If you’re still manually creating paths to curve text in Photoshop, you’re doing it the hard way. The new Dynamic Text feature in Photoshop 2026 is a total game-changer for graphic designers.
I’ve been testing it out, and it’s essentially one-click magic to get that perfect circular, arc, or bow shape. No more fighting with anchor points—just type, select your shape, and adjust your spacing.
Here is the quick workflow:
Grab your Type Tool and write your text.
Open the Properties Panel (or use the contextual taskbar).
Select your shape (Circle, Arc, etc.).
Tweak the spacing and direction to taste!
If you want to see it in action, check out this breakdown by CG Ian: https://youtu.be/vcIm_p2P7WQ
Ever spend hours masking a subject only for them to look like a floating sticker on your background? That "uncanny" feeling is the worst part of photo editing.
Forget manually tweaking Curves and Color Balance for an hour. Photoshop 2026 has a game-changing "Harmonize" AI tool that does the heavy lifting for you.
The Pro Workflow:
Masking: Use the AI "Remove Background" in the Contextual Taskbar for a perfect cutout.
Harmonize: Click the "Harmonize" button to let AI analyze your background and color-match your subject instantly.
Refine: Not feeling the first result? Just hit "Generate" again to cycle through new lighting variations.
It’s fast, it’s seamless, and it finally lets you focus on the art instead of the busywork.
See it in action here: Watch the Tutorial
Need more quick tips? Check out the rest of the collection at GraphicianArt.com!
Photoshop 2026 just completely killed the 3D text bottleneck. 🤯🛠️
If you’re a designer or freelancer, you know the absolute pain of a client asking to "make the headline 3D." It usually means tanking your computer’s frame rate in heavy 3D apps or spending literal hours manually painting shadows, highlights, and perspective grids.
I finally put the new Firefly Image 5 AI engine in Photoshop 2026 to the test for Graphician Art, and the prompt-driven workflow is a total lifesaver.
Here is the quick, no-bs breakdown of how to do it:
Type your text (thick, bold fonts work best).
Flatten the image (the AI engine needs a raster surface to analyze the lettering bounds properly).
Hit Generative Fill on the Contextual Taskbar.
Type your prompt: make text 3D
Level it up with materials: Add descriptors like 3D text, shiny gold material, realistic reflections to instantly map premium textures without a single 3D coordinate axis.
No lag. No tedious rendering loops. Just clean, production-ready assets in seconds so you can actually get back to creating.
🎨 Want to see the variations populate live on the artboard? Check out CG Ian's breakdown at Timestamp 01:50 to watch the AI build it in real-time.
#photoshop 2026 #3d text photoshop 2026 #photoshop 3d text effects #graphic design #adobe firefly #freelance designer #design tutorial #graphician art
Photoshop Nano Banana is real and I’m losing my mind (in a good way)
So I’ve been fighting photoshop nano banana for two weeks now — yes that’s the actual name, no I didn’t make it up — and I need to tell you something.
Regular generative fill? Trash. Turns dresses into plaid garbage bags. Erases noses for fun.
But Nano Banana 2 under that weird Gemini dropdown? Actually listens.
I tested it on my cousin’s nightmare sequin dress (red, reflective, awful). Typed “black turtleneck.” First try gave me a melted candle sleeve. Forgot to unlock my layers like an idiot. Second try after fixing that? Clean seams. Shadow under her chin adjusted. The Variations panel gave me a third version with a fabric fold near the collar.
I leaned so close to my monitor my nose touched the glass.
My keyboard still has cream cheese on the spacebar from that session. My cat stepped on “Generate” twice. No regrets.
How you do it (fast version):
Window > Contextual Taskbar (why is this hidden??)
Ctrl+A to select everything
In the generative fill dropdown, pick Gemini > Nano Banana 2
Type prompts like you’re talking to a literal but talented five-year-old
The Retry button rerolls the seed — hammer it like it owes you money.
Watch the only useful tutorial I found — timestamped at 49 seconds where they stop talking and just do it:
hello everyone! i was asked to make a tutorial as to how i edited this post so here we are! ♡ i did not save my edit history so i'm gonna try to go by memory ~
(also ~ i use photoshop for all my edits/gifs, so i'm not sure if this tutorial will apply to other editing apps.)
i always start off by adding a high pass filter to my images/gifs. i feel like it clarifies the image details a bit more. to do this you first want to duplicate your layer.
layer > duplicate layer.
next, you will select filter > other > high pass. my setting is set to 24 pixels but you do not have to use this same setting. it's up to you. after this is done, you'll want to change the "normal" to "overlay".
i tend to keep the opacity between 20% - 50% so it doesn't alter the image too drastically, but you can play around with it and see what you like best. flatten the image when you're done.
layer > flatten image.
filter > noise > add noise is another step you can use to make the image clearer - these photos were saved from instagram, so the quality wasn't super great. 5 or 7% usually gives you the best results, but again this is personal preference.
other great options for sharpening up an image is the smart sharpen or the camera raw filter. i usually use the camera raw filter to soften the image and add grain but it wasn't working to my style for this particular set of photos.
once all this is done, edit your photo however you want it to look and save it.
now: the sparkles ✨ you will have to download this photoshop action to get the sparkle effect. after downloading to your computer: window > actions > load actions.
i realize this is for gifs, but i discovered it also works on photos. but keep in mind it won't work on ALL photos, as it doesn't work on all gifs. sabrina's outfit screamed "sparkle" to me, so i had a hunch it would work in this instance.
once the action is loaded into photoshop, it's ready to use!
click on "make it sparkle pls", press the play button, then press "ok" or "continue" until the pop ups disappear. select both layers and convert to smart object.
then change "normal" to "screen". and there you go! all sparkly ✨
i personally added smart sharpen, levels, and black & white smart filters to make the sparkles stand out more, but you don't have to do this. just experiment with it and see what you prefer. ♡
~
i hope i explained this clearly! i sometimes fear i am a terrible explainer lol. but if there's any questions, feel free to message me and i'll try to help! ♡
How to remove people from a photo (tumblr edition)
ok so you know that feeling when you take the most perfect picture – golden hour, cool breeze, the air smells like rain and old leaves – and then some random person just… walks into the frame?? yeah. ruins everything.
i used to spend forever with the clone stamp. hours. no thanks.
then i found this stupidly easy photoshop trick. lasso tool. circle the person. (roughly. don't overthink it.) then generative fill – leave the prompt EMPTY. like don't type anything. and photoshop just… poof. replaces them. three variations. pick one.
did it work the first time? not always. but hit generate again and boom.
took me ninety seconds. i actually laughed.
anyway watch this guy do it – starts right at the good part:
hi sending much love after this terrible race weekend </3 i'm trying to learn how to make gifs and was wondering how u do ur colourings?? they always look so nice 🥹 or what's your general process like? ty 🙏🙂↕️
hi thank you so much for checking in, i haven't fully recovered from canada but i'm doing okay. let's say i'm less angry about it and i'm trying to remain hopeful for the rest of the season. i hope you're okay as well 💘
thank you so much for liking my gifs! i am not the best person for tutorials, i'm usually shit at explaining but i can give you some basic pointers. i'm not super skilled with photosop, so i use the most basic settings to colour my gifs, like
luminosity / contrast
exposure
color balance
selective color
for example, for this george gif, i used the following settings (sorry my default language in photoshop is italian, i hope you're still able to understand it, the settings are the one i listed above, in order)
luminosity / contrast and exposure:
color balance (halftone and highlights, again not sure this is the right terminology in the english version):
selective color (i love giving some red tones to neutral colours, they usually make the gifs a lot more soft looking):
and these are my sharpening settings. i use smart sharpen -> amount 500 and radius 0,4, then i select gaussian blur
there's literally nothing else i do (mostly because i don't know how to use other settings), the only feauture i sometimes add is "curve", which i use in order to fix excessively yellow lighting. also colouring highly depends on the starting material, sometimes you have to use a lot of layers of colouring, others a couple would be enough (like luminosity and exposure). you can do many trials and see what method works better for you! there's no standard procedure for gif colouring.
i can suggest you these tutorials, they're super helpful if you're a beginner.
(1) Hi so I’ve had a couple of anons asking me how I make my gifs (some specifically hsmtmts gifs lol) so I’ve decided to write up a... – @galindaelphaba su Tumblr
nym! may i bother you for a second? do you have any tutorials on how you make your gifs? would you mind sharing your settings with me? i’ve been having a hard time with the quality of mine and yours always look so crispy and nice... if that would be okay for you to share, it would be highly appreciated! 🫶🏻
I've never made a gif tutorial before, because I've always been worried my thought process will be too jumbled for anyone to understand, but I'll do my best to give you the nutshell version (+ my settings).
Firstly, I have to say that I am consistently always returning to this tutorial by kylos for my coloring, and they also have a pretty helpful guide on the overall technical gist of how to start giffing.
So, let's get into how I make gifs!
(What we're working with after sharpening, but before coloring)
I use KMPlayer to get my caps, and for the Sequel Trilogy at least, I broke down and downloaded extremely high quality copies (they're about 8gb per file), but this is not necessary. Many of the files I use for my gifs are anywhere between 2gb to 3gb: they're not always the clearest, but they work and they're not a requirement imo, it's just that I love seeing all the details in the sequels (and for TROS, it's necessary in order to gif the sand burrows sequence).
Once I load my caps into Photoshop, I crop my gif. Photoshop is helpful, where they actually have presets for the dimensions you can use. Any of them will do, but if you're setting out to make a mobile header, you'll want to go with the 16 x 9 setting.
For the sake of this tutorial, I'm sticking with my tried and true 2x3, though. The next thing I do is resize it, Tumblr's width dimensions right now are 540, so I always go with that for the width of my big gifs.
Now, what I've learned is what you choose on the drop down menu, will impact how your gif looks. For a brief period in time, I was using billenial, but I didn't like how it made my gifs look (I think they were coming out fuzzier in a way I disliked), so I always select bicubic (best for smooth gradients).
To me, this tends to make the gif look smoother, anyway, once I've resized it down.
Now, from here I fucking cheat, lmao. I made an action years ago to deal with the technical aspect of animating a gif cos I still get confused by that, so I click that until it goes to the portion where I need to start sharpening my gif:
As you can see, I have a few actions saved for sharpening: it's cos depending on the quality of the file I'm working on, I'll shift how I sharpen it to make sure it doesn't lower the actual quality of the gif. Right now, though, my primary sharpening settings are this:
My first smart sharpening layer:
Then, I have a Gaussian blur layer. Since I don't want the gif to be too blurry, I have lowered the opacity of this layer to ensure it doesn't overwhelm the gif itself:
And then I do one last smart sharpening layer, with these settings:
Now that the sharpening is done, I can move into the coloring stage! The first thing I do is I try to brighten up the image/gently color correct. The easiest way to start this is by using the white point color dropper in the curves layer:
What you'll do is look for the brightest corner of the image, click on it with this tool, and it'll color correct for you. This step involves a lot of trial and error, and sometimes I scrap it altogether and use exposure and channel mixer for more control on the outcome of the coloring.
I clicked on the white walls to the left of Rey, and that worked fairly well in terms of coloring. It's a tad more red leaning than I'd like, so I lowered the opacity of that layer to 74% (I always lower the opacity on the "fill" area rather than the actual opacity, cos I'm curious like that), and then I took the white line in the curves box, which designates the lighting/shadows, and I pulled it down a bit to give it a more natural look.
From there, I always add a levels layer: it's great for adjusting highlights and shadows in my opinion. I always bump up the white pointer until I'm happy with the brightness, and then I lower the black pointer until the gif has the depth I want (but not too much, cos I'll go back and edit it with selective coloring later). Depending on the gif, I might use the grey pointer in the middle, which brightens the overall gif, though it's not super often this is necessary.
Now, Rey's still looking a little too red for my liking, but I like the overall brightness of this gif (so far), so I'm gonna get into the weeds of working on the actual coloring. My first trick is adding a vibrance layer:
Lowering the saturation is a great way to get rid of any orange hues on a characters skin, while vibrance adds a (normal) level of color to their skin and doesn't make them look like a corpse, basically lmfao. I actually learned this trick through this wonderful anti orange-washing tutorial, which if you're giving any characters of color, is critical reading.
So now I move onto selective coloring, this one's a very play at your own leisure thing. I tend to work the most with the Reds, Neutrals, and Blacks, to tweak the coloring to get the result I want. This is what my settings look like so far:
There was some pinkish areas in the canvas (near Rey's hairline, her shoulders, and obviously her mouth) so I went ahead and messed with the magentas as well - selective coloring is probably the most important part of any of my gifs, not only does it help me get the tint that I want (or help me remove any tones that I don't want), it's also my primary tool in avoiding whitewashing, next to the vibrance tool - if I were giffing Poe or Finn, there'd probably be at least two or three additional selective coloring layers to make sure their skin tones were the right shade.
So, right now our Rey gif is looking like this:
Which is honestly fine, but I want the background to be a little less neutral. So I'm adding a channel mix layer, and going to the blues: from what I can tell, the lights behind Rey are a bit greenish in tone, so I'm gonna add more blue to the greens in the image:
Now, this made Rey's face a bit more cool/pink than I want, so I'm gonna add another selective color layer, and add more yellow to the reds:
There's still not as much depth to the gif here as I'd like, so I'm gonna add a little more to the neutrals and blacks:
Honestly, we could stop here, but I want to add a little more brightness to the gif (not much), so I'm gonna add a brightness/contrast layer:
Now that I'm satisfied with how the gif looks, I'm gonna run my action to change the speed the gif plays at to 0.05 (PS automatically sets it to 0.03 which is like watching the scene on fast forward), and our result is this:
And that's my usual process! I've gone through many "style evolutions" across the years with my coloring, so my biggest piece of advice is to just go ham fucking wild. Experiment, figure out what works for you: there was a time where I relied on photo filters to color correct my gifs and I used that for almost two years! Then I moved onto color balance for almost a year, I think, until I quit liking how it looked and I landed on my current method.
My other piece of advice is to look up as many giffing tutorials as you can find. I'm only as familiar with all these tricks because I'm constantly reading other people's tutorials and experimenting with their tips and tricks, blending them together until I find my own rhythm. @usergif has a directory of gif tutorials that I frequent often tbh!
And please lemme know if anything here doesn't make sense, or if you have any further questions about the process!
