Images of round objects found online, are seldom going to be perfectly round, but you can make them so.   What I have done here is Remove Background from the globe, and copied it to a new layer. I've made a Shift drag selection as close to the diameter of the globe as I could get without going ourside it. I filled that selection with black (any colour would do) and clipped the globe copy to it. The frame has gone, but the globe is now perfectly round.  It is obviously missing New Zealand, because there are no maps on which NZ appears.   I then combined the globe copy and black disk as a Smart Object, and used Free Transform to expand it just enough to hide the original, out of round, globe.  You can see I masked out the original globe to make sure none of it was peaking out from behind the round globe.     It's the saort of trick you might use one day, and it least demonstrates clipping masks — which are close to as important as the Pen Tool and work paths. ... View more

You really should have a look at Select > Transform Selection You could even give it a shortcut as it is so useful (I just gave it the Ctrl F8 shortcut to demonstrate) You can nudge the selection with the cursor keys in one pixel increments. You can resize either by draging handles, or with much more control, from the W: H: percentage values in the Options bar.  That's way more accurate than you get by dragging.      ... View more

Hi Doc.  You are still obsessed with Photoshop then. 😉   It's expensive at US$199 but Topaz Photo Ai would probably be ideal for a couple of reasons.   1) It has a reasonably effective Refocus tool, and 2) It has an extremely good upsize tool.  If you start with a crisp original, it will give you a 4X upsize that is almost as sharp as the original.  I've used this a lot with forum posts that upload images too small to work with effectively.  This is my favourite, and most used feature of Photo Ai.+ On top of that is an outstanding denoise tool, and it is also my sharpening tool of choice nowadays.  Superfocus does an amazing job in the example on the Topaz site, but I have not been able to match their results. I have not taken a deep dive into the instructions though, so I am almost certainly not doing it right. One of the things that impresses me the most about it, is how it can rescue old photographs with people in them.  I've seen it do magic tricks in some cases, but I think the Ai is making arbitrary decisions on what to replace blurred features with.  You get a much sharper face, but is it the same person?     Click to expand this and view full size.  Check out that hair the mouth and the glasses frame.  There are small areas that look like they have been set to Dissolve, but you'd be working with a copy, so could mask that out.   ... View more

I am far from sure that I am going in the right direction with this, but I'm thinking you are working on details — possibly zoomed well in — and want to assess those changes while viewing the entire document.  There are a couple of ways I can think of doing this.   1) Is Window > Arrange > New window for [file name] and then tiling the two windows, with one set to View > Full Screen (Cmd 0) and the other zoomed in to work on details.  The second window does not update entirely in real time. i.e. when you make a brush stroke, the new window will update after you finish the stroke.   2) The second requires that you work with Spring Loaded Shortcuts enabled. Make your edits, hold down the H key and move the mouse just a touch. The screen will zoom out to Fit to Screen, and a B&W bounding box will appear showing the extent of the current zoom ratio.   This is intended to make it easy to pan to a new area while keeping the current zoom ratio. You move the bounding box and release the mouse button, and it will zoom in at the new location.  It works just as well to quickly toggle between zoomed in and full screen though.     3)  There is a third option if you have lots of screen space, and that's to work with an oversized Navigator window.  This would work in qa similar way to New window for ..... ... View more

It's still useful to know how we did things before Ai and Generative Fill became a thing.   One idea is to use a brush preset.   Set spacing so each stamp of the brush aligns with the last Set Angle Jitter to Direction so the brush orintates to the direction of the brush stroke, and to keep it nice, Stroke a work path.  You'll need to mask out the start of the stroke to make it tidy.   This not going to work so well with curved lines, because there will be gaps on the outside of the curve, and obvious overlap on the inside, so best to make them straight, and use Free Transform warp to do the curve. Now we need to give it some perspective, which we do with Fade (make each stamp of the brush smaller than the last. Because our spacing is so large, we need very low value for Fade. We are now left with two problems. 1) there is an obvious step with each new stamp, and 2) the stroke has gaps toward its smaller end.  Remember, the overlap shows if made too big.   For the first we need a new preset with some perspective. For the second, we have to compromise on spacing, and make the stroke longer than we need, and mask off the excess. That gets us to here. Place on your road.  Free Transform > Warp > Flag or whatever suits. Set to Multiply and reduce opacity. Grop the two layers and use a layer mask to align the ends.   I have used the same method with brush presets to create rope, chain, bike chain presets.  They all work well, but will not go through tight curves because of the gaps, so try to keep the strokes straight, and FT > Warp to fit the scene. ... View more

I forgot to say check both Apps and Background processes.  It will show as 'Adobe Photoshop' so won't be hard to find so long as the list is sorted by Name.  (You can click on any of the tabs to sort by that column. Click again to toggle between 'a to z' or high/low.) ... View more

I've had a similar issue with Windows 11 when switching between the Release and Beta versions.  If you are using Windows, open the Task Manager (Ctrl Alt Del) and look for Photoshop in the list of Processes. If you see one, select and End Task.   ... View more

8XL  Now that's properly BIG! ... View more

I'd love to see the link Bojan.  The mods are not big on sharing links to personal sites when we consider it spamming, but I think someone like yourself has earned the right to share.  Hmmm...  I just thought... it might not be in English? ... View more

Whay are you trying to do this with a brush preset.   I'm thinking of creating your little Pacman graphic and defining it as a pattern. Thenusing Edit > Fill > Pattern > Place along a path. The next panel is a bit clunky, but it's doable. I've added a stroke to the pattern preset so we can see how it handles overlap   I'm with @Bojan Živković  on this, as in I am not sure I completely understand what you are shooting for.     ... View more

What was the tonal value or colour of the area you defined the brush preset from? If it was anything less than full black (RGB 0.0.0) then a single stroke that overlaps would become darker where it overlaps.     ... View more

I'm wondering if @wekiwis found there was no option to save a layered image as a JPG. If that is what is happening here, go to Preferences > File Handling and check Enable legacy "Save As"   ... View more

Hah!  I'm parsing this image and looking for the castle, but my eyes were locked on the foreground. When my gaze drifted up it was a proper 'Woah!!! Where the heck did that come from?" moment. It literally made me jump.  I love the light on the dragon, and that's one of the better jobs I have seen of fitting it to the background with the overlapping grass and some very nice shading.  I always try to place composited elements partially behind some foreground detail, even if it is just a branch or some grass.  The tiniest bit can give the introduced element depth and believability.      Is the light coming from the wrong direction on the castle?  I think you'll find that is because it is cloudy over there, and the light is being reflected off the mist. 😉 ... View more

They both have sharp points, but I think I know which one is going to win 🙂 Dave By @davescm   This is a stretch, but I imediately thought of this video after reading your post Dave.  It doesn't matter how many times I watch this, I laugh and laugh at the unexpected ending.   WARNING There is an F-bomb @0:36     ... View more

I am using Topaz Photo Ai in both versions with no issues.  I don't know in Photo Ai's Upsize code is the same as Gigapixel, but it seems likely they are similar. ... View more

I'm sorry, this is not going to be helpful, but we usually think those type of artefacts are display issues caused by GPU driver problems, and not baked into the image.  i.e. you can save the image with its blue squares, open and view in another app, and the blue squares not there.   My first thought now, is that copy merge went wrong, and that if you turn off the copy merge layer and turn off each layer below it one at a time, the cause will reveal itself.  That does not have to be a raster layer, but if it was an Adjustment layer I would expect it to reflect the quares in its mask.   If none of that is what is going on here, then I am stumpped for now.  A full res screen shot of your entire workspace showing the layers panel might help.   Hey!  Are you in New Zealand?  I'm at Rapaura near Blenheim. ... View more

Yes.  This SFTW is getting more action than the current one.  Mainly because it keeps getting bumped methinks. ... View more

Not Firefly.  I search for animated GIF with transparent background.  It doesn't matter what size they are. I use the Crop tool to make the canvas huge.  Select all frames in the Timeline and drag in a new background.  Crop, export and you are done.   I like YANDEX for finding the GIFs.  You can filter by format (GIF)   Thw White Background option useful as well, if there are not too many frames.  You have to be careful editing exisiting GIFs, but in this case you can select each layer and Remove Background without it getting its knickers in a twist.   The downside is that YANDEX is quite literally 'The Work of the Devil' (Russia) so some people might need to turn your Pragmatism dial up to eleven.   ... View more

These might be the most messed up images I have seen on this forum in the last 16 years!  The issue are not uniform either, so you are going to need to mask so you can edit area by area.  This is just the central section, and has completely lost the face and other detail of the man in the foreground.  Most of the edit below was done with Topaz Photo Ai, and then some more with Camera RAW.  I started with Denoise, but had to keep going back and increasing the denoise strength as I increased detail. I'm thinking that the airport xray theory could well be right.  There are two types of light leakage problems.  The usual one is when the film is removed from the camera, and put in a pocket while not in its wee case.  The light ingress is via the slot in the canister, and shows as streaks perpendicular to the film's length like below.   The other is via leaks in the camera case, and they are going to show as radiating from the source of the leak.  The problem with this film is highly uniform, which I can see coming from light leakage.  Could it also be due to old film stock or poor processing with old chemicals?   Most likely I would say.   Whatever the cause, I don't see how you could get a reasonably usable result from such badly damaged negatives. ... View more

I'm sure I must be missing something here.  Are people saying that it interupts their workflow having to release the Shift key to move to the start of the next line if it is not connected?  That Doesn't make sense.   ... View more

Unless you have a Feather set in the Options bar... ...it is probable due to changes they made according to the first reply in this thread Re: Changes to Generative Fill - Adobe Community - 15002292   I have no idea if this is still the case.     ... View more

It's not clear what we are seeing in the videos, although we very much appreciate you uploading them.  Only the third video 019.dng shows the image panning, which is what I assume you mean by 'moving'.  We don't see the cursor change to the Hand icon either.  It always shows the Pen tool icon.   Something else I am wondering about is that the paths all close showing the marching ants of a selection.  Are you doing something to make that happen?  We don't see the cursor move to the Load path as selection button at the bottom of the Paths panel.   So, sorry to be a pain, but could you have another go at describing your issue?  Or if anyone else thinks they properly understand it?   I don't think it is going to make any difference in thgis case, but you could try changing Spring-Loaded Tool Shortcuts to on or off depending on its current state.   And I would definitely like to know how the path is closing to a selection?   ... View more

Yes.  I think all of the panels that list presets have a Legacy (Shapes, Patterns, Gradients, Styles, Swatches, Brushes) and More option from the pop-out menu. ... View more

I've mentioned the Michael Nimmess Photoshop Power Shortcuts from MAX somewhere about 2014.  He did a big section on Camera RAW presets that would have been perfect if I am understanding  @SteveJM 's intent here.  Michael's video sadly became outdated after a big ACR update, and Adobe took down the entire video.  I do very little photography nowadays, so have lost interest in those aspects, but I imagine there is still similar capability in today's Camera RAW, and that appears to be what @Conrad_C referred to in his post.   I remember an amazing portrait in NATEX (New Zealand's premiere photo exhibition) about 15 years ago.  It had a gritty atmospheric quality that set it appart.  When I met the photographer asked about his workflow, it turned out to be entirely done with a Lightroom preset.   ... View more

When you say 'Organizer' is this something on your phone, or a Windows app?  Adobe Bridge perhaps? My wife used to have something open on her computer when she plugged in the phone.  It had a dark grey User Interface.  Does that sound like what you are talking about?   If yes, then that would be a Windows thing along the lines of 'What to do when iPhone is connected?' message.  If that link has broken, then it could be reset.  Could it be the 'Apple devices app'? ... View more

That's a cool user name, Hello it's Ana!   One minute you're  the scariest dude on the block, and the next you're reduced to being a toaster. ... View more