Tag Archives: tutorial

Use magnetic lasso tool to highlight sections in photos

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Personally I am a bit of a purist when it comes to photos, but recently I’ve had photos rejected from the sites I upload to and I’ve realized that everyone is photoshopping their photos now.

Here is a tutorial on highlighting a section of the photo and making the rest decolourized. This may work for say a fruit tree, where you want to highlight the strong colour of the fruit, but not the tree.

I started with a sample picture from Photoshop 7. As you will see there is no particular reason to alter this image, but I am using it as a demonstration.

I am wanting to highlight one of the balloons and leave the rest desaturated.

1. Open Photoshop and open the image you want to work with

2. Duplicate your photo and work on the copy

3. Select the magnetic lasso tool.

4. Set it like this: Feather, 0; width, 10 pixels; Edge Contrast, 10%; Frequency, 57. Tick anti-alias. You should already be in New selection mode.

5. Go to Edit>Preferences>Display & Cursors and in the Other Cursors select Precise and OK.

6. Zoom in if need be.

7. Left-click on the part of the photo you wish to highlight for the coloured part. Trace around the edge carefully and left click again exactly where you began. You will see little dots all around the item.

8. Go to Select> Inverse. Now you will see everything selected except the item.

9. Go to Image> Adjust>Desaturate.

10. Deselect and save.

Here is the finished product.

After

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How to make a screen capture tutorial video

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CamStudio
Image via Wikipedia

What do you need

1. A video device. In this case I used a video screen capture program called CamStudio. This is free.

2. A microphone of good quality, if not broadcast quality. I now use a headset with microphone and listen back over the headset.

3. A computer which runs at least XP and has at least 80gbs of memory. Movies are big files.

4. A movie maker program. In my case I used Windows Movie Maker which comes with XP service pack 2.

( I heard on the news that Microsoft has lost its court appeal in the EU over abusing competition rules concerning the fact that Windows Media Player comes with XP. It no longer comes with Windows Vista. I’m wondering about the future of Windows Movie Maker because this also comes with XP)

I decided on my topic and practiced a lot. CamStudio for tutorials on the computer is best set to a small region, rather than the whole screen. The final video makes everything look smaller so the more detail you can capture with the region of screen setting, the better.

You need to speak very clearly, loudly and without spitting too much into the microphone. I fall down here.

It’s okay to make a few jokes or to have the viewer hear how you react as you demonstrate the tutorial. Swear words are not a good idea however.

I have much to learn about using a microphone and about feedback too. Turn off your speakers when using a microphone. Speak into it in as soundproofed a room as possible. Speak clearly. I have an Australian accent and I have been to America twice. They often DO NOT understand you and your audience will be mostly American. We have an ugly accent at times too. After 6 weeks of hearing only American accents, when you arrive at the airport to come home and hear those Australian voices, you feel both at home but also embarrassed by our tones and accents. Not that the American accent couldn’t do with some improving.

Speak more slowly than usual but not too slow.

It helps having been a teacher in the instruction stakes. Assume your audience knows nothing and make sure you do not miss essential steps in your tutorial.

Practice and good luck. If you want to buy a video recording program I recommend Camtasia.

Here is my first attempt. I have bought a microphone since and will be making another tutorial soon.

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How to make a screen capture video

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I have been struggling along trying to make the best of free software to make a decent video tutorial using a screen capture utility.

I use CamStudio which is free and a microphone attached to my sound card. The microphone I began with was something I bought years ago and it just didn’t give a good enough sound output, but I practiced with it anyway. I have now bought a new microphone which is also one to plug into my sound card, with a headset. It is slightly better. It is not radio quality. Some people who are using camcorders, video recorders and so on, plug a radio standard microphone into their recorders, not the sound card.
With CamStudio, I set the region to pan over a specified area of the screen. Capturing the full screen produces a video that no-one can see.

I muck around on the computer talking about the tutorial I’m making. The first one was simply about how to download psp tubes into PSP and how to make an avatar out of a tube and then how to make that an image with a transparent background.

After I have made the video which is in AVI format, I open Windows Movie Maker, which comes with Windows XP 2. I import the video I have made, fiddle around with it: that’s called editing, and save the movie as a .wmv file. There is no free software that I can find that will convert that to SWF or FLA, which are better formats because they keep the size of the movie more stable.

I then save that to my computer (takes an age) and those files are huge and upload them to YouTube and Idea 22. You can see the one I’ve done at YouTube, but the one at Idea 22 is currently being improved with the new microphone. Look back later!

Another method of saving the movie is to save to the DVD drive with a DVD recordable disk. Make sure you get the correct format here too. +R type is what my computer requires, but my other computer requires -R. This is for newer computers.

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