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Golden Spirals & Triangles in Photoshop| GoLive to Dreamweaver | Stand on My Chair? No Way.

CATEGORIES: Living In Layers | RC | February 19, 2008

So, I totally think you should spend this morning the way I spent my morning – sipping your coffee and checking out the latest video from Joe McNally on Youtube. OK.. forget about the fact that he’s an accomplished photographer, forget that he has a great book out – this just took guts.. lots of it. I can’t stand on top of my chair without feeling like I’m going to have a nosebleed. Forget about standing on the Empire State Building. A great video to watch, just to see the pure determination for the sake of art.

Speaking of Art. We’ve gotten a lot of really cool feedback on the Golden Spiral shapes that Corey and I talked about on Layers TV this past week. If you haven’t checked that out – it’s the video player over in that section to the right.. go and give that a click – you won’t be disappointed.

Now.. we have a cool Golive to Dreamweaver thing – as well as a cool way to not only access the Golden Spiral, but the Golden Triangle in Photoshop. Want to check it out? You know you want to.. and remember to tell us what you think in the Comments!

GoLive to Dreamweaver by Lynn Grillo
Lynn Grillo has got a really cool column about how to get from GoLive to Dreamweaver. Now, there are still people out there using GoLive, and it seems like there are still plans for having it out there as a stand alone application. I’ll say this though – Dreamweaver rocks.. you want to be here.. and Lynn is the person to take you there. Check out her column by clicking on the link below:

GoLive to Dreamweaver – Lynn Grillo

Using the Golden Spiral and Golden Triangle in Photoshop

This past week, Corey did go over how to use the Golden Spiral shape in some compositions, and a lot of you wrote in asking a little more about actually setting it up, and finding it, in the event you didn’t want to go through the tutorial Corey wrote about making it. I figured I’d throw in some extra ways to sort this out.

For the Golden Spiral
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1. Get the shape from the Adobe Exchange:
Click on this link and you will be brought to the Illustrator Exchange. There is no reason not to be a member – it’s free stuff for your Adobe apps. Once you sign in, you can download the AI file (Mac users may have to strip the .ps file that it appends on the download)

2. Open the file in Photoshop and accept the 300 dpi options (Like the graphic I have attached here)

3. Once you have the graphic loaded, Command-click on the Layer 1 to take all of the contents and turn them into a selection (This will be the spiral, and a bounding box around the spiral)

4. In the bottom of the Paths palette, click on “Make a Path from Selection”

5. Once that is completed, click on Edit>Define Custom Shape, and give it the name “Golden Spiral”

For the Golden Triangle
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1. Download this picture of the golden triangle

2. Open this image in Photoshop

3. Use the Magic Wand to make a non contiguous selection with a tolerance of 2 (uncheck Contiguous) of the black area.

4. Select>Inverse to make a selection of just the bounding box, and triangles.

5. Hide the Background Layer

6. In the bottom of the Paths palette, click on “Make a Path from Selection”

7. Once that is completed, click on Edit>Define Custom Shape, and give it the name “Golden Triangle”

Using the Golden Spiral and Triangles is easy. You can drag out the shape, constraining its proportions using the tool options for the Custom Shape tool. Once you have the portion of the image that you would like to keep, use the Crop tool to create a crop area around the bounding box of the Custom Shape. After committing the crop (Enter), delete the Custom Shape Layer.

For any pictures that have sharp lines and shapes that are angled.. the Triangle will work great.

For organic shapes and things that curve, the spiral will work great.

If you’re wondering where I got the Triangle from? It’s actually a really, really, really underexposed image that I took over the weekend by mistake. That image kind of inspired this whole thing. See, Lightroom has Spiral and Triangle overlays. It made me think, “If I can take a screenshot of the triangle overlay on black.. ” The rest is this tutorial.

Make sure you use the comments and tell me what you think! We really appreciate it.

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