So I want to talk briefly about the clone stamp tool for those beginners who are not overly familiar with the tool. The clone stamp tool for Photoshop is an extremely effective tool for designers who are looking to replicate an area of a picture with specific pixels found elsewhere on the image. By selecting the clone stamp tool which looks like this.

And then taking your cursor over a selected part of the image you want to clone and clicking option+click (mac) then you select those pixels. Once those pixels are selected, you can stamp them throughout the image. This is a great way to hide blemishes, wrinkles or anything else on personal photos, or a great way to add cool effects to images. By replicating specific parts of the image you can create some really cool abstract images like the one below.

Clone stamp has personally helped me in enhancing personal photos, but it also just a really fun tool to play around with. Try it out for yourself!

The first thing that people ought to become familiar with when it comes to photoshop is simple transparency. It was one of the first things I learned and the first that really gets people excited about the capabilities of photoshop. All though transparency is very elementary for most photo editors and something that is possible on many web editing softwares, it’s still something I want to cover.

Transparency all begins with the magic wand tool.

The magic is literally just that – a magic wand that will make anything disappear, just without having to say the whole abracadabra thing. By selecting the magic wand tool you can simply click on something and it will select an outline. See Below.

You can see from the image that when you take the magic wand and select the black background it will select the border of everything in red because it senses that contrast. If you adjust the tolerance at the top of the screen you can adjust the range of the selection and how much it must adhere to the area you clicked. Sometimes you have to increase the tolerance in order to capture the entire image you want to select. In the image above you don’t have to worry about the tolerance because the contrast of the black and red is so easy for photoshop to discern.

Once you have selected the part of the picture you want to remove in order to make the picture transparent (no background), then simply click “delete.” This will remove that selection and leave you with the outline of whatever was not deleted. In the example above, clicking delete would leave you with just the red writing and transparent background.

Make sure to always save your transparent images as .png in order maintain the transparent background.

Hopefully you guys found this useful, and will stay tuned for future posts.