Another Photoshop tutorial - quick outlining

[opt2not]

Against the popular trend around here lately, this is not a "Give me free art" thread. 

rablack97 asked me a for a method for creating a bleed-line for a cabinet profile, so I figured I'd share with the class as well.  This method is a quick way of getting properly scaled outlines (rather than trying to use the Tranform tool).

1. Start off with your cabinet profile, in this case we'll use a Joust cabinet:



2. Select the contents of the layer by holding Ctrl+clicking on the layer's thumbnail. You'll notice your mouse cursor will change to an arrow and marquee selection square when you hover over the thumbnail.


3. Under the drop-down menu Select->Modify->Expand...  set how much bleed space you want, for this example I chose 10 pixels.


Result:



4. The Expand function scales-out the selection from the edges, rather than the Transform tool where it scales based on the center pivot point of the selection. The caveat is that it doesn't know how to figure out sharp corners, so what I like to do is take my Polygonal Lasso Tool and (by holding Shift) adding sharp corners to my selection.


You should then have your selection look something like this:



5.Create a new layer, and fill it with whatever colour you want.

6. Add a stroke outline to the new layer by double-clicking the layer's thumbnail to access the Layer Styles. Click on Stroke to add a outline to your layer and set whatever thickness and colour you want.


6. Set the new layer's Fill to 0%  (remember, Layer Opacity is different from Fill.  Opacity will effect the transparency of everything related to the layer. Fill only effects the pixels within the layer, so Style effects are untouched).

And the result is this:


This should be an adequate method for most of your outlining needs. If you need a cleaner line, you could also trace the new layer with the pen tool effectively making a vector shape out of it, and adding the stroke then. 

Hope this helps.

[Vigo]

Should I be the asshat who points out that Joust shouldn't need a bleed? 

Nice work! Some good fundamentals of selections in here that is useful on many levels.

[opt2not]

Should I be the asshat who points out that Joust shouldn't need a bleed? 

But what if you got an original Joust cab and wanted to MAME it and slather 100+ characters on the sides, or large head shots of street fighter characters? You'll need a bleed then!
 

[yotsuya]

Genius! I never considered the using the stroke command to do that! Thanks, Opt!