Search Results For: photoshop

Freebies / 17 Jun 2011

Weekly Freebies: 20 Outstanding Swirly Brush Sets for Photoshop

Another Friday, another set of awesome quickie freebies for you to download and add to your design arsenal.

The curls, swirls and twirls of these brushes will surely unfurl some creativity in your next design project. Whether you’re looking for grungy, floral or just pretty and abstract, we’ve found some brushes that will be just perfect.

Graphics / 15 Apr 2011

Bringing Photoshop Comps to Life With Fireworks

Photoshop or Fireworks? It’s the question that has thrown all kinds of designers and developers into a heated debate. Today we’ll use both applications to create a simple web graphic.

This tutorial is aimed at all those designers who would never dream of giving up Photoshop and know almost nothing about Fireworks. I’ll show you how to take your Photoshop graphics and add in some interactive features via Fireworks.

Graphics / 7 Apr 2011

A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Masking in Photoshop

Several years ago a friend of mine asked me to teach him how masks work in Photoshop. This is my incredibly late response.

We’ll go over the basics of what masks are, what they’re used for and how wielding them properly will take your Photoshop skills to an entirely new level.

Freebies / 29 Mar 2011

Weekly Freebies: 20 Fractal Brush Sets for Photoshop

Today’s collection of free design resources includes twenty awesomely abstract fractal brush sets that collectively contain hundreds of brushes for you to add to your library.

Graphics like these instantly add life and character to your design and can be used to add texture in the background, a main focal point, or anything else you can dream up. Their natural beauty is easy to leverage!

Software / 10 Mar 2011

25 Professional and Incredibly Powerful Photoshop Plugins

Freebies are awesome, and design blogs are full of them, but sometimes you need a professional tool to handle professional tasks. There are a wealth of extremely powerful and high quality photoshop tools that can dramatically improve your workflow and are worth every penny you have to spend to get them.

Today we’ll look at a number of the best tools available for making color adjustments, adjusting focus, enlarging images, transforming layers in 3D, reducing noise, creating textures, applying complex masks, and even taking that PSD into full-blown HTML.

Graphics / 9 Mar 2011

5 Quick and Easy Photoshop Textures You Can Make From Scratch

The web is full of free texture resources. Unfortunately, we’ve all used them before and hate all the inherent restrictions that come as a result of using borrowed art. For your next project, why not just use textures that you make yourself from scratch? You skip the restrictions and the end product is much more unique because you’re not using the same resources used by everyone else.

Today we’re going to get you started by teaching you how to use a couple of basic Photoshop filters to create five completely different textures. Each texture should only take you anywhere from one to three minutes to bust out and can therefore be quickly applied without eating up your crucial design time. Let’s get started!

Freebies / 1 Mar 2011

Weekly Freebies: 150 Cloud Brushes for Photoshop

For this week’s post we’ve rounded up fifteen cloud brush sets that collectively contain over 150 brushes to add to your Photoshop library. Some are super realistic, others are more artistic so you can pull off any look you’re going for.

Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Graphics / 8 Feb 2011

Weekly Freebies: 15 Pixel Perfect Photoshop Style Sets

Photoshop layer styles represent an incredibly versatile set of tools for changing the appearance of any object you create. The trouble is, it can be quite time consuming to figure out the proper mix of effects to get the look you’re going for. Fortunately, tons of designers have gone before you and created some really complex and beautiful styles that you can apply with a single click.

deviantART is a goldmine for Photoshop styles and we’ve gone through and narrowed down their vast collection to the 15 great styles you see below. Enjoy!

Graphics / 19 Jan 2011

Photoshop Reflections 101

Today we’re going to learn all about how to make convincing reflections in Photoshop. Text reflections, 3D reflections, product shot reflections, all kinds of crazy reflections. We’ll discuss everything from custom transforms to blending modes and beyond. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, you’ll probably learn a thing or two.

You might be thinking that reflections were all the rage a few years ago, but are currently losing a bit of steam, and you’d be right. However, you can still see plenty of them in practice on Apple.com and other sites. You should definitely beware of over-using them and adding to bad web 2.0 trends, but also know that once in a while they can add class to a boring item.

Graphics / 9 Dec 2010

Design a Fun Baby Announcement Site in Photoshop

Designing a baby-centric site isn’t an easy task, especially for people like myself who usually favor masculine themes, colors and textures in their designs. Today we’ll tackle this task head on by creating a fun and unique baby announcement site that’s far from typical.

Feel free to follow along and be sure to download the PSD so you can have a look around or even use it in your own site.

Graphics / 27 Oct 2010

Photoshop Blending Modes: Beginner’s Tips and Tricks

Photoshop’s blending modes are a source of constant confusion for many designers. There aren’t really any sort of built-in examples for you to see and the blending mode names are no where near intuitive suggestions of what the effect actually does to the appearance of your document.

Today we’ll help remove a little of the mystery by discussing how a few key blending modes work in addition to some hints for how to use them effectively.