Download audio file (slavery_dlux.mp3)

Description of the track:

I tried to make a hip hop beat that was on the lines of a slavery aspect.

Terms of Use: This track is available for download.

Have a listen to the track and offer your constructive criticism for this Workshop in the comments section.

• Do you enjoy the song or track itself? Does it have potential?
• Can the arrangement be improved?
• How did you find the mix? What would you do differently?
• What do you enjoy about the rhythm track? What can be done to improve it?
• Is the choice of instruments relevant and effective for the style/song?
• Are the lyrics (if any) effective? Does the style, arrangement and genre of the song suit them?
• Can you suggest any specific techniques that might improve the track?
• Do you have any other constructive feedback?

Need constructive criticism on your own tracks? Submit them for a workshop using this form (new link). Most but not all submissions are published. There may be a wait of up to two months.

When compositing photos in Photoshop, sometimes the story you tell can be just as important as how well you combine the images. Frequent Psdtuts author Tony Aubé is not only good at combining the images he uses, but he is also great at combining them in an emotional way. Let’s take a look!

Ever Belonging Seaheart

In this piece, it is clear that this ship is in trouble. Will the ship’s crew make it to land safely or will they be smashed against the rocks?

Maiden’s Prospect

This maiden is waiting for her prince. Will the suitor on this ship be the one?

David and Goliath

This climber has a tough, if not impossible journey ahead of him. Will he be successful at climbing the face of this mountain?

Awaiting Summer

In this apocalyptic piece, Tony explains how to combine several photos to create a panoramic image in Photoshop. Then he explains how to turn that image into a snowy apocalyptic wasteland.

Red Silk

In this piece, Tony explains how to create an Asian-inspired scene using several photos.

Toscane’s Skies

This composite shows a person enjoying what looks to be a beautiful day, atop a large hill or mountain. In this piece, you get the impression that this person is reflecting upon a major life event. You can see the steps Tony took here.

Returning Home

This rider is almost finished making the long journey home to his castle.

Hitoban Musumegokoro

In this piece, Tony depicts a sleepy Asian-inspired town using several stock images. This image is also available as a tutorial.

As photographers, we’re always being told that light is the most important element of our work, that the shots we produce are dependent upon the light available and the artificial light that we bring to a situation. Whether we’re tired of hearing it or not, it’s true.

However, photographers are often posed with tricky situations in which the lighting is less than adequate and doesn’t match with their intentions. This tutorial will hopefully offer you some creative ideas for dealing with low light scenarios and making the most of the light that you have to work with.

Why low light?

Many photographers avoid dealing with low lit situations because it often doesn’t make sense to work without adequate light. If you are a produce photographer, there are no demands upon your work to shoot in situations where you don’t have the correct light sources on your chosen subject. However, as a photographer who works with a large variety of subjects, I am met by a whole array of situations that require me to know how to work best with the light on offer.

As you read through these tips, consider how they might be best applied to the photographic work that you undertake, whether any of the creative ideas might be worth considering for your own work. Hopefully this practical advice will come in useful when you are next confronted with a low lit situation.

Photo by jliba

What about flash?

I can hear you saying it already. In this modern age, we have a vast array of lighting options so that we no longer have to struggle with a lack of light. I don’t want to detail here how to approach a low lit situation and compensate for that by using artificial light.

Obviously, in any given scenario you have the option to use flashguns, studio style lighting or even something basic such as a torch to make up for the lack of natural light, but I want to focus on the ways in which we can use situations with limited light to our advantage and make the most of the scene we are faced with.

Photo by lightknight

Dealing with low light by using camera settings

So first things first, when confronted with a low light situation, there are means by which you can alter your settings in order to get the shots you want. One of the main things you can do is make the most of the ISO settings. Turning up the ISO will let in more light, the only downside being that it will increase the noise in the shot.

You can also work with the shutter speed in order to let more light in, select shutter speed priority on your camera and experiment with the settings according to the situation and the light available. It can also be beneficial to try using bulb mode on your camera, a feature that will keep the shutter open for as long as the shutter button is depressed. When using bulb mode, it is very beneficial to have a remote shutter release so as not to apply any pressure or vibration to the camera while the shutter is open.

Photo by yazmdg

Step 4 – Equipment to help with low light

If you are working with long shutter speeds and bulb settings, then it is essential to use a tripod. If you try employing shutter speeds of anything under around 1/50, then you’ll begin to see the deterioration and lack of focus in your shots if you’re just holding your camera.

However, if your shutter speed doesn’t require it, then please don’t feel bound to your tripod, I often find my tripod stifles my photographic eye and is a hindrance to my creativity, so if you can, pop the ISO up another notch, select your shutter speed at around 1/125 and go handheld!

You may also have heard the term ‘fast glass’ in reference to lenses that have wide apertures. My favorite lens to use in low light situations is my Canon 50mm f/1.8, which was amazingly affordable, is very light and is extremely ‘fast’ with it’s f/1.8 aperture.

For me, this lens makes the difference when it comes to working in low light scenarios. It can let in a lot of light and I don’t have to worry about noise by turning the ISO up quite so high.

Photo by linh_rom

Urban evening shots

It’s a common presumption from photographers that as soon as you start talking about low lit situations, they will automatically starting thinking about night cityscapes and urban shots with neon lit streets. Now I’ve nothing against these types of shots, they just have to be taken tastefully and creatively.

When you head out to shoot a night cityscape, go out before it gets dark, just before sunset. This way, the light will be low enough to look dark, and the lights will be on, but you’ll have enough light to highlight the necessary detail in the buildings and architecture.

Photo by simonbray

Working with landscapes

I’m sure you’ve read many times that the best times to take landscape shots are during ‘The Golden Hours’, essentially, the time around sunset and sunrise, in which the golden sunlight is poured sideways onto the subject matter. Well, utilizing the extremes of the golden hours, just before sunrise and after sunset, can also prove extremely rewarding.

The low lit hours before sunrise are filled with an air of expectancy for the day, as light begins to seep through the sky and light your subject matter. However, my favorite time of day to shoot is twilight, having watched the sunset, and just for a short while, the atmosphere changes, as the diminished light becomes less adequate, visual judgement reduces and everything looks slightly unreal.

For me, it’s all about picking your moment. Be sure you have plenty of time on location, firstly to appreciate the amazing natural surroundings, but also to take in the details of the scene. Don’t wait too long before getting your camera out, as where sunlight is concerned, the scene and the light will be changing constantly.

Try utilizing long exposures for your low lit landscape shots, especially when involving water, in order to smooth out the scene, you could even use a low grade neutral density filter to enhance this affect.

Photo by simonbray

Try black and white

Low light shots naturally lend themselves to black and white processing because without the color distraction, the focal point of the shot changes. The importance of the light involved in the shot increases as the light and dark draw the attention of the eye without the intrusion of the color.

Working in black and white also draws more attention to the composition and subject matter of the shot, I wouldn’t recommend shooting directly in black and white, but it should be an important consideration for when you come to process the shots. This can be particularly useful if you’ve had to crank up the ISO in order to achieve the correct exposure and are suffering with a lot of noise in the shot. The increased ‘grain’ may lend itself to the atmosphere of a black and white shot rather than intruding upon a color shot.

Photo by justinmclean

Working with people in low light

It is often assumed that working with portraits and trying to capture shots of people in low lit situations isn’t going to work, but there are in fact ways to capitalize on this scenario.

Try using motion creatively, especially when looking to capture a crowd of people. Experiment with shutter speeds and find a setting that’s long enough to blur those moving, but short enough to capture those standing still. Also, consider any jobs or scenarios that involved people working in situations with a light source. For example a welder provides his own light source.

Photo by dk_spook

Use HDR

Another option to make the most of shooting in low light is to try merging two or more shots taken with different exposure settings in order to ensure that none of the shot is under or over exposed. This way you are using the atmosphere of the low light situation without compromising the quality of the exposure of the shot.

Photo by kennytyy

Over to you

So hopefully you’re now well equipped practically and are full of creative ideas of how to work in challengingly lit scenarios. I think it’s a real shame when photographers shy away from low lit shots. Some of my favorite photographic work is quite sparse and shot using minimal light and there is an awful lot of potential within low lit scenes for creative and eye catching shots.

If you’re not sure where to start, why not begin with a simple personal project such as capturing light trails from stars using long shutter speeds, or possibly using minimal lighting for a portrait project, maybe using a solitary lit match or a single lamp.

Photo by benny4bs

Just because you missed that awesome conference, doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! This weekend we’re sharing an interesting talk by Storyteller and Richard Seymour at TED. In this talk you will ponder the questions, how do we tell that something is beautiful? And why does it matter so much to us?

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

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  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

  Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

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  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

  Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

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  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

  In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

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  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

  Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

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• 

  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

  In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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• 

  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

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  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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• 

  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

• 

  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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• 

  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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• 

  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

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  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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• 

  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

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  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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• 

  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

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  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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• 

  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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• 

  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

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  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

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  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

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  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

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  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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• 

  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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In today’s quick tip tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a cinematic “Transfarmers” Text Effect using the layer styles. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial.

• Transformers Solid font
• Dark Metal texture from Texturemate.com
• Brushed Metal Pattern

Step 1

Make a new .PSD document, 1000 x 500 pixels, RGB color, 100 dpi and grey background (color #33333). Create a new layer and fill it with brushed metal pattern from tutorial assets section (any metal texture will do though). Now using the Blending Options, fill this layer with a Light Blue color and set the blending options to “Overlay”. Finally if you want you can add a gradient that include several white and grey tones, with a bright area in order to create a better effect for the background.

Step 2

Now create the text using this font: Transformers Solid. Use these settings: 70 pt – Anti-Alias: Sharp. Now rename this text: “3D”. Then go in the menu Layer > Layer Styles > Blending Options and use these settings:

Step 3

Duplicate the text and rename it “Base”. Right click on his layer and click to “Clear Layer Style” or in the Styles Palette click on the first style “Default style (None)” (It’s the same thing). Now move this text slightly to the right in order to create a “pseudo 3D effect” with the text below (Look the Step image). Then go in the menu Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options and use these settings:

Step 4

Duplicate the text “Base”. Right click on his layer and click to “Clear Layer Style”. In the Blending Options menu on the right set the fill to 0%. Now and use these settings in the menu Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options:

Step 5

Your text effect is almost completed. Now we have to create a text reflection. Insert all 3 levels of the text effect in a group. Duplicate this group. Right click on it and click to “Convert To Smart Object”. Right click on it again and click to “Rasterize Layer”. Then go in menu Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical. Now move it as the image shown and then with the Eraser Tool delete as long as you want in order to create a realistic reflection. Finally to make the text effect nicer I added some sparks with simple brushes and color lights with soft brushes.

Conclusion

Now your text effect is completed!

Valentine’s Day is almost here and what better way to express your love for design than to send a letter? This Quick Tip explains how to create an envelope icon, you’d love to click!

Tutorial

Most of us have experience using the Adobe Suite, but how much do you know about InDesign? This powerful program has an entire host of features that you wont find in Illustrator or Photoshop, it’s for this reason that it has remained one of the most popular programs for graphic design and typography. The thought of learning InDesign may seem daunting to some, but there’s some really useful functions that are easy to learn and will save you hours of work. In this tutorial you will gain experience working with the page palette and special characters to make a basic page numbering system. You will also learn a few shortcuts that will help you work faster with InDesign.

May of 2010

Step 1

Open the multipage document you wish to add page numbers to. Go to your page palette, if it is not visible you can activate it by selecting Window > Pages.

Step 2

Within the page palette double click on A-master (you can do this by clicking on the text or page icon). You are now working in the master page.

Step 3

Select the text tool from your Tools menu (T), if the tool bar is not visible you can activate it by selecting Window > Tools.

Step 4

Position the cursor where you want your page number to sit. Click once and drag to draw a text box wide enough to hold the required amount of numbers.

Step 5

Select Type > Insert Special Character > Markers > Current Page Number. Once you have completed this step a capital "A" will automatically appear. The capital " A" represents the " A" master page. You can select, Command + A, and edit the character to any font, size, alignment and color to match the style of your document.

Step 6

We are now going to create the adjacent page number. However we need to switch back to the selection tool first (Escape + V). In my document I have set the left hand page up first. So, instead of going through the steps again, to place the right hand number we will simply copy (Command + C) and paste (Command + V) the text box you have just formatted.

Step 7

Position this text box on the right hand page, go to the paragraph palette and change the alignment to align right.

Step 8

You can now switch back to your main pages, you will find that every page is numbered. You will also notice that it is not possible to edit the numbers, this is because they are located on the master page and not the main document. To edit the number go back into the master page and use the techniques outlined in steps 1-6.

Step 9

By default number 1 starts on the front cover. Traditionally you wouldn’t need the cover numbered. It’s possible to remove the number without disturbing the rest of the page numbers. Click once on the page icon you wish to edit, in this case it is the first page. Select the options menu for the page palette, which located in the top right hand corner of the palette and scroll down to Override All Master Page Items. Now click on the page number/text box you want to remove and delete it.

Step 10

To start page number 1 on the second page of the document go back into the options menu for the page palette and make sure that ‘allow document pages to shuffle’ and ‘allow selected spreads to shuffle’ is not selected. To deselect highlight all of the pages by clicking on the first page, hold down shift and then click on the last page in the document. Go back into the page options menu and deselect.

Step 11

Click on the grey of the palette to deselect all of the pages, then click once on page 2 > page options menu > numbering and sections options. Select ‘Start page numbering at’ > ok.

Conclusion

There you have it, how to easily number pages in an InDesign document. Once you learn this feature you will love it. Auto numbering takes the stress out of proof reading and editing documents later and will leave you with more time for the things you do best… creating!

Friday Photo Critique is our weekly community project, where we publish a photograph submitted by one of our wonderful readers, then ask you all to offer constructive feedback on the image. It’s a great way to learn more about photography, express your viewpoint, and have your own image critiqued!

Quick Ground Rules

1. Play nice! We’ve deliberately chosen photographs that aren’t perfect, so please be constructive with any criticism.
2. Feel free to offer any type of advice – composition, lighting, post-processing etc.
3. You can also link to photographs that you feel offer a great example of this type of image shot exceptionally well.

Without further ado, here is this week’s candidate for Friday Photo Critique!

The Photograph

Photo Details & Inspiration

• Canon T2i
• 50mm
• f/10
• 1/400, 1/800, 1/1000
• ISO 100
• Three Exposures, Tonemapped

On the way to Tahoe last spring, I stopped at a turnout and took some pictures. I used bracketing because of the contrast between the snow and the trees. This was my favorite of the set because the peak on the right dwarfs the rest of the photograph, especially the bird seen on the left.

Please let us know what you think in the comments – how would you have approached the scene or taken the photo differently? A massive thank you to everyone who commented last week.

The most constructive and helpful comments will be featured on the site. Interested in submitting your own photo? You can do so here!

It’s time for the second part in our SimpleAdmin screencast series. In the previous video we covered the login page, today we’ll design our dashboard including tables, a sidebar and tabbed interface.

Part 2: Designing the Dashboard

Further Resources

• Crisp web app icons – Webdesigntuts+
• Wireframing kits – Smashing Magazine

March of 2009

However, with a little dive into Logic’s environment and Piano Roll editors, you can make sophisticated, arpeggiated lead lines (hereafter: arp line) just like the pros.

Step 1

At the heart of any arp line is a great synth patch. Logic hosts a number of synths that would make excellent sources, but we’ll use the oft-overlooked, yet powerful ES1 synthesizer for its punchiness and simplicity.

Load one instance of the ES1 synthesizer in a new instrument track in Logic Pro. From the drop-down menu of presets, select 06 Sequence Elements – Saw Sequence. Set the octave to 8, select Wave 2 for the Sub-Osc waveform, and add a slight amount of Glide to the patch. Your final patch will look something like this:

ES1 Patch

Step 2

Now that we have a sound, we can hop into the dreaded Environment window. The Logic Environment is feared by many, but the truth is that once you have a basic understanding of it, you can accomplish some powerful things.

Open the Environment window by pressing Command + 8. In the upper left corner, click the down arrow to expand the drop-down menu of Environment layers. Select Clicks & Ports. You should see a set of connections similar to those in the image below.

Clicks and Ports

This window essentially shows the MIDI I/O of your keyboard controller or interface. You’ll notice that at the end of the chain is the ‘Sequencer Input’. This is the last item in the line where Logic receives and routes MIDI input to your tracks.

Step 3

While there are several ways of connecting an Arpeggiator Object, I’ve found this method to be quick, reliable, and relatively straightforward. It has the additional benefit of allowing you to record the arpeggiated MIDI signal, which helps if you wish to edit the notes later on.

From the ‘New’ menu, we’ll select Arpeggiator, and the result should be an Arpeggiator object in the window. Drag the cable output from your ‘Input Notes’ object to the input of the Arpeggiator object. Likewise, drag the cable output of the Arpeggiator to the input of the Sequencer Input object. The result will look something like this.

Arpeggiator object layout

Step 4

After completing the steps above, select the Arpeggiator object and note the panel to the left of the main Environment window, which displays the properties of the Arpeggiator object. Here is where we can begin to tune the way in which the object will affect our incoming MIDI signal.

Have some fun experimenting with the effects of each parameter. For this tutorial, I’m going to use the following settings:

Arpeggiator settings

Step 5

Now that we have our basic setup, we’ll begin recording a few arp lines! Select a tempo that’s appropriate for your tune – I’m going with 110bpm here.

By putting your transport into PLAY or RECORD mode, your incoming MIDI data will now be modulated by the Arpeggiator object. Experiment with this for awhile to get a feel for how it works, then record a few variations using simple chords and intervals. You’ll find that while using this Arpeggiator is an imperfect art (occasional missed notes and late changes), a few short moments in the piano editor to move a few things around will help clean things up to perfect sync.

Download audio file (1.mp3)

First arp line of ES1

Step 6

Now that we have a few variations of our arpeggios, let’s liven them up a bit using a couple of simple techniques. First, we’ll add in some variations to the arpeggios in the Piano Roll editor.

For the first arpeggio, I have a simple alternating octave of 16th notes. I’ll select all the notes in this section and use the Transform – Fixed Note Length function. This will shorten the duration of the notes and give them a bit more punch. I set mine to 120 ticks.

Next, I’ll add in a few third and fourth octave variations to some of the notes, resulting in something like this.

Octave variations

I’ll use a similar process on the second arpeggiated section, adding in some octave variations and adjusting the note duration.

For a closer look at creating cool ostinato effects, check out this tutorial by Ryan Leach.

Download audio file (2.mp3)

Adding more detail to the arpeggios

Step 7

Now that we’ve tuned our arp lines, we’ll add some simple effects to them using Logic’s delay plugins. For this particular style, I really like Logic’s Tape Delay, so we’ll insert one instance of the Tape Delay plugin into the insert track of the Arpeggio arrange track.

We don’t want the delay to overpower the punchiness of the arp line, so here are the parameters I’ve used for this plugin.

Tape Delay

Here’s the final result of our arpeggios using Logic’s ES1, Tape Delay, and the Arpeggiator Object from the Environment window.

Download audio file (3.mp3)

Final arp lines

And for good measure, here’s the whole lot, blended together with a nice dance beat. Enjoy!

Download audio file (4.mp3)

Final mix!

Sometimes using a highlighted effect text gives a stronger emphasis and style to your design. In this quick tip we are going to achieve that effect by utilizing Paragraph Rules in Adobe InDesign. Let’s begin!

Step 1: Insert text

Create a new document at any size you want. Then insert the text that you are going to highlight. The font I use is Calibri. Change the font size to 48 pt.

Step 2: Disable Hyphenation

It is not good to have a short text with hyphenation. To fix this, click the text frame and then open Paragraph panel (Command + Shift + T). Remove the tick mark before Hyphenate on the panel to disable the hyphenation.

Step 3: Create New Paragraphs

In order to highlight the text later on, make each line in the text frame into a new paragraph. The process is pretty simple; by the beginning of each line, except the first line, press Backspace to remove the space that links the previous line.

Press Enter to put the sentence after the cursor into a new paragraph. Repeat the same process for the next line.

The text structure looks the same with the previous step, but this time the text has three paragraphs. You can check it by using Type > Show Hidden Character (Command + Option + I). You will see a character like a reversed P which indicates the end of the paragraph. It means that the line below the character is a new paragraph. The # character means the end of the text/story.

Step 4: Change Text Color to White

Change the text color to white to make you easier to adjust the Paragraph Rules later. Double click the text frame and then select all paragraph (Command + A). Open Color panel (F6), click the "T" icon on the panel, click the Fill icon which is represented by the square. Set all color values to zero to turn the text color to white. Press Esc when you’re finished changing the color.

Step 5: Open Paragraph Rules

Make sure the text frame is selected, open the Paragraph panel (Command + Option + T). Click on the small icon on the top right corner of the panel and then choose Paragraph Rules (Command + Option + J)

Step 6: Paragraph Rules Set Up

Activate "Preview" to see the live result of the adjustments and then set up the paragraph as follows. Choose Rule Below, and activate Rule On box, Weight: 50 pt, Color: Black, Width: Text, Offset: -13 mm, Left Indent: -3 mm, Right Indent -4 mm.

Press OK when you are finished with the set up. That’s it! You have created the highlight for the text!

Conclusion

You can use this technique for short text like title, quotation, and captions in your layout design to give them more style and emphasis. Experiment with the text size and Paragraph Rules options for different variation.

Applying the right atmosphere and lighting to your artwork can be a tricky task. In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, author Wojciech Pijecki will explain how to create a mechanically enhanced subject, in a sci-fi environment, using advanced shading techniques in Photoshop. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members. If you are looking to take your photo manipulation and retouching skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!

Tuts+ Premium Members can login now for instant access to this tutorial. Membership to Tuts+ Premium gets you access to hundreds of exclusive premium tutorials, top selling ebooks, in-depth courses, member forums, and much more. To learn more about Tuts+ Premium, Take the Tour or Join Today.

Portraiture can be a challenging subject, especially for newcomers to photography. There’s something about asking someone to be a model that’s a little nerve-racking if you’re not accustomed to it. Not only do you have to find a willing subject, but you also need to figure out where and when the shoot is going to take place, and how to direct your model once the shoot gets going. All without coming across like someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. Luckily, I’m here to help.

My first piece of advice is to relax and enjoy it. You’ll get the best photos that way. Also, if your model enjoys the shoot they are more likely to work with you again. Once you’ve mastered the skills required and have some confidence, portraiture is tremendously rewarding.

The cool thing about portraits is that each shoot is a one-off. It’s just you, your subject and a camera. It’s not like landscape photography, where the subject is static and can be photographed over and over by other photographers as well as yourself. That means that the results of each shoot are unique. People change as they get older and portraits freeze moments that become more meaningful as time passes.

Find a model

Before you can start, your first requirement is a model. A good place to begin is with family or friends, as your relationship means that you are not dealing with strangers. But if you don’t know any willing subjects, you need to look a little further afield. The internet’s a good source – my favorite website for finding models is Model Mayhem. The standard of photography on the site is also very high and a worthy source of inspiration.

If you can’t find a suitable subject, self-portraiture could be an option. Miss Aniela has found fame and fortune through her self-portraiture work. A look through her photos will inspire you. A couple of other self-portraits I like are Olivia Bell and Carmen Gonzalez. All three take photos of other people too.

When you approach your model, have an idea in mind. Also, it’s important to realize that modeling is hard. Work out some type of compensation, even if it’s just prints from the shoot.

Practice shooting indoors and out

Indoors (lit with portable flash)

Outdoors (lit with natural light)

Perhaps the first decision to make is whether your shoot will take place indoors or outside. I prefer to go outside, but if you are lucky enough to have a photogenic home or a room you can use as a studio then shooting at home frees you up from being at the mercy of the weather. If you are shooting inside, you can use either natural daylight or flash.

Natural light works well if you have a photogenic location with big windows to let in the light. For some inspiration take a look at the work of Jan Scholz, he has some of the best natural light work I’ve seen.

Flash can take a while to learn to use well but it means you can take photos whenever you like, even at night. The Lastolite School of Photography is a good resource for learning about studio flash and you can learn about portable flash from Strobist, Joe McNally and Speedliting. The last three websites have lots of articles about using portable flash both indoors and outside. There are also many resources available at Phototuts+.

Mitchell Kananshkevich has a great eBook about lighting, covering flash, reflectors and natural light here. Piet Van den Eynde has two more here.

Choose your portrait lens

Short telephoto lens

Wide-angle lens

Lens choice dictates the approach you take during the shoot. One approach is to use a short telephoto lens (around the 85-100mm range on a full-frame/35mm film camera). These lenses are traditionally called portrait lenses for a reason. You can take headshots, full body shots, waist-up shots and just about any other kind of portrait shot with them.

Prime lenses are also useful for portraiture because their wider maximum apertures let you take photos in lower light levels and also throw the background out of focus. You can experiment with selective focus with these lenses. A 50mm prime lens (a great portrait lens on a crop sensor camera) is the least expensive way to start with prime lenses. You can learn more about 50mm prime lenses here.

Another approach is to use a wide-angle lens. This lets you include more of the background and get more of the scene in focus. You need to take care to get close enough to your model with a wide-angle lens, else they may be too small in the frame. Wide angles perspectives are a favorite among environmental portraitists.

You can learn more about environmental portraiture here.

Advance your knowledge of camera settings

The simplest option is to set your camera to portrait mode (if it has one) and let your camera take care of the settings. This lets you forget about the camera settings as the camera is doing the work and concentrate on taking good photos. However, it doesn’t give you as much control as some of the other modes.

My preference is to use either shutter priority or aperture priority modes, depending on the effect that I want. If I want a specific aperture (say I’m shooting wide open with the maximum aperture of my lens like in the photo above) then I use aperture priority and make sure the shutter speed is high enough to prevent camera shake.

Alternatively, if aperture isn’t so important, I use shutter priority and set the shutter speed I want. I can then change the ISO and aperture if I want more or less depth of field

Take photos of your family

Taking photos of your family is very rewarding. As the years go by you will create a record of your family growing up and changing over the decades. There’s no reason why you can’t move beyond taking ‘snapshots’ and take some good quality portraits.

I admire Chris Orwig in this area of photography. Take a look at his blog to see some inspirational photos of his family. His book People Pictures: 30 Exercises for Creating Authentic Photographs is an excellent resource for learning about all types of portrait photography.

Experiment with fashion and editorial portrait photography

This is a genre of photography whose intent is to create photos, often of models or celebrities, to illustrate magazine articles, for fashion spreads or for advertising. It’s a difficult area to get into as the top fashion and editorial photographers have access to resources the rest of us don’t, such as top models, make-up artists, stylists and art directors to help come up with the concept of a shoot.

It’s a team effort. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to do the same. All today’s best photographers were once students and many started out with only basic equipment, a desire to learn and creative vision.

For instance, look at the work of Lara Jade on Deviantart. She started off as a beginner, and has gone on to be a professional fashion photographer. By going back to her earliest photos you can see how her work has progressed over the years.

Jingna Zhang’s post “The equipment and where the money comes from” explains how she started out learning with minimal equipment.

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Try to capture ‘character’

Fashion photography takes place in a make-believe world. Capturing ‘character’ is almost the opposite approach. You are trying to capture the reality of your sitter, and express something about their personality in the photo. A tip is to ask them to wear clothes that they would normally wear in everyday life, rather than dressing up for the camera. If they have an interesting job or hobby perhaps you will take a photo of them doing that.

You can learn a lot about portraiture from some of the masters. Yousuf Karsh was an expert at capturing character. This photo of Ernest Hemingway is one of my favorites. There’s an amusing story behind his image of Winston Churchill, too.

Alex Alexander is a contemporary photographer who is good at capturing the character of his subjects. Some of his models are artists and actors and he works with them to create beautiful portraits.

Experiment with alternative printing processes

Some photographers are using alternative printing processes to create some interesting portraits. Alternative printing processes can be difficult to master, but this also means that not many people will try them so they can be a good way of creating portraits with a unique look. Christopher R. Perez has some beautiful black and white portraits created with a variety of techniques and equipment.

You can learn more about alternative printing processes at alternativephotography.com. If you like the look of some of these processes, you can create similar effects using the Topaz Black & White Effects plug-in.

Try to make your early sessions encompass a lot of techniques

Early on, a lot of photographers get a model and try to replicate a specific technique with them. It occasionally works, but many times it just causes frustration.

I would encourage people to initially try out a lot of things with a model. This means if something isn’t working out, you just move on to a new idea. It will keep both you and your model from becoming bored and frustrated.

These photos above of Abbey were all taken on the same afternoon, in a suburb of Auckland. I used an 85mm prime lens for them all. The idea was to take a simple approach and vary the portraits by finding interesting backgrounds. The post-processing treatment, a mixture of colour and black and white, has also added variety.

Conclusion

Portraiture, for me, is one of the most challenging and rewarding types of photography there is. But with so much inspiration available online and so many places to learn from, there is nothing holding anyone back from improving their portraits. All it takes is the desire to learn, a touch of creative vision and plenty of practice.

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

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  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

  Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

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  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

  Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

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  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

  In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

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  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

  Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

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  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

  In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

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  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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• 

  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

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  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

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  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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• 

  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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• 

  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

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  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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• 

  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

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  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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• 

  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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• 

  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

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  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

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  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

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  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

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  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, you will learn how to create a vector golf illustration. It includes creating a golf hole scene, complete with numbered flag for the hole and a cutout section of turf where the golf ball has landed. You’ll also learn to illustrate some dynamic text that fits well with the illustration’s theme. If you are looking to take your skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!

Tuts+ Premium Members can login now for instant access to this tutorial. Membership to Tuts+ Premium gets you access to hundreds of exclusive premium tutorials, top selling ebooks, in-depth courses, member forums, and much more. To learn more about Tuts+ Premium, Take the Tour or Join Today.

Step 1

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Circles”, change the resolution to 200×200 and set the duration to 7 seconds.

Step 2

We don’t need a background solid so we can skip that part and click on the Toggle Transparency Grid button.

Step 3

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 200×200 and name it “Circle”.

Step 4

With the “Circle” solid layer selected, go to Effect->Generate->Circle. Under the effect properties we have to set the color to #302B2F and click on the Radius stopwatch to add a new keyframe. Move forward 2 seconds and change the Radius property to 93.

Step 5

Let’s duplicate the “Circle” solid layers, offset them and change the circle effect colors on each layer.

Step 6

Let’s duplicate the top “Circle” layer once again. Offset it and right click on it and go to Time-Reverse Layer or you can use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+alt+R). Now we have a looped circle animation. We can use this animation in Trapcode Particular as a custom particle for example, but because in this tutorial we’re dealing with default plug-ins, I will use Foam.

Step 7

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Abstract circles”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 7 seconds.

Step 8

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “BG”.

Step 9

With the “BG” layer selected, let’s go to Effect->Generate->Ramp. Change the Start Color to #9BB58F and the End color to #FFA601 and set the Ramp shape to Radial Ramp.

Step 10

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “Foam”.

Step 11

With the “Foam” layer selected go to Effect->Simulation->Foam. Before we move, on let’s drop the “Circles” composition inside of this composition and turn it off. In “Foam” I didn’t change too much. I changed the Bubble Texture Layer to the “Circles” composition and changed the view option to rendered and that’s it.

Step 12

Finaly I just add this crunched paper image and changed it to multiply. It’s an optional step but it just gives a little more depth to the animation.

Step 13

Now you should see something similar to this… Let’s go to the 2nd animation : ).

Step 14

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Radio waves fun”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 10 seconds.

Step 15

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “BG”.

Step 16

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “Radio waves”.

Step 17

Go to Effect->Generate->Radio Waves and set the following properties. I used #FA0047 as the stroke color.

Step 18

Go to Effect->Time->Echo and set the following properties.

Step 19

Here’s what you should see now…. Now, let’s finish the 3rd and final animation.

Step 20

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Circle text Animation”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 12 seconds.

Step 21

The method is almost exactly the same as what we did before. The only difference is that now we have to choose different solid layer colors.

Step 22

With the “Circle 1″ solid layer selected go to Effect->Generate-> Circle and apply it. We need to animate the radius just like we did before, but in this case I need to change the Blending mode to Stencil Alpha.

Step 23

Let’s duplicate the Green solid layer couple times, change the colors on every duplicated layer and offset them.

Step 24

Finally, I just put a text layer on top of all the duplicated layers.

Step 25

Let’s select the Ellipse Tool to create a circular mask on the text. Hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift while dragging to create a perfect circle mask.

Step 26

Let’s change the mask to Add mode and we’ll need to animate the Mask Path as well.

Step 27

I am just trying to create a simple growing circular mask path animation as you can see here. You can add the previous paper texture to the top and change the blending mode to Multiply to create a more dramatic or realistic look and here’s an another trick that I used..

Step 28

We can add a simple point light and then turn the 3D layer option on for all of the duplicated solid layers.

Conclusion

So this is it! I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and learned some new things. Try your own variations or customize the free project file that you can download at the top. My name is Tibor Miklos, thanks a lot for your attention and I’ll see ya next time! If you have any questions or just get stuck, just shoot me an e-mail. sir.tibor.miklos@gmail.com

Final Image

What To Backup

There are primarily two data pools that you will need to backup, your project data and system drive. It is clear why you need to backup your project data, simply because it is your work and it is probably what gets you paid.

It is also important to backup your system drive so as to minimise the downtime should your system drive fails. Having a clone of your system drive allows you to quickly replace your failed system drive and get back to where you were again.

You can also backup your sample libraries but quite often you can recover those from your installers if you do not want to use more backup space. That would fall under personal preferences.

Getting Started

Using an automated backup system takes the pain out from remembering to backup your data. It runs on a scheduled time and knows what backup source and destination. There are many software solutions out there that allow you create such a backup system.

Depending on your choice of a PC or a Mac, the software and method that you would use will defer. Being a Mac user, I will be able to recommend some specific choices for the Mac but it will not be difficult to find a piece of software that does the same job for the PC.

My choice of software for the Mac is Carbon Copy Cloner. It allows me to schedule a backup task and choosing my source folder and destination folder. These are just basic functions that most backup software will have.

Choose a good time for the backup task to run. Obviously, the computer will need to be running at that point of time. If you chose to do an incremental backup, the task will not take long unless you constantly make huge file changes to your drive. I am only working on individual projects at a time so my backups usually take a minute or less.

You can also choose to run the backup manually when you wish to. This could be after a large amount of work and you’re playing it safe.

Choose a Backup Type

There are slight differences in the type of backup that you can choose from. The differences are how the program handles data that have changed.

Firstly, there is the clone option. The program just ensures that there is an exact clone of the backup source. Files that no longer exist on the source are deleted. This type of backup will help when you have a drive failure but does not help if you need to recover a file that you had deleted.

Secondly, there is the backup and archive method. Files that have been changed or deleted are moved to another folder and archived. This takes up more space on your backup drive but provides the possibility of recovering a file that you have deleted.

Backup Your System Drive

Besides backing up your data, it is also good to keep a backup of your system drive in case that it fails. Having a backup of your system drive minimises downtime by allowing you to replace the failed drive and clone your system to exactly the way it was before.

For Mac users, Time Machine which ships with OS X was designed to help recover from such a disaster. However, it still takes a few hours for your drive to be restored using a Time Machine backup. You can use a backup software like Carbon Copy Cloner to perform an exact clone of your system drive to reduce the time needed.

For Windows users, the backup methods mentioned above would work well too. However, a backup and archive method would require a lot of backup space since files changes are much more common on the system drive. A standard clone should suffice for most users.

Its Not That Complicated

Building a backup plan might sound complicated but it is rather easy if you take it a step at a time. Know what is most important to you and make sure you have an extra copy.

Sometimes, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by how much there is to learn in this industry. If jQuery happens to be on your personal “need to learn soon” list, then I’m happy to announce my new course: “Learn jQuery in 30 Days”. If you’ll give me fifteen minutes a day for the next month, I’ll help you become a jQuery pro – and it’s free!

How Does it Work?

Sporadically, your skills will be put to the test, when you take the interactive quizzes!

Once you enroll (free) via email, each day, you’ll receive a 10-15 minute video lesson. As you might expect, every episode will build upon the one it proceeds, and, sporadically, your skills will be put to the test, when you take the interactive quizzes!

Along the way, you’ll learn the essentials (querying and manipulating the DOM), while incrementally working your way up to more advanced topics, such as jQuery’s AJAX methods and plugin development.

I worked particularly hard to make the process of picking up this new skill as easy as possible for everyone – even if you have very, very little JavaScript experience. So…do you want to join me?

Modern Digital SLR flashes do a wonderful job of putting out a large punch of light in a specific direction. Nowadays they even zoom with the lens for more directed light. But what happens when that direct light is too harsh, casting ridged shadows? This happens often in an indoor setting, especially with groups of people, such as at a party. Flash modifiers to the rescue!

September of 2010

Introducing Flash Modifiers

While there are a plethora of flash modifiers out there, this article will focus on just a few of the basic, less expensive models which may aid you in your photography. Each of the modifiers listed here attach to a flash in a number of fashions. Some require Velcro and others slide over the end of the flash, requiring the purchase of the correct model to match your flash.

All photos in this set were taken with a Canon 7D and two flashes. I used two flashes because the Velcro on one flash would not permit the Opteka to slide over the end. The strength of the flashes was balanced to maintain consistency. All images are shot at 38mm (45mm equivalent) at a distance of about seven feet. ISO 100, f/3.5 and 1/60 second except the ambient photo, which was 1.6 seconds.

The ceiling is standard height and all photos were shot RAW and then corrected to 5400K. This is only to represent the lighting effect of each modifier, especially when mixed with ambient light, which taking out the variable of auto white balance. The voluntary model in this shoot is none other than me. While I am often mistaken for a one man party (especially with a backwards baseball hat), this test is meant to be simple, showing coloring and shadow differences between the modifiers.

First up is the “control” photo. This image is shot with ambient light in the darkened corner which I stand. The orange cast is from the room lights. You will see evidence of this in later photos when bounce modifiers are used.

And now the 580EX II flash fired directly towards the subject.

Opteka Flash Diffuser

The first diffuser example is from Opteka. It is a simple unit, retailing for $10US. It slides on the end of the flash and is molded to match contours, making it less functional if Velcro strips are already in place. Its intent is to give your flash more of an all around, bare light-bulb feel.

It works best when angled at 45 degrees up and partially bounced off the ceiling. This first photo shows the effect when simply placed on the flash and fired straight forward, diffusing some of the light.

The light color has changed a bit because of the coloring of the plastic. Features are a little less harsh although I could still use a shave. Shadows are about the same. Now let’s tilt it up to 45 degrees as suggested by the manufacturer.

Shadows are decreasing around my head, but because of the bounce, shadows around my sleeves have become longer. Toning is more even, more pleasant. Finally I”ll point the flash straight up at 90 degrees and see what happens with both ceiling bounce and indirect, diffused flash.

This last photo has even softer shadows and even toning, but it also lets in more ambient light, if you will. Notice the color has become more orange from the house lights. This can be a problem if colors don”t match (and Opteka does make colored filters to match ambient light.)

LumiQuest Pocket Bouncer

Next up is the LumiQuest Pocket Bouncer (retailing at $28US). This unit is held onto the flash head with Velcro strips on the top and sides of the flash. It is operated with the flash unit pointing straight up at 90 degrees. Almost all light from the flash is then directed forward from the highly reflective surface of the bounce.

First, the control photo of the 580 EX straight forward, no modifiers. This is slightly different than the 580EX II, but not much.

Now, the LumiQuest Pocket Bouncer:

Again, the shadows become softer but the added height of the flash makes some of them a bit longer. And more ambient, orange, light has been brought in. Overall, though, the light is more evenly spread. Let’s compare it to a different type of bounce which allows for more light pass-through.

LumiQuest 80/20

The LumiQuest 80/20 (retailing at $29US) attaches in the same way to the Pocket Bouncer but spreads light differently. It gets its name from the fact that 80% of the flash light is allowed to pass up through the modifier and then scatter when reaching the ceiling. This can be a problem with a high ceiling, but in this example, the ceiling is only eight feet high. 20% of the light is then directed forward as with the Pocket Bouncer.

More ambient light is allowed into the scene but shadow edges are softer still. Also catch lights in my glasses are less intense, something worth considering.

LumiQuest Softbox

Last up in this comparison is a LumiQuest Softbox (the most expensive at $43US) . This handy little device attempts to mimic its larger brethren used in professional studios. It requires one more strip of Velcro (four in all) than the other bounces as it surrounds the flash head. It has an extra softening spot in the center to help diffuse and bounce the direct light from the flash. The sides are angled to let light expand outwards from the center.

The softbox attempts to smooth out the shadow edges but still punch the light from the front, rather than above. It does a decent job for a unit of this size. The light tends to be more even and the contrast not as great.

Conclusion

There are many, many more flash modifiers on the market with prices north of $120. This set of four is a basic introduction and a good general purpose set to play with while learning the advantages and disadvantages each flash brings to your photography.

No one diffuser is perfect for every occasion, so experiment and find what works for you!

We recently showed you the first sneak peek of Photoshop CS6 by Senior Photoshop Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes. Today, Photoshop Product Manager Zorana Gee released a new video showing even more features of CS6. In this video Zorana will explain two really nice enhancements to Photoshop; Background Save and some performance tweaks to Liquify.

The first feature that Zorana shows is Background Save. This is a feature that many users have been asking for. It will allow you to save your file and then continue working while the file is being saved.

Another fantastic feature that Zorana demonstrates is a performance tweak to Liquify. If you’ve ever worked in Liquify, you know that you can’t expand your brush beyond 1500 pixels. This is frustrating if you’re working on a really big image. In this video, Zorana works well beyond 1500 pixels. In addition, the Photoshop team has also improved the performance of Liquify so that it doesn’t tile. You can now use Liquify in real-time with no lag.

Layer comps are a great way to organize content inside Photoshop files. They allow you to save multiple design ideas in a single PSD while reducing the need to create duplicate layers. As you’ll see in this tutorial, layer comps can flow from Photoshop to InDesign making your workflow even more efficient. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

• Nitexpress Party Flyer

Ever seen those thumbnails which, when hovered over, reveal an icon in the middle to suggest what’s about to happen? Ever wondered how the effect is achieved? Ever tried, but didn’t manage to get the icons dead center, especially when your thumbnails weren’t of fixed dimensions? Then this Quick Tip is for you..

I’m talking about thumbnails which you might click to trigger a lightbox, or perhaps a thumbnail which links to a portfolio piece. In any case, it’s a great addition to your site’s usability if you can suggest what’s about to happen when someone hovers over a thumbnail.

This Quick Tip is aimed at those of you who have an understanding of CSS, have more-or-less figured out what positioning is about, and are looking for the perfect excuse to put it to use..

Step 1: Starting Block

Let’s quickly throw some documents together to demonstrate what I’m talking about. Firstly, our html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

	<head>

		<meta charset="utf-8" />

		<title>Hover Demo Thingy</title>

		<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css" />

	</head>

	<body>

	</body>

</html>

Then we’ll begin our styles.css file with some reset rules. You may well have your own preferred reset methods, but for the time being I’ve used Eric Meyer’s to kick-start our css:

/* http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
   v2.0 | 20110126
   License: none (public domain)
*/

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td,
article, aside, canvas, details, embed,
figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup,
menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary,
time, mark, audio, video {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	font-size: 100%;
	font: inherit;
	vertical-align: baseline;
}
/* HTML5 display-role reset for older browsers */
article, aside, details, figcaption, figure,
footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section {
	display: block;
}
body {
	line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
	list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
	quotes: none;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
	content: '';
	content: none;
}
table {
	border-collapse: collapse;
	border-spacing: 0;
}

Next, to give our page a bit of layout structure, here are three columns, within a container:

		<div class="wrapper">

			<div class="col">

			</div><!--end col-->

			<div class="col">

			</div><!--end col-->

			<div class="col">

			</div><!--end col-->

		</div><!--end wrapper-->

And now, of course, we need to add some styles to actually get them behaving as columns within a flexible wrapper:

/*our demo styles*/

html,
body {
	background: #29282e;
}

.wrapper {
	width: 90%;
	max-width: 960px;
	margin: 30px auto;
}

.col {
	width: 27%;
	padding: 0 3%;
	float: left;
}

So there we have them; three columns, each 27% wide, with padding left and right of 3%, and all of them floating neatly in a row. Our wrapper is nicely flexible at 90% of the browser window width (to a maximum of 960px). We’ve also given our body and html a nice, dark background color.

Step 2: Images

It’s time to add some images to the mix. I’ve used some wallpapers from Atelier Olschinsky’s rather inspiring cities collection (grab them from kuvva.com for your desktop..)

Each image is going to be contained within an HTML5 figure element, but wrapped directly by an anchor in order to link it with something (either a lightbox enlarged version, or an external site etc.):

			<div class="col">

				<figure>

					<a class="enlarge" href="">

						<img src="img/cities-07.jpg" alt="city number 7" />

					</a>

				</figure>

			</div><!--end col-->

So we’ll place three of our figures, one for each image thumbnail, within a column of its own.

These images are too big, so to prevent them from bursting out of their columns, let’s give them a maximum width by applying a classic fluid image rule:

figure img {
	max-width: 100%;
}

A good start. We have our fluid layout with three columns, each containing an image which links somewhere.

Step 3: Hover State

Let’s make it clear to users that clicking the images does something. We’ll add a hover state, reducing the opacity of the thumbnail:

figure a:hover img {
	opacity: 0.4;
	filter: alpha(opacity=40); /* IE6-IE8 */
}

Step 4: Icon

Now for the all important icon. We want an icon, placed in the center of the thumbnail, to become visible when the image is hovered over. It can be whatever symbol you like, but it should indicate to the user what’s going to happen. In this demonstration, for the sake of ease, I’m just going to use a + sign to suggest a larger version will be activated.

We’ll add it into the mix using the pseudo element :before:

a.enlarge:before {
	content: "+";
	display: block;
	font-size: 40px;
	line-height: 1em;
	height: 1em;
	width: 1em;
	text-align: center;

	color: #fff;
	font-weight: bold;

	position: absolute;
	z-index: 100;
}

We’ve placed our + as a generated :before element, part of the anchor surrounding the image. We’re using the class “enlarge” to identify the anchors which will need the +. If we need another symbol, we can use another class name.

To begin with we need to dictate the content (our + character) and state that it’s a block level element.

Important! The following rules then determine the dimensions. We’ve said that the font-size is 40px. Then we’ve said that the line-height, the height and the width are all equal to 1em (40px therefore). This has created a square of 40x40px. By setting the text-align to center and the line-height to 1em, we guarantee that the character is sitting smack-bang in the vertical and horizontal center of our square.

The next important rules are the absolute positioning (0px,0px by default) and the z-index which determines the stacking order of our positioned elements. By setting this to 100, we can make sure our other elements sit on top of it. Let’s do that now..

figure img {
	max-width: 100%;
	position: relative;
	z-index: 900;
}

figure a {
	position: relative;
	display: block;
	line-height: 0px;
	text-decoration: none;
}

Here we’ve made sure that the img tags are sitting on top of the + icons by setting the z-index higher than 100. In order for that to take effect we ned to state a positioning type (“relative” in this case). Our anchor also has position:relative which means the + icon is now absolutely positioned against it.

You’ll also notice a few other styles added to the anchor. We’ve made it display as a block, removed any underline decoration, plus given it a line-height of 0px. The line-height is important and if not reset can manifest itself as additional padding at the bottom of the element. We’ve now made sure that the anchor fits snugly around the image.

Our icons are actually always present, but they only become visible when the image covering them is hovered over.

Step 5: Proper Positioning

At the moment, our icons are positioned as default in the top left of our anchors. We need them in the center of the thumbnails, irrespective of how big the thumbnails are. Let’s then position them 50% from the left and 50% from the top. Job done, right?

a.enlarge:before {
	content: "+";
	display: block;
	font-size: 40px;
	line-height: 1em;
	height: 1em;
	width: 1em;
	text-align: center;

	color: #fff;
	font-weight: bold;

	position: absolute;
	top: 50%;
	left: 50%;
	z-index: 100;
}

Hmm. Not really. The icon’s nowhere near the center of the thumbnail.. That’s because elements are aligned in relation to their top left corner. Look again:

To compensate for the positioning we have to shift it half its height up and half its width left. We used ems earlier to determine the dimensions (1em = 40px), so let’s now use 0.5em (half the square’s width) to do the shifting. This way, whatever we change the font-size to, all the measurements will remain proportional. Thanks to Gabri for pointing out the use of ems!

a.enlarge:before {
	content: "+";
	display: block;
	font-size: 40px;
	line-height: 1em;
	height: 1em;
	width: 1em;
	text-align: center;

	color: #fff;
	font-weight: bold;

	position: absolute;
	top: 50%;
	left: 50%;
	z-index: 100;

	margin: -0.5em 0 0 -0.5em;
}

To do that we apply a negative margin. -0.5em on the top and on the left will do the job. Think of it as having created a vacuum, into which our element is sucked.

Bingo! Our + icon is perfectly positioned in the center of our thumbnail. Try resizing the browser, it’ll stay exactly dead-center.

Why not take the effect further?

There’s bags of potential for a technique like this:

• Employ the websymbols font and jazz your icons up a bit.
• Apply different classes to your thumbnails, depending on the icon you want to display.
• Why not add CSS transitions to smooth the hover effect?

Conclusion

To seasoned CSS-ers this is a very straight-forward trick, but if you’ve never considered positioning like this before I hope this Quick Tip has been helpful.

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

• 

  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

  Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

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• 

  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

  In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

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  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

  Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

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• 

  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

  In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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• 

  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

• 

  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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• 

  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

• 

  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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• 

  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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• 

  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

• 

  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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• 

  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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• 

  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

• 

  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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• 

  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

• 

  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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• 

  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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• 

  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

• 

  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

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  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

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  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

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• 

  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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• 

  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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King Kong (2005)

VFX Team

• Joe Letteri
• Brian Van’t Hul
• Christian Rivers
• Richard Taylor

Development of the Visual Effects

Working with proxies

For this movie, the VFX team of Weta Digital had to improve their working system with regards to hardware, networking and infrastructure. Now, they have a big philosophical change in their pipeline: so they are more geared toward pulling information together at render time rather than carrying it through individual scenes. This means that technical directors now use low resolution proxies rather than high detailed geometry whether they’re looking for complex scenes or complex characters..

With a creature like Kong, you don’t want to open a scene and have all of the fur in it, and you can’t open up a scene with all of New York in it – Joe Letteri

Development of new tools

The team had to create new tools that could satisfy their needs, so they created a new fur simulation software and new fur shaders to animate Kong’s five million hairs when he moves, ruffle his hair on the plane’s wing, manage the collision with other objects and allow it to become dirty. The crew also wrote a fluid dynamic’s solver, which they use to create the ocean for Kong’s voyage to New York.

You really need your own software so in the case of something not looking right, you are able to open it up and figure out what’s going on – Joe Letteri

Creating Kong

Of course, one of the biggest challenges in the film was the creation of its star. The modelers created him and the doubles which he interacts with in Maya with the help of Mudbox. To breathe life into Kong, rather than rely solely on keyframe animation for the CG gorilla, the crew motion captured the actor who gave life to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Andy Serkis. New software made it possible for animators to drive the CG gorilla with either the mocap data or key frame animation, and a new system interpreted Serkis’s facial expressions before mapping data onto the 3D model.

The software looks at the dots on Andy’s face, figures out what his expression says that he’s sad, for example and then applies that to Kong. – Joe Letteri

VFX Breakdown Video

This video will show you the amazing VFX Scenes, how they made it and some scenes of compositing.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (2010)

VFX Team

• Tim Burke
• John Richardson
• Christian Manz
• Nicolas Aithadi

Development of the Visual Effects

CG Set Design

For many of the scenes in these movies, partial sets and then digital sets were created. This film wanted to show more destruction shots and extensive battle sequences so they decided not to use any more miniatures because with CG Imagery they were able to create more rigid body dynamics and destruction work. The castle in the earlier movies was actually a miniature and so they had rebuilt the entire castle and were able to handle new concepts and ideas. They also rebuilt the set for Godric’s Hallow in CG and almost the entire scene is full of CG environments and CG snow.

Multiple Harrys

For this scene the actors were shot on the set acting out the transformation, sometimes adjusting their height to be the same as Harry. A second set of plates involved Harry acting out every character and he had to dress like all of the other actors. All of these actors except for Harry were shot only for their facial performance. To capture the facial expressions volumetrically they used The Mova Countour Capture rig that is designed to hold 28 cameras around the actors. A phosphorescent make-up was applied to the actors which was then picked up by a series of cameras and produced a tracked surface and mesh. The data was then processed at MPC in conjunction with a facial rig built for each actor and finally, it was animated building skulls inside the heads to keep the facial mechanics of each character as realistic as possible.

Flight Attack

The flight attack takes place in a phrenetic sequence flying over London to escape the Death Eaters. MPC created GG thestrals “a winged horse with a skeletal body”, extended Privet Drive’s set and combined the green screen riders with the CG thestrals and digital doubles. To create the clouds, they used Maya Fluids and then joined the far and near clouds, using different techniques to render it. The spells were created to look like a lightning inside the cloud and also used were some lens flares. The duel between Voldemort and Harry when their wands get connected and then Voldemort’s wand broke up was created using full CG Smoke and using both a digital double and the real actor.

VFX Breakdown Video

This video will show you the amazing VFX Scenes, how they made it and some scenes of compositing.

X-Men First Class (2011)

VFX Team

• John Dykstra
• Matt Johnson
• Nicolas Bonnell
• Fiona McLean

Development of the Visual Effects

Making of the Mutants Effects

The VFX team designed the way mutants exhibited their powers as if there were no film history to deal with. They began with a range of ideas for each mutant and started considering how they related to the mutants in previous films, both visually and in the X-Men comic world. Where there was a character that had already been seen before like Mystique, they tried to relate the effects to earlier visuals. Where there was a family tie in comic book genealogy they tried to relate their characters power to a family similarity, such as the fact that Havok is Cyclop’s brother. In some cases the team didn’t use any real visual reference so they simply chose the visual that they liked the best.

Creating the Diamond Body

The team started by creating simple still illustrations of how Emma Frost’s diamond body would look. The character went through multiple reviews until the team found a look that worked. They then translated those still images into an animation. To get the movement as precise as possible they rotoscoped, frame by frame, the actress’s performance. Finally, VFX artists digitally removed her from the frame and put the animated one in her place. To really look like a diamond, Frost needed to sparkle, so they had a lot of work to make sure she refracted and reflected light correctly. They finally managed to get the right look by taking pictures of a faceted cubic zirconium and using them as a reference.

She had to be both crystal and fluid, because she had to move when she was in her diamond form – John Dykstra

Making of Azazel

Azazel is a devilish-looking mutant who is able to transport between dimensions. For its making, the VFX team began with the development of the digital fire and smoke simulation that appears when he teleports. They roto-mated Azazel, so whatever movement he was doing at the time would then in turn affect the smoke simulation. Then, they also had to create the tail, which was built and animated in CG and some transparency and textures were added in for a real-world feel.

We went through a lot of development of trying to create a digital fire and smoke sim because he was more closely aligned with the devil – Matt Johnson

VFX Breakdown Video

This video will show you the amazing VFX Scenes, how they made it and some scenes of compositing.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s Ends (2007)

VFX Team

• John Knoll
• Hal Hickel
• Charles Gibson
• John Frazier

Development of the Visual Effects

Creating Davy Jones and his Crew

Davy Jones and seventeen of his transmogrified crew were digital creations that had to match seamlessly with the real actors. The team used ZBrush for the creation of the 3D models for the characters. For the animation the team used motion capture but not in traditional methods; instead of recording performances in a mo-cap studio and then inserting the CGI character into a blank space on the plates post-production, they decided to shoot the actors and record their movement on the same plate, and then replace them digitally with the CGI character. The team used Pixar’s RenderMan for the renders, but they were taking so long that they decided to discuss with Pixar how to implement a new technique inside their software. This way, renders that were taking twelve or thirteen hours went down by to just three or four hours and they started to produce the same or even better results in a quarter of the time.

Creating a Maelstrom

To create this scene, ILM hired Frank Lossaso-Petterson who helped to build the Stanford’s fluid simulation engine, which is an hybrid of a PhysBAM engine and a Zeno interface. It’s something like Maya except that it is more customizable. To create the Maelstrom the team used a technique which consists in simulating it as though it were flat and gravity pointing inward instead of sloping down, and then transforming the surface into the whirlpool shape. This scene required a lot of computational fluid dynamic, huge resolutions and computational power and memory.

Environments and Compositing

This movie has more than 1000 VFX shots including waterfall sequences, icebergs, ship destruction, CG Creatures, and so on. Many of these shots have live action elements combined with CGI, except for the Maelstrom whirlpool which is a total 3D Environment. The ships were live action boats extended and sometimes full CG Ships so they had both live water action and CG water simulations. There is a scene where the ship is descending below the water; for this scene water passes were filmed and tracked and then were combined with CGI elements and the motion captured crew.

My goal is to always start from some live action so we got a grounded reality that we can build from- John Knoll

VFX Breakdown Video

This video will show you the amazing VFX Scenes, how they create it and some scenes of compositing.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use Illustrator to create a clean, vector ticket icon. Begin by creating the basic vector shapes, then add pixel perfect highlights, all the necessary text, warping, and grunge effects to give the final result interest. Get started on designing this vector ticket icon at the jump.

Step 1

Hit Command + N to create a new document. Enter 600 in the width and height boxes, then click on the Advanced button. Select RGB, Screen (72ppi) and make sure that the "Align New Objects to Pixel Grid" box is unchecked before your click OK. Now, turn on the Grid (View > Grid) and the Snap to Grid (View > Snap to Grid).

Next, you’ll need a grid every 5px. Go to Edit > Preferences > Guides > Grid, enter 5 in the Gridline every box and 1 in the Subdivisions box. You can also open the Info panel (Window > Info) for a live preview with the size and position of your shapes.

Do not forget to replace the unit of measurement to pixels from Edit > Preferences > Unit > General. All these options will significantly increase your work speed.

Step 2

Pick the Rectangle Tool (M) and create a 490 by 330px shape. The Snap to Grid will ease your work. Remember to look into your Info panel for the live preview with the size and location of your shape. Once created, fill your shape with R=247, G=240, B=224. Now remove the color from the stroke.

Step 3

Pick the Ellipse Tool (L), create a four perfect circles (45 by 45px) and place them as shown in the following image. Again, the Snap to Grid will ease your work.

Step 4

Continue with the Ellipse Tool (L), create two new circles (10 by 10px) and place them as shown in the first image. Select both shapes and go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform. Enter the data shown in the second image, click OK, then apply Object > Expand Appearance.

Step 5

Select all the shapes created so far, open the Pathfinder panel (Window > Pathfinder), and click on the Minus Front button. The resulting shape should look like the second image shown. Move to the Layers panel, Double-click on this shape and name it "Ticket". It will be easier for you to find it later when you will need to edit it.

Step 6

Pick the Rectangle Tool (M), create a 260 by 110px shape, and place it as shown in the following image. Fill it with none but add a 3pt stroke. Select it from the Appearance panel and set its color at R=35, G=103, B=164.

Now open the Stroke panel (Window > Stroke). Click on the "Align Stroke to Inside" button, then apply Effect > Stylize > Rounded Corners. Enter a 5px radius, click OK, and apply Object > Expand Appearance.

Step 7

Pick the Pen Tool (P) and draw two vertical paths (110px tall). Place them as shown in the first image. Add a 3pt stroke for these paths and set its color at R=35, G=103, B=164. Continue with the Pen Tool (P), create two horizontal paths (65px long), and place them as shown in the second image. Again, add a 3pt stroke for these paths and set its color at R=35, G=103, B=164.

Step 8

Select the paths created in the last two steps. First, got to Object > Expand Appearance, then go to Object > Expand (or Object > Path > Outline Stroke). Select the resulting group of shapes, click on the Unite button from the Pathfinder panel, then apply Object > Compound Path > Make. In the end you should have only one blue compound path. Move to the Layers panel, Double-click on this new path, and name it "Frame".

Step 9

Disable the Grid (View > Show Grid) and the Snap to Grid (View > Snap to Grid). Reselect the "Ticket" shape and move to the Appearance panel. Select the existing fill and go to Effect > Stylize > Inner Glow. Enter the data shown below and click OK.

Step 10

Make sure that the "Ticket" shape is still selected, focus on the Appearance panel, and click on the Add New Fill button. It’s the little white square pointed by the arrow. Obviously, this will add a new fill for your shape. Select it from the Appearance panel and use the linear gradient shown below. The yellow zero from the gradient image stands for Opacity percentage.

Step 11

Reselect "Ticket", add a new fill, and select it from the Appearance panel. Make it black, lower its Opacity to 3%, change the blending mode to Multiply, and go to Effect > Artistic > Film Grain. Enter the data shown below and click OK.

Step 12

Reselect "Ticket", focus on the Appearance panel, and select the stroke. Set its color at R=212, G=209, B=179. Now make it 2pt wide and align it to outside.

Step 13

Make sure that "Ticket" is still selected and focus on the Appearance panel. Select the stroke and click on the Duplicate Selected Item. It’s the little file icon pointed by the arrow. Obviously, this will add a copy of the selected stroke. Select this new stroke, make it 1pt wide, and replace the existing color with white.

Step 14

Reselect "Ticket" and focus on the Appearance panel. Select the stroke added in the previous step and click on the Duplicate Selected Item. Select the newly added stroke, make it 3pt wide, and lower its Opacity to 15%.

Step 15

Reselect "Ticket" and focus on the Appearance panel. Select the stroke added in the previous step and click on the Duplicate Selected Item. Select this new stroke and decrease the size to 1.5pt wide.

Step 16

Reselect "Ticket", focus on the Appearance panel, and click on the Add New Fill button. Select this new fill, drag it to the bottom of the Appearance panel, set its color at R=212, G=209, B=179. Now go to Effect > Path > Offset Path. Enter a 2px Offset, click OK, then go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform. Enter the data shown below and click OK.

Step 17

Reselect "Ticket" and focus on the Appearance panel. Select the fill added in the previous step and click on the Duplicate Selected Item. Select the newly added fill, drag it to the bottom of the Appearance panel, set its color at R=151, G=145, B=70. Now open the existing Transform effect. Simply, drag the Move-Vertical slider to 3px and click OK.

Step 18

Reselect "Ticket" and focus on the Appearance panel. Select the fill added in the previous step and click on the Duplicate Selected Item. Select the newly added fill, drag it to the bottom of the Appearance panel, make it black, and open the existing Transform effect.

Drag the Move-Vertical slider at 5px, click OK, then open the existing Offset Path effect. Replace the 2px Offset with a 3px Offset and click OK. Finally, make sure that this black fill is still selected and lower its Opacity to 5%.

Step 19

Reselect the "Ticket" shape, make sure that no fill or stroke is selected, and go to Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow. Enter the data shown below and click OK.

Step 20

Select the "Frame" path and add a new fill. Select it from the Appearance panel and set its color at R=79, G=150, B=192. Now go to Effect > Path > Offset Path and enter a -1px Offset and click OK.

Step 21

Reselect the "Frame" path and add a 0.5pt stroke. Align it to inside and set its color at R=16, G=48, B=96.

Step 22

Reselect the "Frame" path, make sure that no fill or stroke is selected, and go to Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow. Enter the data shown below and click OK.

Step 23

Re-enable the Grid (View > Show Grid) and the Snap to Grid (View > Snap to Grid). For the following step you will need a grid every 2.5px. So, go to Edit > Preferences > Guides > Grid and enter 2.5 in the Gridline every box. Pick the Rectangle Tool (M) and create a 5 by 10px shape.

Now fill it with R=16, G=48, B=96. Place it as shown in the first image. The Snap to Grid should ease your work. Make sure that this new shape is still selected and go to Object > Transform > Rotate.

Enter a 90 degrees angle and click on the Copy button. This will add a new shape as shown in the second image. Select both shapes and click on the Unite button from the Pathfinder panel.

Step 24

Let’s focus on the shape created in the previous step. Select it and move to the Appearance panel. Add a new fill, select it from the Appearance panel, and set its color at R=247, G=240, B=224. Now go to Effect > Path > Offset Path. Enter a -1.75px Offset and click OK.

Step 25

Keep focusing on the cross shape. Select it, move to the Appearance panel, and add a third fill. Drag it to the bottom of the Appearance panel, fill it with the linear gradient shown below, and go to Effect > Path > Offset Path. Enter a 1px Offset and click OK. Remember that the yellow zero from the gradient image stands for Opacity percentage.

Step 26

Pick the Type Tool (T), click on your artboard, and add some simple text as shown below. Set its color at R=16, G=48, B=96, and use the MoolBoran font with a size of 40pt.

Step 27

Select the text added in the previous step, move to the Appearance panel, and click on the Add New Fill button. Select this new fill and set its color at R=247, G=240, B=224.

Now go to Effect > Path > Offset Path. Enter a -1.25px Offset and click OK. Reselect this text, make sure that the fresh fill is not selected, and go to Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow. Enter the data shown below and click OK.

Step 28

Pick the Type Tool (T) and add some random number, as shown in the following image. Use the same font and the same color, but lower the size to 40pt.

Step 29

Reselect the numbers added in the previous step, move to the Appearance panel, and click on the Add New Fill button. Select this new fill, make it white, lower its Opacity to 70%, and go to Effect > Path > Offset Path.

Enter a -1px Offset and click OK. Reselect these number paths, make sure that the white fill is not selected, and go to Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow. Enter the data shown below and click OK.

Step 30

Select the text paths, the cross shape, and the "Frame", then group them (Command + G). Open the Brushes panel (Window > Brushes). Open the fly-out menu of this panel and go to Open Brush Library > Artistic > Artistic_ChalkCharcoalPencil. Select the "Chalk-Scribble" brush, pick the Brush Tool (B), and draw three simple paths (as shown in the second image). Make them black and group them (Command + G).

Step 31

Select the two groups created in the previous step and go to the Transparency panel (Window > Transparency). Open the fly-out menu, click on Make Opacity Mask, then uncheck the Clip box. This will add the discrete grunge effect for your ticket.

Step 32

Select all the shapes created so far and group them (Command + G). Select this new group and go to Effect > Warp > Fisheye. Enter the data shown below and click OK. You can try some other Warp effects. Most of them will work well for this.

Step 33

Reselect the group created in the previous step and go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform. Enter the data shown below and click OK.

Conclusion

Now your work is done. Here is how it should look.

We have another Photo Premium tutorial exclusively available to Premium members today. In this tutorial, we look at some of the styles or effects that photographers usually use on their images to give the final result a certain look and feel that better communicates the message hidden behind their shots. Learn more at the jump!

For best results, a photographer has to keep in mind what message a certain look communicates and what purpose it serves, even before getting into the technicalities of how to achieve each one.

It is also very important to keep in mind that while image styles are created in the digital darkroom, some scenes and subjects just tend to bring out the best of a certain look and shine work with it.

Back when film was the only medium around to shoot with, the variety of available image effects was somewhat limited and well defined by the characteristics of each film type or manufacturer. With digital advancements, the image effects that can be produced are actually more than anyone even cares to find. So let’s get to it:

A Glowing Look

Glowing is an effect that can be produced by actually encouraging light flare. Flare is seen as unwanted rays of light, or sometimes halos and circular white outlines, that are created by the refraction of light hitting the lens directly. When light passes through sharp edges or goes through narrow slits, the rays are deflected and produce fringes of light and dark bands.

When used mindfully though, flare can be incorporated into the image to get that interesting glowing look that feels as if light is pouring out of the frame. This is done by intentionally placing the light source (such as the sun) within the edges of the frame and shooting straight into the light. I should also mention that you need to be carefullooking directly into a bright light source.

This effect is more effective if the whole glow is captured within your frame, and not cut off at the edges of the image. Although it does add contrast to your image (sometimes more than your sensor can handle), flare can add a very warm and indulging feeling to many landscapes, cityscapes, and outdoor portraits.

For best results, experiment with different exposures to get that awesome look you want. Sometimes overexposure might be needed to capture the full effect and convey a dreamy look.

Old, un-coated lenses accentuate this look best as modern and more expensive lenses have been made correct extreme flare.

Photo by Meyer Felix

Photo by Neil Krug

Photo by Neil Krug

The Hazy Look

Photographing in a thick atmosphere, such as fog and mist, can yield very compelling, moody, and dramatic results. Fog is usually present in the evening through early morning. It changes intensity, shape and location with time. We are not aware of it because of the ability of the human visual system to adjust to changing conditions quickly and flexibly.

Haze can also be a product of flare. It gives photos a flatter look by cutting down on contrast as well as introducing a subtle hint of blurring.

Because haze somewhat blurs out internal texture of surfaces, elements in your scene might appear smooth, but the outline is often emphasized and accentuated to some degree. This could help you capture striking, bold silhouettes.

While shooting photos in mist and fog can yield that interesting hazy look, making an exposure can be a little tricky. The somewhat bright quality of fog makes air more reflective. This can causes your camera or light meter to under expose the shot. Fog also acts as a large natural diffusing softbox, which makes everything much more flatly lit.

What you need to do is dial dial your exposure up a little. You can make your shutter speed longer, your aperture wider or your ISO higher.

The hazy look can also be replicated either by placing a soft-focus filter in front of your lens at the time of shooting, or digitally using Photoshop or any image-editing software you might prefer.

To replicate the hazy look digitally, simply make a copy of your image on a new layer on top of the original. Apply some blurring to the copy, and then using a mask apply your blurred results to highlight areas of your image. Play with layer blending modes and opacity till you get the result that best suits your photo for this particular look.

Photo by coyote-agile

Photo by Per Ola Wiberg

Tune In for More

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This is a really interesting technique to perfect, and you’ll be really pleased with the result! This Premium tutorial will help you get started with ease.

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Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

• 

  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

  Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

  Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

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• 

  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

  In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

• 

  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

  Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

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• 

  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

  In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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• 

  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

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  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

  Visit Article

• 

  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

  Visit Article

---

Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

• 

  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

  Visit Article

• 

  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

  Visit Article

• 

  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

  Visit Article

---

Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

• 

  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

  Visit Article

• 

  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

  Visit Article

• 

  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

  Visit Article

---

Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

• 

  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

  Visit Article

• 

  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

  Visit Article

• 

  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

  Visit Article

---

Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

• 

  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

  Visit Article

• 

  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

  Visit Article

• 

  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

  Visit Article

---

Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

• 

  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

  Visit Article

• 

  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

  Visit Article

• 

  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

  Visit Article

---

Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

• 

  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

  Visit Article

• 

  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

  Visit Article

• 

  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

  Visit Article

---

Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

• 

  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

  Visit Article

• 

  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

  Visit Article

• 

  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

  Visit Article

---

Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

• 

  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

  Visit Article

• 

  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

  Visit Article

• 

  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

  Visit Article

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

• 

  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

  Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

  Visit Article

• 

  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

  Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

  Visit Article

• 

  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

  In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

  Visit Article

---

Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

• 

  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

  Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

  Visit Article

• 

  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

  In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

  Visit Article

• 

  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

  Visit Article

---

Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

• 

  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

  Visit Article

• 

  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

  Visit Article

• 

  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

  Visit Article

---

Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

• 

  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

  Visit Article

• 

  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

  Visit Article

• 

  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

  Visit Article

---

Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

• 

  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

  Visit Article

• 

  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

  Visit Article

• 

  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

  Visit Article

---

Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

• 

  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

  Visit Article

• 

  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

  Visit Article

• 

  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

  Visit Article

---

Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

• 

  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

  Visit Article

• 

  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

  Visit Article

• 

  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

  Visit Article

---

Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

• 

  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

  Visit Article

• 

  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

  Visit Article

• 

  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

  Visit Article

---

Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

• 

  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

  Visit Article

• 

  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

  Visit Article

• 

  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

  Visit Article

---

Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

• 

  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

  Visit Article

• 

  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

  Visit Article

• 

  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

  Visit Article

---

Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

• 

  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

  Visit Article

• 

  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

  Visit Article

• 

  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

  Visit Article

The Altered Chord Series

This is the sixth article in a seven part series on altered chords. In the first part I explained that by lowering or raising a tone of a chord by a half step you can change the color and function of a chord.

Part 1 looked at altered V chords, Part 2 at altered II chords, Part 3 at altered VI chords, Part 4 at altered III chords, and Part 5 at altered VII chords. We will continue the series by exploring various ways to alter the IV chord.

Diatonic IV

The fourth diatonic chord in a major key is a major triad. In the key of B it’s E major. If you add the seventh (a major seventh above the root), you get a major seventh chord (maj7).

It’s harmonic function is considered that of a subdominant chord. In an earlier tutorial called The Basic Functions of Harmony, I explained that a subdominant chord is like moving away from home. In diatonic form it has a certain sense of stability, but as we will discover, in altered form it feels much more transitional and strives to resolve.

The IV chord is so basic and common that it doesn’t require much discussion. Here’s a very traditional I-IV-V7-I progression:

Download audio file (1_I-IV-V7-I.mp3)

Altered IV

The most common alterations of IV include:

• iv (minor, borrowed from the minor mode)
• IV7 (dominant 7, borrowed from the dorian mode)

Altering Each Chord Tone

As explained in the previous tutorials, a chord is “altered” by lowering or raising one or more chord tones by a half step. Since there are four pitches in a maj7 chord that gives us four choices for tones to alter, 1 3 5 7.

We’ll go through one chord tone at a time and examine the results of altering each of them.

Altering the Root

Lowering the Root

Lowering the root of a major seventh chord just turns the root into the seventh. Rather than an altered IV, it’s more like a vi chord:

Raising the Root

Raising the root alone changes the chord to a #IV diminished triad or #IVm7b5 chord, which can serve several purposes.

It could be the IIm7b5 in a minor II-V progression resolving to iii:

Download audio file (3_m7b5.mp3)

Or for a voice-leading/line oriented progression you could use the #IV like a passing tone, notice the smooth chromatic line from G down to E:

Download audio file (4_Passing.mp3)

You could also have a chromatic line going up in the bass, like this progression that uses #IV as a way to increase the tension between IV and V:

Download audio file (5_raisedIV.mp3)

Altering the Third

Lowering the Third

By far the most common alteration of IV is to lower the third and get iv, or “four minor”. It’s been used so many times in so many styles that it’s certainly a cliche, but I’ll admit that I still love it.

It’s a sound you are probably familiar with:

Download audio file (6_iv.mp3)

In a previous tut on Secondary Dominants, I used the Beatles song “In My Life” as an example with iv being used twice.

The first time IV plays for two beats before changing to iv, in essence depressing and saddening the chord by moving it from major to minor:

Download audio file (7_Life1.mp3)

Later on in the song, iv is used as the landing chord for a deceptive cadence, providing us with a nostalgic and sad surprise:

Download audio file (8_Life2.mp3)

Another Beatles song that uses a move from IV to iv is “If I Fell”. Listen for the change in the bridge on the lyrics “And I would be sad,” at about 1:00 into this video:

Raising the Third

Raising the third of a major chord changes it into a sus4 chord. In contemporary styles such as film music, sus4 is a great way to create a sense of neutrality. In the sense that “major is happy” and “minor is sad”, sus4 is neither of these emotions, and thus gives you some more flexibility.

Here’s a “film score” style example that goes from Isus4 to IVsus4 and back to Isus4:

Download audio file (9_sus4.mp3)

Something else that helps with that soft and neutral sound is that the sus4 of the IV chord is the b7 of the key, which helps lend to that open and gentler sound.

Altering the Fifth

Lowering the Fifth

A maj7 chord with b5 is quite unusual and not something you’ll run into very often. But I suppose it’s possible that if you lowered the fifth and the seventh, you could actually think of them enharmonically as leading tones into the root and third of the I chord.

Meaning, if your chord is F A Cb Eb, think of it as F A B D#. The B and D# both resolve up a half step into C and E, and the F and A can both resolve by a whole step to G:

Download audio file (10_halfsteps.mp3)

If you lowered the fifth and third a half step, and the seventh a whole step, you could change the chord to a IV diminished seventh chord, which when alternated with I has a beautiful and romantic sound.

This example from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, an excerpt of Waltz of the Flowers, is a perfect one:

Download audio file (11_Nutcracker.mp3)

Raising the Fifth

Raising the fifth creates an augmented chord, or IV+. Although useful for altering I and V chords, an augmented IV chord doesn’t really serve much “functional” purpose.

Altering the Seventh

Lowering the Seventh

Lowering the seventh changes the IV chord from major seven to dominant seven, or IVmaj7 to IV7.

IV7 is most commonly found in the basic 12 Bar Blues, in which every chord is a dominant 7:

You can really hear the b7 of the IV chord on the guitar fill after the line “She’s my sweet little thing” at 0:43.

Another place you can find IV7 is in the song “Brain Damage” from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon:

Download audio file (12_BrainDamage.mp3)

The song is in the key of D. The b7 of the IV chord, lowering the third of the key from F# to F natural, helps create a sense of quirkiness. But it’s especially tritone of B to F, non-diatonic to the key, that adds a sense of “lunacy”.

Raising the Seventh

Raising the seventh of a major seventh chord is essentially meaningless because you just end up back at the root again!

Conclusion

IV is a great chord to alter because it’s already functionally a little more free than I or V. It doesn’t have to have a sense of firm stability like a tonic chord and it doesn’t have to create a strong feeling of tension and need to resolve like a dominant chord. Instead it’s a moment of transition, and thus you have more freedom to play with it’s color by lowering or raising it’s chord tones.

As mentioned, the alteration you’ll hear quite often is iv minor. But as you can see there are a lot of other options out there if you’re willing to experiment and be creative.

Next up and concluding the series will be the Altered I chord.

Please leave your comments and questions below and we will continue to discuss them in the future parts of the altered chord series.

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

• 

  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

  Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

  Visit Article

• 

  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

  Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

  Visit Article

• 

  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

  In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

  Visit Article

---

Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

• 

  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

  Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

  Visit Article

• 

  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

  In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

  Visit Article

• 

  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

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  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

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  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

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  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

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  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

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  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

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  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

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  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

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  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

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  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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The Photoshop team is looking for their next evangelist. They just announced a contest asking for Photoshop users to submit their own hidden gem tutorial, and we would like the winner to be a Psdtuts+ reader or author! A hidden gem video needs to explain a lesser known feature or workflow of Photoshop. Each video would need to be 2 minutes or less and would need to mention “hidden gems.”

To see more examples of what a hidden gem video would look like, take a look at Bryan O’Neil Hughes’ series. The winning entry will win a trip to Photoshop World. For more information take a look at this post and the video below. Rules are listed here. Good luck!

As you know, each month, we round up some of the best Photoshop-related content from around the web. This month, there was some excellent Photoshop tutorials to choose from so please take a moment to review our favorites from January 2012.

Photoshop Tutorials

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  Ice Cube With Cherry Inside

  In this tutorial AlfoArt will explain how to create an ice cube with a cherry inside.

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  Realistic Letterpress Effect in Photoshop

  This tutorial from Abduzeedo will explain how to create a realistic letterpress effect in Photoshop.

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  Sharp Fold Text Effect

  This tutorial from textuts will explain how to create sharp folds in text with Photoshop.

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  Create Hand-Drawn Animation

  This tutorial from Computer Arts will explain how to create hand-drawn animation using Photoshop’s animation features.

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  Create an Awesome Cinemagraph in Photoshop

  This tutorial from Net Magazine will explain how to create an awesome cinemagraph in Photoshop.

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  Making of "The Confrontation"

  This digital painting tutorial from on CG Arena will explain how to create a ôconfrontationalö artwork in Photoshop.

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  Super Easy Pewter Style Metal Text Effect in Photoshop

  This tutorial from Spoon Graphics will explain how to create a metal style text effect in Photoshop.

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  Making of "Fishman"

  This tutorial from 3D total will explain how to create a stunning ôfish manö using 3DS, Zbrush, and Photoshop.

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  How to Hold a Stylus

  This tutorial from Ctrl+Paint will explain how to properly hold a Wacom stylus.

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  Sneak Peek of Photoshop CS6 and Camera Raw 7

  This video by Photoshop Sr. Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes gives us a sneak peek of what Photoshop CS6 and Camera Raw 7 will look like.

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  Easy Wax Seal in Illustrator and Photoshop

  This tutorial from Abduzeedo will explain how to create a wax seal in Photoshop and Illustrator.

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  Love Me – Photoshop Manipulation Tutorial

  This tutorial from PSD Box will explain how to create a love themed photo composition in Photoshop.

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  Making Of "Discovering a Muse"

  This digital painting tutorial from 3D total will explain how to create this beautiful painting in Photoshop.

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  Useful Photoshop Layer Styles Tips and Tricks

  This article from Inspiration Feed will show some excellent layer style tips and tricks.

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  Painting Effects with Adobe Camera Raw

  This hidden gem video from Photoshop Sr. Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes will explain how to give your work a painted effect using Camera Raw.

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Lightroom actions are an awesome tool that can help to automate your workflow and to add creativity to your photo library. Using presets, we can apply a photo style to one or many images in our photo catalogs. Check out more than 100 of the web’s best presets.

As Lightroom’s popularity has increased, so too has the usage of presets to modify and enhance images. Because Lightroom is a non-destructive image editor, we can easily try out all types of presets and not change the original image file. This makes it easier than ever to experiment with applying effects to your images.

Today, we are going to look at how to create a Lightroom preset and then sample some of the web’s best preset offerings for Lightroom.

We have also published a fantastic article explaining how to make your own Photoshop Actions, with 100 amazing examples. You can read the article here!

Creating Lightroom Presets

Creating presets in Lightroom is a breeze! It takes just a few steps to create your own custom preset. The first step is to enter the Develop module by pressing “D” on the keyboard, or by clicking on Develop at top right.

Next, use the settings on the panel on the right to apply some settings to an image. We can tweak exposure, adjust curves and black levels, and even apply custom color effects. Additional options such as lens corrections are also available.

Develop options include all of the image tweaks you’ll need to adjust your images to perfection.

Now that we have applied some settings to the image we are working with, we have the groundwork laid to create a preset with. Any settings applied to the image are now slated to be added to the preset.

On the left side, you’ll see the panel that features presets. To create a new preset, all that you need to do is press the “+” button. Now, a new window appears that allows us to customize the settings to include in the preset. Each portion of the effects we applied can be either checked or unchecked to include within the preset.

Creating a new preset is as easy as pressing the “Plus” button on the Presets panel.

After pressing the “Plus” button, a list of options comes up. This window uses the settings you’ve applied to the active image as the basis for the new preset. Unchecking each individual option allows us to exclude that adjustment from the preset.

After choosing what parts of the edit that you want to include on the edit, make sure to give it a name and then press “Save.” That’s it! You now have presets, ready to apply to your images.

Installing Lightroom Presets

If you’ve downloaded other presets, you will need to install them in Lightroom in order to use them. Often times, presets will come in packs in zip archives. The first step will be to extract the zip files to a folder on your computer.

After extracting the presets, the first thing that I like to do is right-click in the Preset panel and create a new folder for my downloaded presets. I like putting all of my custom presets in their own folder to keep things organized.

Right clicking in the preset panel allows us to create a new folder for organizing presets

After we’ve created our folder for presets, all that we need to do is right-click the folder we’ve created and then choose “import.”

After choosing to import images, point Lightroom to the folder with the presets you wish to add.

A window will pop up to allow us to browse to the folder with the presets we downloaded. Point it to the folder of presets you want to install, and then select the presets to add to Lightroom. You can select multiple presets by holding shift and clicking to select a range of presets.

Click “Import” to confirm and that’s all that there is to it! Your downloaded presets are now ready to use.

100 Free Lightroom Presets

We’ve done some scouring of the web to find 100 of the best Lightroom presets. Do you have presets of your own that you love? Make sure to share them in the comments below. Click the titles of the presets to be taken to the download site. You’ll see some repeated images in these links because we personally created the before-and-after images. We didn’t want to rely on the creators of the preset to provide the examples. Presets are supposed to just work, no intense Photoshopping afterward.

8 Epic Lightroom Presets for Weddings

Holga Lightroom Presets

Bad Ass Film Look

Goldy Browny Effect Preset

Kevin Hosford Summer Presets

Lightroom Sin City Preset

Black and White Film Presets

Color Print Film Presets

Vintage Lightroom Presets

HDR Style Lightroom Presets

Velvia Film Style Lightroom Presets

Polaroid Style Presets

Faded Film Look Preset

14 Free Wonderland Presets

6 Free Black and White Presets

Catchingsand Lightroom B+W Pack 1

Ksouthv2 Camera Portrait

fa-photo Obvious Details

The Prairie Lightroom Preset

ipawluk Color Isolates Presets

Copper Tone Skin Preset

Silky Smooth Skin Preset

Desaturate Me Preset

Light leak + punch + Grain Preset

SaraJ3an Brigthen Preset Pack

Black & White Infrared

Camera Dojo Lightroom Essentials

Vivian Chung Cross Processing

Focus Street Life Presets

The 300 Look Preset

Fall Foliage Preset

Wedding Fantasy Preset

Instagram Nashville Preset

Nostalgic Summer Presets

The Hangover Movie Look Preset

Wedding Day Preset

Ice Cold Preset

Hawaii Five-O Inspired Preset

The Ultimate Fighter Inspired Preset

Vintage Vegas Presets

The Twilight Inspired Preset

Hard Edgy Look Presets

Warm and Fuzzy Effect Preset

The Cutting Edge Preset

Intensive Heaven Preset

Fashion Shot Preset

Presets for Weddings

Fashion Darlings Presets

Dustin’s Fashion Look Presets

Underwater Presets

Old Touch Presets

Polo Ralph Lauren Style Preset

Yeah High Contrast Preset

Post Apocalyptic Preset

Night Palettes

Sweet Presets

“A Good one for Everything” – Cinema Style Preset

Purple Haze Preset

Milky Noir Preset

Muted Tones Presets

John and Marcus Salvation

Holly Orange and Teal Preset

Analogue Love 3 Preset

Lightroom Green Preset

Lightroom Archived Grain Preset

Dust Storm Inspired Preset

Rockwell Warm Preset

Steller Lightroom Presets

190 Free Lightroom Presets from OnOne Software

Warming Lightroom Preset

Daido Moriyama Style Presets

Cinematic Lightroom Presets

Old Skool Toning Preset

Mad Dash Dramatic Style Preset

Another World Lightroom Presets

Lightroom Fake HDR Effect

ipawluk Surreal Color Pack

640 Pixels Presets

28 Free Presets from Christian Wolf

Gavin’s Polaroid Preset

Silver Shadows B&W Presets

Analogue Love 1 Preset

Shadow Crusher Preset

Sharp Washed Preset

Farm Girl Writes Lightroom Presets

Painting Art Style Preset

Pencil Drawing Preset

27 Free Presets by Bryan Wheeler

Photography Concentrate Lightroom Presets

Albert deBrujin Film Type Presets

Fuji Acros Film Preset

Experimental Color Presets

Mediterranean Scenes Preset

Kelvin Borders Preset

Almost Black & White Preset

BDP Glamour Look Preset

Asakusa Preset

The Look of Beijing Preset

Old Film in Latin America

XAnalog Basic Preset

100 Free Photoshop Actions

We have also published a fantastic article explaining how to make your own Photoshop Actions, with 100 amazing examples. You can read the article here!

The use of textures can dramatically improve your print design work. You can (if used sensibly) add more depth to your work, whether your work be business cards, advertisements or posters. The results of using texture in your print design projects can be completely different every time, depending on various factors such as what textures you use, how many textures you use, and how you apply them to your work.

This post showcases a great selection of print design projects that make good use of textures; making the work more visually appealing. The showcase is followed by a small selection of useful links and resources.

This article was originally published in March of 2009.

Textures in Business Cards

Although there are thousands of textured business cards out there, it’s not very often you’re actually given one. Most business cards are very simple, which is usually suitable for the company they are representing, although there are a lot of simple cards being used to represent companies that could do so much more with their corporate image, such as landscaping and construction agencies. Below is a selection of great textured business cards.

Chuck Tingley

The use of texture in this card is incredible. A little bit of grunge mixed with paint and splatter marks is (usually) never a bad thing, and the composition of this card shows how to do it perfectly.

Artams

Redbox Media

Redbox Media use a subtle grunge texture in the red of their business card to make it just that little more appealing. The digital texture of the lined paper and coffee stains, combined with the ‘hand-drawn’ style typography make this card very unique.

Magouya

Marko Manojlovic

Well, it’s quite obvious what the texture is used for in Marko Manojlovic’s card. Although very simple, it’s interesting and definitely appeals more than a standard plain card!

Matus Macej

Colokial

Colokial use texture in their business card to give it a worn-out and stained “tropical” look. It works very well with the color scheme of the logo and that little touch of Spot UV makes it so unique!

SeedVibe

Hypno Liberate

The texture used in Hypno Liberate’s card adds a lovely vintage look to the design, matching the corporate brand of the company well.

DigitalMedia

Textures in Printed Advertisements

In my opinion, textures are used to their greatest advantage in print advertisements such as billboard posters and postcards. Taking a look at the selection of superb designs below; you can clearly see the huge difference adding a little bit of texture can make.

Jones Soda Ad

Got 2 Be

This fantastic advertisement for a hair product is incredibly clever and is made up (almost) entirely of hair texture. The addition of someones face in the bottom center of the poster makes it a little comical, too.

Zippo Hero

Smoke Shave

This great poster to encourage people to stop smoking has a great three-dimensional look to it which was created using textures. In fact, without the textures in this poster, there’d be nothing left!

Pepsi Max

Pepsi Max

These clever Pepsi Max posters (see other one above) show a depressed lonely calorie, advertising that Pepsi Max is a one calorie per can soft drink. The use of textures make the illustrations much more interesting to look at, and just gives them that extra “Oooomph”!

Musou Music Publishing

Hugo

OXY

Midwest Trader

The use of an old stained piece of paper in this poster makes it individual and much more interesting. The way it works so well and merges in with the model and birds is superb!

Days Of The New Show

Textures in Poster Design

A lot of the creative posters below actually rely on textures – without the texture in the images, some of the designs would be fairly simple and quite boring to look at. The following collection shows that texture really can bring your work to a completely new level!

First Date With Alice

“First Date With Alice” has an excellent yet simple composition and a beautiful, bright color scheme. The texture makes the poster a lot more interesting, adding different shades of color to the main shapes in the center of the poster.

All We Need To Know

The Creative Mind

This poster makes use of subtle texture to just a little more depth in the background of the piece.

Magic Tree

Saint Design

Giant Mutant Centipede

Like in the Pepsi Max advertisement posters showcased earlier in this post, this poster uses textures to add new life to the otherwise flat vector illustrations. The extra noise gives it a that little extra detailing it needs to keep you looking at the poster for a longer period of time.

Type and Grid

Squares

Light grungy textures are using in the posters “Squares” to give it an interesting background and to add a little extra noise to the model and other various shapes used in the composition. Without it, the overall feel of the poster would be completely different.

Chinawhite Dancer

A Part Of Me

First of all, I have to say “wow!" What a great poster! The vibrant colors mixed with the grungy textures and superb lighting effects make this a stunning one, definitely worthy of going on the office wall!

Typography

Global Warming

Future Imperfect

Retro Vector

This Abduzeedo poster uses texture to add a retro look to the otherwise plain background. A slightly grungier texture has been used to make those clean-cut abstract shapes fly into a completely different dimension!

Some People Refuse 2 B Default

Sour

Axygene

Last but not least, this great poster titled “Axygene” uses plenty of different textures to bring the poster to life, as well as using a grungy eraser brush to remove areas of the right-angled corners.

Links & Resources

• Freebie Roundup: 12 Places To Download Free Textures
  A round-up of 12 superb places to download free, high-resolution textures.
• 200+ Textures, Brushes, and Fonts: Ultimate Grunge Roundup
  A huge compilation of grunge resources such as textures, brushes, and fonts.
• 300+ Vintage Style Textures and Photoshop Brushes
  A collection of over 300 vintage style textures and brushes to use in your designs.
• 50+ textures for Your Design Appetite
  A lovely collection of high-resolution and free textures to use in your everyday work.
• The Big Collection Of Free Design Textures
  What seems like a never-ending list of free textures that you can download and use in all of your own designs.
• Textures in Modern Web Design
  A showcase of 50+ incredible uses of texture in fresh and modern web design.
• Dirty Design: Create a Grungy Thriller Book Cover
  Create your own grungy book cover using plenty of textures and techniques.
• How to Make a Highly Textured Site Layout in Photoshop
  In this tutorial, learn to create a textured site layout by layering multiple images.
• Create a Leather-Textured, Realistic Briefcase Icon
  Learn to crete a realistic leather briefcase entirely from scratch using layer styles and textures.

Join me in this screencast series as we build a clean, flexible admin template. We’ll begin by mocking up our designs in Photoshop and today we’ll get the ball rolling with our login page.

Admin Templates

With the rise of various Content Management Systems (CMS), admin templates are in high demand right now. Some of them are so popular that they’ve racked up over 2000 sales on ThemeForest in a relatively short amount of time.

So, what makes a CMS theme successful? Is it the design or the functionality? I think a little bit of both. Also, how can such a theme become a top seller? I mean, there are hundreds of CMS’s out there. Can we really account for all of them and make a theme that would fit them like a universal size glove? Probably not. But my goal in this tutorial is to create a flexible theme that can be adapted to as many systems as possible.

We’ll start with some quick mockups in Photoshop to get an idea of the general placement of the elements and also about colors and typography. We’ll then continue with the coding part, learning and experimenting with EM layouts.

Part 1: Designing the Login Page

Further Resources

• Crisp web app icons – Webdesigntuts+
• Wireframing kits – Smashing Magazine

Battery showing the sine waves of the 808.

The first thing I have done is instantiate Battery (this can be done in any DAW and sampler) with a static kick drum sound from an 808. This is to lay the basis for my kick drum and generate the necessary low frequency sine waves inherent to clean and pronounced sounding kicks.

Next, I went through my library and found a velocity layered ‘real’ kick sample to lay on top of the 808.

Download audio file (808.mp3)

Download audio file (Vel.mp3)

I then recorded both kicks and sent them through a free app. called Transcribe! (you should check it out www.seventhstring.com) which helped me to tune both kicks to C (an arbitrary tuning, but that is what we will work with here – I had to pitch the velocity layered kick form A to C).

The analyzed kick drum.

I then filtered out most of the high end of the 808 and the low end of the velocity layered kick so they were not overlapping as I wanted the fundamental bass of the 808 with the rather organic top end of the velocity layered kick to meld.

The left filter is for the 808, the right for the velocity layered cell.

Download audio file (Comb. & Filt.mp3)

I then went to the modulation menu in Battery and set a tune modulation by envelope to both drum sounds and set it to a fast attack and quick decay in order to modulate a octave + of pitch which accentuates the attack phase of both kicks.

The modulation envelope in the bottom left.

Download audio file (Mod.mp3)

I then went in with Logic’s transform tool to randomize my MIDI layers. I gave the tops a +- 10 random velocity from what I had selected previously as I wanted to take advantage of the different samples of the velocity layers and I gave my bottom end a +-5 as I wanted my lows to remain constant and not articulate too much. If your DAW does not have something like this, you can easily add some randomization by hand.

Logic’s Transform Tool.

Download audio file (Rand.mp3)

From there I took out some mid lows with an EQ to get rid of unnecessary sonics and tighten up the sound-basically get rid of the floppiness of it. I then added some point to the attack with the high shelving filter and cleaned up the bottom end and added some punch with a resonant low cut.

Logic’s Channel EQ.

Download audio file (EQ.mp3)

You can definitely use more than two sample layers for this trick, but you should also be careful not to overdo it and make your sound muddy. I have found 3 for the kick is about the maximum for me. Snares and other elements which consist of a lot of harmonics can be layered more depending on the sound you are going for, but you should still be careful not to overdo it as you will just have to get rid of the extra information later on.

Although this trick is really no replacement for a live performance, it can give the feeling of one and is a great substitute for expensive studio and recording time. Furthermore, as many mixers drop the bottom end of kick recordings for pure sine waves anyway, this kick layering trick sounds great and current for the time/effort involved while allowing for a large amount of control over dynamics and sound variations.

Part 1 explains the concept and builds the bulk of the shapes used to create the effect. We also start to get into using gradients to control the layers. Part 2 finishes the gradient control layers and begins fine tuning the look with motion. Part 3 finishes the tutorial with lights, adjustment layers, expressions, camera animation, and final tweaks.

Once you build the out the project, you can use it for anything just by modifying a few layers. Check it out!

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Each month, we search the web for the best vector-related content and showcase it here for you all to enjoy. This month, we showcase high quality tutorials on mixing vector techniques with photography, we learn how to create vintage style lettering that has a grainy retro style, dive deeper into Illustrator’s 3D tools, and more. We have loads of tutorials, in addition to inspiring articles, resources, and useful vector freebies inside. Dig into January’s illustration and design material for vector lovers.

Vector Tutorials

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  Merge Vectors with Photographic Imagery

  In this tutorial Neil Stevens shows us how to merge abstract, colorful vector shapes created in Illustrator with photo imagery in Photoshop. The results have a wonderful, retro feel. Learn to merge a few found images, and mix them in with vector shapes to create a unique editorial illustration.

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• 

  Custom Dusty Type Treatment

  This awesome tutorial from Ryan Putnam over on Vectips shows us how to create our own custom type effect that hinges on using Grain Effects and Live Trace in Illustrator CS5. I can’t wait to try the techniques in this tutorial in my own work, and give it a grainy, dingy, dusty style that while vector, will feel like it’s hand made.

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• 

  Photoshop & Illustrator Tutorial: Organic Texture and Shape Effects

  Illustrator François Leroy shows us how he crated his work for the exhibition by the Designers Against Child Slavery campaign. Learn how he creates blended vector shapes, then mixes them on a large canvas in Photoshop with a photo, and adds numerous subtle adjustments and effects, such as drips.

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  How to Create an Isometric Shopping Basket Using Illustrator, Phantasm CS and VectorScribe

  Learn how to create a shiny, realistic shopping basket icon in Illustrator using vector 3D modeling techniques, as well as the Phantasm CS and Vectorscribe plugins. Discover how Iaroslav Lazunov adds shine, shading, and all the professional touches to this vector icon.

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  Illustrating with the Gradient Mesh Tool

  In this video tutorial Jeff Witchel shows us how to work with the Gradient Mesh tool in Illustrator. This tutorial covers techniques like transparent overlay, adding anchor points, as well as sampling color.

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  How to Illustrate a Lighthouse

  Follow along with Alexander Egupov as he demonstrates in detail how to illustrate a vector lighthouse in Illustrator. Walk through the basic shape construction, then into the more advanced parts of the tutorial that use the Gradient Mesh tool and Opacity techniques to color the work and give it a shiny 3D quality.

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  Create A New Year Card in Illustrator

  Learn how Nguyen Ngoc Bao crated a New Year Card in Illustrator. This tutorial features the creation of a cute dragon inside of puffy curled clouds. Clipping Masks, gradients, blurs strokes and more techniques are covered in this detailed workflow.

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• 

  Learn How To Create a Tree From Scratch in Illustrator

  This beginner Illustrator tutorial by EntheosWeb will teach you how to create a beautiful maple leaf tree from scratch using Illustrator. First you’ll use the Pen Tool to create the leaf and then create a custom brush to make many leaves of different sizes.

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  Create a Cute Bird’s Nest in Illustrator

  In this intermediate Illustrator tutorial Simona Prefundner shows us how to create a cute bird’s nest icon. Learn how to create a fragile vector eggshell inside a nest using the Pen Tool, bringing it to life with the Gradient Tool, symbol tools, and finishing it up by adding shadows and highlights.

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  Set ALL the Things Script

  Rype shows us how to batch transform object in Illustrator using the Set ALL the Things Script, which is a handy tool to add to Illustrator. Currently within Illustrator, there is no wash way to do this, except by adding this script.

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  Illustrator Tutorial: Holland Tulip Field

  In this Advanced Illustrator tutorial Abolic shows us how to create a tulip field scene. The Gradient Mesh tool is used extensively to create the tulips in various colors. This is a gorgeous work and each step to create it is well documented.

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Vector Inspiration, Articles, and Resources

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  40+ Fresh And Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

  Put together by Noupe, this collection of Illustrator tutorials from last year has some of the best from across the web. Many of these are well detailed, step-by-step guides put together by talented designers and illustrators.

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• 

  Showcase of Logo Designs with Detailed Patterns

  Chris Spooner showcases a collection of well designed logos that put detailed patterns to good use. See how the designers have combined shapes to produce intricate logos that draw in the viewer – great inspiration.

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  Children’s Illustration Grows Up

  Alice Ross shows us the key features that make children’s illustration interesting and successful. It’s critical that children’s illustrators have fertile imaginations, are able to craft captivating characters and exciting worlds. A good feel for the absurd and nonsensical certainly helps, as well as having the ability to revert back to your younger self. Learn more about illustrating for children with great classic example from Dr Seuss, among others, as well as modern children’s illustrations.

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  365 Awesome Designers

  Over on Computer Arts Garrick Webster shows us the project 365 Awesome Designers. This project by Matthias Mentasti is a great place to get design and illustration inspiration. The site was put together in WordPress and links back through to portfolios of images in Dribbble. The work featured has a taste for grainy textured retro illustration styles, my favorite.

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  Anchor Points: Hyaku

  The Hyaku of Japanese illustrators create chic modern vector illustrations. They are inspired by all sorts of pop culture and fashion references and have a unique retro feel to them. Learn more about this successful illustration team over on Vectips.

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  Swissted

  Swissted is the project of one, Mike Joyce (the NYC-based designer). This is an interesting project that takes hardcore punk and indie show flyers and redoes the posters in swiss modernist style posters. Lots of angular layouts, grids, transparency and scale. And he’s done so many! Take a gander, it’s fun to look through. Each design is set in Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Medium, all lowercase

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(FREE!) Vector Downloads

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  Exclusive Vector Freebie: New Social Media Icon Set

  Noupe released this awesome set of 25 social media vector icons. They are created in Illustrator CS5 by Jasmina Stanojevic. They are free to download and use. The download contains a ZIP file with the original AI file and an EPS version as well. Icons are available for use in personal and commercial projects.

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  96 Vector Icons

  These minimalist icons are designed to look great on any background The free download includes both black and white versions, ready for use. There are multiple free vector icons in this set in various sizes of PNG exports. The fully editable Illustrator file with all the icons is in the download as well.

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• 

  12 Floristic Designs

  This is a nice set of free vector florals available in AI format. They are designed by creative_alys and released by Vecteezy. Grab these floral designs for free today. If you’re looking for more, then check out our big post Massive Collection of Vintage Vector Graphics: Floral Borders, Corners, and Frames.

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• 

  350+ Free Graphics: Vector Arrow Symbols and Shapes

  This article hosts an assortment of arrow symbols, shapes, and icons, all available for free download. If you’re looking for arrow graphics, with various styles, such as flat silhouettes that curve, hand drawn elements, or sharp edged classic designs, then jump over to this large collection. They are available in EPS, CSH, AI and other vector formats for free download.

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Lunar New Year is here! This red card was chosen as a Lunar New Year E-card because in Chinese culture the color red is auspicious and represents happiness or good luck. During Chinese New Year red packets are given out for luck and prosperity in the coming year. In this quick tip you will learn how to use typography, gradients and the shear tool to make a striking card design.

Step 1

Open a New Document with size 128mm x 210mm. Use the Rectangle Tool (M) to draw a 128 x 210mm background and open the Gradient Panel (Window > Gradient). Set the gradient Type to Linear with a color 0,100,100,33 for the dark red and 0,100,100,10 for the lighter red. This will be the gradient for the background.

Step 2

To fill the background select the background rectangle and use the eyedropper tool to tap on the created gradient. This will change your background to the gradient color.

Step 3

Make a new layer above the background. Use the Rectangle Tool (M) to create 3 rectangular shapes a square and a banner. The width for the shapes should be less than 128mm, to fit on the background.

Step 4

To create the banner, firstly use the Rectangle Tool to create a rectangular shape for the middle and use the Pen Tool (P) to draw the side elements.

To make the side elements, draw a rectangle with a point in the side then add a small triangle (in a darker red) that will make up the shadow. Once you draw one of the side elements, select it and use the Reflect Tool (O) to create one for the other side. Place the middle of the banner on top of the side elements so that it meets the shadows.

Step 5

To create the stamp, select the star tool and Alt + Click on the artboard area. The option panel will pop up. Enter 60px for "Radius 1" and 55px for "Radius 2". The points represent the number of sharp points you want for the stamp, I’ve used 60.

Step 6

Next draw a smaller inner circle over the star stamp and go to the Pathfinder Panel and select minus front. This will create a transparent area for the stamp.

Step 7

Once you are done with the stamp and the banner. You can start adding typography to the elements.The fonts I have used are indicated on the image below, they are Steefish and Bebas Neue. The Chinese font can be download here.The chinese character on the stamp means "Dragon" in mandarin and the four Chinese words at the bottom is "Chinese New Year"

Step 8

Now group all of the elements together and go to Object > Transform > Shear. The Option Panel will popup, select Shear Angle -12 degree, Axis : Vertical. Click OK.

Step 9

Select the group of elements and test it on the background you previously created. Next we will be creating a shadow to contrast the elements with the background.

Step 10

Select the 4 main elements and copy and paste them onto the background layer (Command + C then Command + F) then fill it with a darker gradient to the one currently in use.

Step 11

Next group the elements together go to Object > Transform > Shear. Shear the banner as follows, shear angle is 12 degree and axis: Vertical.

Step 12

Finally, place the main elements on top of the background and shadows.

Conclusion

You can adjust the shadow elements by using the Direct Selection Tool to move them around. Now you are done with your unique typography card! I hope you’ve enjoyed this tut.