2D Archives

Ramblings, Tips and Tricks around 2D drawing apps such as Photoshop, Manga Studio, SketchBook and the likes.

How to open a layer as a new document in Photoshop

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Sometimes it’s nice to extract a layer from an intricate Photoshop document and turn it into its own isolated document. Here’s how to do it: Select your layer and head over to Layer – Duplicate Layer… This will bring up a menu that lets you choose what you’d like to call it, and most importantly …

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How to use Smart Objects in Photoshop

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Smart Objects are a great way to employ non-destructive editing in Photoshop. The idea is that Photoshop “remembers” what was applied to a layer rather than apply an effect. Take a background image with a blur effect applied for example. You could simply select the layer, head over to Filters – Blur – Gaussian Blur …

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How to display frames instead of timecode in Adobe Premiere Pro

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No matter what preset you select for your sequence, Premiere will always default to showing timecode in your timeline. This will be automatically adjusted to the relevant EBU or SMPTE timecode. Some advice from the Memory Tree Video Production team: “Full frames on the other hand can be very useful for things like animations where …

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How to create editable blurry text in Photoshop

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There is an easy way to create blurry or out-of-focus text in Photoshop using Layer Effects. The text remains therefore perfectly editable. Here’s how to do it: First we’ll create a standard text layer. Pick a font and write something nice, and choose the foreground and background colours as you wish. You should end up …

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Keyboard Navigation in Photoshop

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There are a number of super handy keyboard shortcuts for navigating the Photoshop interface. I keep forgetting them so I wrote them down here as a reference. I’m using Photoshop CC 2014 on a Mac which means that magic trackpad gestures work well for the following: zooming (pinch gesture) panning (two finger drag) rotating the …

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How to define a Pattern (Material) in Manga Studio 5

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Manga Studio has a great feature called Materials. These are akin to Photoshop’s Patterns, but I find they are implemented so much better in Manga Studio. In the olden days, traditional Manga tone artists would cut out small pieces of a pattern out of a larger piece of paper, then stick it to the coat …

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How to define a Pattern in Photoshop

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You can define a pattern from any image in Photoshop and use it as Pattern Overlay later. Simply head over to Edit – Define Pattern and give your new pattern a catchy title. That’s it! There are a few things to be aware of though: most patterns are used as tiles and will therefore repeat. Once …

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12 Procreate Brushes: Stitches and Sequins

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Over the last few days I’ve been exploring how to create custom brushes for the excellent Procreate on my iPad. To make 3D clothing textures look more realistic we needed some stitch brushes. Plenty are available for Photoshop, but scouring the internet I couldn’t find any for Procreate. Here’s my first attempt at some custom …

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How to add effects to a single layer in Photoshop

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Photoshop has a feature called Clipping Layers. It’s extremely useful, but doesn’t quite describe what it does. Besides it’s extremely unintuitive if you’ve never used it before. Among other things it can be used to add an effect to a single layer rather than the entire image, as you would if an adjustment layer is …

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How to remove the Bristle Brush preview in Photoshop

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The Bristle Brush preview in Photoshop is great if you have a large screen, but on smaller setups it can get annoying. It’s easy to switch off if you know where to look. Let me show you where that is: Head over to Window – Brush (or Window – Brush Presets). A window opens which …

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Autodesk SketchBook Pro 7 First Impressions

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If you’ve read my previous article then you know that I’m a big fan of Autodesk SketchBook Pro and its many variations. This summer a new version has appeared which introduces new features and a new licensing scheme which cleans up the jungle of SketchBook versions – at least on your desktop. Or so you’d think. …

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The many faces of SketchBook Pro

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It occurred to me the other day that I now own every single version of Autodesk’s SketchBook Pro family that is currently available. They’re all a little different, and they’re all for different platforms. At the same time, I hardly ever use SketchBook Pro – but knowing that it’s available on every device I work …

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How to fix Brush Lag in Photoshop CC

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Photoshop CC splashBack in 2013 I was trying out the then-new Photoshop CC for 30 days. I wasn’t sure if the upgrade was for me or if I should stick with my trusty copy of Photoshop CS5 (which by the way I own and can use forever and a day, without a monthly license fee… but that’s another matter).

So I’ve installed CC, marvelled at the new look and the 3D tools, made a brush stroke on a new canvas and… what the hell is that?

My stroke was lagging behind by about a second or more until it appeared on the screen. I wasn’t using a complicated brush either, just a bog standard 20 pixel soft edge brush without any Blending Options.

Shocked, perplexed, dissatisfied and smiling to myself, I consulted Google. One user in particular had this problem too, and many more chipped in on a forum thread over at the Adobe Forums and the (now defunct) Photoshop.com. I was glad to hear I was not alone – yet nobody had a solution to this problem.

Yesterday, a lovely representative from the Photoshop Facebook Page got in touch with me and offered help and advice – and ultimately solved my problem. Thanks, Jeff!

Let me share with you what worked for me, perhaps it works for you too.

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Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription Woes: does it really matter?

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Adobe_CS5.5_Product_LogosYou can’t buy any of the Adobe Creative Suite products anymore. From now on you can only “license” any of Adobe’s products for a monthly or annual fee. This includes Photoshop, Premiere, Dreamweaver and all the other CS products we know and love. That’s old news.

What isn’t so old is the bitching and bickering from everybody (including myself) about the idea of being “forced” to shill out small regular payments and pay for “access and incremental upgrades”, rather than “invest big” once and own the software.

While this is certainly a departure from the old licensing model, I wonder: is it really worth losing sleep over it? Let’s examine the options and see if perhaps a monthly subscription is actually cheaper than purchasing a product the old fashioned way.

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How to render with Alpha Channel in Anime Studio 8

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We’ve been playing with Anime Studio 8 Pro and love it – for years I’ve been bombarded with “special offer” emails that told me how amazing this programme was so we finally gave in. I’m glad we did – Julia and I are having lots of fun creating 2D animations.

The included tutorials are great, but I believe they’ve been made for previous versions of the software. Some features have changed, and this is one I’ve had trouble funding on the web:

How to render an animation while retaining the Alpha Channel.

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