Teach me your tricks, oh wise ones

[Flying Mullet]

I do my fair share of image molesting in my spare time, but I'm nowhere near as good as some of my fellow EoFFers. So my question to you, to help out this amateur image editor, and others like me:

Do you have any tips or tricks that you can share that make for cool effects or edits to your images?

I'm sure there's simple techniques or features included in various photo editing applications that can make for some pretty impressive effects. The trick is knowing how to do it. Perhaps everyone can learn a thing or two here!

[Polaris]

It depends what programm you use and what you want to do :) But if you want to change for an example the colours of a picture the secret it's in opacity! :) (I don't make distinction between pros and noobs but well a noob image is smth that is ugly and a pro one is where you looks and everything looks nice, so yeah there are people who are called pro because they smudge and I call them noobs because they're like thousands of works that I've seen!) Where you have the difference between a so called "noob" and others is that noobs use a lot of green or blue all over the image and it's not balanced! And opacity allow us to harmonize!

And opacity exists in Photoshop and GIMP! :)

Btw in Deviantart there are great tutorial for photo changes (not banners just photos) whee you change the colours and look natural! I think that for GIMP it doesn't exists but I can make a small one later if anyone is interested.

[Flying Mullet]

But if you want to change for an example the colours of a picture the secret it's in opacity!
That's exactly the stuff I was thinking of. I've never thought to set the opacity of an image over a background of a certain color (as I'm assuming you're talking about) to give that image a certain color hue.

Very cool. Keep them coming! :)

[Miriel]

I seriously cannot recommend enough, the You Suck at Photoshop (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M) (there is some profanity here, so if you're offended, stay away!) series on YouTube.

It's hilarious and the tricks that are taught are really useful. Watch the videos! ALL THE VIDEOS!

I think my best friend in Photoshop is the layer blending options and also the opacity. Changing the opacity back and forth can really make a difference in the seamlessness of whatever image you're trying to manipulate.

[Captain Maxx Power]

Real Men Use MSPaint (tm).