543 Creating a better screen shot

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week I'm gonna show you at least one way to create what I'm calling the perfect screenshot. So the idea is this, we're working on a new version of our Photoshop channels and mask book, which I hope to make available at deke.com. And at one point I'm trying to show how to get good results with the Quick Selection tool. So here's an actual screenshot, but it's also a very bad one, because we're not honing in on the action. We've got way too much visual distration in the form of the panels and the toolbox and we can barely see either the Quick Selection cursor right here or the selection outline.

And it gets even worse, because I need to be able to reproduce this thing at 30 picas wide, at which point you can't make out anything. Which is why in this movie I'm gonna show you how to create your own custom cursor, as well as a modified and enhanced selection outline using a few clever applications of shape layers inside Photoshop. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, just to recap, here's that conventional, but terrible screenshot, and here's the really great one, complete with marching ants and brush cursor.

And here's how it works. The first thing you need to do is select the area around which you wanna trace the marching ants. Now you can do that using the Quick Selection tool, but it is a little bit of work. And so just to save some time I've saved a selection in advance. And you can load it up by going up to the Select menu and choosing the Load Selection command. And then you'll see this Channel called ground, which is just fine, in which case, click OK. And you'll get your selection outline. Now it'd be great if you could trace a pattern around a selection, but that's not possible in Photoshop, so instead we need to convert this selection to a shape layer.

And you do that by going up to the Window menu and choose the Paths command, which will bring up the Paths panel, then drop down to this icon right here, Make work path from selection, and click on it. Alright, now you don't need to save this path, because we're not interested in keeping it, it's just an intermediate step in the creation of a shape layer. So go ahead and switch back to the Layers panel and then, this is a little bit weird, but this is how it works, with the path selected you go up to the Layer menu, choose New Fill Layer, and then choose Solid Color. And I'm gonna call this layer black, because it's gonna serve as the black dashes in the marching ants, and I'll click OK.

And in my case that fills the selection with black, which doesn't matter, just go ahead and click OK. We actually wanna get rid of that fill. And to do that you wanna switch to the black arrow tool, which Photoshop calls the Path Selection tool, but it has the keyboard shortcut of A for arrow, and then go up to the Fill swatch up here in the options bar, click on it and set it to None. Next what you wanna do is change this line weight value to whatever thickness you want for your marching ants. Now I'll be printing this image at a very high resolution, so I'm gonna change the line weight to five pixels, you might wanna go with more or less depending on your taste.

And now I'm gonna zoom in, 'cause I want you to see something here. Notice how messed up these miter joints are right here. And to fix them what you wanna do is press the Shift key and click on this path outline right there in order to deselect it, and that's gonna leave a few micro path outlines that we don't want, and so to get rid of them just press the Backspace key or the Delete key on a Mac. Now go up to this bar icon up here in the options bar, click on it, and change the Align setting to center, like so, and then change the Corners from miter, which is giving us these spikes, to either bevel or round.

I'm gonna go with round, but that's ultimately a matter of taste as well. Alright, believe it or not, that takes care of the black dashes in the marching ants, now we need the white ones. And you make them by first creating a copy of this layer, and the easiest way to pull that off is to press Control + J or Command + J on the Mac. Now I'll go ahead and rename this layer white, and I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac. And now click on this Stroke swatch right there and change it to white, either by selecting the swatch from your list of Recently Used Colors, or by clicking on the white swatch, which is included with your images by default.

Now if that doesn't work for you, notice my stroke is white, but it's appearing black on screen, that's just a display flaw, but everything's gonna work out great. If I click on this bar once again and click on the More Options button in order to bring up these Stroke options right here. And now I'm gonna turn on the Dashed Line checkbox and notice now we're seeing our white stroke for whatever reason, and I'll change the Dash value to six and I'll change the Gap value to six as well. Now you can change these values to anything you like, however, you need to know that they should both be the same if you're going to have even black and white dashes.

Now I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change and I'll hide this panel. And so the great thing about this technique is you're making the dashes follow the stroke, which is not otherwise possible inside Photoshop. Alright, now I'll go ahead and zoom out here a little bit and I'll combine these two layers into a group by clicking on white and Shift clicking on black, like so, and then I'll bring up the Layers panel flyout menu and I'll choose New Group from Layers. And I'll call this group selection, let's say. Alright, now I wanna draw the Quick Selection tool brush cursor.

And I'm gonna do that by selecting the Ellipse tool from the shape tool flyout menu, and then I'll just click right about here, let's say, to bring up the Create Ellipse dialog box, and I'll change both the Width and Height values to 200 pixels. Of course, those values are up to you, but these are the ones I'm going with, and I'll click OK. Now I don't want this guy to be filled like this, so I'm gonna click on the Fill and change it to None. And then I will change the line weight value once again to five pixels, so that I'm using a consistent line weight throughout.

Alright, now I'm gonna zoom in. At this point you may know if I was really using the Quick Selection tool it would have a little cross in the middle of it. It's really a plus sign that indicates that you're going to add to the existing selection outline, and the easiest way to draw that plus sign is with not the Line tool, but rather with the Rectangle tool. That's just gonna give you more control. The Line tool just draws very skinny rectangles after all. And it's advantage is that you can draw lines at an angle, but if you wanna draw them perpendicularly, as we do, then the Rectangle tool's the better way to go.

And now I'll just click any old place in the image window and I'll change the Width value to 50 pixels, this is gonna be the length of the line, and then the Height needs to be five to match the line weight of the ellipse. At which point I'll click OK in order to create that very tiny rectangle. Now if you wanna move it around you can press and hold the Control key or the Command key on the Mac to get the black arrow tool on the fly, then release the key once you get your rectangle in position. And it's a good idea to go ahead and turn on the Align Edges checkbox, by the way, to make sure that you're drawing inside the pixel grid.

Alright, now I wanna rotate a copy of this rectangle, and I'll do that by pressing a keyboard shortcut, 'cause this is the only way to go. You press Ctrl + Alt + T, or Cmd + Opt + T on the Mac, there is no command equivalent. And now you go up to the options bar and change this rotate value to 90 degrees, like so, and then press the Enter key or the Return on the Mac a couple of times to apply that change. Alright, now I'm gonna go ahead and rename these layers. I'll call this guy plus and then I'll call this one brush. Now obviously we need to align the plus sign inside the circular brush cursor.

It's tempting to just grab them both and then align them together, but if you do that then you'll run the risk of upsetting the fact that the cross is aligned to the pixel grid. So what you wanna do instead is press the Control key or the Command key on a Mac, and click on the thumbnail for that plus layer right there to load it as a selection outline, and then with the brush layer selected switch to the Move tool, which you can get by pressing the V key, and then go ahead and click on the center align icons, both Align vertical centers and Align horizontal centers.

And you'll end up with this absolutely perfect alignment. At which point go ahead and press Control + D or Command + D on a Mac to deselect the image. And then let's go ahead and group these guys by Shift clicking on the plus layer, returning to the Layers panel flyout menu, choosing New Group from Layers, which offers you the advantage of naming the group as you create it, and I'll go ahead and call this guy cursor, and click OK. And we now have our nicely organized cursor in one group and selection in another. And that is at least one way to create a better screenshot that hones in on exactly those details you wanna highlight and makes them obvious as well here inside Photoshop.

Alright, now the thing about that trick is at least where the selection outline is concerned it involves a lot of rote steps, the kind of stuff that gets pretty tedious to perform after a while, which is why if you're a member of lynda.com I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to save off this thing as an action that you can play back very reliably in a fraction of a second. If you're waiting for next week, well this is gonna seem a little bit weird, but it's actually totally great, I'm gonna show you how to draw a bacterium, complete with a gradient mesh inside Illustrator.

Who wouldn't wanna do that? Deke's Techniques, each and ever week, keep watching.