Efficiency. As comic creators, we’re all striving for it. With full-time jobs, family, and everything else life throws at us competing for our precious art time, being more efficient means getting more done. My goal with these Photoshop articles is to help you streamline your process to get more work done in the same amount of time – or even less.
I began with an article on using Photoshop Actions in your workflow. Today, I want to talk about using some of the more powerful features of a world class application like Photoshop. Specifically, creating shadows and effects nondestructively. But what is nondestructive editing? Let’s have Adobe explain it:
Nondestructive editing allows you to make changes to an image without overwriting the original image data, which remains available in case you want to revert to it. Because nondestructive editing doesn’t remove data from an image, the image quality doesn’t degrade when you make edits.
The key here is keeping your image data intact. Instead of working over a color layer with all kinds of shadows and effects only to find out you don’t like it, I’m going to show you how to preserve the integrity of your base layers and then add on anything you like. If it doesn’t come out right, you’ll be able to modify or revert at will – as many times as you want, and as far into the future as you want, too!
Enough words, take a look at the two embedded screencasts. I apologize if some of my instruction is a little rough or hurried, I was attempting to make it within the time limit (and failed anyway!) If you have questions, please let me know and I will be glad to explain or elaborate. The good news is the screencast can be viewed in fullscreen HD (I suggest you watch it that way) so you can get a good look at what’s going on.
Again, post any questions you have in the comment section and I will be glad to address them.
Part One
Part Two
While I use Gimp, I already use layers in my workflow, but doing the shadows by filling with the shadow colour then painting the mask is not something I thought of doing. I have been painting grayscale on the shadow layer itself with the layer set to multiply, but I believe if I follow the method shown here it could be an improvement to my artwork.
I can’t sing the praises of non destructive editing loud enough! I use adjustment layers and constantly create a workflow that allows me to make changes on just about everything i do. You just never know when something that seemed like a great idea now, turns into a bad idea 5 minutes or 5 weeks later.
i’m curious if anyone knows whether using layer masks vs. just separate layers adds to file size. I work non-destructively, except that I don’t use layer masks often, I just work on separate layers using clipping masks.
Just follow this steps.1. Go to Image-Adjustment-Desaturate.2. Select History Brush Tool’.3. Click the rose part.(use Zoom tool to make it acatcrue)Tip. Your friend must have done some thing to the black and white part to make it look more stylish. If you wanna do it, go to Image-Adjustment-Color Balance.In here you can control the black and white color. Do this before step2.Good luck!
I suspect that the difference is really negligible, unless you are really pressed for memory on your machine. In any event it has always seemed to me based on past experience that it is really what you are doing – like applying a busy filter or painting a lot of pixels – vs. number of layers/operations that really adds to filesize. I’ve seen UI psds that have literally thousands of layers in them. I’d never worry about using too many layers or masks if it helps you do what you need to do.