Luigison's Training 2.0: Photoshop Magic Wand & Resizing For this training I will be using Photoshop CE, but the task I detail are the same in every version of Photoshop I've ever used. I also have Photoshop 7.0 on this computer and if you have question about any version please repley in this thread and I'll help. For other training threads see the bottom of this post. Also, Gimp has a Photoshop skined version that can do nearly everything just like Photoshop. So if you don't have Photoshop go download a free copy of Gimp to follow along with. There will be a few slight changes, but the general idea will be the same for every task. For a detailed 8 paragraph explanation on how to find, capture, and save the images I will be using in this training see my thread Luigison's Training 1.0: Finding & Capturing Images http://www.dojoofpain.com/redsteel/forums.html?view=posts&forum_id=234&topic_id=43139 . For the purposes of this thread I will assume you either already have the images used here or can easily get them from the links I provide. For my first bit of training I'll show you how I made one of my destop wallpapers. Let's start by opening RedSteel_Temple_02_l.jpg http://media.ubi.com/us/games/redsteel/conceptart/RedSteel_Temple_02_l.jpg that we saved in the last trainging with Photoshop. After opening it I suggest renaming and saving it so you'll always have the original to go back to if needed. I simply deleted the "_02_1" part of the name and resaved it. Since we are making a desktop wall paper and need the background image to be at least 800 x 600 we need to know the size of our current image. Click "Image" then move your mouse pointer to "Resize" and and "Image Size..." For future reference I will write such menu selections as "Image > Resize > Image Size..." See below: http://kontek.net/Luigison/dojotraining/size.PNG Here you'll notice that the image is 800 x 639. On closer inspection of the image you'll probably see white horizontal bars going across the image. Since we need to reduce the image height by 39 pixels let's try removing the those white bars and see what that leaves. To remove those white bars we will use the crop tool. http://kontek.net/Luigison/dojotraining/croptool.PNG Once you've selected the crop tool click the left mouse button while hovering over the first top left non-white pixel of the image and holding the button down drag all the way to the bottom right non-white image. Right-click on the image and select "Crop" if you are happy with your select or "Cancel" to try again. If you accidently did something to the image you can't undo then you'll need to use the "Step Backward" feature of Photoshop. "Edit > Step Backward" http://kontek.net/Luigison/dojotraining/stepback.PNG Using "Image > Resize > Image Size..." you see that the cropped size is now 800 x 548. We wanted a height of 600 so we have a couple of things we could do to achieve that. We could "Step Backward" and recrop so as not to take off as much of the height and leave a little of the white bar(s). We could add back to the height and fill the space left with color, a frame, and/or text. Or we could resize and distort the image. I typically would not pick the later, but it will work okay for this image since we will only be stretching a large image by only about 50 pixels. If this was a smaller image or had a lot of straight lines like a city scape I would not distort the image. On the "Image Size" menu you will need to uncheck the "Constrain Proportions" box. Now the the links that tied the width and height of the images are gone you are free to change the dimensions independently. Type "600" in for the Height and click "OK". The image will be stretch/distorted to 800 x 600. http://kontek.net/Luigison/dojotraining/imagesize.PNG If the image looks fine to you then it's time to save it. If you did not rename the image earlier I suggest you select "Save As" from the "File" menu and give it a new name to save it under. This way you can go back to the original if need to later. Be sure to select an appropriate file type to save it as. (I may do a training thread on file types later if needed.) Don't close the image or Photoshop. You now have a background for your desktop wallpaper that need more to make it a Red Steel wallpaper. For this I used the Red Steel logo http://onnintendo.com/Posts/2006_04/28/1/00001.jpg I mentioned in Training 1.0. Download it (if you haven't already) and open it in Photoshop. Select the "Magic Wand Tool" and click the white space of the Red Steel image making sure not to click too close to the red of the logo itself. http://kontek.net/Luigison/dojotraining/magicwand.PNG Now you have the white background selected, but we want the logo itself so right-click and select "Select Inverse" to switch the selection to the logo. (Note: We did not select the logo itself because the letters are cut and seperated so we would have had to add each part of the letters one at a time.) Looking closely at the outlined selection you may notice that the two white areas around the trigger are not outlined. If we were to paste this image over another one the areas around the trigger would cover the background. To fix this we need to right-click the white areas we want deleted and select "Subtract From Selection". http://kontek.net/Luigison/dojotraining/magicwand.PNG From the main menu select "Edit > Copy". Then click the bar or image of the background we made earlier. (You may want to change tools so you don't use the magic wand on the background. Select "Edit > Paste". If you are happy with this then "File > Save As. If you don't like what you pasted then "Edit > Undo Paste or Step Backward" and go back to fix the logo. My tutorials: Luigison's Training 1.0: Finding & Capturing Images http://www.dojoofpain.com/redsteel/forums.html?view=posts&forum_id=234&topic_id=43139 Luigison's Training 2.0: Photoshop Magic Wand & Resizing (this is it) Luigison's Training 3.0: MS Paint Image Editing (coming soon) Luigison's Training 4.0: Links, Clicks, & HTML (coming soon) If there are any other tutorials you'd like please let me know. If you found this tutorial useful please click the http://www.kontek.net/Luigison/dojotraining/plus1.png at the bottom right of this post. If you didn't like or had problems with this post please reply, PM, or otherwise contact me before giving me negative feedback. Thanks.