In a previous post I drew inspiration from Police’s Synchronicity album cover to create a Photoshop project. This week the cover for the Nine Inch Nails album, Downward Spiral, caught my eye. If you want to see the original album cover, check it out here – I think it’s a great way to showcase a grungy image such as this graffiti.

Here’s how to create the effect:

Step 1

Open the image and crop it to a square shape.

Add a new layer by clicking the Add New Layer icon at the foot of the layers palette and use the rectangular marquee to drag over the bottom third of the image.

Fill this selection with white by setting the foreground color to white and press Alt + Backspace or Option + Delete on the Mac. Drag the Opacity slider down to around 60 percent so that you can see some of the image through it.

When you’ve finished doing your basic color correction to an image in Lightroom you’re ready to look into sharpening the image. In a previous posts I explained the basics of sharpening and how to use the High Pass Filter in Photoshop to sharpen an image. Today I’ll show you how to sharpen in Lightroom.

Continuing with my ‘tool’ secrets posts, here are 8 secrets of the Photoshop Zoom Tool.

1. Quick toolbar shortcuts

The Zoom tool can be selected by pressing the letter Z – it’s an easy and handy shortcut to remember because it saves you from having to click the Zoom tool to select it.

Being a tourist would be more fun if there weren’t thousands of other tourists getting between you and the shot you want to capture.

When you are visiting a popular location and if you have difficulty getting a photo that is free of people, take two (or more) photos making sure that somewhere in each you have a good clean portion of the sight you are interested in photographing.

On your return you can assemble the images in Photoshop and create one good, tourist free image.

Here’s how to do this with two images. This process relies on a feature called Auto-Align Layers which was first introduced in Photoshop CS3. If you have an earlier version of Photoshop you can manually align the layers but Photoshop won’t do it automatically for you as shown here.

We get a lot of requests for tutorials on enhancing eyes in Photoshop – here’s a video one that hopefully helps those asking:

Of course there are many techniques for most tasks in photoshop – how do you tackle enhancing eyes? Feel free to share your tips in comments below.