Tutorials Tested and Recommended – week of Nov 19- Nov 25

Vector starting tutorial: I KNEW there had to be a way to use paths to draw lines – and lo there is. This handy-dandy little tutorial got me going, and had some spiffy tips on using paths in your work.

Saving Photoshop Brush Sets: Wonderfully simple directions on how to save a set of brushes. (Love the keyboard shortcut for deleting the other brushes.)

Making Prop Swirls: Very simple little tutorial. Handy in other situations too. (I felt like trying a celtic type swirl, with 3 lines and polar coordinates.)

Mountain Gorge: Pretty mountains from a terrain map/overhead view in just a few steps. (Still not fjords like I’m striving for right now, but still learned a few things.) No example graphic from me – the ones on the tut site are better than my fjord tests with this technique.

 

–Avlor

Circuit board brush set 1

I’ve been wanting to do some circuit board brushes for a while now. It’s been fun tinkering with them. (Just sections of the scan of the motherboard, scanned at over 300 dpi, weren’t clear enough for my tastes. So I used paths and shapes as much as possible.)

Download here. (Trying out a file host for downloads, we’ll see how it goes.)

–Avlor

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Usage: My brushes are linkware, so I ask that you link back to http://photoshopthings.wordpress.com if you use them. The site address is in the brush name, so it’s easy to remember.

Designing with color? Try Kuler!

Ok, this is a Flash(tm) thing but it works very well and gives great results. Check out:

http://kuler.adobe.com/

When you go to the site, you will be prompted to update your Flash player to the latest version (there is a link right on the page), and you will need to shut down your browser while you do the update. Then you can take a look at the color editor. It’s basically a color wheel and a lightness slider, but you can also pick several options for the combinations such as “Analogous”, “Monochromatic”, “Complementary” and others. Then you can drag any or all of the points on the color wheel to any different postion and see the results in the color swatches below. Below the each of the swatches is a RGB slider to manipulate each color (want more red in your main color?). Then below each of the sliders are the HSV, RGB, CMYK, Lab, and Hex values for the color swatches.

You can also see color combinations that other people have put together or add your own. Go there and check it out. My words can’t do it justice.

I can think of a lot of aplications for this. I know a few people who are weavers and fibercrafters (one of the first combinations that someone else had made I saw was “My New Sweater”). Remodeling a room in your home? Designing costumes? The uses are endles. (I almost wrote “The ends are useless”, but that’s not right.)

On a personal note, I think I have solved a very large technical issue with my laptop and my internet connection at work. I’ve discovered the wonders of Open DNS (opendns.com). By changing my DNS settings on my laptop, I can now connect to the internet all the time. It would take more time than it’s worth to explain it here, but I could only browse the internet for a few minutes at a time (oddly enough I could stay on Skype all day). If you want further technical details, let me know. The practical upshot of all of this is that I can now read the blog (and maybe even post) a lot more often. Hooray!

My next planned post is on monitor calibration.

-Ghostrock

Tutorials Tested and Recommended, and Smart Objects Investigated – week of Nov 12-Nov18

I decided to change this to a recommendation for tutorials, since I refuse to try or even review a tut I don’t like. (Don’t have the time.)

Posting a day early. Tomorrow is my son’s B-day – no time to play with Photoshop then.

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Teddy Bear Photoshop Tutorial: Fun and short tutorial. Gives the steps simply with good pictures. I didn’t have to follow it step by step, instead just looked at it to understand the basic concepts to see if I could tinker on my own. From what I learned, I was able to create this little fox character.

Plastic Wrap Effect: I adore this simple and clever little effect. The last step (“Finale”) is the actual plastic wrap effect, with the key being the outer glow being just a pixel or two larger than the stroke.

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Smart Objects: I’ve heard these mentioned a several times. Thought I’d try to learn more about them. The Smart Objects — Photoshop CS2 (Photoshop 9) Video Tutorial shows how to bring an object in from another program (i.e. Illustrator) in a layer so that it will be scalable and fully editable. Neat tutorial, but I’m still a bit fuzzy on smart objects are. So I did some hunting around to see if I could find more explanation and found: Smart Objects, Smart Guides, Layer Enhancements in Photoshop CS2 and Work Smart with Photoshop CS2’s Smart Objects. The two things I thought were the neatest about these are

1. if you make a copy of a smart object layer, it remembers the orignal size of the object and
2. you can transform and play with the size of these repeatedly without having to undo.

No little projects to go with these tutorials and explanations, but I hope to cook up a tut using smart objects for a next tutorial of my own…

Speed tip for tutorial graphics

Make an action for resizing (if you need to) and saving as a non psd file (jpeg or whaever format you’re using). Saved me quite a bit of time.

PhotoshopSupport has several action tutorials – the Photoshop Actions – Video Tutorial from Total Training is particularly good, just a few minutes long and the guy has a nifty accent.

–Avlor

Creating a realistic globe – part 3

Poles:

• Hide the clouds group.
• New group above the land group – poles.
• New layer (in the land group). (Name it poles.) Filter->Render->Clouds.
• Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer->Curves. (Black 115,0. White 213,255 and a middle point of 128,106) So there’s large maxed out white areas and a lot of black like this.

Creating a realistic globe – part 2

Rivers:

• New group above the land group – rivers.
• New layer. (Name it rivers.) Filter->Render->Clouds. Then Filter->Render->Difference Clouds.
• Curves adjustment layer – move the white all the way over to the left so it’s (4, 255), and black is (0, 75). Here’s the look I was going for (with just this layer visible).

Creating a realistic globe – part 1

I’ve been tinkering with creating “worlds” off and on since I reviewed the tut on making a simple globe. Here’s how I created my latest world. (Click image thumbnail for full view.)

No tut reviews this week – but a project “showoff”

My schedule hasn’t allowed me to do tutorial reviews this week. But I did finish a little wallpaper project/test to see how my skills in Photoshop are progressing and to play with a few plugins. Here’s a thumbnail link to the image. (1280×1024).

What it took to do the wall…

• extract the image from the scan, here.
• enhance the feather so it shows up (Outer glow with a gradient was fun to play with. So was tinkering with the technique in the Guru Lounge’s Line Art from a Photo – link in this review at the bottom. Doesn’t just have to be used on a photo.)
• learn about plug-ins so I could use one for the kaledoscope effect.
• learn how to install new brushes, so can use the feathers
• tinkered with different layer effects to get the spiral clouds to show well and yet be able to see the layers below.
• learned how to “jitter” between the foreground and background colors with a brush (for the stars)
• worked with duplicating layers and multiply to get darker effects
• did I forget anything? Probably.

Scan of Spiral anime character from Minitokyo.net

Feather brushes by At0mica.net

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Hope to get a drawing of my own up and colored in photoshop someday – but not there yet…

Tutorials Tested and Reviewed – week of Oct 30-Nov 5

After the last tough round of tutorial reviews I decided to try a few simple ones.

Sparkles and Stars: Simple and sweet. This is worth playing with, for simple happy little effects. She does her sparkles each by hand, according to the tutorial. But I am lazy, and work hard to be that way thank you… I inverted the colors on my little test and turned the it into a brush. Then tinkered with the brush settings, just for fun. Two swipes and a sky full of stars…

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Glass Text: Very simple, just a few steps. Makes me want to just sit and tinker with layer styles. Works best with a thick font. (Found if you just use an outline font like the one directly below – looks like metal wire work instead of glass. Very pleasing.)
wireglass

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Globe: Very simplistic, but worth while. Took a few tries to get a globe I liked. The tutorial’s globe was flat and featureless. But it was good to learn the tricks of render clouds for land and using the spherize filter. I’d recommend adding a feather to the selection, then doing the spherize, and skipping the final stroke/outline. And instead of putting it in a new image, use {CTRL} J to just put it in a new layer (so you can tinker and go back if needed). I tinkered with what I learned and played with filters to try to get a first attempt at a planet simulation. (Recognize the stars?) The clouds and water need work especially. But this tutorial gave me the inspiration to tinker, and I will continue to do so.

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Smoke: Another fun effect. Doesn’t take long to do. (Though, I will need to study real pictures of candle smoke more, to get a more realistic effect.)

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Glassy Orbs: A much more complicated tutorial. Nice effects. Good for notes on glass and reflection looks and for selections of particular sections. This took me several days. What I have isn’t quite perfect, but for a first try I’m OK with it. (Orchid photo taken by André Karwath, Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 2.5.)

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Fire Cube Text: Eye catching effect. Not as easy as the directions say… Took me several tries. My font was too small. (Bold but not large enough for the effect to work well.) Once I enlarged the font and tinkered with the size in the mosaic step, then I had something that looked right. Overall pretty good tut.

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–Avlor