Digital artist: Rado Javor
DeviantArt lets you discover numerous great artists. This is also where I discovered Rado Javor, and he’s really exceptional. For the most part, he draws big, old sail ships or futuristic, giant battle vehicles. Always on duty. Here I’d like to show you four examples of his work.
Photoshop/Print/Illustrator combination
Having enjoyed my first sweetened milk with coffee flavor for the day, I can offer you this beautiful combination of a preparation in Photoshop, a print of hand drawn shapes, a scan and some processing in Illustrator: Add Vector Flair to Model Shots.
Iron Man 2
The animation company Perception did some really good work on creating the interfaces, PDAs and presentations in Iron Man 2 (among many more little design elements). I bet it’s a lot of fun to produce designs for a film like this.
Disco Portrait
In the tutorial Paint this gorgeous Disco-inspired Portrait, the color palette alone is worth to be seen. The color frenzy continues when the hair is created using the brush jitter. Drawing the body and the face is more difficult. Especially the eyes and the mouth sell the picture and show a great love for detail.
Fire and smoke
The tutorial How to create a burning flower in Photoshop shows you how to let material go up in flames. A brush is equipped with a few layer styles and decorated with extracted fire pieces.
Instead of fire, the workshop Create Surreal Artwork via Simple Break Apart Effect and Smoke Texture in Photoshop only uses smoke to call attention to a lady in an interesting way.
Brain maze
The tutorial Maze in my Mind shows some brain matter of a very special kind. In this collage, a maze is combined with a person in such a way that it creates an illusion of looking inside this person’s head.
Photoshop Kazoo
So somebody sits down and creates a video for a well-known composition… in Photoshop. Layer for layer, it plays the video, which has come out really great – including extraction work and cloning. Photoshop is always good for a surprise…
Grunge effect on paper
I find the idea to the Worn Look Tutorial both simple and genius: Instead of using Photoshop to artificially make the image look old and torn, the type was printed, then treated with a scalpel and a fork, and then scanned again. Makes for a great result.
Design clothing
Now to design something completely different with Photoshop: Clothing. Going digital instead of using pen and paper to design something trendy to wear for the “next top model”. The tutorial Outline the clothes for young women shows an example. I rather like the style in which the design is presented.
Portfolio: Michael Muller
The names of the categories in Michael Muller’s portfolio alone are intriguing: Expedition, Entertainment, Portrait, Music, Sport or Advertising. Simply good and inspiring shots, which have been heavily seasoned with Photoshop.
Combinations and contrast
Contrast makes for an interesting composition. The article How to Create an Eye Catching Digital Illustration shows how to turn a cool source image into a combination with warm colors and light effects.
Instead of a flood of colors, Create a Dark and Surreal Poster Using Your Own Portrait uses a contrast with desaturated areas in combination with only one single color.
3D donut tutorial
I wonder what Homer Simpson would say? The article Create a 3D Donut Illustration Using Photoshop describes how to design one of those beloved hand-sized pastries. The author uses 3D Studio Max to build the basis. But Photoshop Extended would also do the job. Yum!
Examples of good image manipulations
In the collection 66 Mind Blowing Photo Manipulations Art on instantshift.com, the author collected a few really impressive image manipulations. Here are but two examples of the quality.
On a new background
The Photoshop mama shows in the video Bunch o’Stuff how to extract a lady (in an interesting position) using channels and paste her in front of a new background. As a little extra, the background is fitted with a circular pattern and it gives more information on what to pay attention to in regard to the shadows.
Melting face
The article Melting Girl in Photoshop combines the shot of a skull with that of a woman in such a way that the illusion of a melting face is created. It also makes use of a little chocolate sirup, albeit colorized appropriately.
Photoshop CS5: Close All and more
Before Photoshop CS5, when you selected File > Close All, you had to decide for every single open or changed document whether you want to save it or not. Now you can just tick a checkbox for the first document, and you can apply your decision to the whole batch, saving a little time in the process.
It’s been possible for quite a while now to create, save and load different workspaces. In Photoshop CS5, this function has been optimized further. Now you can put several configurations right next to each other in the options panel, so you can switch from the basic view Essentials to Photography at the click of a button.
If you always wanted to configure the layer style presets yourself, Photoshop CS5 now gives you a button to do that in the appropriate dialog window. This way you can set new default values for each layer style.
Water castle
Instead of a castle in the air, the author at alfoart.com builds a water castle in his article Fantastic Water Landscape. He starts with the background, then inserts an extracted castle, so in combination with a blending mode it looks like it was made from water or ice.
Photoshop CS5: Straighten horizons
Photoshop CS5 offers a new and very simple way to align a skewed horizon. Pick the Ruler tool from the toolbar and set the horizon. In the options panel you’ll see a button called Straighten, which does exactly that: Click on it and Photoshop aligns the document with the measured angle and trims the edges.
Broken glass
In the tutorial Broken Glass Photoshop Photo Effect you can see that a texture can help in dirtying up the far too clean result of a 3D character. In this case, the broken glass has been simulated with special brush sets. For example, you could use the Shattered Glass set for this one.
Photoshop CS5: Mini Bridge
Photoshop CS5 has been officially announced, and here I’d like to present some of the highlights, bit by bit. Let’s start with Mini Bridge.
Right next to the big Bridge’s icon you can now discover another one for Mini Bridge (you can just as well call this palette over the menu, under Window > Extensions). A palette will open which gives you access to your image collection via Search Files.
There are several view modes, such as miniature, film strip or list. Other than that, you can navigate through Mini Bridge just as you’re used to, over your favorites, the
last folder or last files.
3D packaging
If software or other non tangible products must be presented, it often helps to simulate a packaging for the object. The article 3D packaging presentation tutorial shows you how to create the design in Illustrator, the boxes in Blender and the presentation itself in Photoshop. So it’s very professional, although I think you could just as well design it all in Photoshop alone.
Sci-fi poster design
The article Create a Cosmic Sci-fi Poster Design takes you through the creation of a poster that is reminiscent of old 80ies hard rock band covers. The type and chains were created in Cinema 4D, the rest – such as the moon, the background and the grid – was created entirely in Photoshop.
The best Photoshop mistakes
There are a number of websites that collect the most beautiful Photoshop mistakes committed by designers. The article 52 Worst Photoshop Mistakes In Magazines presents the best mistakes from magazines once more. So there should be actual professionals behind it. But they’re having their lapses, too. All the better for us, since it provides us with a great source of entertainment.
Gnarls Barkley Inkblots
The video to Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy showed some great animated ink blots (like you see in a Rorschach test). This style is simulated in the article Gnarls Barkley Inkblots. A portrait is treated with the Threshold adjustment, and copies of it simulate the smeared color.
Summer to winter
Changing an image from day to night or from new to old is great fun. You can easily act out your creativity this way, just like in the article Summer to Winter Touch-Up. In a pretty elaborate process a summer shot is turned into a winter shot there. The entire street is exchanged for a winter version, the bus headlights are switched on and some realistic snowfall is created.
Light effect with texture
The magazine Computer Arts provides decent tutorials time and time again. The new article Create light effects with texture combines a light effect with a texture. The white type and drawings are a little reminiscent of chalk on a board.
Real or fake?
The portfolio realfake / creative retouching studio is not just worth seeing, but also very instructive. Each of the compositions comes with some of the original elements, that is the source elements for the collage. This way you learn from which single shots this rat hat was created.
PSDtuts.com
Right from the start, the psdtuts.com project set standards in terms of article length and quality. Starting out as a simple blog, the page developed into a magazine with numerous contributing authors and a fee-based premium area that requires membership. Interviews, collections of great tutorials, sources of inspiration, add-ons, brush presets, textures and videos top it all off. Countless other websites with Photoshop tutorials are trying to match this role model.
Quality examples:
1. Create a High Flying Snowboard Illustration
2. 40 Mind-blowing Digital Space Paintings
4. 8 Ideas, Techniques & Tricks for your Web Design Toolkit
abduzeedo.com
In addition to Photoshop tutorials, abduzeedo also offers Illustrator, Fireworks, CSS and even Gimp tutorials. Every week a new wallpaper is published as a changing desktop theme, or they present wallpaper collections with links to other sites. There are also interviews with great illustrators and Photoshop artists to discover. „Reader Tutorials“ allow readers to publish ideas of their own.
Quality examples:
1. Dragons Attack in Photoshop
2. 14 Brushes for Light Effects
3. Inspiration : Tragiklabs (Evergrunge) Artworks
4. Swirl Mania in Illustrator & Photoshop
5. Interview: Photoshop Master Justin Maller
PSDLearning.com
Starting out as one of numerous PSDtuts clones, PSDLearning came to find its own style in time. You won’t find any interviews, videos or other extras yet, but the workshops they offer are one-of-a-kind. For example, they show you how to create an airplane crash and then combine this composition with other elements to make a sophisticated DVD cover.
Quality examples:
Tutorial9
Not only Photoshop, but also photography and blogging tutorials can be found on Tutorial9’s „cloud“. Alongside tutorials for advanced Photoshop users they also offer a School of Photoshop. It goes from preschool over kindergarten up to receiving your degree. This way you can train the basics before proceeding to the more difficult workshops.
Quality examples:
1. Amazing Retro Rainbow Curves
3. Energize Your Graphics with Abstract Energy Lines
4. Creating a Cartoon Hot Air Balloon Scene
5. Abstract Dust And Spray Effect
PSDfan.com
Another great PSDtuts clone is its namesake PSDfan. Like the original, they offer workshops, interviews and freebies. There’s even a „Members Area“ that seeks your attention. But other than their role model, they usually follow far darker themes in their program, such as zombies or blood-spattered people.
Quality examples:
1. Making the ‘Clean Grunge’ Blog Design
3. Design a Sleek Valentine’s Day Card
4. Design a Grungy Floating Island
5. Create an Awesome Paint Explosion Image
Worth1000.com
The Worth1000.com project is without competition. A large part of the Photoshop fan community should remember them for their constant competitions. The sometimes astonishingly good results are collected in countless galleries. And the tutorials on the website explain some ways to achieve sophisticated collages like these.
Quality examples:
1. How I created a cyborgenic leopard
4. How I Created Raspberry Frog
10Steps
10Steps is a fairly young project. The website sometimes presents great artists, sometimes icons, shapes or brushes for download, and sometimes they hold competitions. All in addition to amazing tutorials, of course. And they also take care of providing sufficient inspiration and link tips.
Quality examples:
1. Create Architecture with Pixel Stretching
3. Decorate Your Own Hello Kitty Car
4. Color Effects with Alpha Channel
5. 40 Sets of Floral & Trees Brushes
3Dtotal.com
Even if 3D Total is a community for 3D artists, Photoshop is still a big topic over there, in addition to 3D Studio Max, Maya, Lightwave and other CG specialists. The Digital Painting category is also worth a look, where the emphasis is on creating original characters.
Quality examples:
4. Walkthrough Painting Series
Little possum
Possums are small and pretty cute marsupials. The tutorial Creating a Furry Possum at designreviver.com describes how to design such a cute little animal in Photoshop. Noise and the Smudge tool are the main ingredients here. This way even laymen succeed in generating thousands of hairs.
Creating a mixed creature
A chimera is a mixed creature. This combination of beings is also possible with Photoshop, of course. The Making of Chimera describes just that: A way to create your own mixed creature. A whopping five animals are melted into a new life-form here.
Coffee break
After a long day at work, there’s nothing better than enjoying a good cup of fresh coffee. Being a fan of the brown beans‘ aroma and being a Photoshop fan as well, I can only recommend the tutorial Create a coffee cup in Photoshop.
Don’t be thrown off by the 60ies wallpaper in the background. The image is created layer for layer, first the saucer, then the cup, and finally the white coffee. Simply delicious!
Countdown for the CS5 launch
On Monday, April 12th 2010, the long wait will be over: Adobe Creative Suite 5 will be announced worldwide. Just for this occasion, Adobe set up a website (http://cs5launch.adobe.com/) where you can register to be a witness to the online presentation.
On that note: Here’s a new video that offers a „sneak peek“ at the new content-aware fill. Now that’s a great time saver right there.
Paris in High Definition
Not everybody has a chance to go to the City of Love once in his life. Anyone who still wants to explore Paris can do so now with Paris 26 Gigapixels. This project is a collection of 2346 single photos, which together allow a panorama view of Paris in a resolution of 354159 x 75570 pixels. There’s also a very interesting Making Of that describes how the gigantic photo was created.
Two fantastic compositions
The „fantastic“ part could refer to the images‘ content, because both compositions show mythical beings. The tutorial Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly shows a dark angel in the dunes. By the way, the web design in this case is also well worth seeing.
The article Manipulate Water to Create a Splash Artwork shows how a water goddess can be designed in Photoshop. The water artwork is created in a very elaborate way here.
Revision3: PixelPerfect
A few years ago now I presented PixelPerfect, the video magazine created by and featuring Bert Monroy. The show has really great production value and is generally worth a recommendation time and again. In this example you can see a few impressions of the latest Photoshop World as well as a technique to make skin appear softer.
Open Source Photoshop Brush Viewer
Luigi Bellanca from Palermo lost track over his collection of brush presets. That was his catalyst to program ABRviewer. The software is open source, runs on every PC that has the Microsoft .NET framework installed, and can show a preview of one or even several sets of brushes that have been created with Photoshop and have the extension .abr.
Over 1000 brush presets
Similar collections always talk about the number of brushes. This way you can easily throw around impressively high numbers. But for the most part, those are only sets that contain 30 to 40 brushes. So to give you something more honest: I collected 70 high quality Photoshop brush sets for Print24. Download and install!
Shortcuts with matchstick men
Images like these are a big help especially for image manipulators like us whose strengths lie more in the visual department. They’re a great reminder: Photoshop Shortcuts – The Fun Way. The shortcuts are re-enacted by little matchstick men here.
Arial Font is Bullshit
The very amusing video Arial Font is Bullshit shows how much typography nerds can concern themselves with fonts. And speaking of fonts: Jessica Hische did a great job with her evolutionary diagram of font taste (taste as in sense of design, not the other kind of sense).
40 sources of great design and Photoshop tutorials
Today I’m giving away some of my sources. Forty of them, to be precise, in the article 40 sources of great design and Photoshop tutorials. Next to direct links to weblogs and magazines you’ll find two current examples for each of them, as well. This way you can measure the site’s quality at a glance.
Photoshop: The first demo
It’s actually astonishing how advanced the demo was with which John Knoll convinced Adobe of Photoshop. In this video he presents the software once more, just like 20 years ago.
Photoshop Plugins: 3D and Beauty
The Noupe weblog published one of my articles: Photoshop Plugins: 3D and Beauty. Plugins have somewhat of a bad reputation, but there are worthwhile exceptions for almost every purpose. In this article I’m presenting you the best 3D and retouching extensions.
50 fresh logo ideas for your designs
In the collection 50 fresh logo ideas for your designs you’ll find plenty of inspiration for your own work. It’s amazing what some designers come to think of. You can hardly identify any trend.
Creative Block
In the Photoshop tutorial Smashing Your Creative Block Jacques van Heerden shows how to smash a typeface. Real glassed is used for the effect.
40+ creative examples for poster designs
In the collection 40+ creative examples for poster designs I gathered any tutorials that make use of Photoshop. Fairly different results, different goals, coming from different designers.
Underwater website
A website under water. Not a bad idea, and well executed too. In the article Underwater Content Box Design in Photoshop Matthew Heidenreich describes the development. A stock photo is used as a basis, then the info box is designed with a splash effect.
Combination photo/graphic
The combination of an extracted element from a photo and graphical structures is a trend that’s not too fresh anymore, but it’s always nice to look at. Here I’d like to present two examples. How to create a spattered photomontage in Photoshop uses color splashes in the background to center the person.
Another good example is Creating a Sparkle Abstract Piece. Here, lighting effects and light streaks are layered above the image. You can very easily act out your creativity this way.
Water font
The tutorial Watery at texteffects.me describes how to form type from water, and of course the water is totally digital. The only thing used is a combination of various layer styles.
Avatar drawing
Remember those blue kitten things with their USB tails? Anyway, in his article Painting Jake Sully’s Avatar, Rafael Teruel Caceres describes how he drew a Na’vi. Step by step and brush stroke for brush stroke, he creates this little masterpiece.
Eye tutorials
I wasn’t aware that there are so many tutorials dealing with creative changes to the eyes, such as you can see in the collection It’s All in the Eyes: 100 Beautiful Photo Manipulations. Eyes are very important for human beings, after all.
3D sphere and cube
Initially, the Photoshop tutorial How To Design a 3D Glass Icon leads us to a 3D sphere including lighting effects. In addition to that, the sphere is then put inside a transparent cube. So basic geometric shapes are arranged in a beautiful composition.
Create your own shapes
Photoshop offers a number of default vector shapes, but of course you can create your own shapes, such as described in the workshop Creating Custom Photoshop Shapes. A very abstract form with holes in it is created there.
60+ creative Twitter backgrounds for inspiration
The Print24 weblog published another one of my articles: 60+ creative Twitter backgrounds for inspiration. The diversity in which designers adapt the background is really astonishing. And this is even though Twitter doesn’t offer many options in that area (in terms of profile personalization in general).
Adobe Photoshop CS5 – new painting functions
The following video shows you the new capabilities that the upcoming Photoshop CS5 will have for color choice and color application. The color picker, the eyedropper, the brush settings and the zoom function have been optimized and Photoshop is supplemented with a new brush tool.
Snow Cold Poster
The article Create an Abstract Piece Theme – Freezing Snow Cold shows you how an image is fragmented and pieced back together again. New landscapes are created and combined with a few graphical elements.
Light Streaks Effect
The article How to enhance your subjects with striking light effects shows you a way to put a light streak effect into a Photoshop image. First, a background is created, and then a separated person above the background is treated with an interesting light streak effect (it’s hard to describe, but you can see it below :) ).
Logo ideas
The logo ideas collected in the article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less have not been designed specifically for existing companies. It was more about choosing a word and then creating a fitting logo for it. Still a great source of inspiration.
Photoshop 1.0 to CS5
Two more additions at this point. Firstly another preview for CS5 (the impacts get closer, it probably won’t be long now), and secondly a birthday tribute with Photoshop 1.0, which has been created very lovingly.
The Egg
Hardly anyone would choose Photoshop to design an egg, of all things. But if you look at the result of the tutorial Egg Planet. Fantastic globe photo manipulation, you’ll have to agree: Looks great, that egg. A high class composition.
Beautiful photos at the push of a button
I’m a little apprehended that at some point in the future – maybe in 20 years – Photoshop will have a button that says: Optimize Photo. And BOOM, proportion rules are automatically considered, the crop is adjusted and image elements are repositioned. Don’t believe me? Well, then have a look at this:
Making of Grenat
Another Making of. A painting called Grenat has been created in Photoshop, and you can read about its development history at the cgarena.com website. A simple palette as a base is enough for the artist to achieve the result below.
80 Photoshop actions for your projects
I’ve collected a couple of good sources again for the Print24 blog, this time 80 Photoshop actions for your projects. The majority of these actions is for creative changes in photo material, such as black/white conversions, cross processing or Polaroid simulations.
Photoshop Timeline
Gizmodo has published the Photoshop history as a timeline. A good overview for any fan who’s interested in the software’s development.
Photoshop 1.0 on the iPhone
A nice video for iPhone owners and Photoshop junkies. Russel Brown presents the first Photoshop version, 1.07, on the iPhone. Sure, it’s just a simple simulation with a welcome screen and the option to adjust the levels of an image, but the hardcore Photoshop fan would love to have this as an app… but no…, sadly, this program is not available on the App Store.
The (funny) history of Photoshop
Another video that shows Russel Brown talking about the history of Photoshop, filled with a lot of gags and surprises:
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