Colour Your Worlde

Color consistency is key; in design, when building brand recognition, in conveying your message, for graphic output...the list goes on and on. The Pantone system is the recognized industry standard of color matching. Having that language of color translated and organized has be come an invaluable resource to a number of businesses, including shops like ourselves who deal in accurate color representation every day.

This video gives a behind the scenes look at the Pantone process. The video was made by Base in conjunction with the release of The Plus Series, the next generation of the classic Pantone Matching System. The Plus series added 566 new colors to their matching system, a total of 5,024 in their library.

Knowing how to create and work with layer masks in Photoshop can save you time and offers control and versatility when editing and manipulating images that is superior to just using selections. For some reason layer masks have the reputation of being difficult to do, which is simply not true. Mastering this technique can aid immensely when prepping images for printing; selective color adjustment, lightening, and sharpening can often make the image pop and come to life when printed.

Jay Kinghorn for Photo.net shows you how to get started. He explains exactly what layer masks are, the benefits and how they work, and why it is a better workflow than just using selections of an image.

Harnessing the Power of Layer Masks

Layer masks are one of Adobe Photoshop’s most powerful, yet least understood features. In this tutorial, I’ll demystify layer masks by highlighting the benefits of incorporating layer masks into your image correction workflow and demonstrating the use of these tools in common, real-world situations. This tutorial is designed for photographers who are comfortable working with layers in Photoshop and have at least a basic familiarity with Photoshop’s painting and drawing tools, including the Marquee selection tools, the Brush and Gradient tools.

You can use layer masks most effectively if you first understand what they are and what they do. Layer masks allow you to selectively hide, or mask, portions of a layer while allowing other portions of the layer to show through. For example, you may use a mask to make the background of an image transparent. This allows a designer to combine the photo with text or graphics in a page layout program.

More commonly, photographers use layer masks for applying changes to specific portions of an image without affecting the rest of the photo. Similar to burning and dodging in the wet darkroom, these changes give you tremendous control over your photos. These selective corrections can bring a photo alive, add depth, improve contrast and shape your photo in subtle, yet powerful ways.

Photographers also use layer masks to composite multiple images for an entirely new creation, or, blend multiple exposures taken of the same scene to expand dynamic range, blend multiple white balances, or extend the depth of field.

Understanding how to use layer masks is one of the keys to unlocking the true potential of Photoshop. Once you’ve mastered the use of Layer Masks, the doors to Photoshop are wide open for you to explore.

The people at HandMadeFont.com combine photography and typography to create custom font sets. They take everyday objects, like toast, rose pedals, oil, grass, and even cheese to construct unique letters, then photograph them to transfer the font sets in to a digital format. The result is not your dad's Helvetica. These real life fonts are available for purchase to be used in your own graphic design.

Paulo Canabarro interviewed brothers and founding members of HandMadeFont.com, Maksim Loginov and Vladmir Loginov, for Abduzeedo to find out more about their font creation process.

You guys have done endless number of different and very unique hand made fonts. What inspires you the most to keep creating all these different fonts?

If we only knew, where they come from (especially the genius ones), we would be very rich. But in our case it is more simple. “In the beginning, there was a word...“. Every object has its own name. Every word consists of some letters. It means, that every word implies some shape. For example, imagine a pencil on a table. We take a lot of pencils and compose a word "pencil“. This is a beginners level. But, going further on, if we compose a word "painter“ using the same pencils, then we receive the shape of the word "painter“, which expands itš sence.

We’re all surrounded by the lots of different things, which can be made into a font. Often we follow our instincts rather than just logic in choosing something. It’s like a man scratching the name of his beloved on some tree never thinks what font he’s using. Same with us. First we make something, than look at the result. Sometimes it’s no good , but usually we are happy with the first choice. It has more integrity and the spirit. The quirkiness of our fonts and the raw feel to it is important to us. It has energy.

On line stock image agencies are a great resource for designers when creating large format signage, advertisements, and displays. Getting the right image can be as easy as the click of a button. Finding an image that is appropriate for large format output can be more challenging.