It is usually better to show a client what a website will look like before the development stage starts. Here are a few tricks for creating website visuals in Photoshop. Here is a course I created where I show you exactly what I do to design a website visual for a client in Photoshop. In-depth … [Read more...]
Free open source alternatives to Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator
For web designers, developers and amateur creative types that work with a lot of graphics and image manipulation, the decision of which software to use is an important one. While Adobe Photoshop and its related Creative Suite programs are well respected throughout the world, open source software … [Read more...]
Photoshop a flag inside a country
This is was a Photoshop image I did to illustrate how Chinese national oil companies were active in Africa. I'd tried recently many vector flags and country outlines solutions to similar illustrative quandaries and I thought this time it was nice to do it all in Photoshop. I created the mask … [Read more...]
American flag inside country map outline
A while ago I did an article explaining how to create a country,s flag inside its map outline and I used as an example the Australian map and flag. I've since had a lot of interest from Australians who wanted to use the image so I thought I'd do one for Americans as I get a lot of visitors from the … [Read more...]
How to put one image inside another image
There is an ad campaign in London at the moment for Portuguese tourism. You can see 48-,24- and 16-sheet adverts in the tube with giant portraits of famous Portuguese celebrities (Cristiano Ronaldo, José Mourinho) with a landscape showing through the image. Something similar to this effect that can … [Read more...]
Improving photos with Photoshop by a Graphic Designer
The above picture is one of my snaps taken very quickly at the end of clearish autumn day. I have improved this picture with Photoshop by selecting certain areas and altering the colour, brightness and contrast. I first thing I did was to copy the photo to a new layer (Cmd/Cntl-J) I then use my … [Read more...]
How to design a montage in Photoshop
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 … [Read more...]
Montage design for music DVDs
I have been working on some CD and DVD packaging for a music creation software company. I love doing stuff to do with music and here I was asked to create some montages to express different musical genres. The montages will eventually go on large sierra boxes (a sierra box is a large cardboard box … [Read more...]
How to make PowerPoint presentations and Word documents look beautiful
If your client hands you a .PPT from MS PowerPoint or and .DOC Word and says: "The presentation/print deadline is tomorrow, make this look nice", what are you going to do? The answer is to use other programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, Premiere or Keynote and get … [Read more...]
How to turn a photo into an illustration
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 … [Read more...]