How to Improve Picture Quality in Photoshop

face

Every designer knows that sometimes your clients will give you awful photos to work with. But when this happens there are many things you can do to improve the picture quality in Photoshop. Images can be improved by increasing contrast, increasing saturation, cropping and by employing a host of other Photoshop tricks. Increasing contrast Increasing [...]

How to put an image in another image

Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao's heads put on babies' bodies with Photoshop

I’ve done many articles about Photoshop in this blog. And many of them concern photo montage where a composite photograph is created by joining two or more other photographs. However, this article has come from something I’ve seen in studying my Google Analytics. An awful lot of people arrive at my site having typed the [...]

Designing title pages

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Designing the title slide, front cover or homepage is almost always the most important part of any job. And this particular area will rightly be where you and your client spend the most head-scratching time. There was a good reason your mother always told you to tuck your shirt in, first impressions count. It’s impossible [...]

Using Photoshop channels to create cool montages

davos-connected

A client of mine was illustrating an article about the World Economic Forum whose annual meeting is usually held in scenic Davos in Switzerland. My client was keen to stress the importance of interconnectivity within both the forum and the wider business community and gave me an image of connected wires of light to marry [...]

How to make CDs and DVDs in Illustrator

cd-dvd-illustration

This took me a while to figure out! The object is to get the gradient mesh to radiate out of the centre of a circle and that’s not as straightforward as you might expect. Anyway, this is a good one. To start with something easy – draw a circle. Select the circle tool and drag [...]

How to design sound waves in Illustrator

sound-waves

This is a nice little trick using Illustrator’s Blend option. To create perfect sine-waves – or something very close – first of all, draw a line. Then go Filter > Distort > Zig Zag… and choose the number and height of waves you want (remembering to click the smooth radio button, otherwise you’ll get a [...]

How to do distressed, grunge or rubber stamp designs in Photoshop

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Put type or whatever you want distressed, grunged or “rubber stamped” on one layer in Photoshop with a white background layer beneath it. The create a blank layer above it (Cmd/Ctl-Opt-Shift-N). Then you need to create some clouds. Very easy. First of all make sure your background and foreground colours in the Tools palette are [...]

How to design shiny interface buttons in Illustrator

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These little buttons take a few seconds to make in Illustrator and give a nice polished, “web 2.0″ feel to a website or interactive environment. Firstly, when creating this shiny effect in Illustrator remember to make the document RGB. Go File > Document Color Mode > RGB. It won’t work otherwise. Many thanks to Simon [...]

Designing photo montages in Photoshop

russia-putin

Although it’s important to cut out images well when composing a montage in Photoshop, it’s definitely not the most important thing. Images should be chosen for their ability to fit in with the other graphic elements in the composition. Usually one piece or element should stick out more than others – the “hero”. It is [...]

Creating cool twirls and spirals with Illustrator

wierd-trees

Here is an amazingly cool Illustrator tutorial about creating twirls from Veerle Pieters a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. Twirls from Veerle, you might say. (Sorry!) The Spiral Tool can be selected by holding your mouse down on the Line Segment Tool. Once you have created a spiral you like, copy (command/control -C) and paste [...]

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