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.

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!

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.

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

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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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.

Photoshop is a fantastic tool to help 3D artists save time and improve the look of their renders. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to combine ZBrush materials and lighting render passes to create a stunning metallic textured skull. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

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

• Background
• Brushes File
• ZBrush Assets

Before You Begin

While this tutorial uses both Photoshop and Zbrush, we won’t get too in depth with the Zbrush steps as 3D isn’t the focus of this site. If you would like to learn more about ZBrush, head over to our sister site Cgtuts and have a look at their ZBrush category. For the purpose of this tutorial we have included PSD files that were exported from Zbrush so that you can follow along with the Photoshop aspects of this tutorial.

Step 1: Composing the image in Zbrush

For the first few steps, I’ll give you an explanation of what I did in ZBrush. I won’t get too in-depth as that isn’t the focus of this tutorial. I sculpted the models and placed them on the viewport in the position I wanted them to be rendered. In this case, I composed the image using the 2.5D capability of ZBrush. Then, I dropped the different tools on a 2.5D canvas, moving, scaling and placing them into the right position. I don’t usually like to make preliminary sketches. I do most of my work directly on the canvas.

Make sure to set your canvas size in ZBrush as twice the size as you want your final image. Then, you can use the AA button before exporting the image for good anti-aliasing results.

Step 2: Settings materials and light in Zbrush

For this image I set two different lights, global and rim, and three materials, two for the metal, one for the textured worn finishing, and other chromed, and one more material for the bone part. I also used a flat material render for use it as a mask to isolate the background, which we use later.

Step 3: Start composing in Photoshop

Zbrush exports documents as PSD files by default, then I open one of the materials renders and start adding more layers.

My idea is for the skull to have a worn metal effect but over a polished surface, as if the passage of time has added layers of dirt and rust. So I added a new layer with the image of textured metal on top of the “chrome” later, after that I copy the same layer, right click > duplicate layer, and set the blending mode to Hue and adjust the opacity to 50%.

Step 4: Adding some destruction

In this step we are going to make the "tricky" part of this image, add a Layer mask to the "Texture" layer and use a textured brush (no300, no400, or no250 brushes from the assets) and black color to paint on it, thus create the scratches needed to reveal the chrome surface and give the effect of worn metal layer.

After that, we are going to add the shadows to highlight even more stains and create more surface realism, for that we will add a Layer Style to the "Texture" layer as a Drop Shadow as shown in the picture.

Step 5: Adding the bone part

For this part we need the bone material render from ZBrush. Put it on top of the rest of the layers and name it "Bone," then we have to make a mask to reveal just the part that we want, add a Layer mask to the "Bone" layer and paint it with black. I used the Brush Tool (soft round brush) because it is a small and regular area that is easy to define.

Step 6: Adding some texture and shadows to the bone part

To add texture to your surface, use overlapping layers set to soft light. You can vary the opacity depending on how much you want to emphasize the effect. In this step, I used texture brushes with a layer mask. You can also use the burn tool using a textured brush to apply the desired effect.

Then, I added a new soft light layer set to 35% opacity and painted in some black using a textured brush to add some irregularities to the surface.

I then created the “bone shadows” layer and set it to multiply at 100% opacity to paint in some shadows into the eyes.

To avoid painting on undesired metal parts Copy and Paste the same Layer Mask that we used to isolate the bone part.

Step 7: Adding the secondary light

I usually like to add a secondary color source light to add some atmosphere to my images, it enhances the feeling of location and add strength to the image impact.

Then I add the rim light render from Zbrush as a new Lighten layer "Rim Light"; when I am building the image, I usually don’t have very clear idea of which kind of scene I want to render, then I play with the color of that light, Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation > Colorize, and I see how it works with different color schemes, the result will influence on the final mood of the image.

In this case I set the color to a red light which is coming from below, then I add a Layer Mask and paint a gradient from top to down to turn off the light on the upper part, I set the opacity of the layer to 75% to integrate it a bit more.

Step 8: Adding the background

Add the background that we included in the assets above and apply a layer mask as shown below using the ZBrush mask render.

Step 9: Integrating the background

To integrate the background we are going to need to add some layers and adjust their blending modes. Add 3 news layers as shown in the layer stack in the screenshot and apply a layer mask as shown. You can then paint highlights and shadows using white and black colors using the layer’s opacity to adjust the lightness/darkness of the layer.

Next, we are going to integrate the cables with the background. Create a new layer, name it "Background shadows" and change the blending mode to Multiply, 100% opacity, then do as before with the Mask layer, copy it and apply it to this new layer, and with a soft round brush paint some curved strokes to achieve the cables shadows.

Step 10: Adding some steam effect

The brushes found in the tutorial assets above includes some very interesting smoke, cloud, and fog brushes which we are going to use to add some toxic steam.

Create a new layer and name it “Ambient steam.” Se the blending mode to normal at 100% opacity and paint some strokes with brush number 566 onto the lower part.

Step 11: Toxic juice

Here we add the toxic liquid that drips down from valves, add a new layer, name "Toxic liquid", blending mode Overlay 100% opacity, we need a soft round brush, adjust size to fit stroke to the valve exit, pick a bright green color and paint from there to down, keep pressed the Shift key to have a straight line while you trace, after that, use the Erase tool, with the same soft round brush, to remove a bit of the lower part, use this tool adjusting opacity less than 100% to fade it down.

Now we are going to add some toxic vapors and add some brightness to the toxic liquid, create a new layer, name "Toxic vapor", blending mode Normal, 100% opacity, pick brush number 300 Rising smoke, and with the same green we used before paint some vapor clouds coming out from the valves, then we repeat same process as before, soft round brush, pressing Shift key and paint a straight line, in this case decrease a bit the brush size and pick a lighter green.

Step 12: Merge Layers

When I have a considerable number of layers I like to "restart", merging them and have a new base to work with, but I keep original layers for future changes or corrections if necessary, keeping them organized in a group folder.

Then select all the layers, duplicate them, and merge the duplicates together. Name the new layer “Toxicskull.” Now place all the unmerged layers into a group as shown below.

Step 13: Levels and color corrections

Let’s add some adjustments to this piece by adding adjustment layers. You can use your own judgment here in terms of settings.

Step 14: Start adding light sources

To add some atmosphere, create a new layer and name it “red light.” Set its blending mode to normal with 80% opacity. Use brush number 300 rising smoke-1 and paint some fog in the bottom left corner.

Step 15: Adding more light sources

In this step we are going to add another light source. Add a new layer, name it “top light.” Set blending mode to Lighten with 55% opacity and apply a white to black gradient as shown.

Step 16: Adding metallic highlights

Use the Dodge tool to lighten up areas that you want to add highlights. Then, on a new layer use the number 500 Flare brush to paint in some flares. Use different brush sizes depending on how big the reflecting surface is.

Step 17: Adding extra shadows

In this step we’re going to add some extra shadows to give some parts more depth and detail. Here, for example, I see that screws need some shadows, then I add a new layer, named "Extra shadows." Set to Multiply blending mode, at 40% opacity, pick the Brush Tool and with a soft round one and black color paint shadows where necessary.

Step 18: Add impurities to air

To add some impurities into the air, use brush number 200, the Ash brush, it works very well and I use it a lot. Add a new layer, named "Impurities," Normal blending mode, 100% opacity, pick pure white color and paint in those areas where the light has more intensity, light illuminates those small particles floating on the air, paint using different brush sizes.

But this is not enough. We will add an extra effect to our atmosphere, create a new layer "Impurities copy", paint a bit more with same brush, but now try to choose areas where light is visible, then apply a Gaussian Blur to the layer, Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur, a small amount 1.2 pixels is ok, with this extra step we will add a sense of depth to the image blurring air particles which are closer to our point of view. One tip is, if you want to remove some of this particles erasing them, pick a kind of brush with a shape of cloud, fog, smoke, etc.

Step 19: Vignette

I usually add a vignette to my images; I think that it adds an extra of bit of attention and strength. To do this, make a selection of the entire image using "Backgroundl" layer, Command/Ctrl + left click on the layer, then add a new layer, name "Vignette" Normal blending mode, 100% opacity, and stroke that selection, Edit > Stroke, use black color, 6 pixels wide inside, then blur it, Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and apply a big amount, over 30 pixels is fine.

Step 20: Refine jagged edges

To refine the ant- aliasing, grab the Smudge tool and adjust it in two ways, set the Strength to low values, between 1 and 5, and adjust brush size very small, between 5 or 9 pixels. A soft round brush will work well, and smudge the edge doing several passes always following the direction.

Step 21: Add depth of field

There are different ways to add depth of field to an image, in this case we are going to apply it manually, because the only part I just want to blur are the background wires, grab the Blur Tool, adjust Strength to 30%, and blur them softly.

Conclusion

I like to finish my images with one last layer, the noise layer, I add it for two reasons, one, I like the noisy surface, and it helps to homogenize the entire image, integrating the background with the extra painting layers added during process.

Create a new layer named "Noise." Set blending mode to Multiply at 100% opacity, fill it with white and go to Filters > Noise > Add Noise. Set noise to 12% or whatever looks best.

If you have ever searched for speed paintings on Youtube, you’ve probably seen the work of Nico Dimattia. Dimattia is an exceptional digital painter from Argentina who has received worldwide attention on his Youtube channel with his amazing speed painting videos. In this article we will feature some of his videos and artwork. Let’s take a look!

Wolverine

Slash

Toy Story 3

Iron Man 2

Radio Head Tribute

Megan Fox

Chuck Norris

ALF

Spider Man

Mad Hatter

Arnold Schwartzenager

John Malkovich

Ben Stiller

Bumblebee

House

Paris Hilton

Robert Deniro

Sarah Connor

Sheldon

Stan Lee

Will Smith

In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, author Mark Mayers will create a post-apocalyptic photo composition that will take inspiration from movies such as Planet of Apes, where an astronaut finds himself marooned on Earth thousands of years in the future only to find scattered relics of mankind. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members. If you are looking to take your photo composition 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.

Most of you probably know those awesome letters that were generated with 3D programs. But what about when you don’t have any particular program and you need to make 3D typography? This tutorial will show you how to create the 3D text shape and give it a high quality metal look using pure Photoshop. Check it out!

Editor’s note: This tutorial was originally published on Psdtuts in December of 2008.

Step 1

Let’s start with a new document of 1500 pixel by 1500 pixel, and 300px/inch resolution. Create a new layer, name it "3D TEXT_first." Then grab the Type Tool (T) and type big letters of your desired text, in my case it’s written as 3D TEXT. Also don’t worry if your text goes out of canvas, it has to be very big. Because we’re going to rasterize this layer and distort it in the next step.

Step 2

So now, right-click on the "3D TEXT_first" layer and select Rasterize Type. Then use Edit > Transform > Distort and create a nice perspective to our text by dragging the corners. Make sure your text is way smaller. This way you won’t lose its quality and the text won’t get blurry.

Tip: If you fail by distorting, and some text edges look fuzzy, use Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask, and increase the Amount.

Step 3

Now that the text is way smaller and has a nice perspective, create a duplicate (Command + J) of this text layer and name it "3D TEXT_last." Switch to Move Tool (V) and use keyboard arrows to position the "3D TEXT_last" layer a bit above the "3D TEXT_first" layer. In my case this was 16 pixels up and 2 pixels right.

Step 4

Create duplicates (Command + J) of both text layers and position them as you see in the image below. Make sure you have exactly the same order as shown, as it’s important!

Step 5

Now turn off "3D TEXT_first" and "3D TEXT_last" layers. Select the "3D TEXT_first copy" layer and make around 60 copies (Command + J). Now, select "3D TEXT_last copy", go all the way down to the bottom of Layers Palette, hold Shift and left-click on the first "3D TEXT_first copy" layer – this should select all 60 layers. Next right-click on those layers and select Link Layers.

Step 6

Switch to Move Tool (V), select "3D TEXT_last copy" layer. Go to the upper toolbar of the move tool. Click on Distribute Vertical Centers and Distribute Horizontal Centers. Then notice that our letters were perfectly distributed creating a nice 3D shape. Next, select all linked layers and merge (Command + E). Name this layer "3D TEXT_merged."

Step 7

Go to Layers Palette, turn on "3D TEXT_last" and open this layer’s Blending Options. Apply a Gradient Overlay from #1a3236 to #cffffb. As for setting the Angle, try to make this gradient look darker on the top of letters, and lighter on the bottom of them.

Step 8

In the Layers Palette select "3D TEXT_merged," turn it off, then hold Alt and left-click on this layer’s thumbnail to load the selection. Make a new layer, name it "3D TEXT_colored" and fill it with #a6e6fe. Deselect (Command + D).

Step 9

Now go to "3D TEXT_colored" layer’s Blending Options. Select Gradient Overlay. Make sure you select the second preset in the Gradient Editor, that is Foreground to Transparent, and then set the color values starting as: #000000, #4a4747, #ffffff, #262626, #ffffff, and #000000. Next, depending on which direction your text is going, the Angle will be different. So in my case I set the Angle to 123, and as you can see the gradient goes through the center of the whole text. So that will be our lighting.

Step 10

Some spots and the top of the letters look too bright, so we need to create just a touch of shadow in places indicated below. So hold Alt, left-click on the "3D TEXT_colored" layer to load its selection, then create a new layer above the "3D TEXT_colored" layer, and name it "Shadows." Set your Foreground Color to #1a3236 or darker, then grab the Brush Tool (B), set Flow around 30%, Hardness to 0% and paint. Then Deselect (Command + D) once you’re done.

Step 11

Now let’s start giving this text a quality look. Go to the Layers Palette, hold Alt and left-click on "3D TEXT last" layer thumbnail to load its selection. Then create a new layer above all layers, name it "Shining lines." Grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M), right-click on your image and select "Stroke." Set Width to 1 pixel, Color to white, and Location to Center. Grab a nice big brush with Hardness 0% and Flow around 30%. Then erase everything except places indicated with arrows. These arrows point to lights, and those pointed edges need some shine. So make sure you leave them untouched.

Step 12

When you’re done erasing, create a duplicate of the "Shining lines" layer, lower its Opacity just a touch, and merge (Command + E) those two layers. You may switch for a moment to a black background to see if you did a good job with erasing, if not, make some further corrections. You should get something that looks similar to the image below.

Step 13

Now go to the bottom of the Layers Palette, select and turn on "3D TEXT first" layer, rename it to "Bottom shadow 1." Make a duplicate of it (Command + J), name this copy "Bottom shadow 2." Now apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur to the "Bottom shadow 2" layer, with Radius of 3 pixels.

Step 14

Switch to the Move Tool (V), and by hitting keyboard arrows move this blurred shadow 5 pixels to the left. You need to create an illusion that the curvy text lines drop more shadows inside. So we do not need some outside parts of this shadow. Grab the Brush Tool (B) and softly brush parts of the shadow shown below. Don’t be to picky, there is no need to make an accurate erase. It’s OK if you leave some gray shadow edges, like in the second image below.

Step 15

Now go back and apply Filter > Blue > Gaussian Blur to the "Bottom shadow 1" layer. Set the Radius just a little smaller, like 2 pixel. Next, switch to the Move Tool (V), and by hitting the keyboard arrows, position this shadow 2 pixels down, and 2 pixels to the right. Let it cover the whole space under the letters, and remember to keep the shadow edges very thin.

Step 16

Great, we made our text really stand out. Next go to the Layers Palette, hold Command, left-click on the "Shining lines," "3D TEXT_last," "Shadows," and "3D TEXT_colored" layers. Now that you have selected them, drag these layers onto the Create a New Layer icon. Next, merge those copies (Command + E) and name this layer "Reflection." Place it above all layers and turn it off (it’s important to turn it off, so do not skip this step).

Step 17

Now, turn off the "background" layer, or even delete it, we no longer need it. Go to Image > Merge Visible, name this merged layer "TEXT." Position it above the "Reflection" layer. As you can see we have two similar layers with a small difference, the "TEXT" layer has a drop shadow, and "Reflection" has no shadow. We will be working now with the "TEXT" layer so let the "Reflection" layer remain invisible.

OK, let’s give these letters a higher quality look. Select the "TEXT" layer, duplicate it (Command + J), and this should automatically be named "TEXT copy," leave it this way. Then

change the "TEXT copy" layer Blending Mode to Overlay and Opacity to 63%. Next go to Edit > Adjustments > Gradient Map, and select the Black to White preset.

Step 18

Next, make another duplicate (Command + J) of the "TEXT" layer, and position it above all layers. Name it "Sharp edges" and by the way change it’s Blending Mode to Hard Light. Then go to Filter > Other > High Pass, set the Radius to 1 or 2 pixels. Lower this layer’s Opacity around 60-70%.

Step 19

Create a new layer below all layers, name it "Surface," press D on the keyboard to set colors to default. Grab the Gradient Tool (G) and create a large gradient, through the whole image, from top to bottom. You can start it outside the canvas. Then go to Edit > Transform > Distort, and give this surface a touch of perspective. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Because when you’re done, select the Crop Tool (C), and crop the image nicely to get rid of the surface edges.

Step 20

As I was looking to this image I thought the text is a little to bright for me, so next thing I did, was select the "TEXT" layer and apply Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. I lowered the Contrast all the way down.

Step 21

Next, go to the very bottom of the Layers Palette, and create new layer above the "Surface" layer, then name it "Glass". Grab the Paint Bucket Tool (G), fill this layer with color #3f3f3f. Then apply Filter > Noise > Add Noise, set the Amount to 28%, Distribution to Gaussian, and leave the Monochromatic option checked.

Step 22

Now, select Filter > Blur > Motion Blur, set the Angle to -90, and Distance to 144 pixels. Change this layer’s Blending Mode to Overlay, and set the Opacity to 50%. Grab the Brush Tool (B), then with a very nice soft brush of Hardness 0% and Flow around 20%, start erasing some spots of this blurred noise. Next erase places around the text to get a little of the glassy depth of the surface.

Step 23

In the end, I decided to colorize this whole image. If you want to get the same final color effect, go to Layers Palette and add an Adjustment Layer on the top of all layers. Pick Hue/Saturation. Make sure you have the Colorize option checked. Then set Hue to 201, and Saturation to 17.

Next, select the "Reflection" layer, turn it on. Lower its Opacity to 20-30%, switch to the Move Tool (V), and by hitting the keyboard arrows, position it a few pixels down to make a nice reflection. Then you can apply a Layer Mask and softly erase some of the reflection bottom.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it, here is our quality 3D text, simply made in Photoshop. If you want to add some flat text to this image, make sure it’s going towards the perspective. Also, try to discover your own use for this 3D typography by experimenting with colors and lights. You can get many cool, various results.

Thanks for reading the tutorial, I really enjoyed making it. Hope you’ve learned something new. You can view the final image below or view a larger version here.

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In this video, Photoshop Senior Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes gives us a sneak at Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw and Adobe Photoshop CS6. The most dramatic change that you will notice from this video might be the darker color of the new interface (although this can be adjusted). What do you think? What features would you like to see in Photoshop CS6 when it is released some time during the first half of 2012?

Photoshop is an excellent tool for manipulating photographs but it can also be used as a means to create stunning digital art. This tutorial is part of a 25-part video tutorial series demonstrating everything you will need to know to start producing digital art in Photoshop. Digital Art for Beginners, by Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, Martin Perhiniak will begin by teaching you how to draw in Photoshop. At the conclusion of this series you will know all you need to produce your own concept art and matte paintings in Photoshop.

Today’s tutorial Part 21: Create a Medieval Battle Axe in Photoshop will demonstrate how to construct a medieval battle axe in Photoshop. This tutorial will cover several techniques but don’t worry, it won’t be too difficult to follow. Let’s get started!

Concept art plays an important role in the creation of just about any animated movie or video game. In this article we will feature some quirky and creative illustrations and concept art from some amazing artists and illustrators. Let’s take a look!

Niddler – The Pirates of Dark Water

Easter Goblin

Old Yoda

Smurf Sighting

Beam Me Up Scotty

Cockroach Smoko

Playtime

I Love My Planet

Konk – The Pirates of Dark Water

The Adventure Of Sanitary Ware

Pinocchio-Born With Anger

Early Bloom

Alien’s Picnic

Every once and a while we like to share a little love with our sister Marketplace – GraphicRiver. Plenty of Marketplace authors have cut their teeth here on Psdtuts+ and have gone on to develop outstanding portfolios. Here is our rundown of some of the best selling PhotoShop add-ons available for sale at GraphicRiver. Take a peek, get some inspiration and start selling your own Photoshop add-ons!

1. Elegant Glass Text Effects & Styles

8 Transparent Layer Styles & 3 Elegant Glass Text effects created by using them in combination. Works great for Icons and Buttons too!

2. 8 Tileable Paper Texture Photoshop Patterns

16 .PSD files (1400px * 1024px) with 2 layers – a pattern layer and a radial gradient top layer to create the same effect as in the preview image.

3. Pressed – Letterpress Photoshop Styles

Save time by using pre-built great looking styles in Photoshop! This is a set of 5 letterpress Photoshop styles – they will make your text look as though it’s been pressed into any color background. With each of the 5 primary styles, there are 3 styles based on your text size: Small, Medium or Large. In all there are 15 styles.

4. 3D Map Generator – Photoshop Action

Create your own 3D maps with only one click! Every shape is possible and delivers a professional result. Ideal for web graphics, infographics or presentations.

5. Dimensions – 3D Generator Action

The Photoshop Action ‘Dimensions’, helps you to generate whatever you want (text, image, shape, etc,) in 3D.

6. 22 Vintage Letterpress Photoshop Actions

These 22 actions make it simple to create that vintage wood type letterpress look. Simply select the layer and hit play! Complete with 11 different textures and 2 sizes of each. Great for print or web! Works on ALL layer types (text, vector & raster).

7. New Photoshop 3D Text Styles

Easy to change the text: just click on the text with the type tool and change it.

8. PROActions Bundle – Photoshop Film & Special Effects

These actions are not simple, filter-playing actions. The steps they take have been studied and thoroughly tested, making these actions true image enhancers. The results of these actions are realistic re-creations of traditional effects, without any gimmicks.

9. 3D That!

You want to create 3d images but don’t have the skills to use any 3d modeling program/software? But you do have to skills to install a Photoshop Action and click the play button? Well, then you are the perfect candidate to use this amazing easy to use Photoshop three-dimensional (3D) action!

10. Premium Photoshop text styles

6 high detailed text styles – clear glass #1, #2, metal, gold, tin and chrome. Works with thin and bold fonts. Some text effects used two piled up layers.

This tutorial is part of a three-part series explaining how to design UI elements for mobile applications in Photoshop. In this part, we will explain how to design an icon for your mobile device’s home screen. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

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

• Wood Texture

Step 1

Create a new document. In this tutorial we will be designing our icon at 1024×1024 pixels but feel free to design yours at 256×256 or 512×512 pixels.

Step 2

With the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) draw a shape using a red color. (I sampled the Eyedropper Tool (I) on the official Psdtuts+ icon).

Step 3

With the Brush Tool (B) Paint a vivid light red color to create a light spot on the upper right part of the icon.

Step 4

Add a black shadow with the Brush Tool. Use the image as a reference.

Step 5

Add a shape like this on top of the icon with the following Layer Style.

Step 6

Duplicate and reduce the last shape with Cmd/Ctrl + T. In a new layer, set as a Clipping Mask (Alt-click in the separation line between two layer in Layers Palette), paint some light red color with the Brush Tool (B).

Step 7

Refine the upper lights using the Brush Tool (B) alternating light and dark red.

Step 8

I refined the bottom part using the same way as the previous step.

Step 9

In a separate layer, using Rectangular Selection Tool (M) add two thin stripes and select the blend mode in Overlay.

Step 10

Make a Rectangular Selection. Fill it with the Gradient Tool (G) set White to Transparent. Distort the layer with Cmd/Ctrl + T and set the layer’s blending mode to Overlay.

Step 11

Create a new layer and with the Rectangular Selection (M) select a thin stripe of pixel. Fill it with black and distort the layer with Cmd/Ctrl + T to obtain a result like the image below. Place the layer near the border of the center white gradient. As you can see I duplicated the stripe for the right side.

Step 12

Refine the shadow with the Brush Tool (B) in a new layer.

Step 13

Add two Highlights stripes. Use the Step 11 method again.

Step 14

Little adjustment with the Brush Tool (B) to the center spotlight and borders. I make a group with the center layers and added a layer mask to smooth the lines just a bit.

Step 15

Add a subtle texture to the icon with the filter Noise > Add Noise, set the blending mode to Soft Light. Try to alter the layer with Cmd/Ctrl + T.

Step 16

With The Rectangular Shape Tool (U) create a plus shape and add the following Layer Style.

Step 17

Duplicate the plus shape and shift it a bit to the bottom with the Move Tool (V). Add this Layer Style.

Step 18

Add some reflections with the Pen Tool (P). Draw some random black shape and with a low layer’s opacity.

Step 19

I refined the border of the upper cross adding white lines with the Pencil Tool.

Step 20

Magic Wand time. Add a black cylinder shape with this Layer Style.

Step 21

Add another white shapes on top of the wand with this Style.

Step 22

And finally the last shape with the following Layer Style.

Step 23

The brush is composed of two parts. First draw the main shape with the Pen Tool (P). Use this Layer Style.

Step 24

With the Brush Tool (B) start to paint inside the brush with a small hard brush. Use the Spacing Propriety inside the Brush Panel (F5) to boost the velocity of this Step. Try to alter the brush’s color too.

Step 25

I added a bottom shadow and colored with yellow the top part with the Brush Tool (B) in a new Layer.

Step 26

Draw a cylinder shape with the Pen Tool (P) Apply the following Layer Style.

Step 27

Place the wood texture inside the document and apply it to the previous Shape as a Clipping Mask in Overlay Mode.

Step 28

For the metal part, draw another shape with this Layer Style. I refined the shadow of this part in a new Layer by painting some black inside.

Step 29

Create a new layer and paint the smoke using the Brush Tool (B) with purple and yellow colors.

Step 30

Draw a Star using the Custom Shape Tool. Add this Layer Style.

Step 31

Duplicate the star shape and make it darker by selecting a dark yellow color. Arrange this layer behind the previous one. I duplicated the star two times and placed the copied one around the wand in various size.

Step 32

One last step is to refine the entire icon lighting in a separate layer with the Brush Tool (B). I added some small details to the icon, like paint drop, sparkle, shadows simply just paint them.

Step 33

I added a blue color light between the objects with the Brush Tool (B) in a new layer.

Step 34

Finally I created a drop shadow to the icon, and a custom orange background, in separate layers.

Final Image

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!

Tinker Toy

Timeless Beauty

Under My Skin

Bonsai – Tree of Life

Dexteria

Skin Deep

AmalgaMATE

AmalgaMATE 2

AmalgaMATE 3

AmalgaMATE 4

AmalgaMATE 4.5

AmalgaMATE 6

Crocodile Tears

MichaelO’s Donna

Apple

Gold Rush

Trophy Wife

Play Thing

Soul Searching

We Did It

Today we’re going back to basics with a simple, elegant, and professional button tutorial from Liam McCabe. Liam creates all sorts of great web elements, so he’s going to be a great guide through the process. If you’ve been looking for a way to spice up your designs with a uniquely styled button or UI element, look no further…

In this tutorial I will be showing you how to design a detailed button using Photoshop. Various useful techniques are used to achieve the pixel perfect design, and it’s a fairly simple process taking no more than 15-20 minutes. The end result can be seen below. Like it? Then let’s get started!

Step 1: Getting Started

First thing you want to do is open up photoshop. Ctrl + N to bring up the new canvas window. The width and height is entirely up to you but make sure the resolution is at least 72 and the color mode is RGB 8 bit. Oh and set the Background contents to transparent. So something like this:

Step 2: Fill

Now fill the current layer by pressing Shift + F5 to bring up the fill window and from the drop down menu, select Color… and copy the hex value 141d28 into the box next to the # sign. This should fill the layer with a nice dark blue color.

Step 3: Alignment

Now when it comes to designing almost anything, it’s always a good idea to use guides to makes sure everything is nicely aligned. To add a guide slap bang down the middle of the canvas, from the top menu select view -> new guide, then select vertical and input half of whatever your width maybe, for me it’s 250px.

Step 4: Rounded Corners

Next you want to select the rounded rectangle tool (from the panel on the left) and draw a nice rectangular shape in the middle of the canvas, like so:

I set the background color of the rounded rectangle to a slightly brighter blue, hex value: 17202b. To do this you can either set the foreground color before you draw the rectangle or double click the layer thumbnail color after you’ve drawn the rectangle.

Step 5a: Layer Styling

With the basic shape drawn we are going to add some layer styling. To add styling to a layer simply double click the shape layer and a layer style window will appear. The first style to add is a drop shadow. By using a shadow with the spread value set to 100 we can give the button a 3d feel to it.

(For the following layer styles, feel free to play around with the values and use mine as guidelines)

Next style to add is an inner shadow, this will give the button even more 3d feel by adding a shine to the top of the button.

An outer glow simply closes up the top, encompassing the button.

By adding a gradient overlay we can simulate a curved surface, suggesting the shape is more of a pressable object like a button.

The final layer style is a stroke. This gives the whole shape a nice border and gives a bit more definition between the bottom of the shape and the drop shadow.

Step 5b: Gradient Border

Okay that’s the layer styling out of the way. It’s always worth spending time experimenting with the various styles, as you can achieve some very nice effects. If we take a look at our button we can see the very bottom (bottom of the drop shadow) lacks definition and is therefore a slight blur. To fix this we’ll add a nice gradient border.

The first thing to do is to set the foreground color to something around #050607. Create a new layer (ctrl + shift +n) and then hold ctrl and click the shape thumbnail. This is how you select the contents of a layer.

Done correctly and you should have a dashed line around your rounded rectangle. Now press G to select the gradient tool and drag from the middle just below the shape outwards like so:

With the shape still selected, switch back to the marquee tool by pressing M and then press up once, and then delete. Now press V which will allow you to move you newly created gradient border and position it at the bottom of the drop shadow like so:

Step 7: Further Detail

To add further detail to the button, duplicate our gradient border layer, position just above the bottom of the shape, invert by pressing ctrl + I and set the blending option to overlay. You may want to duplicate that layer also, just to brighten it up a bit.

Step 8: Radial Gradient

Now to add a radial gradient to the top of the button. Like before hold ctrl and click the layer to select the shape. Select the gradient tool (G) and set the foreground color to white. A good tip is to press D which sets the foreground color to black and the background color to white and then X to reverse the colors.

Above the selection drag from the middle outwards much like before, to get the following result:

Press ctrl + D to deselect and then set the layer to overlay.

Step 9: Text

Add some text, I chose Arial bold, size 14 smooth and add a slight drop shadow and there you have it! A wonderfully detailed button. Further detail can be added to the drop shadow section (looks a bit plain) and you can also begin to imagine how you could code this up in css with the various states to play with.

Finished!

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and have fun creating some beautifully detailed buttons :)

Workshops, presentations, and conferences are excellent places to learn Photoshop. These types of events occur every day, all over the world. We understand that you can’t attend every event, everywhere. That is why each month; we display some of our favorite presentations here for you to enjoy. In this nearly 60-minute long presentation for Academy Class, our friend Martin Perhiniak will explain how to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 and Adobe Photoshop CS5 together in a seamless workflow to enhance your raw photographs.

Slick designs are an important part of a successful iPad interface. In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, author Paul Flavius we will explain how to create a beautiful GUI for an Audio/DJ iPad application in Photoshop. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members. If you are looking to take your interface and mobile design 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.

Photoshop is an excellent tool for manipulating photographs but it can also be used as a means to create stunning digital art. This tutorial is part of a 25-part video tutorial series demonstrating everything you will need to know to start producing digital art in Photoshop. Digital Art for Beginners, by Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, Martin Perhiniak will begin by teaching you how to draw in Photoshop. At the conclusion of this series you will know all you need to produce your own concept art and matte paintings in Photoshop.

Today’s tutorial Part 20: Apply Digital Painting Techniques to Photographs will demonstrate how to paint a giant viaduct over a small town in a beautiful valley. Let’s get started!

From time-to-time we like to introduce you to art groups and collectives that we find online. Art groups and collectives are great ways for designers to network and improve their skills. In this article, we will take a look at some of the work produced by the Cosmosys Collective, an online art community that’s been around since 2009. Cosmosys just released their 7th exhibition. We’ve included pieces from their latest release as well as some other notable pieces from their collection. Please take a look and enjoy!

Satori by Sam Hue

Isolation by Daniel Tatarinow

Harlem Renaissance by Joseph Converse

Lit by Howard Winterson

Voyage by Adrien Andre

Temple by Ari Bennett

Sanguine by Cristopher Pham

Leviathan by Clyzm

Return of the Debris by Josue Iniguez

Peyote by Clyzm

Volcano by Matheus Felix

Cosmosys by Mark Joseph Paje

Self Destruction by Joseph Converse

Deadly Dreams Part 3 by Jon Dalgir

A New World by Leonk

Witch Hunt by Daniel Tatarinow

Eek! by Aaron Campbell

CMS by Mark Joseph Paje

More Information

For more information you can visit their website, like them on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter.

Are you looking to start your new year with a fresh set of prints to help promote your design business? Today, our friends at UPrinting are kicking off 2012 by giving away business cards, posters, or postcards to 36 lucky Tuts+ readers. To enter, all you have to do is submit your entry using the form below and select which prize you would prefer.

Update: The winners for this giveaway have been selected. Thanks to everyone who participated.

If you are a frequent reader of our site, chances are, you are already familiar with UPrinting. They are an online printer that offers business cards, poster printing, postcard printing, and much more. UPrinting is a frequent sponsor of this site and we are very excited to partner with them on another giveaway.

Up for Grabs

Today, UPrinting is giving you several options to choose from. You can enter to win 500 standard business cards, 100 postcards, or 1 poster print. The choice is yours! More details can be found below.

500 Standard Business Cards
2" x 3.5" US Standard, 2" x 2" Square, 1.75" x 3.5" Slim
14pt Cardstock Gloss / Matte, 13pt Cardstock Uncoated
Front and Back Printing
3 Business Days Turnaround time

1 Poster Print
18" x 24"
Semi Gloss / High Gloss
1 Business day print turnaround time

100 Postcards
5" x 7"
14pt Cardstock Gloss
Front Only Printing
2 Business days print turnaround time

Rules

• To enter, submit your entry and select which product you would like.
• You may only enter once.
• Follow UPrinting on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ (Optional)
• Make sure to enter a valid email address so that we can contact you.
• Entries will be accepted until Friday, January 20, 2012 at 11:59 PM, EST.
• Shipping is free to U.S. and International residents.

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!

Tutorial Assets

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

• Truck (Personal Stock Photo)
• Car Seat (Personal Stock Photo)

Step 1

Start by opening the Truck in Photoshop. This photo is taken outside using ordinary pocket camera. No fancy lighting or set used in the process. So, it’s obvious that you can do it yourself.

Step 2: Drawing Perspective Lines

Activate Paths panels and click Create new path icon to make new path. Use Line tool to draw perspective line by following the cars shape. In the end, you will end up with a two-point perspective. Psdtuts+ has already published a very complete tutorial on drawing perspective. I found out that the best tutorial is How to Draw with Perspective from Gavin L. The technique used here is similar to Step 39-44 in the tutorial.

Below you can see the detail. You can see that we can just simply following some straight lines on the truck.

Step 3

We are going to render the perspective path into a line. First, we need to set the Brush property. Activate Brush tool (B), right click and set its brush size to 5 px with 0% Hardness.

Step 4

Make new layer. Activate Path Selection tool, right click on the canvas and select Stroke Path. In the next dialog box, select Brush.

Step 5

Below is the perspective I used in this project.

Step 6: Background

Before moving on, let’s work on its background. Make new layer and draw a radial gradient from white to gray.

Step 7

Duplicate background by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + J. Perform transformation (Ctrl/Cmd + T). Pull transformation handle down until we have a nice floor.

Step 8

Activate Eraser tool. Select big brush size and set its hardness to 0%. Erase top part of the floor.

Step 9

Add Adjustment Layer Hue/Saturation with following settings. This Adjustment Layer will add a nice green color onto the background.

Step 10: Cutting The Truck

Select truck head using pen tool.

Step 11

Convert path into selection by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + Enter. Hit Ctrl/Cmd + J to put selection into new layer.

Step 12: Bumper

Let’s start drawing its bumper. First, we need the perspective line to guide our drawing. Place the line on top of the canvas. Following this guide, draw bumper basic shape. No need to worry about shading or highlight. The first important thing is to match its perspective.

After complete working on the perspective, then start painting its highlight. Add new layer. Activate Brush tool with low Opacity setting. Paint white for its highlight and black for its shadow.

Step 13

Let’s hide the new bumper for now by clicking on its eye icon in Layers panel. Select original bumper and then hit Ctrl/Cmd + J to duplicate it to a new layer.

Step 14

Bring the new bumper back by clicking its eye icon again. Place the duplicated bumper on top of the new bumper. You may need to erase its edge until it blends with the new bumper using a soft Eraser tool.

Step 15

Make new layer and place it on top of the bumper. Activate Clone Stamp tool. Set sample source to All Layers. Alt-click area similar to the new bumper as clone source and then click on the license plate to cover it. Do this carefully. You may need to use lots of clone source to avoid repeating pattern and get natural result.

Step 16

Activate brush tool and set its Opacity to 20-35%. Set foreground color to white and draw some highlights on lower part of the bumper.

Step 17: Intercooler

Let’s draw a hole for intercooler inside the bumper. Make new path and then draw a rounded rectangle path on the bumper. Make sure to keep an eye on its perspective. Hit Ctrl + Enter to convert the path into a selection and then fill it with black. Using a soft brush with small Opacity, draw some soft and subtle shadows on left and lower sides of the intercooler. See picture below for reference.

Step 18: Side Body Kit

Draw more perspective line to help you draw its side body. I find it convenient to draw using pen tool. It helps to draw precisely. And, if you mess up all you need to do is modify each point using Direct Selection tool.

Step 19

Convert path into selection and then fill it with #8dab3c.

Step 20

Make new layer on top of the side body kit. Activate brush tool with low Opacity. Hit D to set foreground and background color to default, black and white. Hit X to exchange these two colors. Paint white to draw highlight on top of the side body kit and black to draw shadow on lower part of the side body kit.

Step 21

Extend the side body kit. Paint another highlight and shadow on top of it.

Step 22

Draw a small polygonal selection on fender and fill it with white.

Step 23: Tire and Rim

Draw an elliptical shape for its tire.

Step 24

Alt-drag the shape to duplicate it. Place the tire under rear fender.

Step 25

Use pen tool to simply draw a polygonal shape for tire sides.

Step 26

Draw a white elliptical shape. Add layer Style Gradient Overlay.

Step 27

Draw two overlapping ellipses with color #a19b94. Set path mode to Add and Subtract. Add Layer Style Gradient Overlay with following settings.

Step 28

Duplicate crescent shape we have just created and change its color to #353535. Move inner ellipse few pixels away to the left. Place the shape under the original shape. Add Layer Style Gradient Overlay.

Step 29

Repeat Step 28. This time change the color to #bfbaba.

Step 30

Repeat previous step. Move the inner ellipse further away. Change the color to #252423. Add Layer Style Gradient Overlay to add subtle reflection inside the metal rim.

Step 31

Now we’re working on the spokes. Draw another shape behind the rim with color #191919. Make some holes inside the rim by adding elliptical shape with mode Subtract. Add Layer Style Gradient Overlay.

Step 32

Activate Brush tool with low Opacity and 0% Hardness. Make new layer and draw subtle reflection of the holes on the rim.

Step 33

Draw inner side of the hole with color #10100f. Make new layer and paint subtle highlight.

Step 34

Draw another shape behind the rim with color #232220.

Step 35

Draw black shape for tire background. Add Layer Style Gradient Overlay.

Step 36

In Layers panel, Ctrl-click layer shape made in Step 31. Make new layer above the rim. Click Edit > Stroke. Set color to white and Width: 2 px.

Step 37

Use soft Eraser tool to erase some of the stroke line. See picture below for reference.

Step 38

Draw an elliptical shape with color #323233. Add Layer Style Bevel and Emboss and Gradient Overlay with following settings.

Step 39

Draw following shape for center of the tire. Add Layer Style Inner Shadow and Gradient Overlay.

Step 40

Make a new layer. Draw thin black lines on center of the rim and then reduce its Opacity to 10%.

Step 41

Draw an elliptical shape. Set its Fill to 0% and then add Layer Style Bevel and Emboss.

Step 42

Let’s draw the bolt. Draw a ring shape and rectangle on its center with color #666667. Draw a black circle and rectangle. Subtract it with circle from previous shape. Draw bigger circle behind the bolt for its shadow. Activate brush tool and paint subtle highlight on the bolt.

Step 43

Below is the finished, viewed in 100% magnification. Put all bolt layers inside a group layer by selecting them and then hit Ctrl + G.

Step 44

We have placed the bolt layers in a group layer which makes it easier to duplicate. Alt-drag the group to duplicate it. Make some bolts on tire center.

Step 45

Place bolt, rim, and spoke in a group layer. Duplicate them by Alt-dragging the group layer and place it on top of the other tire.

Step 46

Make sure to do some minor editing to match perspective on each tire. Below, you can see some subtle difference I made onto the tire. Compared to the right tire, we can see more holes on the left tire’s spoke. I also add a subtle shadow on upper part of the left tire.

Step 47: Side Wing

Make new layer and place above all layers. Activate pen tool and draw side wing basic shape. Convert path into selection and then fill it with #98b338.

Step 48

Do not remove selection yet. Make new layer. Right click and select Stroke. In the dialog box, select white color with size 1 px. Make new layer and draw shadow on lower part of the wing.

Step 49

Draw a polygonal shape that attached wing onto the side body kit. Paint some highlight and shadow on it to give it realistic appearance.

Step 50

Make new layer under the wing. Paint soft shadows from polygonal shapes made earlier on the side body.

Step 51: GT Wing

Before drawing the GT Wing, we need to modify the perspective lines. Draw some vertical lines to help us match the perspective of the spoiler. Psdtuts+ has published another great tutorial on drawing with perspective, Perspective Basics: A Draw-Through Technique, With a Spaceship.

Step 52

Draw GT Wing basic shape. Make new layer and convert it to Clipping Mask by pressing Ctrl + Alt + G. This way, everything you paint will goes inside the GT Wing. Paint some white and black lines using soft Brush tool.

Step 53

Draw green shape as seen below. Paint white on top of the shape for highlight and black on its lower part for shadow.

Step 54

Alt-drag to duplicate the shape.

Step 55

Make new layer and paint GT Wing shadow on the shape.

Step 56: Carbon Fiber

Let’s make a carbon fiber carbon texture. Click File > New to make new file. Set its size to 2.000 x 1.500 px.

Step 57

First we need fiber pattern. Make new file again, this time with size 80 x 30 px.

Step 58

Activate Gradient tool. On option bar, click the gradient preview box to open Gradient Editor dialog box. Set its gradient from #090909 to #595959.

Step 59

Select half of the canvas using Rectangular Marquee tool. Shift-drag to fill it with gradient from top to bottom.

Step 60

Select the other half. Fill it with same gradient but this time with opposite direction.

Step 61

Let’s save it as a pattern. Click Edit > Define Pattern. In the next dialog box, name the pattern as fiber.

Step 62

Close the pattern file. You don’t need to save the file because we have saved it as a pattern. Let’s return to the bigger file (2.000 x 1.500 px). Click Edit > Fill. Set Use: Pattern and select fiber pattern we have just created. Click OK to fill the canvas with fiber pattern.

Step 63

Click Filter > Distort > Twirl.

Step 64

Copy carbon fiber texture we have just created by pressing Ctrl + A to select all then Ctrl + C to save it to clipboard. Ctrl-click GT Wing to make new selection based on its shape. Click Edit > Paste Special > Paste Into (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + + Alt + V) to paste texture into selection

Step 65: GT Wing Base

Using Brush tool, draw GT Wing base. Add following Layer Styles to add glossy effect onto the shape.

Step 66

Ctrl-click GT Wing base. Make new layer and then paint shadows from the GT WIng. Below, you can see the difference before and after painting the shadow.

Step 67

Use Brush tool to draw a polygonal shape on tip of the spoiler base. Add some shadows and highlights onto the shape to give it realistic appearance.

Step 68

Draw white cable tip using Brush tool on indicated area below. Add following Layer Styles to turn it into a three dimensional shape.

Step 69

Use Brush tool to draw a simple line and circle for cable and screw.

Step 70

Repeat Step 67-69 to the other GT Wing base.

Step 71: Rear Bumper

Draw shape shown below for basic bumper. Make new layer on top of it. Ctrl-click the layer to make a selection based on its shape and paint subtle highlight using soft Brush tool.

Step 72

Change Brush to smaller size. Draw a small and subtle highlight on the bumper edge. Then, draw more highlights on other parts of the bumper to make sure the lighting is realistic.

Step 73

Draw a white elliptical shape on rear bumper. Add following Layer Styles to give it three-dimensional appearance.

Step 74

Draw a white rectangular shape as a cable tip. Add following Layer Styles.

Step 75

Draw a white thick line to be used as a cable. Add following Layer Styles.

Step 76

Use Brush tool to paint cable shadow on the rear bumper.

Step 77: Left Tire Fender

Draw left tire fender on area indicated below.

Step 78

Start by drawing fender basic shape. Then, paint its highlight and shadow on different layer.

Step 79

Remember that we have two wheels. So, let’s duplicate the fender by Alt-dragging it.

Step 80: Seat

Open car seat photo in Photoshop. Trace the seat using pen tool and set its mode to Add to path area. Trace its inside and then set its mode to Subtract from path area.

Step 81

Hit Ctrl + Enter to convert path into a new selection.

Step 82

Drag selection into our truck image. Hit Ctrl + T and then right click the transformation area and select Flip Horizontal. Change its size until it is proportional inside the truck.

Step 83

Use Brush tool to draw seat belt strap. Paint shadow on top of it to give it a realistic lighting. Paint strap shadow on the seat. Finally, paint black behind the seat.

Step 84: Dashboard

Make new layer and place it behind the truck. Draw dashboard basic shape. Activate Brush tool and set its Opacity to 30% or lower. Paint white for its highlight and black for its shadow.

Step 85: Steering Wheel

Use pen tool to draw a steering wheel with color: #010101. Paint some highlights on its upper side. To make it realistic and not too flat, draw a curve on the steering wheel and paint subtle shadow on it.

Step 86: Gear Stick

Draw a white rectangle for the trucks gear stick. Add following Layer Styles to give it realistic lighting.

Step 87

On top of the gear stick, draw another shape for its knob. Add following Layer Styles.

Step 88

Draw a white shape connecting gear stick and its knob. Add following Layer Styles.

Step 89: Roll Bars

Draw two roll bars inside the truck. Add following Layer Styles.

Step 90

Draw a polygonal shape connecting the roll bar and truck. Draw some holes inside it. Paint some shadows to add realistic lighting..

Step 91

Draw highlight and shadow on the roll bar using Brush tool. See picture below to see the progress on drawing it.

Step 92

Draw highlight and shadow on the other roll bar using same technique.

Step 93

Draw a roll bar above the door. Add following Layer Styles to give it highlights and shadows.

Step 94: Side Window

Draw path for side window car glass. Convert it to selection by pressing Ctrl + Enter. Paint white and black using soft Brush with low Opacity. Make more layers and then paint subtle highlight and shadow on the glass.

Step 95

Repeat the same process to draw right side window.

Step 96

Duplicate seat and its strap by selecting them and then Alt-drag it. Merge the layer using shortcut Ctrl/Cmd + E. Place the duplicated seat and strap on side window near it. Delete unneeded areas outside the window. Set blend mode to Soft Light and reduce its Opacity to 70%.

Step 97

Duplicate driver seat and place it on the passenger position.

Step 98: Rear Part of The Cockpit

Make new layer and then draw rear part of the cockpit.

Step 99

Set foreground color to black and then draw layer shape for rear window hole.

Step 100

Paint shadow on rear part of the cockpit using Brush tool. Reduce Brush Opacity and then paint subtle shadow behind the seat and on the car glass.

Step 101

Activate Brush tool with low Opacity. Paint subtle white and black for highlights and shadows on the windshield. I also draw a red rectangle on top of the windshield.

Step 102: Door

Select upper part of the door. See picture below for reference. Click Image > Adjustments > Desaturate to remove all its color. Click Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. Reduce Brightness and increase Contrast until this part turns to black.

Step 103: Front Intercooler

Select front intercooler. Duplicate it to new layer by pressing Ctrl + J. Click Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. Decrease Brightness setting to make the intercooler darker.

Step 104: Luggage Compartment

Select luggage compartment using pen tool. Convert path to selection. Click Image > Adjustment > Brightness/Contrast and reduce the Brightness.

Step 105: Door

Do not remove the selection yet. Copy fiber texture we have created in Step 56-63. Paste it inside the selection (Ctrl + Shift + Alt + V). Set blend mode to Overlay with Opacity: 85%.

Step 106: Air Scoop

Draw a rectangle matches with the truck perspective. Make new layer and then paint its highlight and shadow using soft Brush with low Opacity. Draw more shapes inside it. See picture below for reference.

Step 107: Steps

Draw some steps right under the side intercooler. Paint its shadow on the truck. Still using soft Brush tool, paint highlight and shadow on the steps.

Step 108: Wind Deflector

Draw a simple wind deflector on truck rooftop with color #b0d156.

Step 109

Paint some shadows and highlights. See picture below for reference.

Step 110

Paint highlight on top of the wind deflector. Select half of the highlight and then erase it.

Step 111: Muffler

Draw a simple rounded rectangle for muffler. Make sure to match its shape with the truck perspective. Add simple Drop Shadow to lift it from the truck body.

Step 112

Make new layer and paint subtle gradient on top of the shape.

Step 113

Draw two intersecting black circles.

Step 114

Make a new layer. Paint subtle highlight and shadow to turn the shape into a three-dimensional tailpipe. See picture below for reference.

Step 115

Current pipe shape is not yet three-dimensional. It appears very flat. We need to emphasize its edge. Select the circles path and hit Ctrl + Enter to make new selection based on its shape. Make new layer. Click Edit > Stroke. Set Width to 1 px and white color.

Step 116

Erase some of the stroke line using soft Eraser tool. Repeat the stroke a few times until we get more definition on its edge. Finally, draw some bolts and its shadow.

Step 117: Cable

Draw cable behind the truck. Make new layer. Manually, use Brush tool to paint shadow and highlight. Once you’re done, select cable and its highlight and shadow. Merge them into one layer by pressing Ctrl + E. Duplicate the cable, then resize and place it under the original cable. This will become cable reflection on the truck body. Erase cable outside the truck body. Erase upper part of the reflection and then reduce its Opacity.

Step 118: Highlight

Activate Brush tool. Set foreground color to white and then reduce tool Opacity to 10%. Paint some subtle highlight on wind deflector and its windscreen.

Step 119

Let’s add more highlights. Draw a circular selection on top of front tire. Make new layer. Click Edit > Stroke. Set Width: 2 px with Color: White.

Step 120

Soften stroke line by adding Gaussian Blur. Click Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Activate Eraser tool. Erase stroke line outside the truck.

Step 121: Edit Truck Color

Currently, the truck is still in its original color. Personally, I found it too bright and it looks like a plastic. So, let’s reduce it. Select its green color.

Step 122

Hit Ctrl + Shift + C to copy all areas inside the selection. Without removing the selection, click Edit > Paste. Click Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and edit the settings until we have darker color.

Step 123

Set blend mode to Hue and reduce its Opacity.

Step 124: Shadow

Make a new selection under the truck. Make new layer and then fill it with black.

Step 125

Remove selection by pressing Ctrl + D. Soften the shadow by adding Gaussian Blur. Click Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

Step 126

Duplicate the shadow by pressing Ctrl + J. Soften this shadow again, this time use bigger radius size in Gaussian Blur.

Final Image

Below is our final result. I hope you enjoy it. Remember that we started this project using a very simple photo from a cheap pocket camera. So, I’m sure you can do this to your own truck. Well, if you have one.

Tiago Hoisel is a Brazilian illustrator with a talent for producing fun, and humorous illustrations. In this article we will feature some of our favorite illustrations from his portfolio. Let’s take a look!

AXL

Shark

Praia

Minotauro

Chico Bento

Keith

Davy Cartoon

Capa Turista

Jantar

Teen

Rachel

We know how much you guys like to test your knowledge of Photoshop so today we are giving you an opportunity to do so with another quiz from Martin Perhiniak. Please take a moment to complete this 10-question quiz and see if you’re prepared to pass our test! Good luck!

Editor’s note: this quiz is for Photoshop CS5.

Illustrator and Photoshop work extremely well together. In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, author Alex Beltechi will use both apps to produce elegant leafy lettering that can be used for a variety of projects. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members. If you are looking to take your typography 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.

Photoshop is an excellent tool for manipulating photographs but it can also be used as a means to create stunning digital art. This tutorial is part of a 25-part video tutorial series demonstrating everything you will need to know to start producing digital art in Photoshop. Digital Art for Beginners, by Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, Martin Perhiniak will begin by teaching you how to draw in Photoshop. At the conclusion of this series you will know all you need to produce your own concept art and matte paintings in Photoshop.

Today’s tutorial Part 19: Create a Lava Monster Concept Painting will demonstrate how to start a concept painting using rough lines and then how to add details using color and shading. Let’s get started!

Today we are featuring the art of Filipino digital artist John Barry Ballaran. His stunning digital paintings feature a wide variety of themes ranging from super heroes to cyber punk monsters. Let’s take a look.

Wolv

This portrait of a popular superhero captures all of his emotion perfectly.

Rain

This stunning painting features a monumental battle sequence that encompasses a lot of interesting scenery.

Stained

This piece features a gruesome looking hunter that has just caught his prey. The detail in the character is fantastic.

Venom Within

Here is some Spiderman fan art that features a hybrid character who is part Carnage and part Spiderman.

Reinforcing General Prealus

This piece features some interesting looking Sci-fi characters in the middle of a war.

Perseus Faces The Kraken

Another Steampunk painting that was made for a CGTalk contest.

Mud Blood Steel

Another war inspired painting that was made for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2 art book.

Mr. Raven

A very ominous painting of Mr. Raven, another character that is well developed with a rattling expression.

Life Colossus

This piece was made for Rifts Create a Colossus contest featured on DeviantArt.

Grasper

Another horror inspired painting, it was created for the Silent Hill Downpour contest.

Ezio

Here is some fan art from the Assassins Creed universe featuring its main character Ezio.

Engkanto Encounter

A mesmerizing fantasy painting created for CGhub’s Natives of the Lifeless Forest Challenge.

Death Colossus

Another entry to Rifts Create a Colossus contest, this time it features the Death Colossus.

Cardinal

This painting of a Vatican cardinal once again shows John’s talent for detail and expression in his work.

Bad Hatter

The Mad hatter is painted here for the Picture Yourself in Wonderland contest.

John on the Web

• John’s DeviantArt
• John’s Tumblr
• John’s Twitter

Let’s be honest, most of Photoshop’s default filters and effects don’t give you much flexibility and don’t always look very realistic. Filter Forge is a powerful third-party plugin for Photoshop that allows you to do some pretty amazing things with filters, and even create your own. Today, our friends at Filter Forge are giving away a copy of Filter Forge 3.0 to 3 lucky Psdtuts+ readers.

Version 3.0 features support for multiple source images, improved preview interactivity, new amazing filters, and much more.

On the surface, Filter Forge is just a Photoshop plugin, a pack of filters that create visual effects, enhance photos, generate textures, and process images. However, there are some things that make Filter Forge unique:

1. All users get free access to thousands of filters. Anyone can contribute their textures and effects to the online filter collection so it grows with every submitted filter.

2. You can create your own filters. If you cannot find an appropriate filter in the library you’ll love the Filter Editor – a visual node-based tool for creating custom-tailored textures and effects. All filters are constructed by connecting components that represent basic operations such as blurs, gradients, color adjustments, noises, distortions, or blends – without writing a single line of code.

To win a free copy of Filter Forge, all you need to do is enter using the form below.

Up For Grabs

• 1 copy of Filter Forge Basic to 3 readers

Rules

• To enter, submit your entry using the form above.
• You may only enter once.
• Make sure to enter a valid email address so that we can contact you.
• Entries will be accepted until Friday, January 13, 2012 at 11:59 PM, EST.

To learn more about Filter Forge, visit their website, download the demo version of the software, and check out their gallery.

Editor’s note: This post was sponsored by Filter Forge.

We recently had the opportunity to chat with Matt Kloskowski about his new book, Photoshop Compositing Secrets. Photoshop Compositing Secrets demonstrates some excellent techniques to help you create realistic compositions in Photoshop. Matt was generous enough to let us publish one of the tutorials from his book on our site for all of you to enjoy. In this tutorial he will demonstrate how to create a studio sports portrait using the same techniques that you may have seen on billboards and in magazines. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

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

• Damaged Road
• Empty Highway
• Source Photography

Introduction

This is probably one of the hottest compositing trends today. A lot of photographers are now choosing to photograph athletes in a studio and then composite them into a background that’s more fitting to their sport, or simply more dramatic. Whether it’s for an advertisement (Nike and Under Armour do it all the time), or whether the athlete just wants a great photo of themselves, shooting this way offers a ton of opportunities. Plus, it makes things a lot easier if you don’t have access to some of the cool locations that you’d ideally like to shoot in.

Prepping the Background

As always, our background is almost just as important as the portrait itself. After all, we’re doing all this work so that we can put them into a really cool place, so it’s worth spending some time to set this up. We’ll have to combine a few elements to make this background. First, we’ll need a road that has the correct perspective to it. Since we’ll be including our subject’s feet, this part is really important. Then, we’ll need a city skyline for the background. Throw in some dramatic clouds (I love clouds, if you haven’t realized) and you’re good to go.

Step 1

Open the photo of the road. The first thing we’ll need to do is extend the canvas, since we’ll be adding some buildings and sky to it. You’ll see later that this is sort of a ballpark size for now. It gives us some room to work with, but you can always crop it later if you’d like, depending on the end result. Go to Image > Canvas Size, and in the dialog, make sure the Relative checkbox is turned off, then change the Width and Height unit pop-up menus to Pixels. Let’s keep the Width the same, but increase the Height to 4200. Also, go to the Anchor grid, at the bottom of the dialog, and click the bottom-middle square to keep the road anchored at the bottom of the image and only extend the canvas toward the top. Click OK when you’re done.

Copyright – © iStockPhoto/Petko Danov

Step 2

Press W to get the Quick Selection tool. Then, brush over the sky and solid area at the top of the image to select it. Don’t worry about refining it with the Refine Edge dialog, because it’s in the background and we’ll never really see any detailed area back there.

Step 3

Open the clouds photo. Go to Edit > Select All to select the entire photo, and then to Edit > Copy to copy it. Switch back over to the background image (where we already have an active selection from the last step), and go to Edit > Paste Special > Paste Into to paste the clouds into the selection. This automatically creates a layer mask, so the clouds only appear in the top of the photo.

Step 4

Open the photo of the city skyline. Use the Quick Selection tool to select the buildings. Make sure you zoom in and use a smaller brush to get all the tiny edges that the Quick Selection tool probably won’t pick up on the first pass. Remember, you can Option-click (PC: Alt-click) to remove anything it selected that you didn’t want selected. Then, click the Refine Edge button up top in the Options Bar. Since there are lots of tiny little details around the edges of the buildings that we’ll want to select, turn on the Smart Radius checkbox, so that Photoshop will look outside of the selected edge for them. Then, set the Radius to 10 pixels, set the Output To setting to Layer Mask, and click OK.

Step 5

To copy the city photo, we have to use a different command because it has a layer mask with it. So, go to Select > All to select everything, then Edit > Copy Merged to copy the photo. This copies exactly what you see onscreen with the transparent sky. Go back to the background image and Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on the layer mask of the clouds layer to put a selection around the sky once again. Then go to Edit > Paste Special > Paste Into to paste the city skyline into our background image. Use the Move tool (V) to move it into place. Because the Paste Into command automatically created a layer mask, you don’t have to worry about moving it over the road. It’ll automatically stay hidden from the bottom of the photo.

Tip: Reselecting the Same Area. If you want to reselect the same area you previously had selected, go to Select > Reselect and Photoshop will automatically bring up your last selection.

Step 6

Next, we’ll add some contrast and darken the city a little. Click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Curves. Click in the middle of the curve and drag it downward. Then, click on the Create a Clipping Mask icon at the bottom of the Adjustments panel (it’s the third icon from the left, and looks like an Oreo cookie with the top being pulled off). While you’re at it, let’s darken the road, too. Just press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and drag the Curves adjustment layer you just created down above the road layer. Holding the Option key copies (not moves) the adjustment layer to wherever you drag it.

Step 7

There are some pretty bright clouds and light coming from behind the city, but we don’t see any of it, and we really want to take people’s attention off the city. Press G to select the Gradient tool from the Toolbox. Click on the down-facing arrow next to the gradient thumbnail in the Options Bar to open the Gradient Picker, and choose the second gradient from the top left, which is Foreground to Transparent (circled here). Immediately to the right of the Gradient Picker are the gradient type icons. Click on the Reflected icon (the second from the right), then set your Foreground color to white by pressing D, then X.

Step 8

Click on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to create a new blank layer. Then, position your cursor in the middle of the buildings and click-and-drag downward to the bottom to add the gradient on this layer. It creates a white gradient in the middle, and the gradient appears to fall off as it gets further away from the middle. This gives the appearance of adding a lot of light to the background. If it’s too bright, then reduce the Opacity of the layer to around 70%. It’s a bright light wash like this that lets us “sell” the composite more easily and keep the focus on the subject that we’ll eventually be adding. When you’re done, go to File > Save and save this as a PSD file.

The Portrait Setup and Extraction

If you’re shooting this type of photo with processing it in Photoshop in mind, one of the best things you can do is give yourself a lot of options. Get multiple poses and multiple angles, so you have more options in Photoshop later. Set up one pose and fire off two photos. Then, have the model move and fire two more off. Then, change your angle and get down lower. Don’t overshoot the same pose. Constantly move and constantly have the model move. That way, when you’re done, you have lots of photos to work with and lots of options for compositing, depending on the background you choose.

Step 9

Here’s a photo of the studio setup for this example. You can see the two strip lights with grids on the sides. Directly in front of him is a beauty dish with a diffuser on it. This gives us that nice edge light, which is not only great for adding some mood to the photo, but also helps us extract the photo from the background a lot faster.

Step 10

Just so you know, I’ll typically take at least 100 photos during a shoot like this. Sometimes I know exactly what I’m looking for, and I’ll start with a certain pose. Sometimes I don’t, so I’ll take a bunch of different poses from different angles. In this example, I kinda knew the general pose I wanted. It was a low camera angle with him either bouncing the ball or slamming it on the ground. However, I wasn’t sure what background I was using yet, so I made sure to take a few different angles of the same photo. Some were close up at a wide-angle focal length, and some were pulled back a bit for a more normal view. You can see a few of them here in my Lightroom window.

Step 11

Go ahead and open the photo we’ll be working with. As you can see here, I opted for the wider-angle close-up photo of the basketball player. The photo will open in the Camera Raw window. Right off the bat, I can tell it’s a little warm, but I’m not going to make any adjustments yet. We’ll want to make sure we give ourselves a way back and forth to Camera Raw, so press-and-hold the Shift key and click the Open Object button at the bottom right of the dialog to open the photo as a Smart Object. This way, when we see the photo in the final composite, we can always double-click on its thumbnail to come back to Camera Raw and make adjustments.

Step 12

Press W to get the Quick Selection tool, and start painting a selection on the basketball player. And, because I’ve said it so many times before, I won’t even mention here that you should zoom in and use a smaller brush to make sure you get all the details around him (oops, I said it, didn’t I?). Anyway, since he’s wearing such dark clothes that contrast with the background, the Quick Selection tool should make a good selection pretty easily here. Once you’ve got the general outline, zoom in to the feet and get them as close to perfect as possible, because that’s a key area to pull off the composite and make it look real. If you over-select an area, then press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key to subtract from the selection.

Step 13

When you’re ready, click the Refine Edge button up in the Options Bar and then press the W key to change the View setting to white. Since we have hair in this one, turn on the Smart Radius checkbox and set the Radius to 10 pixels to try to pick up the edges. Now, move your cursor over the photo and brush around his hair at the top of his head, as well as along his arms and legs to get all the details. Set the Output To setting to Layer Mask, and click OK when you’re done. You’ll have one layer in the Layers panel with a layer mask attached to it. Don’t forget, if any of the edges seemed to have dropped out, you can get the Brush tool (B), set the Mode in the Options Bar to Overlay, set your Foreground color to white, and paint over those edges on the layer mask to bring them back. Go to File > Save, save it as a PSD, and get ready to move on to the composite.

Creating the Composite

This composite was a lot of fun to create. Once the background is done and the athlete is selected, our main goal is to make him fit into the final image. Because you often need to actually put someone on to the background before you can figure out what to change, I used a Smart Object and Camera Raw to help out a lot. After that, the shadows on the ground played a huge part of pulling this one off. And perhaps the most fun part for me was the cracked concrete on the ground. It really helps to add to the intensity of the overall image.

Step 14

Open the background image we created earlier. If you didn’t follow along, don’t sweat it. The finished background is ready for you to download. If you did follow along, though, then go to Layer > Flatten Image to flatten all of your layers into one.

Step 15

Now, open the selected basketball player. Again, if you didn’t follow along, just download the image and you’ll already have the selection done for you. First, we need to move him, so press V to get the Move tool and drag him onto the background image.

Step 16

He’s a little too bright to fit into the background right now, so let’s fix that first. Double-click on his layer thumbnail to reopen the photo in Camera Raw. Reduce the Exposure to around -0.80, increase the Fill Light to 70 to bring out some details in the shadows, and reduce the Vibrance to -26 to take some of that color away from the photo. Don’t click OK yet. We still have one more change to make.

Step 17

His arms, legs, and shoes are still too bright compared to the rest of the photo. So press K to select the Adjustment Brush tool from the toolbar up top. First, set the Exposure to -0.10 and the Brightness to -5, then paint over his arms (including the ball) and his legs. Don’t worry about being precise, because we won’t see any of the spillover, since he’s already selected.

Then, click the New radio button at the top of the Adjustment Brush options, so we can create a new adjustment and darken his feet separately. Set the Exposure to -1.05 and the Brightness to -20. When you’re done, click OK to go back to Photoshop.

Step 18

Next, we’re going to use a trick we used in a few other tutorials to give a slightly desaturated and edgy look to the athlete. Right-click on the layer and choose New Smart Object via Copy to make a copy of the original Smart Object layer. Double-click on the new layer’s image thumbnail to reopen it in Camera Raw, go to the HSL/Grayscale panel (the fourth icon from the left, shown circled here), and turn on the Convert to Grayscale checkbox to remove all of the color.

Step 19

Go back to the Basic panel and reduce the Exposure setting to -0.45. Set the Fill Light slider to 100 to really open the shadowy areas, set the Blacks to 10 to darken the blacks a little more, then set Contrast to 0, and Clarity to 35. Finally, press K again to get the Adjustment Brush and then press the Clear All button at the bottom right to remove all of the selective adjustments we created earlier. Click OK when you’re done. To complete the edgy effect, change the layer’s blend mode to Hard Light.

Step 20

Let’s warm him up a little to add to the fiery mood that the photo is building. Click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and select Photo Filter. Make sure the Filter pop-up menu is set to Warming Filter (85), then click the Color radio button and increase the Density to 55%. Next, add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and set the Saturation to -60 to decrease it just a little more. Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on each adjustment layer in the Layers panel to select them both, and go to Layer > Create Clipping Mask to force each one to clip to the layer right below them.

Step 21

It’s time for some shadows. Click on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and drag the new layer below both of the basketball player layers. Press B to select the Brush tool from the Toolbox and choose a small, soft-edged brush. Make sure your Foreground color is set to black, set the Opacity to 75% up in the Options Bar, and paint a dark, hard shadow that comes out from under both of his feet and the basketball. It doesn’t have to spread too far away from the feet, though. Remember, it’s just a shadow that his shoes are casting on the ground.

Step 22

Create another new layer on top of the last one. This time, press the Right Bracket key to make your brush larger and set the Opacity to 10%. Now, paint some more shadow areas on the ground in front of him. There’s a light source coming from behind him, so we want to make sure we’re casting some shadow on the ground in front. Since you’re painting with a 10% opacity brush, the more you paint, the darker it’ll get, and you’ll be able to build up the effect. Also, it’s a good idea to start double-clicking on the name of each layer and giving them more descriptive names at this point.

Tip: Save Your File Regularly. If you haven’t already, it’s probably a good idea to go to File > Save to save the image as a PSD file in case Photoshop or your computer accidentally crashes. In fact, I press the shortcut for Save (Command-S [PC: Ctrl-S]) all the time, just to make sure I’m always covered.

Step 23

Now, it’s time for some really cool stuff. I photographed him in this pose specifically because I had the idea that I wanted to make it look like the ball was being slammed into the ground. In order to do that, we’ll need a photo of some damaged concrete. Go ahead and open the damaged concrete photo and use the Move tool to drag it into the composite. Make sure you position it directly above the Background layer, but below all of the other layers. Don’t close the concrete image yet, because we’ll need it again.

COPYRIGHT – © iStockPhoto/Michaela Fehlker

Step 24

Of course, it doesn’t fit yet, so we’ll have to transform it. Press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to go into Free Transform mode. Press-and-hold the Command (PC: Ctrl) key, click on the top-left corner handle, and drag in toward the center. Then Command-click the top-right corner handle and do the same. Drag the top-middle handle down a little to make it seem like the cracks have the same perspective as the road. Also, you’ll want to position the cracks in the ground so that the hole appears as if it’s under the basketball. When you’re done, press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in the transformation.

Step 25

Change the blend mode of the concrete layer to Hard Light. This fades the actual concrete portion of the layer into the original road, and just leaves the cracks. Sometimes, the Multiply blend mode works, too, and sometimes it may be Soft Light or Overlay. Depending on the color, you’ll have to experiment with which one works best.

Step 26

Click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to create a layer mask for this layer. Press B to get the Brush tool, make sure your Foreground color is set to black, and paint with a small, soft-edged brush set to a low Opacity to fade away the edges of the cracked concrete image, so it blends better with the road around it.

Step 27

Remember how I asked you not to close the concrete image yet? Well, go back to the original cracked concrete photo and go to Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontal. This way, the cracks will go out in another direction. Then, drag it into the composite and repeat Steps 11-13. Also, rename these layers, so you know which one is which.

Step 28

If we want the ball to look like it’s sunk into the ground, then we have to hide part of it. Create a new blank layer at the very top of the layer stack. Press S to get the Clone Stamp tool and make sure that the Sample pop-up menu is set to All Layers in the Options Bar up top. Option-click (PC: Alt-click) on an area of concrete with cracks on it to sample the texture. Then, start brushing upward with a small, hard-edged brush to cover the bottom of the basketball. You may have to Option-click a few more times as you’re painting to continue to pull in the right texture from the ground.

Step 29

Press O to get the Dodge tool. Up in the Options Bar, set the Range to Midtones and the Exposure to 20%, and use a small brush to paint along the very top edge of the concrete you just created to add a highlight. Then press Shift-O to get the Burn tool. Use the same settings and paint to darken the concrete, so it appears the ball is casting a slight shadow on the ground.

Step 30

Next, we’ll add some light from behind him. As you can see, the sky is pretty bright on the middle left of the photo, so we’ll work with that. Create another new blank layer at the top of the layer stack and go to Edit > Fill. Set the Use setting to Black and click OK to fill the layer with black. Then go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare. Set the Brightness to 140%, the Lens Type to 105mm Prime, then position the lens flare on the middle left, and click OK. Change the layer’s blend mode to Screen to hide the black and reduce the Opacity setting to around 50%-60% to make the effect more subtle.

Step 31

All right, we’re almost done. Just a couple of finishing touches left. Press Command-Option-Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E) to merge everything together into one new layer on top. Let’s add an edgy effect using the Tonal Contrast filter in Nik Color Efex Pro at its default settings. If it gets too textured in the cloud or skin areas, just add a layer mask and paint them away with a low-opacity black brush, as I did here.

Step 32

There’s one more finishing touch for this photo, though. I really want a warmer feel to it and color is a great way to add mood. And for composites, it’s a wonderful way to tie all of the random parts of the image together. One way to do this in Photoshop is to click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and select Gradient Map. Then, click on the gradient thumbnail in the Adjustments panel to open the Gradient Editor. To change the color of the gradient, just double-click on the little color stops (the tiny squares) under the gradient ramp in the middle of the dialog. When the Color Picker appears, choose an orange color (I used R: 176, G: 79, B: 6) for the left color stop, and a greenish-yellow (I used R: 186, G: 186, B: 53) for the right color stop. Click OK to close the Gradient Editor, then change the layer blend mode to Overlay and the Opacity to 80%. Now, it’s got a very fiery, warm color tone to it.

Tip: Using Nik Color Efex Pro Instead: If you have Nik Color Efex Pro Complete, you can also use a filter called Bi-Color filter. In fact, I used it for this image and, personally, I like it a little better, because it seems to still add some nice color, but it keeps the skin tones fairly removed from the effect. Again, though, either one will work. I always make sure I give you the free Photoshop way to do it, but I’m just being honest by saying one of my secrets for compositing is Nik Color Efex Pro for finishing things off.

Step 33

So, here’s the final image with Nik’s default Bi-Color filter run on it. Lastly, one of the secrets to compositing people’s feet on the ground is to darken the entire area to keep people’s attention away from it. We’ll use a gradient for this. Create a new blank layer above all of the other and then press D to set your Foreground color to black. Press G to select the Gradient tool, click on the down-facing arrow next to the gradient thumbnail in the Options Bar to open the Gradient Picker, and choose the second gradient from the left (Foreground to Transparent). Then, drag the gradient from the bottom right of the photo to about a third of the way up, as seen here. This gradually darkens the entire area and you can always reduce the Opacity if it gets too dark.

Conclusion

As you can see below, there’s room for some ad copy on the top, or maybe even the athlete’s name. Or, you can just as easily select the Crop tool and crop the image to remove some of that space up top.

With Gradient Map

With Bi-Color Filter

In this article we will feature the work of Shinobinaku, a Lisbon-based designer with a talent for producing dark, surreal, emotional, and sometimes disturbing artwork. Let’s take a look!

Moonlight Serenade

The Black Widow

Alice Madness

Hurt Locker

Evelyn Evelyn

Garden of Hidden

Heisei

Lestat de Lioncourt

Nature’s Lullaby

Necromentia

So Long Scarecrow

A Deadly Cocktail

Sunset

Follow the White Rabbit

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to compose magical scene from different stock images, how to create strong atmosphere and add interesting lights and shadows. You’ll also learn many different ways of color adjustments to get the exact images you’ve always wished. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

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

• Upper background
• Sea
• Stone
• Sky
• Woman
• Stone face
• Waves brushes
• Fog brushes
• Clouds
• Bird brushes

Step 1 – Preparing the Upper Part of the Background

Create a new file in Photoshop. Set the dimensions on 600px (wide) and 900px (height). Download the picture of the background and drag it into the just created file. Name this new layer e.g. UPPER BACKGROUND. To set the proper size of this layer press Command/Ctrl + T on your keyboard (or go to Edit > Free Transform) and resize it on proper size. Hold Shift while doing it to remain the same proportions. To apply changes press Enter on your keyboard.

Place the layer UPPER BACKGROUND to the upper part of the image.

I like the overall serene atmosphere of the stock photo. It has an enigmatic, foggy mood which I find to be especially attractive. But I also like drama in my images. To bring some drama here you’ll create higher mountains on the left and right side.

Grab the Lasso Tool (L) and select the right part of the rocks. Press Command/Ctrl + C to copy this selection and then Command/Ctrl + V to paste it. Name the new layer RIGHT ROCKS and place it above the original rocks. Below you can see an example of what I mean.

As you can see it looks very unrealistic right now. To make it better looking you need to blend it with the rest of the image.

You could do it with the Eraser Tool (E) but I have a better idea for you – using layer mask. When using the Eraser Tool (E) the erased parts are lost for good and it’s very hard to reappear them if you realize you want to do something differently. If you work with layer masks the parts are just hidden (not erased) and you can easily make them reappear.

The principle is simple: if you want to hide something, paint on the layer mask with black over that part, if you want to have something visible, paint over it with white.

Make sure you’re on the RIGHT ROCKS layer. Click on the button Add layer mask. You can find this button in the bottom part of the palette Layers. If you don’t see this palette press F7 on your keyboard or go to Window > Layers and it appears.

Grab the Brush Tool (B), select some soft round brush and set the Master Diameter on about 70 px. Lower the Opacity on 40% and pick black color. Make sure that the layer mask is active (just click on it) and start blending RIGHT ROCKS with the background.

Now do the exact same process with the left part of the rocks. On the picture below you can see how your manipulation should look like after this step.

Step 2 – The Bottom Part of the Background

Download the stock photo of sea listed in the beginning of the tutorial and drag it into your manipulation. Name this new layer SEA. Press Command/Ctrl + T and change its size to fit the rest of the manipulation. Press enter to apply the changes.

You need to blend the SEA with the rest of the image. You’ll do it same as you’ve blended rocks in the previous step. Add a layer mask and paint with the Brush Tool (B) over the transition between see and rocks. Use the same brush settings as in the previous step. Paint till you create nice soft transition. On the photo below you can see how the blending should look.

Another element, which needs to be added, is the stone in the foreground on which the woman sits in the preview picture. Download the stone photo listed in the beginning of the tutorial. Drag it into your manipulation, place it on the top of all layers, resize it and name it STONE.

As with previous parts of the background you need to blend the stone with the rest of the picture properly. To do this, add a layer mask to the STONE. Grab the Brush Tool (B), pick some soft round brush, set the Master Diameter on about 150 pixels, lower the Opacity on 50% and pick black color. Paint over the areas of the STONE you want to hide. On the picture below you can get the inspiration how the layer looks with the layer mask.

And there is shown how the overall manipulation looks so far.

Step 3 – Darkening the Sky

In this step you’ll focus on adjusting the sky. Right now it’s too bright, which doesn’t fit to the mood you want to achieve with this work. In this step you’ll darker it little bit and then you’ll make some more adjustments in following steps.

Download the stock photo of the sky listed in the beginning of the tutorial and drag it into your photo manipulation. Place it on the top of the layers and name it SKY. Press Command/Ctrl + T or got to Edit > Free Transform and resize it on proper size. Press Enter to apply the changes.

You need to do two things to blend this layer properly with the rest of the image – to change its Blending Mode and to blend it with the help of layer mask.

Let’s start with the changing of the Blending Mode. You can find it in the upper part of the palette layers. Change it from the mode Normal to Multiply and then lower the Opacity on 50% to get more gentle effect.

Add the layer mask to the SKY and blend it the same way you did it in previous steps.

On the following photo you can compare how the sky looks before and after this step.

Let’s take a look at how the layer order should look like:

Step 4 – Adding the Woman

This is very quick step. Download the stock photo of the woman and drag it into your photo manipulation. Place it on the top of all layers and name it WOMAN. Press Command/Ctrl + T on your keyboard and resize it on proper size. After you’re done press Enter on your keyboard to apply the changes.

On the photo below you can see how the photo manipulation should look like so far.

Step 5 – Adding Faces

As you can see the side parts of the stone, on which the woman sits, looks really weird because of the very soft edges. But don’t worry in this step you’ll add stone faces on each side to fix it.

Download the stock photo of the face and open it in Photoshop. Cut out the background. You can you the Lasso Tool (L) or the Pen Tool (P) or any other method you are comfortable with to do it. After that drag the face into your photo manipulation. Name it RIGHT FACE and place it on the top of all layers. Press Command/Ctrl + T on your keyboard and resize it on proper size.

To blend the face better with the rest of the image change its Blending Mode from Normal to Overlay.

On the following picture you can compare how the face looks when it’s set on Normal and on Overlay Mode.

You want to have the face also on the left part of the stone. Right click on the layer RIGHT FACE and choose the option Duplicate layer. Name the new layer LEFT FACE. You need to flip it so go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. Grab the Move Tool (V) and place it on the left side of the image.

Step 6 – Adjusting the Faces

If you look at your picture right now you see that both faces are too bright and because of that doesn’t fit to the rest of the photo manipulation. You’ll make them darker in this step.

Add new adjustment layer Levels above the RIGHT FACE but under the LEFT FACE. You can find the button Add new fill or adjustment layer in the bottom part of the palette Layers right from the button Layer mask you’ve used in previous steps.

I strongly recommend you to use adjustment layers instead of direct adjustments you get from Image > Adjustments > … path. If you use adjustment layer you can always go back and tweak the adjustment or you can simply delete it or do just only local changes.

So, add new adjustment layer Levels above the RIGHT FACE, set the Input Levels on 9; 0,21; 255 and the Output Levels on 17; 142.

As you can see, all layers under the adjustment layer (in this case it means all layers except LEFT FACE which is above) are adjusted. And you don’t want that, you want to adjust only RIGHT FACE. Luckily there is really quick solution for you! Right click on the adjustment layer you’ve just added and choose the option Create Clipping Mask. And only the RIGHT FACE is darker.

Let’s move on the LEFT FACE. Add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set it the same as you set Levels for RIGHT FACE (see picture above). To adjust only LEFT FACE and not the whole image right click on the adjustment layer and select the option Create Clipping Mask again.

On the picture below you can take a look at how the photo manipulation looks so far.

Step 7 – Adjusting Highlights

Most of the main elements are already placed in the image. So from now on you’ll focus on creating the atmosphere of the picture. If you look at the manipulation right now you see it’s pretty boring – there is no interesting light neither some movement, two elements which are really helpful while adding drama to your manipulation.

In this step let’s start with creating more interesting highlights.

Add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set the Input Levels on 0; 2.83; 255.

Now you’ll see another great reason why to use layer masks instead of direct adjustments – the local changes.

Grab the Paint Bucket Tool (G) and pick black color. Click on the Layer mask of the adjustment layer Levels and fill it with this black color. The adjustment disappears.

It’s the same principle you used while blending background photos in the beginning of the tutorial. Back then you used black brush to hide unwanted part. This time you’ll use white brush to reappear the adjustment on the parts, which should be lighter than they are right now.

Grab the Brush Tool (B), pick some soft round brush, set the Master Diameter on 10px – 20 px. Lower the Opacity on 5% and pick pure white color. Start painting over areas you want to have lighter. This would be easier and quicker if you have tablet but with little practice you can get great results with your mouse too.

You should focus on woman’s cheek and arms, waves, mountain in the background and faces while you paint. On the picture below I highlighted with red the areas where I painted to give you an example.

Step 8 – Adjusting Shadows

Logical step after adjusting highlights is adjusting shadows so let’s do it!

Add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and this time set the Input Levels on 0; 0.19; 255.

Grab the Paint Bucket Tool (G), pick black color and fill the layer mask with it. Then grab the Brush Tool (B), use the same settings as in the previous step (don’t forget to pick white color) and paint over the areas where deeper shadow should be – lower part of woman’s dress, upper part of sky, opposite side of mountains and faces.

As in the previous step I highlighted the areas where I painted to give you better idea of where you should do it.

After these two last steps your photo manipulation should look like the one shown below.

Step 9 – Adding Waves

In previous steps you’ve created bit more drama by adjusting the light scene of the photo manipulation. Now let’s focus on some movement.

If you look at the sea it’s very calm and peaceful. Wouldn’t it be more dramatic if there were more waves? You’ll add them in this step.

Download the waves brushes listed in the beginning of the tutorial and install them into Photoshop. If you don’t know how to install custom brushes, you can take a look at this tutorial.

Add new layer on the top of all layers and name it WAVES. Grab the Brush Tool (B) and select one of the wave brushes you’ve just installed. Press Alt on your keyboard to activate the Eye Dropper Tool (I) and select some very light color from the picture. Try to avoid using pure white and pure black colors (not just only in this one but in all your photo manipulations). Both are very harsh colors and rarely look realistic. If you look around you, you will notice there are very few examples of both of these colors. Most likely they’re variation of e.g. light yellow, light blue… instead of white and dark green, grey or brown instead of pure black.

Now simply paint some waves around the stone on which the woman sits. Let’s see where you should add them.

Step 10 – Adding Mist

If you’ve read more of my tutorials you probably already know that I really like adding fog into my photo manipulations. The reason is that according to me fog can add very nice touch of magical or enigmatic atmosphere and that’s what I really like in images.

Add new layer on the top of all layers and name it FOG. Download the mist brushes listed in the beginning of the tutorial (or feel free to use any other which are for free) and install them into Photoshop.

Grab the Brush Tool (B), select some of the fog brushes you’ve just installed, press Alt on your keyboard to activate the Eye Dropper Tool (I) and pick some very light color from the picture. Now simply paint some mist around the mountains in the background.

Be careful to not to paint on the woman. It wouldn’t look realistic because she is in the foreground where is no fog.

Step 11 – First Global Adjustments

In this step you’ll do three things – increase the contrast with use of Gradient Map, add bluish tones with Levels and desaturate woman’s skin a little with Vibrance adjustment layer. Let’s start with increasing contrast.

Add new adjustment layer Gradient Map of the top of all layers. Choose the Black, White Gradient.

The only thing the gradient did so far is that the picture is black and white. But you want higher contrast, don’t you? To achieve that simply change the Blending Mode of this layer from Normal to Luminosity.

Here you can see how the Gradient Map adjustment layer affects the photo manipulation.

The second thing which you will do in this step is to add blue tones. To do that add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers. Choose Blue channels and set the Output Levels on 19; 255.

Let’s take a look at how this adjustment changes the picture.

And the last thing – desaturate woman’s skin a little. Add new adjustment layer Vibrance on the top of all layers and set the value Vibrance on -10.

(If you have some older version of Photoshop (I think CS2 or lower) the adjustment Vibrance is not available there. But you can achieve pretty same effect by adding the adjustment layer Hue/Saturation, as color choose Red and set the value Saturation on -10.)

Let’s take a look at how your photo manipulation looks like after all these steps and adjustments.

Step 12 – Darkening the Dress

Because of the previous adjustments the woman’s dress is too bright which doesn’t create interesting contrast between the clothes and the rest of the image. You’ll fix it in this step.

Add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set the Input Levels on 25; 0.70; 255.

You want to adjust only the woman’s dress and not the rest of the picture. Because of that you need to fill the layer mask of this layer with black color and then paint over the areas which you want to have darker.

Grab the Paint Bucket Tool (G), pick black color, make sure the layer mask is active (just click on the layer mask thumbnail) and fill it. Then grab the Brush Tool (B), select some soft round brush, set Master Diameter on about 50 pixels and set the Opacity on 100%. Pick white color and paint over the dress to make it darker.

On the following photo you can compare how the picture looks before and after this step.

It’s quite subtle change but I strongly believe that while doing photo manipulations you should make more decent adjustments instead of one radical. Because of that you get more natural looking and more interesting images.

Step 13 – Higher Mountains

According to me the composition right now still lacks drama I want to achieve. It would help if you make the mountains in the background even little bit higher. To do that right click on the layer RIGHT ROCK and select the option Duplicate layer. Name this new layer for instance RIGHT ROCK II and place it on the top of all layers. Grab the Move Tool (V) and move the mountain up so it looks it’s higher.

To blend the layer properly with the rest of the image add layer mask to it. Grab the Brush Tool (B), set the Master Diameter on about 30 pixels and lower the Opacity on 50%. Pick white color and paint over the edges of the mountain to blend it.

Then do the exactly same process with the left side of the mountain.

On the picture below you can see how the manipulation looks so far.

Step 14 – Changing the Sky

I think the sky right now has lack of the details and looks boring because of that. In this step you’ll add stormy, more dramatic clouds. Download the picture of clouds listed in the beginning of the tutorial. Place it on the top of all layers and name it CLOUDS. Press Command/Ctrl + T on your keyboard and resize it on proper size. Then press Enter to apply the changes.

To blend the clouds well with the rest of the image change its Blending Mode from Normal to Overlay.

If you look at the image below you may notice that there is harsh transition between just added clouds and the rest of the image.

You want to blend it. To do that add layer mask to CLOUDS. Grab the Brush Tool (B), select some soft round brush, set the Master Diameter on about 100 pixels and lower the Opacity on 50%. Pick black color and paint over the transition to get nice, soft one.

Step 15 – Adjusting the Sky

The overall picture would look better if the sky is bit darker. You’ll do it on this step. Add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set the Input Levels on 15; 0.90; 250.

You want to adjust only the one layer below (CLOUDS) and not the rest of the image. To achieve that right click on Levels adjustment layer and select the option Create Clipping Mask.

To add even bit more depth to the sky, darken the upper part a little. Add another adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and this time set the Input Levels on 0; 0.45; 255.

You want to adjust only the upper part of the sky. Because of that grab the Paint Bucket Tool (G), pick black color and fill the layer mask of this adjustment layer. Then grab the Brush Tool (B). Use the same size and type of the brush as in the previous step. Set the Opacity on about 30% and pick white color. Now paint over the upper part of the sky. On the picture below you can get the ideas where, it’s highlighted with red color.

Your image should be similar to the one below.

Step 16 – Adding Birds

This will be really quick step. I’ve already mentioned that I like using mist in my images because of the enigmatic atmosphere it creates. Another favorite element is flying birds because of the movement they add to the image. You’ll add some them in this step.

Download the bird brushes listed in the beginning of the tutorial and install them into Photoshop. Add new layer on the top of all layers and name it BIRDS. Grab the Brush Tool (B) and select some of the brushes you’ve just installed. Hold Alt on your keyboard to activate the Eyedropper Tool (I) and select some dark blue color from the picture. Paint some birds! Don’t paint too many of them because it won’t look realistic.

Step 17 – Darkening and lightening

Let’s move on another step. In this final part you’ll focus on creating more interesting atmosphere by adding multiple color adjustment layers.

Let’s start with darkening of some parts of the image. Add new layer on the top of all layers and name it e.g. DARKENING. Change its Blending Mode from Normal to Soft Light.

Grab the Brush Tool (B), select some soft round brush and set the Master Diameter on about 30 pixels. Lower the Opacity on 10% and pick black color. Paint over some parts of clouds to make it bit darker and dramatic.

Then change the color from black to white and paint over the top of the mountains to create more interesting lighting effect. On the picture below you can see where to paint.

Step 18 – Adding More Cyan Tones

According to me to better evoke the whole "sea like" atmosphere the overall picture should have more cyan/blue tones. You’ll add them in this step.

Add new layer on the top of all layers and name it MORE CYAN. Grab the Paint Bucket Tool (G) and pick some cyan or blue color. If you want to use the exact same color as I did type #649395 into the highlighted square.

To use this layer for color adjustments change its Blending Mode from Normal to Soft Light and to get smoother, gentler effect lower its Opacity on 25%.

Let’s take a look at how your photo manipulation should look like so far.

Step 19 – Darkening and More Contrast

In this step you’ll make two gentle adjustments. You’ll make the picture bit darker and bit more contrasted.

Let’s start with darkening. Add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set the Input Levels on 5; 0.95; 255.

To increase the contrast add new adjustment layer Gradient Map on the top of all layers. Choose Black, White gradient.

Change its Blending Mode from Normal to Luminosity. To get a more gentle and realistic effect lower the Opacity on 30%.

Step 20 – Darkening Dress and Rock

Let’s focus on the bottom part of the image because it lacks contrast. Right now the stone in the foreground is as light as the sea, which doesn’t look interesting. Also the bottom part of the dress should be bit darker – it’s wet and clothes usually tend to be darker.

Add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set the Input Levels on 0; 0.5; 255.

You want to make only local adjustments. Because of that grab the Paint Bucket Tool (G), pick black color and fill the layer mask. Then grab the Brush Tool (B), pick white color and start painting over the areas you want to have darker.

On the following picture you can get inspiration where to paint. Those areas are highlighted with red color.

The dress should be even darker. To do that add a new adjustment layer Hue/Saturation on the top of all layers and set it as shown below.

As before you want to make only local adjustments. Fill the layer mask of this new adjustment layer with black color. Than grab the Brush Tool (B), pick white color and paint over the areas, which are highlighted with red color on the following picture.

Step 21 – Darker Highlights

This is another really quick step in which you’ll make highlights little bit darker. Add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set the Output Levels on 0; 235.

On the following picture you can compare how the manipulation looks before and after this adjustment.

Step 22 – Adjusting Color of the Dress

I’m still not satisfied with the color of the dress. It’s too bright and too red. You’ll change it in this step.

Add new adjustment layer Selective Color on the top of all layers. From the Color palette choose Red and set the same values as shown on the picture below.

Woman’s hand and face is now adjusted too but it doesn’t look nice – it’s too cyan. To hide the adjustment on that areas grab the Brush Tool (B), pick black color, click on the thumbnail of layer mask and simply paint over her hands and face.

On the following picture you can compare how the image looks when woman’s skin is adjusted by Selective Color (before) and after hiding it with layer mask (after).

Step 23 – Darkening the Skin

This is the last local adjustment you need to do before you finish this tutorial. Woman’s skin seems to be too bright. To fix it add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set the Input Levels on 0; 0.8; 255 and the Output Levels on 25; 255.

To only adjust the woman’s skin fill the layer mask of this layer with black color. Then grab the Brush Tool (B), pick white color and paint over the areas you want to darken. You can get inspiration on the picture below. Areas where I painted are highlighted with red color.

Step 24 – Lighter Image

This is the very last step and it’s very quick and easy. You’ll make the image little bit lighter.

Add new adjustment layer Levels on the very top of all layers and set the Input Levels on 0; 1.00; 240. And that’s it!

Final Image

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With the release of Photoshop CS5 there have been substantial improvements to the noise reduction tools found inside of Camera Raw. Now, it’s possible to reduce noise while maintaining clarity and sharpness throughout the image. In this tutorial we are going to be taking a jpeg image into Camera Raw and fixing both the color and luminance noise that can be found in the image. Let’s get started!

Painting in Photoshop can seem like quite a challenge to take on. An idea may be vivid in your mind but hard to translate to canvas. To help out this process, many artists use photo references to understand the elements of their pieces such as lighting, composition, and perspective. In this article I’ll show you what you can learn from referencing photos as well as how to apply those concepts and techniques to your digital art.

Questions You Should Ask Before and During Your Painting

When I attack a new painting, I plan it out as thoroughly as possible in order to understand how to approach it the best way. I draw mini sketches of different compositions, write lots of notes about its symbolism and key details to remember, and try out various color tests with the final sketch until I’m satisfied. Knowing which questions to answer as you’re painting will train you in noticing and implementing incredible detail to your work. These answers also prepare you for researching the best photo references to guide you to your desired result.

Here are some basic questions for your next piece:

1. What is the focus of this painting?
2. Where is the light source?
3. What is the mood? (includes symbolism)
4. What is the composition? (Portrait, perspective, etc)
5. What is the color scheme?
6. Which brushes and/or PS tools will I need and for what?

Photo References

Once you understand these basic questions you can gather up as many photo references as you need to help execute your work. I have chosen three very different sxc.hu stock photos to learn essential painting concepts in Photoshop, and in these next sections I’ll show you how to effectively apply these ideas to your art.

Photo Reference #1: The African Plains

Let’s say you want to create a painting with a beautiful sunset like The African Plains. Feel free to continue to ask questions during this process in order understand the components of your reference. For instance, are these trees black? No, but they appear black because the light source of the sun has fallen behind them creating a silhouette, while negating nearly all the details of the trees.

What other details can you notice that might help your composition? Looking real closely, you can see both the sky and the grass create lots of slightly angled lines while the trees bluntly separate the two. Training your eyes to see this will help you create visual continuity in your paintings.

Executing This Style

When trying to execute this sunset, it’s safe to say you can stay with the normal soft and hard round brushes. Use a very soft, low opacity round brush to paint the clouds with the colors melting into each other, a hard high opacity round brush to create the blunt, textural strokes of the trees, and a slightly hard, mid to high opacity brush for the grass. Consider the role that organizing your layers plays in Photoshop too. You can effectively compose a similar background, middle ground, and foreground by creating the layers as grass, trees, and sky (from top to bottom).

Also realize that a significant story is being told in the photograph. Day is now turning into night, and you can utilize this concept for perhaps a powerfully symbolic painting about one chapter ending and another beginning.

Photo Reference #2: Jack The Cat

“Jack the cat” is as adorable as can be posing for the camera, but which techniques can you see in our furry friend’s photo? The key to painting animals is to highlight the features we love the most, a technique done well in the photo referenced below.

Cats are known for their prominent ears, gorgeously mysterious eyes, and lovely thin whiskers, and if you look closely at this reference, you’ll see that the body of the cat as well as the background of the photo is blurred, while the head still remains in focus. The camera’s viewpoint is above the eye level of the cat where we can see the top of its head, but not too high that we would see either the back of its neck or the top of its body–an important idea when understanding character position.

Executing This Style

Have you noticed that the composition of the reference favors the right side, making it almost appear heavier on the right as opposed to the mystery and openness of the background to its left? In fact we have many things favoring the right side of this photo, from the position of Jack’s head, to where he’s looking, as well as an additional light source far beyond the camera’s reach.

A beginner to painting may think that tiny, incredibly thin, and wispy brush strokes are necessary to conveying the look of animal fur, but this isn’t always true. What’s crucial is to understand the directional path of Jack the cat’s lovely coat. Rather than the porcupine hair it’s most often mistaken for, the cat’s coat follows the contours of the face while moving outward and backward in several directions stemming from the nose and the eyes. I would use a blunt, round brush to convey the look of Jack’s fur on his face, while incorporating softer, round brushes for the rest of his body, as well as the background.

This photo is creating an interesting story that can be easily implemented for a painting. Discovering the mystery behind what exactly has Jack’s attention also adds to the image by inviting the viewer’s intrigue.

Photo Reference #3: Black And White Portrait

This last reference is a striking black and white portrait we can learn a lot from. How would you approach a painting with such a powerful singular light source? In order to understand this lighting setup, study the bright spots and directional path of its source located to the bottom-right of this scene.

Notice that the shadows are organic in form, so instead of painting with sharp angular lines, paint with soft, curvy shapes to effectively illustrate them. What about her body position? Initially, she looks like she could be sitting back in a chair, with the photographer taking the shot from high above especially because the photo is upright. But the dead giveaway that she’s lying down on a surface is that her hair folds beneath her head.

Executing This Style

Large portions of the woman’s body reside in the negative space where the strong shadows fall, so roughly sketch out her entire body before painting the light and shadows. Looking closely, the photo has a slight blur to it, so softer, mid opacity round brushes would be used for her face and body. However, working out the other details such as her hair and lace top, may require a harder round brush.

Conclusion

We are able to pick up all these details with our eyes because they are in obvious in a photo, but developing a strong, original composition from your mind is much harder than it seems. Luckily, we have this wondrous world of photo referencing to bail us out of “painter’s block.” Remember to keep asking yourself questions during the process, and soon you’ll know exactly how to execute your next painting. Which other concepts or techniques do you think you can learn from these photos?

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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!

Resources

This tutorial uses the following images but you are welcome to find alternatives for the ice cream and wine glass images.

• Elephant Image 01
• Elephant Image 02
• Ice Cream
• Wine Glass

Step 1

Open the wine glass image. Our first step is to try to manipulate the wine glass into a more dessert-like container. Start by selecting the top half of the wine glass and Copy (Command/Ctrl + C) and Paste (Command/Ctrl + V) it on to a new layer.

Step 2

Transform > Warp this layer to drop the base of the glass more. This will result in a more defined perspective.

Step 3

As an additional step, I’ve used the Liquify Tool on the base of the bulb of the glass. This will help with the perspective.

Step 4

Go back to the original "Background" Layer and select the base of the wine glass. Copy (Command/Ctrl + C) and Paste (Command/Ctrl + V) this on to a new layer.

Step 5

Transform (Command/Ctrl + T) this layer by scaling it vertically until the base of the wine glass has a stronger perspective.

Step 6

Move this layer up so that it appears to be a shorter dessert glass.

Use a layer mask to help blend this layer with the rest of the glass. Don’t worry about the “Background” layer—we will crop this down later.

Step 7

Using a soft brush set to a low Opacity, sample the background colors and start blending so that the background appears uniform. Quickly sample colors by holding down Alt with the Brush Tool selected to switch to the Eyedropper Tool.

Step 8

To finish the dessert glass, we need to correct the perspective on the top of the glass. Currently, we are looking ‘up’ at the opening and we need to be looking ‘down’.

Using a small brush, sample the colors on the glass and repaint the sides that overlap. The goal is to reverse the direction of the overlap to make it appear that the opening of the wine glass is now in front.

Step 9

Save this as a separate file in case you need to go back and change anything. Flatten this image and select just the wine glass and drag it down to the bottom of the canvas.

Next, select the space just above the wine glass and stretch it to fill in the top of the image.

Step 10

The next step is to go through your images of the elephant and extract the parts you can use. Use the Pen Tool to make your selections and Paste them to a new layer.

Step 11

When you’re done extracting all the pieces, place them into the new scene with the dessert glass.

Step 12

Now that we have all the pieces on our canvas, go through each one and clean it up a bit.
For this piece, I’ve used the Clone Stamp Tool to remove the tusk. A trick is to use the Clone Stamp Tool on a new clipping layer with the Sample set to All Layers. This will allow you to work freely without having to worry about cloning past the boundaries of the image.

I also copied portions of the trunk and manipulated it to rebuild the damaged sections.

Step 13

For the body, I’ve used the same techniques from the last step to remove the small portion of ear that was cropped with the piece.

Step 14

For the legs, I’ve continued the same process to remove the chains and rebuild the legs.

Step 15

The next step is to get all the colors to match. First, we’ll decide which piece we want to match the color to. In this case, the “Body” layer is the largest piece with the most uniform color, so we will match the other pieces to that. Select one of the leg pieces and go to Image > Adjustments > Match Color. In the Source box, select the PSD file that you’re working in. In the Layer box, select the "Body" layer. You can use the sliders to fine-tune the color correction.

Do this for the other leg piece. The resulting pieces should now appear similar in color

Step 16

The texture on the legs appears too flat. To add texture, we will sample some of the texture from the “Body” layer. Start by selecting a portion of the body piece that has good texture.

Step 17

Copy and Paste this piece above the leg layer and make it a clipping layer.

Step 18

Edit > Transform > Warp this layer to match the contours of the leg.

Use a Layer Mask to blend the texture into the leg. Next, set the Blending Mode to Darker Color

Continue this technique to add texture where needed.

Step 19

Use this same technique to build texture on the other leg

Step 20

Lastly, I’ve adjusted the color of the toenails to make them appear more natural. To do this, I’ve painted a cool gray color on a new clipping layer with the Blending Mode set to Color and the Opacity set to 37%

Step 21

We can now start building our scene. Before we start, I will mention that it is good practice to make a copy of your pieces before using them since we will be going back to the original unedited pieces at times

Now, flatten each piece to its own layer.

Next, make a copy of the body layer and Edit > Transform > Warp this so that it covers most of the interior of the glass. This layer will act as a backdrop to cover any unintentional gaps as we put the pieces together.

Step 22

Use the Pen Tool to trace around the inside of the glass. It helps to hide the "Body copy" layer so you can see the edges of the glass. Go to Window > Masks to open up your Masks Panel and select the "Add Vector Mask" button (Alternatively, you can just right-click the path and select "Create Vector Mask" as long as you still have the Pen Tool selected). This will allow us to update the path at any time to refine our mask.

Step 23

Make another copy of the body layer and Warp this one into position. This body layer will be used as the main body.

Step 24

Create a new Layer Mask. Use this mask to blend this layer in with the background body layer. Also, remove the parts of the body that are coming out the top of the glass.

Step 25

Make one last copy of the body layer and Warp it to appear as if it is bulging out the top of the glass.

Step 26

Use the Pen Tool to create a Vector Mask, just like we did in step 22.

Step 27

Next, make a copy of the "Head" layer and Warp this into position.

Step 28

Make a copy of the "Foot" layer and place it as shown. Create a new Layer Mask and mask out most of the leg, leaving just the foot.

Step 29

Make a copy of the “Thigh” layer and place it behind the "Foot" layer. Use a Layer Mask to blend the thigh into the rest of the body. It doesn’t have to be perfect—we will fix anything that needs it later.

Step 30

Make another copy of the "Thigh" layer and Rotate and Scale (Command/Ctrl + T) into position.

Step 31

Create a Layer Mask to help create the illusion that this leg is wrapped around the foot.

Step 32

Go back to the original body layer and select some of the texture using one of the marquee tools. Copy and Paste the sampled texture over areas that need help blending in. Transform or Warp the texture into position and blend in using a Layer Mask.

Step 33

After you’ve done this, go through and merge each grouping of pieces into their own layer. This image should have four layers (not including the “Background” layer): Body, Head, Foot and Thigh. Go through each piece and apply the Sharpen Filter (Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen). This will help bring out the detail that was lost when we were manipulating the pieces.

Step 34

Our next step is to add some depth to our image. Just above the "Body" layer, create a new clipping layer with the Blending Mode set to Multiply. With a soft brush set to a low opacity, sample a dark gray color from the elephant and start painting over the low lights and shadows.

Step 35

Continue this technique with each piece of the elephant.

Step 36

Our next step is to make the elephant appear behind glass. To start, merge all the pieces of the elephant together (to make things easier, I’ve merged my scene down to three layers: the Background, the elephant pieces that appear inside the glass, and the pieces that appear outside of the glass. It might be a good idea to save this as a new file.

Step 37

On a new clipping layer, use a white brush and paint over the elephant where it might be making contact with the glass.

Step 38

Set this layer’s Opacity to 27%. Also, adjust the layer’s Blend If sliders to allow for the texture to show through.

Step 39

Continue this technique for other areas on the elephant, making sure each new layer is a clipping layer. I’ve also used Layer Masks to fade the effects as needed.

Step 40

Add another clipping layer and with a large, soft brush, paint in some white around the edges of the elephant.

Step 41

Add another clipping layer and with the same brush, paint in some larger areas to make it appear to reflect light. Change this layer’s Opacity to 27%.

Step 42

Continuing this technique, add a shine with a harder edge. Change this layer’s Opacity to 33%.

Step 43

To finish the elephant, I have painted a new eye. To do this, create a new layer and use the Ellipse Tool to make a dark brown ellipse. Add a subtle Drop Shadow and Rotate (Command/Ctrl + T) into position.

Step 44

Now, start to paint the eye using a new clipping layer. Use a hard black brush to paint in the pupil. After that, use a soft brush with a low Opacity to paint in colors of the iris and possible reflections. To finish, add some white dots to get that glossy, realistic effect to the eye.

Step 45

Open up the image of the dessert and extract just the whip cream topping with the help of the Pen Tool. Paste the image into our scene.

Step 46

Transform (Command/Ctrl + T) the topping into position

Step 47

Add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer to color correct the image. Note that I have used a Layer Mask to hide the cherry from the affects of the Adjustment Layer.

Step 48

Using the same techniques from Step 34, paint some shadows on a new layer to help add more definition to the whip cream. Do the same with the highlights, using a white color to enhance the highlights. Changes will be subtle, but effective.

Lastly, add the shadows casted by the whip cream on to the elephant. Make sure to do this on a new layer that is below the Whip Cream Layer.

Step 49

You’re Done! Your image should resemble the following.

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 Festive Cocktail Using Photoshop’s 3D Capabilities

  For many of our readers, this time of year is filled with family, friends, and celebration. In this tutorial, we will explain how to create a festive cocktail using Photoshop’s 3D capabilities just in time for your New Year’s celebrations. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create a Dark, Conceptual Photo Manipulation With Stock Photography

  In this tutorial we will be teaching how to integrate elements from different sources to create a realistic photo manipulation with dark and conceptual elements. You will learn some lighting and blending techniques as well as some interesting post-production tips. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create High-End Action Figure Packaging – Tuts + Premium Tutorial

  With collectables, the packaging of the product is often as important as the craftsmanship of the product itself. In this two-part Tuts+ Premium tutorial, author Tim Kyde will explain how to create packaging for a high-end 1/6 scale action figure. Part 1 of this tutorial will explain how to shoot your own photography and create a print-ready outer sleeve and inner packaging for our action figure. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members — Join Now to get started!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

• 

  Wrangling with the Facebook Graph API

  Have you ever wanted to learn how to make your applications more social with Facebook? It’s much easier than you think!

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• 

  From Idea to Market: How We Built Gradient

  Retracing the steps you’ve taken is a helpful way to understand how well you’ve executed your vision – whatever that might be. What could you have done better? What should have been avoided? Today, I’ll share what we’ve learned (and are still learning) while crafting Gradient. It’s an experience that has changed everything for us.

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• 

  Should You Learn CoffeeScript?

  I’d imagine that I represent a large portion of the web development community. I’m very intrigued by CoffeeScript; I’ve even learned the syntax and used it in a few demos. However, I haven’t yet taken the plunge and used it in a real project. It comes down to this one question for me: is CoffeeScript something that is truly worth investing time and effort into learning?

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

• 

  Outstanding Tutorials, Quick Tips, Articles and Interviews from Vectortuts+ in 2011

  As the year comes to an end and we pack up our vector tools for some well deserved rest and relaxation, let’s take a look back at some of the best and most inspiring Vectortuts+ articles and tutorials for 2011.

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  Community Project: 2012 Calendar Design Project

  Vectortuts+ loves Illustration and discovering new talent, so today we are proud to be launching a new community project that combines both, the Vectortuts+ 2012 Calendar Design Project. The best thing is, you can be a part of it! Find out how to get involved, at the jump.

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• 

  Quick Tip: How to Create a Watercolor Background Using Adobe Illustrator

  In this tutorial we will learn how to create Watercolor Background using a Gradient Mesh, tools of deformation and Blending Modes. The techniques which are described here allow the creation of complex textural backgrounds in a simple and effective way.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

• 

  A Year in Web Design: How the Experts Saw 2011

  “What did you find most memorable about the world of web design in 2011?” That’s the question I posed to some of our industry’s shining stars last week. One word cropped up more than any other (can you guess?) and everyone had plenty to say. See for yourself after the jump, and let us know what rocked your boat in 2011!

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• 

  Get Into LESS: the Programmable Stylesheet Language

  I don’t like CSS. Plain and simple. It makes the World go round on the web, yet the language is restrictive and hard to manage. It’s time to spruce up the language and make it more helpful by using dynamic CSS with the help of LESS.

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• 

  Say Hello to the HTML Email Boilerplate

  Figuring out html email will test the patience of any human being. A seemingly small formatting issue will inevitably arise and you think to yourself, “self, I’m a world class web developer type person schooled in the latest and greatest html5/css3/whatever, I can tackle this with plenty o’ keystrokes to spare.”

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

• 

  Tips to Get Started with Still Life Photography

  There arent many photographic practices that date back further than still life photography. When photography originated, it was necessary for exposures to be quite long, so photographing static objects was the ideal subject matter. However, as the technology developed, the fascination for capturing still life has remained and is still one of the most viable photographic professions today.

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• 

  Is It Worth It? Some Gear Buying Advice

  A lot people believe their photography will improve “if only…” With the holidays approaching, a lot of avid wanna-be photographers, amateurs, and professionals will be making wish lists for gear that they erroneously believe will make them better photographers. There are many forums, YouTube videos, and articles pandering how camera/lens/light/brand/voodoo doll will make your photos better. Today, we’ll examine that idea.

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• 

  Superb Photos of Paths and Stairways

  “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” an infamous movie quote inspired by a pathway to a land of dreams. Wherever your paths take you and whatever amount of stairs you have to climb, its always worth it to see whats at the end, but more importantly to enjoy the journey. Today’s collection gathers dozens of images of paths and stairways, images that symbolize something different to every person.

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

• 

  Freebie: Epic 3D Character Model Of Pyro From Team Fortress 2

  Today we’re super excited to bring you this amazingly detailed character model from Cgtuts+ regular Shaun Keenan. Shaun has re-created “Pyro” from Valve’s hit game Team Fortress 2 in glorious detail, and is making the model available to the Cgtuts+ community for free!

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• 

  Digital Matte Painting And Projection Basics: From Photoshop To Maya To Nuke, Part 1 – Tuts+ Premium

  This Tuts+ Premium tutorial series covers a variety of basic techniques for both creating and projecting matte paintings using Photoshop, Maya and Nuke. The first part of the tutorial will cover how to approach the creation of a matte painting, the research and background knowledge you need, the concept, and finally starting to create your matte painting in Photoshop. Log in or Join Now to get started!

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• 

  Create A Flying Paper Animation In 3D Studio Max With Thinking Particles

  In this tutorial by Cristian Pop, you’ll learn how to create a nice flying papers effect in 3d Studio Max using the power of Thinking Particles. We’ll start by creating the paper shapes and materials, then move into Thinking Particles to set up the rules and look at how we can combine them to create the flying paper effect.

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

• 

  How To Track Footage That Is Out Of Focus

  In this tutorial we are going to take a look at a simple, but interesting idea. The main point will be to show you how to work with footage that is out of focus making if difficult to track. After we track it we are going to attach the camera interface elements and fake some depth of field to create the illusion that they are floating in space and shift in and out of focus like the rest of the scene.

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• 

  DIY – Create A Camera Dolly Completely From Scratch

  Ever wonder how to get smooth footage from your video camera? Today you will learn how to build a Camera Dolly that will help you acquire this type of footage. Get out those dusty power tools, buy some cheap supplies at your local hardware store, and you’ll be on your way to capturing some amazing footage in no time!.

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• 

  How To Create A Dr. Who Time And Space Vortex – Tutsplus Premium

  In this tutorial well be creating a Time & Space Vortex (like that used in Doctor Who) completely inside of After Effects. We will be using Trapcode Particular and Trapcode Shine to create the vortex. I will then teach a vital Expression that drives the camera and completes the Effect. Once you have mastered the effect, you can personalize it to create whatever Time-Tunnel you desire! All of Time and Space awaits you…

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

• 

  Drum Compression: Get Your Attack and Release Times Correct

  Compression can be a tricky one to get your head around, and even if you’ve got your head around the threshold and ratio settings without the attack and release times being set correctly it will always be difficult to get the desired effect. This quick tip will outline a really handy trick I learned from a friend a few years ago which allows you to get your attack and release times just right. It’s primarily designed to work on drums but the same principles will apply to any percussive sound.

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  Quick Tip: Punchier Drums with the New York Compression Trick

  Ever have a mix where you wish the drums were bigger, more energetic, more in-your-face? I first heard about this technique in Bobby Owinksis, The Mixing Engineers Handbook, and it has since become a staple in my bag of tricks. The technique is a more aggressive take on parallel compression that can really add punch to your mix.

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  D Mixing Part 6: Depth

  In this segment of our mix down tutorial, we are going to begin to look in depth into depth. Depth within any mix and listening situation is paramount to proper sonic understanding. Much like we see in 3D, we hear in 3D and taking out any one of these dimensions only serves to create a flat and unnatural sound. As such, the most common tools which give the illusion of depth (reverb and delay) become an important and necessary part of mixing.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

• 

  Getting Started With EaselJS: A Flash-Like Interface for the HTML5 Canvas

  There’s been some resistance from Flash developers to our new HTML5 content. In this article – aimed at experienced AS3 coders – we’ll look at EaselJS, a JavaScript library that makes working with the HTML5 canvas very similar to working with the Flash display list.
  

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  AS3 Quick Tip: Hacking the Event Flow

  Sometimes you may find yourself needing to modify the behavior of a component for a user input event. This article will explain how to do so by modifying the event object in-flight, before it’s processed by the component. That’s right, you can lie and cheat. In code.

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  in Flash and Web Apps: A Retrospective

  With the year 2011 at a close, it is time to reflect upon some of the major industry events of the year. A lot happened… we’ll pick out some of the bits and pieces that will be most interesting to browser app and game developers from the world of industry, web, runtimes, operating systems, mobile, and more!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” Is Finally Here! What’s New?

  The latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named ’Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is immediately available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard. We’ll be covering lots of the new features of 3.3 this week, but for now, go and great the latest version! As we’ve mentioned before, it’s the best way to keep your WordPress site safe and stable.

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• 

  Getting Loopy – Ajax Powered Loops with jQuery and WordPress

  In this tutorial, we give you a starting point for creating AJAX interaction in your blog. We follow a step by step process, showing you how to load posts based on the viewers page scroll. The tutorial covers enqueueing scripts, setting up an AJAX handler, how to get a file outside of WordPress to use WordPress functions and access the database, and logic for loading posts on user page scroll.

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  Saintly” Practices that All WordPress Developers Should Strive For

  Here on Wptuts+, we talk a lot about the ‘how’ and less about the ‘why.’ Of course, we are a tutorial site, so that’s the goal, right? Well, as a followup to last month’s article on the “Cardinal Sins of WordPress Plugin Development“, today we’re going to look at a few practices that, if every developer followed, would make the world a better place (well, at least our world!).

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

• 

  Getting Started With Kindle Fire Development

  The Kindle Fire is the new touchscreen and e-book reader from Amazon. This device has generated a lot of buzz, and for good reason! It is currently the best selling Android tablet, with millions of units already sold. This tutorial will teach you how to begin making apps with the Android SDK specifically targeted for the Kindle Fire.
  

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  iOS 5 SDK: Storyboards

  Storyboarding is one of the most exciting new features about the iOS 5 SDK. Take a look at the wealth of functionality offered by Storyboards in today’s iOS 5 SDK tutorial!
  

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  Titanium Mobile: Build an Image Uploader

  This tutorial will demonstrate how to build a custom progress bar by creating an image uploader with Titanium Mobile. Specifically, the demo project will allow you to select an image from the device photo gallery and upload it to a remote server for storage. Both the Titanium Mobile code and the server-side code will be explained. Now, let’s get started!
  

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Happy New Year!

We’d like to wish all our readers a very Happy New Year! Why not take a look at our Holiday Wishes post to see a video message from the Envato HQ team, and find out more about what you might have missed over the Christmas period.

We hope you’ve enjoyed everything that we’ve had to share this year, and look forward to publishing thousands more top-quality tutorials, articles, freebies, and resources in 2012.

Thanks for being part of the Tuts+ community!

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 December 2011.

Photoshop Tutorials

• 

  Christmas Night Magic Scene With Flying Santa

  In this tutorial from Alfoart you will learn how to create a beautiful holiday card using a few stock photos in Photoshop.

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  Photoshop Matte Painting Tutorial: Mountains

  In this tutorial 3D Total will explain how to create a matte painting using video opened in Photoshop.

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  Glossy Snow Globe Text Effect

  In this text effect tutorial on Textuts you will learn how to create a glossy snow globe text effect in Photoshop.

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  How to Create a Photo Manipulation of a Wolf in Stormy Weather

  This tutorial from PhotoshopTutorials.ws will explain how to take several photos and combine them into one composition.

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  Making Of ‘Ibaloy Warrior’

  This tutorial from 3D total will explain how to create a detailed warrior using digital painting techniques.

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  Paint a Multilayered Surreal Portrait

  This tutorial from Digital Arts will explain how to create a surreal portrait in Photoshop.

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  Candy Cane Text Effect Using Illustrator and Photoshop

  This tutorial from Design Instruct will explain how to create a candy cane text effect using Photoshop and Illustrator.

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  How To Intensify Your Landscape Photos in Photoshop

  This tutorial from Spoon Graphics will explain how to enhance your landscape photos in Photoshop.

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  Paint Bucket: How to Avoid a Messy Edge

  This beginner’s tutorial on Ctrl+Paint explains the best way to paint inside the lines using the paint bucket tool.

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  Working With Photoshop’s History Panel, Snapshots, and the History Brush

  This tutorial from Adobe’s Julieanne Kost will explain how to work with Photoshop’s History Panel, Snapshots, and the History Brush.

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  Make Your Type Pop With Layer Styles

  This tutorial from computer arts will explain how to use layer styles to make your text pop.

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  Dozens of New Timesavers

  In Photoshop CS5, Adobe released several tweaks to features that many users had been asking about for a while. This video from Photoshop Sr. Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes will explain some of these tweaks.

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• 

  Photo Manipulate a Surreal Apple Habitat Scene

  This tutorial from Psd Fan will explain how to create a surreal apple habitat in Photoshop.

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  How to Create A Detailed Cassette Tape in Photoshop

  This tutorial from WeGraphics will explain how to create a detailed cassette tape icon in Photoshop.

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The older I get, the faster time seems to fly by. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I was drafting last year’s Best of Psdtuts article. Since then we’ve published a ton of amazing Photoshop tutorials and articles. In this round up, I’ve picked some of my favorite content from Psdtuts to share. This content features photo manipulations, matte paintings, interface designs, text effects, and much more. Please take a moment to review some of our favorite content from 2011.

Photoshop Tutorials and Articles

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  The Cosmos: Create a Red Giant Star in Photoshop

  When a star like our own reaches the end of its life, it begins to run out of hydrogen fuel in its core. Like a car running out of gas, it will begin to sputter, swelling to a size that could encompass every planet in our solar system out to Mars. These stars are called red giants. In this tutorial we will explain how to create a red giant in Photoshop.

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  Undress a Giraffe in Photoshop

  Have you ever wanted to know what a Giraffe looks like without its spots? If so, this tutorial is for you, you pervert! In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to undress a giraffe by removing its spots. We will then show how to turn its spots into an outfit that will be draped over an ironing board.

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  Create a Retro Electronic Safe Lock Interface

  Photoshop can be used to create interfaces for all sorts of applications in addition to websites. In this premium tutorial, author Diego Monzon will demonstrate how to create a retro style electronic safe lock interface using both Photoshop and Illustrator.

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• 

  The Incredible Digital Paintings of Serge Birault

  This article features the work of Serge Birault. Birault is a French digital painter with a stunning portfolio. Most of Birault’s work features the same theme; sexy, naughty, wicked, and often armed women. Please take a moment to review some of Birault’s amazing work and enjoy!

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  Create a Stitched Text Effect for an iPad Wallpaper

  In this tutorial we will show you how to create a custom stitched text effect for an iPad Wallpaper.

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  Create an Alien Portrait Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

  Our culture depicts aliens in all shapes and sizes – but what would a creature from another planet really look like? Would it be the classic anthropomorphic, almond-eyed beings from the X-Files and countless Hollywood movies, or would it be so different from our own DNA to be totally unrecognizable? In this premium tutorial, author Mark Mayers will mix human and animal textures to transform a 3D render into a fantastical extra terrestrial portrait.

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  Mockup Blister Packaging in Photoshop

  Designers and clients often have different ideas about how a finished product should be presented. Designers want to show the finished artwork, clients want to know exactly how their design will look on the shelves. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to create a mockup for some blister packaging so that you can present your design to your clients.

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  Create a Print-Ready Blu-ray Packaging Design

  Creating excellent product packaging is more than just producing a great design. To make great packaging you’ll also need to produce printer-friendly artwork that your printer can use to easily apply your design to print. In this premium tutorial, author Mark Mayers will demonstrate how to create a Blu-ray in-lay card for a fictional zombie movie and mock it up as an impressive 3-D Blu-ray case that you can present to your clients.

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  Create an Exploding Moon Orbiting a Gas Giant in Photoshop

  Exploding planets are a staple of just about every popular science fiction television show or movie, but did you know that you don’t need your own special effects department to create these types of effects on your own? In fact, all you need is Photoshop. In this premium tutorial, author Ed Lopez will demonstrate several techniques including how to break apart a planetary object, create a star field, dust and clouds, and even how to create a gas giant from scratch.

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  Create a Surreal, Politically-Charged Photo Manipulation

  Photoshop is a fantastic tool to help you create all types of artwork. By combining the right photographs, you can say just about anything you want without saying a word. In this premium tutorial, author Mario Sánchez Nevado will demonstrate how to create a politically charged photo manipulation using quite a few stock photographs.

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  Paint a Professional Caricature Portrait in Photoshop

  Having a caricature painted of yourself can be a fun and exciting experience. That’s because just about everyone has wondered, at some point, what they would look like as a cartoon or as an illustration on the cover of a magazine. In this premium tutorial, veteran illustrator, Jason Seiler will demonstrate how to create a professional caricature portrait using Psdtuts Editor, Grant Friedman as an example.

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  Create a Fictional Arctic Snow Frog in Photoshop

  Photoshop is a great tool to create scenarios that can’t or don’t exist in real life. In this tutorial, we will combine several stock images and effects to create a fictional arctic snow frog in Photoshop. As you can see, some of his unfortunate friends are frozen into the ice behind him and his meal is frozen just out of reach.

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  How to Make a Textured 3D Spray Can

  In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to combine Illustrator and Photoshop to create a 3D, textured spray can. This tutorial requires some basic understanding of Illustrator and Photoshop as well as the pen tool.

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  Clever Conceptual Photo Manipulations That Tell a Story

  Conceptual photo manipulations are all about depicting an idea, message, or story that a digital artist wants to convey to their viewers. In a conceptual photo manipulation the idea is the primary motive for the piece, not the materials, tools, or techniques that were used during its creation. These works are truly inspirational and tell a story through the characters, landscape, emotions, or through political or social commentary. In this collection you will find a mixed bag of clever conceptual photo manipulations, some of which include a bit of fantasy, surrealism, or humor.

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• 

  Create a Snow Covered, Coastal, Mountain Town Matte Painting

  A matte painting is a backdrop that filmmakers use when the scene they need doesn’t or can’t exist in real life. In the past, they were created by actually painting a scene on a canvas or a sheet of glass. Today, they are created digitally by combining photographs to produce the scene that they need. In this premium tutorial, author Ed Lopez will demonstrate how to create a snow-covered, coastal, mountain town scene using Photoshop.

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  Design a Conceptual Album Cover in Photoshop

  Album covers are always fun projects to work on. In this tutorial we will take a look at the step-by-step process of creating a conceptual album cover in Photoshop.

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  The Cosmos: Create a Green Planet, a Setting Sun, and a Space Ship in Photoshop

  Our universe is vast. So vast, in fact, that astronomers don’t measure its size in meters or miles but by explaining how long it would take to travel a certain distance at the speed of light. Light travels approximately 186,282 miles per second. This means that in a one year a person traveling at the speed of light would travel about 6 trillion miles. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to create a green planet, a setting sun, and a space ship which has traveled several million light years.

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  Create a Herd of Grazing Dinosaurs in Photoshop

  Just about everyone remembers that scene from Jurassic Park when the characters come across herds of dinosaurs grazing in a grassy field. In this premium tutorial, author Ed Lopez will demonstrate how to create a scene filled with Triassic era dinosaurs including a Brachiosaurus, one of the largest animals to ever exist. In this lesson we will demonstrate several matte painting techniques and will also show how to create dinosaurs from scratch.

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• 

  How To Draw a Vintage Polaroid Camera Icon

  In this tutorial, we will create a Polaroid camera icon. We will use lots of layer styles and draw manually with the brush tool to achieve a realistic appearance.

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  Create a Sweet Donut Icon in Photoshop from Scratch

  In this icon design tutorial we will learn how to make a sweet and tasty donut icon from an initial sketch. So let’s begin, and remember: don’t try to bite the screen!

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  Create a Surreal Rock Formation in Photoshop

  While photo manipulation is an important part of just about everything we do in Photoshop, photo manipulation isn’t always the answer. Sometimes you’ll need to do a bit of digital painting to create the image that you need. In this premium tutorial, author Marco Casalvieri will demonstrate how to create a surreal rock formation in Photoshop.

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  Create a Wine Bottle and Glass with Smart Objects

  Smart Objects are very powerful layers in Photoshop. In this premium tutorial, author Stephen Petrany will show you how to create a wine bottle and wine glass using Smart Objects as well as demonstrate their benefits.

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  Epic StarCraft 2 Fan Art

  StarCraft is one of my all time favorite video game franchises. I started playing back in high school – way back in 1998. I continued to play it off and on throughout college but eventually stopped when it seemed as if Blizzard would never release a sequel. Fast forward about 12 years and today, StarCraft 2 is a thriving e-sport with people like HuskyStarCraft and Day9 pushing the game on their YouTube pages. Since I am such a huge fan of the game, I decided to showcase some of my favorite pieces of StarCraft fan art for all of you to enjoy.

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  Create a Devastating Tidal Wave in Photoshop

  Matte painting is a technique that filmmakers use to create backgrounds for scenes that can’t or don’t exist in real life. In the early days, matte paintings were actually painted onto glass. Today, modern filmmakers use digital applications such as Photoshop to produce the backdrops that they need. We have published many matte painting tutorials on this site meant for intermediate and advanced users. This tutorial is part of a series of tutorials that we will be publishing on this meant for those of you who may be relatively new to Photoshop or matte painting in general.

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  Create a Planetary Asteroid Impact

  While asteroids don’t slam into the Earth all that often, movie producers sure act like they do. We can all think up a few movies with similar plots. An asteroid is about to hit the planet and a group of heroes comes to save the day. In this premium tutorial, author Ed Lopez will demonstrate how to create an asteroid impact, just like in the movies.

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  The Making of the Nutty Boat Trip

  Most of you probably know how hard it can be to find the perfect stock images for your designs. That means you will often have to get creative and find new ways to create the perfect composition. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to place a couple of squirrels in a coffee mug that is floating in a body of water.

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  Create a Lakeside Scene From Scratch in Photoshop

  Photoshop is a great tool for creating realistic photo manipulations or compositions but it can also be used to create scenes completely from scratch. These types of exercises can be helpful to learn how to create textures and then apply them to your artwork. In this premium tutorial, author Stephen Petrany will demonstrate how to create realistic-looking wood and water textures, adding some nice nails to create a nearly true-to-life lakeside scene.

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  Create a Detailed Camera Icon in Photoshop

  Icons can be a lot of fun to create. Simple icons are relatively easy to create but more realistic icons can be quite challenging. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a detailed Fuji X100 camera icon in Photoshop.

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  Create a Winter-Themed Holiday Card in Photoshop

  In this premium tutorial, author Stephen Petrany will demonstrate how to use various techniques to create a winter-themed holiday card in Photoshop. This tutorial will creatively utilize Photoshop filters and transformations to create a fantastic winter illustration.

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  Create a Post Apocalyptic Panoramic Matte Paintingl

  This tutorial is part of a two-part series demonstrating how to create a post-apocalyptic photo manipulation. In Part 1, we showed you how to shoot and assemble the base panorama. In Part 2, author Tony Aube will demonstrate how to turn the image we created in Part 1 into a snowy post-apocalyptic matte painting.

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  Create a Medieval Landscape in Photoshop

  In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a medieval landscape using digital painting and photo manipulation techniques. We will begin by sketching out a rough idea of how we want our image to look. Then, we will then add various stock images and build upon them until we produce the scene below.

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  Fan Art From Popular Nerd Franchises

  There are no shortages of nerdy movies on the big screen these days. In this web round up we will feature some of our favorite fan art from some of your favorite nerd franchises. Pieces included in this showcase will include Star Wars, Star Trek, Transformers, and many more. Please take a moment to review this fantastic showcase of nerd fan art.

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  Photo Effects Week: Create a Cutout Photograph in Photoshop

  In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a cutout photo using simple selections and advanced transformations.

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  The Artwork of Miriam Moshinsky

  In this article we will be showcasing the work of Miriam Moshinsky, a Russian-born designer currently living in Israel who has authored several tutorials here on Psdtuts. Miriam’s work features colorful, fantasy worlds full of children, animals, food and candy. Her work always includes some type of dark and morbid twist, which is a hallmark of her unique and creative style. Please take a moment to review some of her remarkable creations and enjoy!

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  Photo Effects Week: Create a Print-Ready Environmental Poster

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  Photoshop Basix

  Are you new to Photoshop? Have you been trying to teach yourself the basics of Photoshop but have found the amount of educational material available on the net a bit overwhelming? Photoshop Basix, by Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor Martin Perhiniak, is a series of 29 short video tutorials, around 5 – 10 minutes in length that will teach you all the fundamentals of working with Photoshop.

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  Digital Art for Beginners

  Photoshop is an excellent tool for manipulating photographs but it can also be used as a means to create stunning works of art. Digital Art for Beginners is a 25-part video tutorial series demonstrating everything you will need to know to start producing digital art in Photoshop. Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, Martin Perhiniak will begin by teaching you how to draw in Photoshop and during the course of the series will show you all you need to know to produce your own concept art and matte paintings in Photoshop.

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In this tutorial, I’ll show you a creative process that gets you using your crazy brain. The workflow for creating the splashes involves taking photographs of thrown paint. Through photography you can capture amazing 3D images without the need for 3D software. Learn to make a splash in your next design.

Editor’s note: This tutorial was originally published on Psdtuts in April of 2008.

Step 1

We need three boat photos taken from a high view. For this tutorial, you can substitute boats with cars, shoes, or anything else.

Step 2

Start to throw the paint from a cut plastic bottle. You can do it in front of a white wall or a green screen (if you have it) to obtain a good contrast on the edges of the splashes. The results will show better if you mix water and paint together. Be forewarned, stay away from the paint. In this attempt, we lost a cashmere pullover and a watch—irremediably stained.

Step 3

Select the best splashes you photographed. If some parts of the paint are out of focus, don’t worry. It’s a fine effect and it will contribute to a sense of depth in the final result.

Step 4

Use the Rapid Selection Tool or Magic Wand Tool to select the white background around the splashes. After you complete the selection process, go to Select>Refine>Edge and make some adjustments. Add Feather, Radius, and Expand or Reduce the selection until you find a nice result. Use a black background to remove excess white pixels on the edges. After that, go to Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal Selection to hide the white background.

Step 5

For each splash you need to repeat Step 5 and duplicate the layer every time. At the end, you may have a multilayer file like the image below.

Step 6

Now switch off every Paint layer so we can concentrate our attention on the boats. Select the Pen Tool (P) and start creating a path in the shape of the first yacht. This is the only way to make it. Without a suitable green screen the edge becomes too complicated so you can’t use any Photoshop tools to speed up this step.

After you create the path, click on the dotted circle icon at the bottom of the path box to create a selection. Select > Inverse and Delete the background (or create a mask to hide it). If your object is complicated, then your paths may take some time to create. Repeat this step with all the boat images (cars, shoes, or any images you’ve chosen).

Step 7

Use three different layers to work on the boats. At the end, you should have a good composition like this.

Step 8

Now the boats need some improvements. Start with the opaque glass. Select the Pen Tool (P) and create a path around the shape of the glass.

Step 9

Go to the Path Palette. Click on the dotted circle icon at the bottom of the box to create a selection from the path.

Step 10

Add a new layer called “glasses” over the boat layer and fill it with a gradient using white to black for the colors following the direction of the arrow shown below.

Step 11

For the Blend Mode use Color Dodge. Also, set the Fill Opacity to 60%.

Step 12

Repeat this step for all the boats. Now we must improve the color of the boats. Start with Select > Color range. Then pick a white point on the foredeck of one boat with the Eyedropper and set the Fuzziness to 123.

Step 13

With this new active selection, copy the white color from the boat layer and paste it into a new layer called lights over the boat layer. For the Blend Mode use Soft Light and set the Fill Opacity to 100%. Repeat this on the other boats. Now the foredeck appears brighter.

Step 14

Start revealing every single splash layer and move them below the boat layers. Keep in mind, you can put some layers of paint below one boat layer, while being above another boat layer. Mix and match until you have a nice composition, like the second image below.

Step 15

The Warp Tool is the magician of this tutorial. From the Top Menu go to Edit > Transform > Warp. Move the anchor points creating the spray from the paint waves, bringing the splashes near the hull.

Step 16

You can also create new splashes from your images by changing their shape with the Liquefy Filter. Go to Filter > Liquify. Use a medium brush to change the shape of the blue splashes.

Step 17

Your design so far should look like the image below.

Step 18

Create a new layer over the splashes. Select a brush similar to the one used in the image below. Set the Hardness to 0%. Then, with a dark blue color selected, draw shadows below the boats.

Step 19

For each boat, duplicate a splash layer near the hull. Move this new layer over the boat. Call it “reflections.” For the Blend Mode use Overlay. Then set the Fill Opacity at about 60%.

Step 20

Select the Pen Tool (P) and create a path along the lower side of the yachts. Create a selection from the path. Then create a new layer above the boat layer. Fill the selection with a blue color picked from the blue waves. Call this new blue layer “Halo.”

Deselect (Command/ctrl+D) and from the Top Menu choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Apply a Radius similar to the settings below. For the Blend Mode use Multiply. Then set the Fill Opacity to about 75%. Now you have a blue reflection on your hull. Repeat this process for every hull (which includes this step and the previous step).

Step 21

After having completed the shadow and reflection, now we’ll create a light background. Create a New Layer (Shift+Ctrl+N). Call it background. Put this layer below the others. Use the Elliptical Marque Tool to draw an Ellipse.

Then Select > Modify > Feather and set the Radius to about 40px. From the Menu go to Filter > Render > Clouds. Use white for the foreground and a light blue for the background. Set the Opacity to 70%.

Step 22

Now we’ll add a background using Photoshop Brushes. Select a Rounded Brush and play with options like Shape Dynamics, Color Dynamics, and Scattering to create a good distribution of random bubble patterns. On a new layer, called bubbles, draw a texture with a light blue foreground and a dark background. After this, select Color Dodge for the bubbles layer in the Layer Palette.

Conclusion

Now you can add anything you want to your advertisement design. I placed a logo and some text in the image below. Good job, your work is finished! Remember to use your software well, but also use your crazy brain. See you at the next tutorial.

Enhancing a sports photo with cooling liquid effects can drastically improve the look and feel of a composition. In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, author Mark Mayers will apply these effects to a photo from sports photographer Jordan Weeks. In the process, Mark will explain how not to overwhelm the model, but rather, to compliment the flow and movement of the original photography. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members. If you are looking to take your compositing 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.

We know how much you guys like to test your knowledge of Photoshop so today we are giving you an opportunity to do so with another quiz from Martin Perhiniak. Please take a moment to complete this 10-question quiz and see if you’re prepared to pass our test! Good luck!

Editor’s note: this quiz is for Photoshop CS5.

Movie posters are meant to be attention grabbing, captivating, stunning and intriguing. The designers have a large canvas to work from, so their creativity has few limits. Because of this, movie posters can result in some of the smartest graphic design you’ll ever see. Here are 50 brilliantly Photoshopped movie posters for your viewing pleasure.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Psdtuts in March of 2009.

1. Batman: The Dark Knight

2. Watchmen

3. Taken

4. X-Men 3

5. Push

6. Gladiator

7. Day Watch

8. Sin City

9. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

10. Spider-Man 3

11. Death Proof

12. Planet Terror

13. 300

14. Walk the Line

15. Superman Returns

16. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

17. Crash

18. Ocean’s 12

19. Terminator: Salvation

20. I Am Legend

21. Star Wars Episode 1

22. War of the Worlds

23. Apocalypto

24. Narnia – Prince Caspian

25. Pan’s Labyrinth

26. Cloverfield

27. American Gangster

28. Transformers

29. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

30. A Scanner Darkly

31. Hellboy II

32. V for Vendetta

33. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

34. Bridge to Terabithia

35. WALL-E

36. Napoleon Dynamite

37. Lord of War

38. Big Fish

39. Zodiac

40. Star Wars Trilogy DVD Poster

41. 3:10 to Yuma

42. No Country for Old Men

43. Jurassic Park 3

44. The Eye

45. Iron Man

46. Dawn of the Dead

47. Halloween

48. Perfume

49. Identity

50. Pathfinder

For many of our readers, this time of year is filled with family, friends, and celebration. In this tutorial, we will explain how to create a festive cocktail using Photoshop’s 3D capabilities just in time for your New Year’s celebrations. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

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

• Fabric and Fabric (Image 7)
• Foam
• Wood
• Splatter
• Patterns and Shapes
• Reflection texture

Step 1

Create a new document, the size is 768x1024px. Insert fabric image, we will use this texture to create background. Apply Flip Horizontal transformation to it. Go to edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. Then expand the layer proportionately, press Shift as you drag a corner handle to scale. Choose Edit > Transform > Scale. You should have visible just the drapery left bottom part of the image.

Step 2

Select the bottom part of the red fabric just like on the example, use Rectangular Marquee Tool . Copy and paste it into a new layer. Then go to Edit > Transform > Perspective. Drag one of the bottom corners handles to apply perspective transformation. Then choose Free Transformation and move bottom edge of fabric shape to the bottom edge of Photoshop document. You should completely cover the white background space.

Step 3

You will get similar result.

Step 4

Create glass wall silhouette. You may use Pen Tool in the Shape Layer Mode .The size is 145x359px. It should be a half of full glass shape silhouette. You may create you own shape, but keep right cross edge vertical and bottom line horizontal – check out the guides on the screen shot. Do not rasterize created shape.

Step 5

Open 3D Tools palette. And create a new 3D object from the glass silhouette path.

Step 6

You will see the 3D settings window. Apply adjustments like on the screen shot below. Especially pay attention to "Reference point location" click on right point to choose right spinning axis. Our shape should spin around inside edge with Angle 360° . Choose Best Mesh Quality. Click "Ok".

Step 7

Tilt down 3D perspective a bit. Make active "Rotate the 3D Object Tool" and adjust only "X" Orientation setting (-10). Keep "Scene" Render Settings like on the screen shot.

Step 8

In order to set materials for the glass cup, make active "Materials" palette. In this tutorial we will use only Extrusion Material (marked with green color) for the most of the shapes. That’s why the Opacity parameter for all other materials should be 0% (!). So, set Opacity = 0% for the "Front Inflation Material", "Front Bevel Material", "Back Bevel Material", " Back Inflation Material".

Step 9

Apply following settings for the Extrusion Material. Upload texture for Diffuse Parameter by clicking small folder icon. I used another Fabric (Image 7) texture, cropped as the square 1000x1000px and flipped by vertical and horizontal. You may play with Opacity, Gloss, Shine etc settings to see how 3D effects change.

Step 10

To change texture position Right click Diffuse icon and choose "Edit Properties". You may play with Scale and Offset settings (use the scrubby sliders) to find better texture position or use settings like on the screen shot.

Step 11

Open Lights palette to add a light, click the Create A New Light button , and choose the light type from the drop down menu. You may start from "Infinite light" with adjustments like on the screen shot. Find Light position settings in the top part of screen shot or apply your own by rotating 3D Axis guide. To view Axis guide click the Toggle icon  and select 3D Axis. 

Step 12

You may find the rest of lights settings for this glass shape on following screen shots.

Step 13

Apply Inner Shadow and Bevel and Emboss layer style effects to created 3D glass object.

Step 14

Duplicate created 3D glass layer. Change Extrusion Material setting for this layer. Remove texture and apply black color to Diffuse parameter. Adjust lights settings.

Step 15

Return to the Layers palette and apply Color Dodge Blending Mode and Fill = 60%. Add Inner Shadow effect.

Step 16

In order to create large streamline light reflection, duplicate previous 3D glass shape. Apply Screen Blending Mode to this layer and Opacity 70%. Add Layer Mask, click small icon in the bottom of Layers palette. Fill Layer Mask in the bottom part of the glass with Black and White gradient.

Step 17

Open materials palette and upload the new texture to Diffuse map. It should looks like a black square with white horizontal line. You may fill the line with white/gray gradient, just like on the screen shot. Play with texture properties to move it on the right side of the glass shape. You may see how light spot position changes with different texture properties, check out the last screen shot.

Step 18

Apply following light settings to the shape with light reflection.

Step 19

Draw a new shape for the foam inside the glass. The size is 139x117px.

Step 20

Create the 3D object just like in the previous actions with the glass shape. Use the same Repousse Shape settings and set X Orientation "-10" to apply the same perspective as for the glass shape.

Step 21

Place foam layer above first glass 3D shape and below the second one. Choose Screen Blending Mode and Fill = 85%. Apply Gradient Overlay layer style effect and Pattern Overlay effect. In order to create this pattern, make a new Photoshop document 1000x1000px with the white background. Insert several layers with different splatters, choose Multiply Blending Mode for each splatter layer. Flatten layers, go To Edit > Define Pattern. Also, save created texture as JPG or .PSB to use splatter texture for swirl cream 3D shape in the future steps.

Step 22

Prepare foam texture. Open original foam image and crop square area 1000x1000px, choose the area with small brown bleed lines. Apply Gradient map effect to this image. Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map. Then add Smart Sharpen effect. Filter > Sharpen > Smart sharpen. Save created image as.JPG or .PSB.

Step 23

To make spongy foam effect apply following settings and created texture to the Extrusion Material. Upload to Diffuse and Bump parameters the same foam texture with the properties just like on the second screen shot.

Step 24

Apply Light setting.

Step 25

Draw oblateness ellipse using Ellipse Tool in Shape Layers Mode . Create a new 3D object once again.

Step 26

Use following settings, Mesh Quality should be the Best. Adjust Orientations settings, you may find them on the second screen shot. Move the shape on the top of the glass with Move tool .

Step 27

Apply Material settings, upload the same foam texture as for the previous shape with the texture properties like on the second screen shot.

Step 28

Set light effects for the swirl shape.

Step 29

Duplicate swirl cream 3D shape, apply Multiply Blending Mode to it. Use splatter texture from Step 21 to upload it into Diffuse map.

Step 30

Create the cup handle shape using Pen Tool in the Shape Layer Mode . The size is 128x198px.

Step 31

Convert it to the 3D object with following settings, use Bevel effect for this shape. Apply the same map settings to the "Extrusion Material" and "Front Bevel Material" as for the first glass 3D shape(red glossy shape, Step 9).

Step 32

Adjust light effects.

Step 33

Move handle layer below all glass layers and apply layer style effects.

Step 34

Draw the straw shape with Rectangle Tool, rotate it a bit – around 12° . Apply Gradient and Pattern Overlay layer style effects.

Step 35

Rasterize straw shape and duplicate it. Use one of the duplicates for the top part of straw. Erase marked areas.

Step 36

Make active second copy of straw shape, tilt down it a bit, erase area above the foam texture. Put layer above first glass 3D shape, apply Opacity = 80%, add Layer Mask and fill it with Black and White linear gradient in the bottom part of the straw.

Step 37

In order to create springy part of the straw, draw a small ellipse and convert it to 3D object. "Best" Mesh Quality is very important for this complicated shape.

Step 38

Rotate this shape, or you may put Orientation settings like on the screen shot. Adjust Extrusion Material, use red diagonal pattern for diffuse map, the same as for the straw.

Step 39

Adjust light settings.

Step 40

Copy small part of the straw and place it above crated shape and rotate like on the example.

Step 41

In order to improve 3D objects appearance and smooths contours apply Ray Traced Final Quality to all 3D shapes. Make it in final. Merge all glass layers after rendering. Make small ellipse selection on the cream surface around the straw and process this spot with Burn Tool .

Step 41

Lighten bottom right part of the background using Levels settings. In order to apply these settings just to the bottom area, fill Adjustments layer mask with Black and White gradient, with the angle around 100°.

Step 42

Duplicate merged glass layer, apply Flip Horizontal transformation to the duplicate. Move it down. Add Layer Mask to this layer and fill bottom part of Layer Mask with the Linear Black and White Gradient.

Step 43

Insert Wood texture, load selection for this shape, use Command Ctrl + Click layer thumbnail, copy selected area.

Step 44

Create a new empty layer above red background, go to Filter > Vanishing Point. Take "Create Plane Tool" and make plane like on the screen shot, use Ctrl + V command to insert copied wooden texture, drag it to created plane, then click "OK".

Step 45

Apply Multiply Blending Mode to the Wood Layer, add Layer Mask and fill it in the top part with the Linear Black and White Gradient to make smoother far wooden edge.

Step 46

Create a circle under the cup to make shadow effect, apply Overlay Blending mode, Fill = 0% and Inner shadow layer style effect.

Step 47

Load selection for the original merged glass shape and fill it with any color in a new layer, apply layer style effects to this shape to create black glass silhouette with transparent liquid area, don’t forget to fill with black color straw area inside the glass. Merge created shape with the new empty layer.

Step 48

Apply Free Transformation to shrink the created shape by vertical and Skew Transformation to move top edge left. Edit > Transform > Skew.

Step 49

Apply Soft Light Blending Mode and Opacity 60% to this layer. Add Layer mask and fill top part of shadow with gradient just like in the previous steps.

Final Image

The holidays are upon us, and we’re feeling festive at Tuts+ this weekend! We’d like to take this opportunity to say a huge Christmas thank you to all our readers, and wish you a very Happy Holiday. Read on for a video message from the HQ team, and a few freebies from around the Tuts+ and Envato network!

A Message from Envato HQ

Although the Tuts+ team is spread over the globe, Envato HQ is where much of the Tuts+ magic happens! It isn’t looking traditionally Christmassy in Melbourne at the moment, but we have a special holiday message from everyone at head office:

From everyone at Envato we want to wish you a Happy Holidays and look forward to seeing you all refreshed and ready for another big year in 2012! From Envato HQ to the community, we’ve created a little video to share the holiday cheer. Enjoy!

Music is Kids Holiday Theme by AudioJungle Author CraigHall

Gift Guides & Freebies!

Wondering what to buy your fellow geek this Christmas? Never fear! You may have left it it a little late, but our holiday gift guides can still come in handy. Here are a few great places to start:

• The Official 2011 Nettuts+ Holiday Gift Guide
• 30+ Gift Ideas for Browser App and Browser Game Developers
• 10 Last-minute Gift Suggestions for the Musician in Your Life
• 36 Great Holiday Gift Ideas For The Cg Artist!
• The Official 2011 Phototuts+ Holiday Gift Guide
• 20+ Great Gift Ideas for Any WordPress Developer

We also have a couple of exclusive freebies and discounts, just in time for the holidays:

• Get $6 Off Our New Rockable Book: “How to Record Great Music”
• Exclusive Freebie: 50 Crisp Web UI Icons

The Christmas Freelance Freedom Comic

The “holiday jingle” comic encapsulates everything that we love and hate about freelancing. Don’t forget to sing along to the “Jungle Bells” theme music as you read it…!

You can also enjoy the whole back catalog of Freelance Freedom comics over at FreelanceSwitch.

AppStorm Giveaways

We have two fantastic competitions running over at the AppStorm network over the holiday period, and there’s still time to get your entry in to stand a chance of winning:

1. Business Productivity Bundle Giveaway —Each bundle includes a license to Daylite and Billings Pro – it’s the perfect combination for getting your business organised and making money!
2. The AppStorm Holiday ’11 Video Game Giveaway — In the spirit of this season we’ve hand picked a few critically acclaimed, and award-winning, games released over this year to give away to our readers!

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

All that’s left is to wish you a very happy holiday on behalf of everyone at Tuts+! We hope you’ve enjoyed everything that we’ve had to share this year, and look forward to publishing thousands more top-quality tutorials, articles, freebies, and resources in 2012.

Here’s to another exciting year at Tuts+, and thank you for joining us on the journey!