[Mike Gondek]

You can draw a straight line with any brush, by holding down shift while dragging.

To make this follow a curve you need to draw a curve with the bezier tool. The with the curve selected, go to the path palette and choose stroke path.

I agree though would be nice to have more tool for better 3D in Photoshop. From your post sounds like you could do this on a curve which is really cool (Aldus freehand long time ago used to have “fountains” – not sure if Macromdia or Adobe brought that feature back)

Can you tell me though if what you are trying to do looks like the blue hipflask type
https://www.comicbookfonts.com/fonts/DL/catalog.html?item=fonts:dl244&sid=0001ndVa74LQBoYTjY0g2i5

I want to make sure ther is no outer bevel layer style or similar solution I can come up with for you.

[Mike Gondek]

Your printer should be responsible for trapping and overprints(that is what they get paid for). Sounds like your printer needs help in figuring out how to turn off overprint.

To take black overprint off of the entire document
Edit >> Preferences >> Appearance of Black
Uncheck “Overprint Black Swatch at 100%”

To check overprint is not assigned to an individual object
Window >> Attributes >> make sure overprint fill is unchecked

To test your seperations
Windows >>> Output >> Seperations preview
Check view seperation, then hide all the eyeballs except the color you want to preview

One thing confused me about your post, as where the black overprinted, you siad it faded. It should have been glossier/darker with the extra colro underneath. Maybe by faded black you meant that it had a color tint to it.

A rich black is composed of 100k 20c 20m 20y or up to 100k 60c 60m 60y. Basically the paper soaks up the ink and adding some extra CMY in somehwat even amounts helps make a black darker.

[Mike Gondek]

Sounds like you want a custom brush, from your recent post, though I do not see that doing a nice job, even if you set spacing to 1%.

To enable a custom brush shape:
Go to you brushes palette, click on brush tip shape on the left and begin to paint

TO creaate your own cusotm brush
Dra a rectangle marque around the artwork you want to use
edit >> Define Brush Preset

You will see a grayscale version of your artwork appear as a brsuh in your brush tip shapes.

Sorry I can’t remember Deluxe paint, that was on my commodore 20 years ago last time I seen it. Let me know if I did not understand your question.

[Mike Gondek]

Start out with the dodge tool set range to midtones or shadows (depending on your image one may work better), and brush over his beard. You can also use the saturate tool, set to desaturate to taek out an residual color if needed.

For wrinkles, I would get an image of an old person, and put this on layer above your original image, and scale/rotate the image in place (temporaily chaneg the mode to difference to help align). Then add a layer mask to hide all and then paint with white on the layer mask to reveal some wrinkles. The wrinkles should of your top layer will need to follow the curvature of your (soon to be Ex-)friends face.

When done you should post your image to https://www.menwholooklikekennyrogers.com/

[Mike Gondek]

Photoshop does not have an option, to do that well, but Illustrator does:

effect >> 3D >> Extrude and bevel (turn up persepective)

object >> envelope distort >> make with warp (thsi will add some curve to extruded object)

If you want to hand draw this in PS, you can drag some guides out, and then use shift in between clicks to draw straight lines. You could later use
edit >> transform >> warp if you want to add curvature to your extruded type.

This is much more of an Illsutrator project, so hope you can use that method.

The font company comicraft (www.comicbookfonts.com) has many fonts and dingbat fonts that have that Kaaapow! Blaaamo! Krunnch! style.

[Mike Gondek]

Try either of these:
effect >> stylize >> round corner

effect >> Distort and transform >> pucker & bloat

Since thee are effects to your original shape you will want to
object >> expand appearance
so that the original shape expands into the shape with the effect (so that you paste a flower spline not a star spline into Cinema 4D)

[Mike Gondek]

Got it working again.

[Mike Gondek]

Wish we could solve all your color management problems with one post, give me all the details you can of comparing 1 image in 2 scenarios (colorspace, file format, profiles, transfer interpolations encoding options, are you comparing printed to your monitor or 2 monitor situations, which software programs)and we will take it one problem at a time.

[Mike Gondek]

Eyecandy has water drops in their Nature package.

You can do this manually but would have to illustrate a bump map, or make one form an exisitng image. You then run Filter >> Distort >> Displace. You would then from the bump map create a shadow and highlight map, and use layer blending modes to apply them to the artwork.

[Mike Gondek]

Use File >> Automate >> Contact Sheet II and chosoe a folder of your source images.

Change units to pixels as it can occasionally lock up if Photoshop has difficulty calculating how to split a pixel.

You can duplicate all your source images and crop them if needed (set your crop tool to something that divides evenly into 1280 x 720, like 128 x 72). This will also speed up processing for contact sheet.

Contact Sheet is great as you can uncheck flatten layers, and get layers for each one so you can animate them.