In This Issue

  1. Welcome
  2. This Month's Tutorial
  3. Resources

Welcome
I want to personally welcome everyone to the our first newsletter. As some of you may already know, even though the name of the group is "St. Jacob Photoshop Users Group", you do not have to even live in Illinois to be in the group. The focus of this group is to share my knowledge (and that of others) with as many people as I can. I have been using Photoshop since version 3 (current version is 8 or CS2 for those not following the upgrade cycle). The product has changed considerably since then.

Each newsletter will include a tutorial and some tips. If you have something you would like to learn more about, let me know. I will tend to focus on items that exist in most versions and will mention anything specific to the newer versions.


This Month's Tutorial
This month I will focus on an item that has been around since version 5 - the Web Photo Gallery. If you have ever taken a bunch of photos and then wanted to make it available on the web quickly then this tool is for you. The first step is to make a copy of your photos into a working folder. In this example, we will just create a folder on the desktop called sample. For the destination folder, create another folder on your desktop (or wherever) named output. Once you have a group of photos from your camera copied into the sample folder, we will be ready to start. Please note that my screenshots are from Photoshop CS2 and if you have another version, yours will look slightly different and options may also change but the basic functionality will still be there.

Click File and then click Automate and then Web Photo Gallery


Now you wil see something similar to the following picture. You can scroll through the styles and it will show you samples of what the layouts look like. Depending on which version of Photoshop you have these will be different. For example, I used "Flash Gallery 2" for this page. You can fill in the E-Mail field and it will add an E-Mail link to the web gallery so people can contact you (probably not a great idea unless you want some C!@L!5 or V1AGR@ offers). I just leave it blank for mine. Once you have selected the style to use, make sure you select Folder for the Source Images and you tell it which folder to use by clicking browse and point it to the desktop/sample folder. You will now click on Destination and choose the desktop/output folder.

If you click on the dropdown for Options, you will notice there are several choices here. I will not go through them all, I will just let you know that this is where you add your page text, colors and photo sizes (thumbnail and large) for the web pages. Feel free to experiment. The next step is to click OK and Photoshop will work its magic - depending on how many photos you have, this can take a minute or two. Once it finishes, it pops open the project into a web browser like this:

I chose "Dotted Border - White on Black" for my style. Depending on how many pictures you have, there may be more than one page. If you click on the thumbnail, the full size (as specified under options) image will appear:

If you are running these locally on Windows XP SP2, you may get a warning about Active content - you can ignore this, the pages just use javascript to navigate. If you do not like the way it looks or want to try different options, create some more destination folders and try it as many times as you want - it does not touch the original photos. Once you have found one you like, all you have to do is rename the folder to something meaningful and post it to your website. If you do not have a website, contact Bob at www.activeservers.com and tell him Erin sent you - his prices are great and he has been my web host for about 8 years now.

Well there you have it - how to quickly and painlessly get all those vacation pictures out on your website for family and friends.


Resources
Here is where I will tell you about resources for learning Photoshop. My favorite is the National Association of Photoshop Professionals - they have a monthly magazine called Photoshop User that runs for $10 (I know it is high, but it is packed with excellent info) - if you like it, do yourself a favor and sign up as a member. Membership for one year is only $99 and in addition to getting 12 issues of their magazine, you will often get a free dvd, booklet and cd filled with training videos, samples and tutorials. You also get various discounts on car rental, services at Kinko's, as well as a website filled with thousands of tutorials. If you think you might be interested, pop on over - you will love it.


Closing
Well, this wraps up the first official newsletter - I hope you found it to be helpful and interesting. I am willing to go in whatever direction everyone wants just take a moment to send me your thoughts. Was this too basic? Too advanced? Just right? Drop me a line at stjacobphotoshop@klompy.net and let me know.

Thank you very much.

PS - I have not yet figured out how I will do the physical meetings yet, one possibility is netmeeting or something like that. Another thought I am considering is videotaping some tutorials and putting them out on the website.

Reset Colors
If you have been working with custom colors for your foreground and background colors, you can quickly reset them to black and white by pressing the D key on your keyboard.

Better Safe than Sorry
If you plan on making some changes you are unsure about, duplicate your layer and hide the copy just to be safe (in photoshop everything is on a layer - think of it like an onionskin but layed out flat. You can set varying transparency on all layers to get different effects). Simply drag the layer to the "Create a new layer" icon in the bottom right of the layers palettte (just left of the trash can). The duplicate layer will appear as "layername copy" then you can just click the eyeball to the left of it. If you screw up your original layer, you can just delete it (drag it to the trash icon or right click the layer and select "Delete Layer") and then make your copy visible again and start over.

Hide the Layers
If you are working with numerous layers and want to quickly hide all but one, hold down the Alt key and click the eyeball next to the one you want visible - poof - all the other layers are then hidden. To bring them all back simply repeat the process a second time.

Create a New Layer
There's no need to keep clicking the New Layer button in the Layers palette to create a new layer. Simply press Ctrl-Shift-N and the new layer dialog will appear. If you want to duplicate the layer (or new layer with just the pixels currently selected) you are working on, press Ctrl-J.

Rename your layers
To keep track of what your layers are, give them names other than the defaults. To change their names, simply double click the name and type a new one.

Scanning loose photos
If you have been recently tasked (as I have) with scanning in a ton of loose photos for archiving, the following should make your day. Instead of cutting out the photos one by one and straightening them and saving them individually, simply make sure the scanned sheet of photos is the active image then click File, Automate, "Crop and Straighten Photos". Within seconds, the pictures will all be seperated and straightened - the original will of course be untouched.
©2006 St Jacob Photoshop Users Group
No refunds, No exchanges, and certainly No No No do-overs.
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