in.

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On the closed side of the bag, use your hands to tear a hole. Don’t use scissors, since you’ll want the edges to be rough, uneven, and slightly random.

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Take the open end of the bag and slide it over your camera lens, with the hole end extending a little past the end of your lens. You want to make sure it can be seen in your viewfinder. Don’t cover up the middle portion of the frame, since you’ll want a clear section to see your subject through.

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Voila! You’ve got yourself an instant hazy, retro, light leak look for just pennies:

Okay, a sample photograph of an empty smoothie glass is a bit lame, but check out what McGrady has been able to do using this “hack”:

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To customize the look you get, you can take a colored pen and draw over the plastic bag, adding color to certain parts. Here are a couple of photos shot by McGrady using a baggie that was marked with purple:

You can find more of McGrady’s photographs shot using this trick/technique/hack here and here.

Photography outsourcing: Why you should go for it !

Photographers, generally gets uneasy when they hear the word “outsourcing”. Noway you would want to ruin your concept of the image by letting anyone do the post production. I mean how could you be a photographer and outsource your work, is it even your work anymore? How can anyone else implement the vision you had while taking the shot? 

We think the concept to outsource photo editing is one that is very hard for most photographers to tell themselves that it is the right choice, but we’re here to tell you, that at a certain point in your career, it most certainly is the right choice.

If you’ve ever read the E-Myth (and if you haven’t go pick it up now!) it talks about how the death of a business is when the technician is always in control, that you need the manager and entrepreneur to play equal roles. When you, the photographer, spend all your time sitting at a computer editing your sessions, the technician is in control and consumes the time you could be doing management or entrepreneur work.

The time would be much better spent putting your face out in the public, booking more clients, shooting additional sessions, or collaborating with other members of your community. Your time has value, and there comes a point that you are actually holding your business back by doing that type of work. There will become a point when your time holds a much higher value than the cost of paying to have your edits done by somebody else, you will in fact be saving your business money!


So when is a good time to consider it?

  1.  You need to know your style.

    You need to have it nailed because if you’re going to be outsourcing that job, you need to be able to tell the company or person how to get the job done. And being able to describe your editing style is also something that you should feel comfortable doing and if you don’t know how to answer that, then take a step back and evaluate your work some.

  2. Have your SOOC pretty consistent and streamlined.

    This goes along with the above. But we do think it’s worth mentioning, that it has been our experience, that even when you feel pretty good about your SOOC shots, once you start to outsource, we can almost promise you that they will get even better, consistent if you will. It just kind of happens that way.

  3. Evaluate your time.

    This next piece is up to interpretation as each of our lives are filled very differently. But you need to evaluate how much of your time is consumed and if that’s at a level that you’re wanting it to be, maybe you’d like another hour per day to spend with your family. Have you run out of hours in your day? It’s time to asses when the number of sessions is

    a) consistent
    b) at a point where you have run out of time to ‘do-it-all.’

  4.  Maybe you don’t enjoy editing!

    Well this one may throw you off, but if you’ve got your style figured out and you’re rocking your SOOC; maybe you’re not a ‘professional’ maybe you’re shooting for YOU! But just like that other photographer, your time is precious and maybe, just maybe, you don’t enjoy the editing. Yes, I think even as a hobbyist, choosing to outsource is totally reasonable and ok!

    Now do you need all four steps checked off the list to decide to outsource? Absolutely not. We think 1 & 2 are essential to make the switch but then I think you either fall in category 3 or 4, not necessarily both.
    Outsourcing shouldn’t be a big scary word that you avoid, and it shouldn’t be something you take lightly either, but it is something that should make you happy. At the end of the day you should feel good about your choice, own it and start doing all those other things you could be doing with your time and business.

Background color change- BEFORE & AFTER

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Step 1: open up your Photoshop and the picture you want to change the background colour.

Step 2: click the quick selection tool here and use that tool to select the person. if the selection goes out of the person, subtract the selection using this  you can find it at the top of Photoshop

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Step 3: after that, at the top of photoshop click refine edge. here

this should pop up.

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click the smart radius. after that adjust the radius. mess around with it. after you’ve finish click ok.

Step 4: right click on the picture, select inverse like this  after that click layer>new fill layer>solid color. like this

Step 5:  After that simply click ok without doing anything. After you click ok. this will pop up.

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Step 6:  Choose any solid colour you want to fill your background. after you’ve finish click ok.

Step 7:  you’re done! click ‘save’ or ‘save as’.  make sure that you change the format into JPEG.

Why Your Company Should Consider Outsourcing Content Creation

Outsourcing content to the experts at an agency that specializes in exactly what you’re looking for has some major benefits:

1. You can scale your efforts quickly and in bursts.

When you build an internal content team, you risk being forced to hire quickly when it’s time to scale up your efforts or make major layoffs when you want to scale down. But if you’ve outsourced your content to a trustworthy agency, your ability to scale is limited only by budget, not your team’s time or personnel resources. And for a fast-growing startup, this ability is helpful.

2. Custom technology can empower your team.

Hiring an agency focused on effective, collaborative content creation and management means you can gain access to that agency’s tools rather than use general software that doesn’t meet your specific needs or build your own tech, which requires significant time, talent and financial investment.

For example, Influence & Co.’s clients have access to CORE, our proprietary content technology, that allows them to access their content, view their content’s analytics and even showcase their published content on their public profile, which makes the entire process easier, more enjoyable and more transparent.

3. You can save time and money.

No matter how much confidence you have in your marketing team, if it’s already focused on executing 10 other marketing initiatives, content creation, management and distribution won’t be as timely, as high-quality or as efficient as an outsourced firm that specializes in content marketing. If you’re in a time crunch, consider using a knowledge management template to streamline your content creation efforts.

Now that you understand a few key benefits of outsourcing content, it’s important to really think through what type of agency relationship you’re looking for. Here are three kinds of agency relationships to help you decide what you need to make outsourced content marketing work for your team:

The curator

Content curators collect, organize and deliver published content that’s relevant to you or your audience to help you grow a following. They’ll usually deliver content for your social platforms, blog and email newsletter on a weekly or monthly basis. Normally, this is content that’s been published before in online publications and may be tweaked a bit to fit your branding, but it’s not unique to you, exclusive to you or bylined by you.

The implementer

Implementers take your documented strategy and execute the content creation. It’ll normally be a network of freelance writers who turn around articles based on your parameters, such as cost, quality and time. This is a good option for companies looking to churn out high quantities of average-quality content very quickly.

The partner

Content marketing partners handle everything from strategy development to content creation, editing, publishing, distribution and analytics, and they act as true partners in your team’s marketing efforts. Partner agencies often assign teams of account managers, content strategists, writers and editors to work with you to understand your company, your audience and your goals and to create content in collaboration with you.

While I’m biased toward a partnership firm as the best kind of outsourced agency relationship (as my team and I built Influence & Co. to act as a content partner), only you and your team know what type of relationship meets your needs.

Outsourcing your content means you understand your team’s limitations and want to be confident that your content marketing is as high-quality and effective as possible. And delegating it to the experts at an outsourced content marketing agency can achieve just that.