Photoshop – Fill with colour quickly

Photoshop

Back in the day I used PaintShop Pro and I was really comfortable with it. During those years I had a brief fling with Photoshop 7 which left me feeling utterly confused with her seemingly counterintuitive tools.

One of those things I seemed to do really often was fill stuff with the Paint Bucket tool. In PaintShop Pro, this seemed to work as expected and I got so used to the way it works; you just set it to 100% Tolerance to fill the whole layer or selection.

The Paint Bucket tool just doesn’t work that way in Photoshop – in fact it is very similar to the Magic Wand – it just fills with colour the same way it would make a selection. I had some retraining to do if I was going to grow up and move in with Photoshop…

I found out it’s actually quite simple to fill a layer (or selection) with colour in Photoshop – just hold down Ctrl and press Delete to fill with the Background Colour or hold down Alt and press Delete to fill with the Foreground Colour!

Cutting out the Background

Cutting out the Background

Photoshop is a powerful tool and a bit like my human brain;  I know how to use only about 10% of it.

Much of this is because there are lots of tools and techniques that I don’t use often enough to remember all the steps required to achieve a certain result.

Clicking the Magic Wand and pressing delete is easy. Some images lend themselves well to the Magnetic Lasso Tool. But there are some images that end up looking like you cut them out with pinking shears no matter how good your Lasso and Magic Wand skills are.

Particularly troublesome are images where you need to cut around animal fur and human hair. The following is a dual tutorial that I found and bookmarked. Rather than using a layer mask, the author uses a colour channel and the burn tool to create a selection that really works well with the right images. Lets go!

http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/handy-techniques-for-cutting-out-hair-in-photoshop

My WordPress CMS Checklist

WordPress Checklist

WordPress is great. I’ve tried Snippet Master, PageLime, Joomla, Drupal and various other CMS packages but for some reason I ‘clicked’ with WordPress.

One of the main challenges with creating a CMS website for a client is making the administration back-end or ‘Dashboard’ as user-friendly as possible. A lot of CMS packages overwhelm the end user with too many options and some are just not powerful enough for many websites.

WordPress started out as a Blogging platform and is still very much a blogging platform. Through the various releases of WordPress we can see where it has developed into something a more like a CMS but it is still not a back-end I’d want to hand over to 90% of my clients in it’s standard configuration.

One of the best (and worst) things about WordPress is the Widget functionality. It’s really cool how you can stick widgets here and there on ‘widget-ready’ themes but on the other hand you don’t really want to have to tell your client; “Yes you can put that special offer in the sidebar but you have to learn HTML and CSS to format it the way you want” and “Sure, if you want an image there you’ll have to type the whole path. You want it linked too? OK, just put in one of those little left-angle brackets, then type in A HREF=….”

You see what I mean. YOU know what you’re doing. YOU don’t mind inserting bits of codes into little boxes. Your client on the other hand probably won’t be very impressed with the hoops they have to jump through.
Again, Short Codes, while very handy, are still not completely ready for the end user that wants pure WYSIWYG editing…
People want to see what they are editing, not a piece of code that says your (whatever) will appear here. Continue reading »

OpenCart | Canonical URLs

We recently decided to setup an OpenCart store for one of our clients. This comes after years of using CubeCart as an off-the-shelf shopping cart solution for various other clients. For various reasons that I won’t go into here, we decided to go with OpenCart instead.

One of the things I like to do with any site is to make sure we are using Canonical URLs.
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here is a quick description:

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages . *

For example, I like my URL to be in the format ‘www.example.com’ rather than ‘example.com so I use Apache’s MOD REWRITE function to make it change automatically when someone types in the URL without the ‘www’.
This can be helpful for Search Engine Optimisation amongst other reasons. More info at the end of the post. Continue reading »

Welcome to HobWebs!

Wow!
Hard to imagine that hobwebs.com is twelve years old.

HobWebs Limited started out that long ago in St. Lucia, when we started our foray into the then new world of St Lucian Web Design.

The company is all but gone now and it is time to finally take down the outdated site that was here and use the domain name for something a bit more current.

We’re going to put some (hopefully useful) information on here as we come across it. You know, all those things you spend hours trying to find out then wonder where you found the info next time you need it and end up spending another couple of hours researching it all again!

So basically it will be a dump for how-to’s and tutorials on everything from Web Design to Photoshop and all the hardware that powers it all. If you find it useful, please leave a comment! If you’re a spammer; move along.

Cheers,

Julian