[Keith Carmichael]

Yes, I can, as it will provide temporary relief from my own burdensome responsibilities.

Okay, so two things:
1-The snake is in a tube, the rat is not
2-the edges of the snake background are blurred out

If you just want to blur the edges, it’s very easy and there’s a hundred ways to do it. Here is one. Enter quick mask mode by pressing this button at the end of your toolbar.

Using a large, very very blurry (hardness set to zero) black brush, paint the rat red. (Yes, you will use a black paintbrush, the result will look red.) It should look like this: (where the word “should” is understood to be used very loosely. What on earth is this FOR, anyways?)

Then click the quick mask button to leave quick mask mode. You should see this:

Now that you’ve blurrily selected the edges of the image, you can lighten them any way you want to–i’d go to hue/lum/sat and drive the lightness up. Or use an adjustment layer if you’re a fan of nondestructive editing (i.e, frightened of commitment.)

Now, do you want the rat to actually be IN the tube? Then you have to cut the rat out of its background, which is again, something there are many ways to do. Cutting things out of backgrounds has been a prime concern of human beings since the earliest of ages.

Here is a very basic approach you could try.

-Open both images
-choose the Move tool and drag the rat onto the snake (once again, WHAT are you doing this for?)
-select the layer with the rat, go to layer, layer mask, “reveal all”
-look in the layers panel and select the LAYER MASK FOR THE RAT LAYER, not the rat layer itself (just click the little white square)
-use a soft black brush to paint out the rat’s background.

Good luck!

[Keith Carmichael]

Short answer:
Go to New and create a document that is 72 pixels/inch, 1440 pixels wide and 900 pixels tall.

Long answer:
Hmm…. so by “background,” do you mean that you’re creating desktop wallpaper? If so, the perfect size for the wallpaper is the resolution of your desktop. You can find out what your own resolution is, or just google wallpaper downloads, and you’ll find a lot of common sizes are offered. (1440×900 is a very reasonable size that’s fine for most people, unless they are these people at lifehacker–read some of the comments–who find that size laughable. )

“As the background behind the table”… –AHA!!! You’re creating something for the web! If that’s the case, then again, there is no “standard” size. You’ll have to experiment and look around the web until you get a sense. For example, the white “content” area of this very webpage looks to be about 1000 pixels wide. The blue area, or background, is flexible to the size of the window. (So 1440×900 pixels is a perfectly fine place to begin.)

Bear in mind that it’s meaningless or at best confusing to talk about “inches” unless you’re designing for print media. For the most part, computers care how many pixels wide something is. The resolution, or pixels/inch value, is just a sort of tag telling the computer what size and resolution to print the document if you ever were to print it. Even then you can print it at whatever size you want, the computer just uses pixels/inch as a starting point. Some programs do use this metadata, that’s why it’s a good idea to keep everything 72 pixels/inch (standard resolution for web and screen graphics.) This way also you’ll have a sense of how big your designs really are.

[Keith Carmichael]

I think one of us isn’t understanding the other!

[Keith Carmichael]

Um…. okay, it’s a little hard to tell what your trouble is, but I’m guessing here are my guesses for what’s going on.

-Your image might be grayscale (check image>mode)
-You could be painting on a layer matte by accident. (Look in the layers panel.)
-You could be using a blend mode like Screen, in which light colors can come out white (check the blend mode option on the brush toolbar)
-You could be painting on a LAYER whose blend mode is screen, which would have the same effect.

Um… you could be accidentally erasing?

It sounds like you rendered some clouds and now you want them to be different colors–I would set your brush to Hue mode and pick a color you like, that way you won’t disturb the clouds themselves.

[Keith Carmichael]

You didn’t say if your hard drive is full. By default, your scratch disk is your hard drive, so if your drive is approaching fullness you’ll get an error. Clear off some space and/or designate an external drive as a scratch drive in preferences > performance.

[Keith Carmichael]

.png format maintains transparency. Some people prefer to fill the transparent areas with the same color as the site background.

[Keith Carmichael]

Does pmp stand for pimp master photoshop?

I’m sorry. that was uncalled for.

thanks for the suggestion. The filter looks cool, I’ll check it out.

[Keith Carmichael]

I think I’m slowly getting the hang of this…. so when you select a RANGE of colors from the palate window (and you can only select adjacent colors, right?) Then photoshop is like “okay hotshot, I’ll replace these colors with the points along a linear gradient of your chosing,” right?

Also just knowing about the median filter is a great help. (Gaussian blur, threshold is not so necessary after all…)

THANKS for the tip!!

[Keith Carmichael]

Do you mean that the aspect ratio of the image changes? Just press shift and it will stay locked. Or click the chain link that appears in the tool options bar above the image as you scale.

You can also press alt to keep the image centered as you scale it.

If the image is truly “bending”, then you’re accidentally using warp or skew or perspective, not the scale tool, which is what you want.

[Keith Carmichael]

Well, you’re never going to have the kind of editable curves in PS that you get in illustrator.
But here are some things you can try:

Once you define a path with the pen tool you can stroke it with any brush style you want. (This is a DIFFERENT OPTION than “stroke” from the edit menu which just gives you a simple line of the desired width.)

Select the pen tool and make sure the mode is set to “paths.” (The second button right after the pen tool… just hover around all the option buttons and you’ll find which one it is. If your curves are always filled it’s because your mode is set to “shape layers” or “fill pixels”–“shape layers” is default.)

Select the brush you want. You can play with all the shape and color dynamics to make basically any type of line.

Now WITH THE BRUSH TOOL STILL SELECTED, click stroke (the filled circle at the bottom of the layers panel.) You’ll stroke the present path on the present layer with the desired brush. (If you click stroke with another tool selected, it will function like the “edit” version of stroke and give a simple line.)

As long as you save the path you can then stroke it with a different brush later if you decide that’s what you want. The path will also be editable. But yes, each time you stroke it will be “stamped” on to one of the layers and not editable once that’s done.

Alternately, if you stay in “shape layers” mode, those stay editable forever. You can play around with different layer styles and in effect create different types of lines. Or try a vector mask.