Agenda November 16- Adobe Exchange

Now that you've been using Photoshop for a couple months, you have used the brushes and maybe gradients that are available. But you also may have seen features used on Photoshopped pictures that are not available on your computer. Well, thats because you can download new brushes, textures, gradients and actions from the Web and load them into Photoshop. Just like you can download fonts for Microsoft Office programs and put them in the "Fonts" folder on your computer so they'll show up in the font menu, you can download new features and put them in the correct Adobe Photoshop folder so they'll appear when you go to use that tool.

One tool that we haven't talked about is Actions. These are basically like mini programs that you can write (or download already created) that will do several steps to your picture automatically. It is helpful if you like to frequently do the same thing to different pictures. You don't have to remember the steps, just run the Action!

One of my favorite sites to go to for downloading new features is Adobe Exchange. Once you go to this site, you use the same Adobe ID that you created to download the Color Swatches and then you can download whatever you want. There are other sites where you can download them, but we will stick to this reliable one today. There are lots of options on this one site!

Here's how you do it:

• Click Brush, Texture, Gradient, or Action, in the menu on the right and find one that you would like to download.
• Click download button, then you'll have to sign in
• Click "Open" and it will open in WinZip
• Open "My Computer" in a new window. Browse for: C:/Program Files/Adobe/Photoshop CS5.1/Presets/click on folder of what you are downloading (brushes, Photoshop Actions, Gradients, etc.) and drag from WinZip to that folder.

To load brushes:

• Go into Photoshop
• Select Brush tool
• On the part where you select the size and type of brush there is a small button that looks like a circle with a triangle (arrow pointing to the right)
• Select "Load Brushes"
• Find the file you just downloaded (click on my computer on the left and browse for the folder)
• Now your brush should be able to be chosen from the menu.

The other features (textures, gradients) work the same way, you just have to select that tool and find the triangle button to load them. I hope this opens up even more possiblilities for what you can do with Photoshop. We will download one together in class and then you can play with it on your own. Here's the Action and the Brush I'll download to show you as an example. Where you load textures can be a little tricky, so I'll show you how it works by making something look like its painted on a brick wall.