How-To Make A Lightsaber in Photoshop
April 9th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
We can do anything in Photoshop nowadays from swapping people to making them disappear. When I read this technique to make a lightsaber from Star Wars, I just had to share it.
From Photoshop 911 comes this great little technique to take your Adobe to the next level:
Create the object you wish to make the light sabre. Use the Pen tool to create a simple straight path. This will provide the structure for the “light” …
Now, set a soft-edged brush to the appropriate size to be the thickness you need for the sabre.
Now, you’ll use the Stroke Path command to paint the sabre. The Stroke Path command allows you to create a paint stroke (using the current settings for your painting tools) that follows any path.
Start a new layer. When you stroke a path, the color values appear on the active layer. Make sure the layer you want is active before beginning.
1. Select the path in the Paths palette (Cmd/click or Ctrl/click).
2. Click the Stroke Path button at the bottom of the Paths palette. Each click of the Stroke Path button builds up the opacity of the stroke and in some cases makes it look thicker.
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Building A Printer-Friendly PDF File
March 5th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
When building a “for print” PDF file properly, you want to use the PDF Writer in your printer Dialog box. This converts your file to a postscript first and then converts the postscript to a viewable postscript PDF file, at this point you have a compressed completely printer friendly PDF file.
What is a postscript file you ask?
Postscript is the printer language that Apple uses to tell the printer how to print out your page from the program you are using. Apple created this so that all postscript printer files would be compatible to all Mac printers, unlike the PC which uses open architecture Plc printer drivers that are created by the makers of each particular printer Manufacturer and is not compatible to one another, keep in mind that postscript drivers are available for the PC as well.
When using the save as command, all you are doing is saving that Photoshop / Illustrator, etc. file as its raw data program in a PDF viewable file. This method saves all the layers, filters, and transparency information in raw program form and though it looks good on screen it is not necessarily a printable file from Acrobat or though a printer que.
The raw file save as PDF method not only creates a possible problematic print file, it almost always creates an unnecessarily large file. When using the print to PDF writer method, not only is the file contained as a postscript friendly print file but it will most times make what is a 40 mg raw PDF file compress down to around a couple hundred kb, smaller, easier to transport, faster to rip and print, as well as the best method to print.
Or as Matt says “just make the letters bigger.” And Malcolm asks for more pretty pictures.
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