Home E-mail Image Bank ⦁ Introduction ⦁1. Getting Started ⦁ Lesson 2 Airbrushing a B&W photo ⦁ Lesson 3 Selection tools ⦁ Lesson 4 Intro to Masking ⦁ Lesson 5 More with Masking

An Easier Way. I am a little devious with this lesson in that I teach my classes the hard way to do things first and then show them an easier way later. There is a reason. I want you to practice before you land on this page is so you get used to switching tools, using tool settings brush sizes and so forth. Many of the tools in Photoshop all have the same sorts of settings. Even tools that have nothing to do with "painting" use the same types of settings. This "exercise" is the most fun way I can think of to get students accustomed to how things work. By now though, you have probably realized that getting an even color application by switching back and forth between the airbrush and eraser is virtually impossible. Go over a space twice and it looks blotchy. Erase too much, same result. Trying to spray right to the edge of a shape is also difficult right? Ok, lets make life simple. Set your airbrush all the way to 100%. Totally opaque. Spray in an area completely covering it up. Now... look at your layers palette. Behold, there is an opacity setting there too! Take the entire layer down to whatever percentage looks good. Voile! Color choices limited? The swatches palette is OK as a fast way to grab a color but it's selection is pretty limited. There is a better way! Look at your tool palette. Towards the bottom are two large squares. The upper most one is your foreground color and below that one is background color. Click the foreground color square and that brings up your COLOR PICKER window. Now you can fine tune exactly what color you want. The two boxes in that menu, towards the upper right, show you what color you had, and what you are selecting. Move the toggle handle up and down the color bar to change hue. Move the small circle around within the large color window to select a shade. Once your used to using this palette you might not want to bother with swatches again. The finished image with all it's layers. I hope you had fun with my little project. I love watching my students work on this image. No two are ever the same. If you would like to send in a sample of your finished image feel free to contact me. It would be fun to start up a "students" page and post samples there.