Darken Grey Hair and Remove Wrinkles With Photoshop

When you have taken enough of portraits, you are bound to get a request to darken someone’s grey hair or to remove someone’s wrinkles. Here are two quick ways to do both of that Photoshop magic.

To darken grey hair, just use the Burn Tool and set the Range to Midtones and the exposure to 20%. Choose appropriate brush size and gently and carefully paint over the grey hair till you get the desired shade. Use Control-J to get a new layer to work on.

To remove wrinkles, use the Healing Brush tool. Choose appropriate brush size and not too much hardness (say 5-10%). Alternate-click on a clear adjacent part to use for covering the wrinkle. Use Control-J to get a new layer to work on.

How To Convert Case In Excel

Recently I was given a list of participants in a seminar and I was required to print out a certificate of attendance for each of them. The problem was the names were all in Uppercase. That would make the printout on the certificates look bad. I had to change them all to Propercase before merging with the Certificate template in Word for an automatic printout of the certificates. Luckily there is a simple formula to do that in Excel where I had copied the list of names.

Consider that the names are in column A. Now we are going to convert the UPPERCASE names in column A to Propercase in Column B.

In cell B2, type =PROPER(A2), then press Enter. This formula  converts  the name in cell A2 from  uppercase to proper case. To  convert  the text to lowercase, type =LOWER(A2) instead. Use =UPPER(A2) in cases where you need to  convert  text to  uppercase, replacing A2 with the appropriate cell reference.

How To Adjust The Display Size of a WordPress Video

First, a suggestion: it may be better to just embed a video link to your video file hosted at a 3rd party site like YouTube as the video file will consume precious storage space on your website.

Nevertheless, there’s a case to be made for uploading a video file as an attachment to your article if it makes the article more compelling when the video is played in-situ.

Uploading and inserting the video into your article is straightforward enough. But there’s no dimension editing capability in the media library. To adjust the display size of the video, turn on the TXT or Source Code in the block and edit the dimensions within the code. It is not so straightforward but easy enough.

How To Increase Upload File Size Limit For WordPress

You know the awful feeling, when you are putting the final touches to your great article of the day, but the awesome image and/or video file just cannot upload due to the ridiculously low maximum file limit set in your media library.

The limit (something like 2MB) may be a default setting, which you can change yourself, or it could be a system limit set by your webhosting provider, in which case you need the webhosting provider to change for you.

If you Google for a solution, you will learn that there is no built-in ability to change within WordPress itself (why?). Invariably, the method calls for inserting some code into the .htaccess file or function.php file or php.ini file. If any of those does not work, then you need to contact your webhosting provider to do it for you.

If you intend to add code in any of the files mentioned above, you generally have to FTP download the file and edit it and then FTP upload it back. But here is a neat way to modify your php.ini file without the neccessity for FTP nor writing any code.

Go to your domain cPanel and look for MultiPHP INI Editor, in the Software section. Select your website from the dropdown menu and all the various parameters are there, including the Upload_Max_Filesize. By default, the  maximum upload size in WordPress  ranges from 2MB to 150MB depending on the settings of your web hosting provider is giving by default. I recommend you to put at 64MB. Here’s a peculiarity I discovered. My webhosting provider generously set for me 200MB but my WordPress websites all default to 2MB with that setting. I had to step it down to 64MB and it works. You may experience the same thing.