Turn your client’s photos into beautiful images

A-client's-portrait-as-a-beautiful-photoshop-image-example-1

The problem Err, sorry, the challenge. How many times does this happen? You have an otherwise beautiful design and your client insists on including pictures of people who’s images weren’t taken by one of the world’s best photographers. This is a reoccurring hitch; we have to include pictures of the CEO, the MD, the whoever, [...]

How to design psychedelic pop art

Jimi Hendrix psychedelic pop art

I made this image of one of my favourite guitarists, Jimi Hendrix. He is associated with flamboyant clothing and psychedelic colourful artwork on his album covers and guitars so I tried to make this image as vibrant as possible. To do this I followed the basic techniques of pop art that I’ve used before. Only [...]

How to design a montage in Photoshop

montage-girl-s

Here, as promised, is a short tutorial about creating montages. Here is a montage of three different images which gel together without having to laboriously cut anything out. Layer masking with a brush I sized the cityscape image over the picture of the girl and played around with layer blend modes until I chanced upon [...]

How to create paper, receipts or newspaper with torn edges

receipt

I was asked by a client to present their final figures in a pitch they were doing in the form of a receipt. I thought it was quite a nice little Photoshop trick and a nice idea. Here’s how. Draw the outline of the receipt, or piece of paper, with the Pen Tool (P), and [...]

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 [...]

How to design a cool web 2.0 button in Illustrator and Photoshop

button-ai

An earlier tutorial on how to make a shiny button in Illustrator using the Opacity Mask feature can be improved upon greatly by adding a sexy brushed steel surrounding ring to your amber jelly button! As previously explained, the shiny “web 2.0″ button look can be made by placing a circle with a linear black-to-white [...]

How to turn a photo into an illustration

sunflower

Remember Adobe Streamline? Adobe stopped upgrading its vector conversion application some time ago. But with the advent of CS2, Illustrator’s old Trace Tool became the new super Live Trace and opened up a new world of possibilities! As soon as you place or paste a photo into Illustrator a button on the Control Palette offers [...]

Graphic designer’s picture quiz #3 with hidden famous faces

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How many famous faces can you spot, who are they, what’s the background they’re superimposed on? I did this to illustrate an article I wrote commenting on the music industry. I used paths, marquees with a feather of two pixels and a brush eraser with a hardness of 0% to cut out the heads. It’s [...]

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