Nobs Tutorials

An Alternative Approach To Sharpening

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:06:00 +0000

This is an alternative approach to sharpening images I would like to share with you. We all know that Photoshop has a set of pretty decent Sharpening filters, so "why bother?" you can ask. Well, there are some up- and downsides in any method, so why not learn about one more? In this tutorial we're going to make a sharper and more detailed picture like this:

Let's begin. Open the picture you are going to sharpen (I took my favorite photo of a business lady with a phone :)) and duplicate the layer Cmd+J. Now set the layer's blending mode to Overlay in the dropdown menu of your Layers palette. You'll get something like this:

I know, this doesn't look like sharpening, but hold on for a second. Now go to Filter → Other → High Pass... And start moving the Radius slider back and forth, while looking at your picture. With a low-resolution photo like mine (its quite small, 360x270 pixels - but it's totally OK for web use) the Radius is gonna be 1pixel – just use your eyes and adjust it to your taste:

That's all, no more steps in this trick! Cool, eh?

Now you might ask why is this better than for example the trusty Unsharp Mask filter. Let's consider this.

Here I took the same image and applied Filter → Sharpen → Unsharp Mask..., aiming for the same amount of sharpening as with High Pass. Here are my settings and the sharpened picture:

While these images might seem almost identical, they are not! For example, a noticeable downside of using Unsharp Mask filter is this:

Here you can see how Unsharp Mask tends to "overburn" the contrasting edges, and adding too much dark to the darker areas.

One more, High Pass filtering is more likely to give you a clear picture of small details, like hair (roll your mouse over the picture a couple of times to see the difference):

You can see that Unsharp Mask is basically just adding more contrast, while High Pass actually preserves the details.

But while both methods have their goods and bads, the main thing here is the incredible flexibility of High Pass approach. Now your sharpening effect is just a layer, you can do whatever you want with it. You can try to change it's Opacity to see different amount of sharpening. And here I did a version where only the face of this lady is sharpened, and everything else is not – as you can see, this instantly drags the attention of the viewer and establishes eye contact!

As always, I hope this was interesting – and good luck with your designs! :)

Oh man, I have to change that last line to something more creative. What 'luck'? Are we in Las Vegas or something? It's not luck, it's hard work, everybody knows that!

So, I hope this was interesting, and remember – today is the day to come up with something better than everything you did before! Cheers! :)

P.S. While tweaking the High Pass filter, I discovered a surprising effect I want to show you:

While the colors and lighting here seem a bit unnatural, the whole picture looks kinda interesting compared to the original. It's the same little trick but with a High Pass Radius of about 5px. Hmmm, definitely will try to use this somewhere...

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Text Wrapping Around the Picture in Photoshop

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:58:00 +0000

If you were ever wondering, how to make your text wrap around a picture in Photoshop, you are not alone. If you already know how to make a layout like this, then maybe there's nothing new for you in this tip – but for me it was a nice finding I'd like to share in this tutorial...

Let's start assuming that we have some grid already established in composition and a little illustration placed at the beginning of the paragraph. I added a thin border to it, just to make things a bit more professional:

Now it's time to add the actual text. Grab the Text tool (keyboard T) and make a rectangle area for the paragraph. It snaps to our grid guidelines, so our text will occupy it's predefined place and won't spread any further:

And input some text (I actually hate 'lorem ipsum' placeholders so I took this random paragraph from Wikipedia):

It's overlaying the picture, and that's obviously not what we wanted to do! But hold on.

Now we're going to use one of the most overlooked palettes in Photoshop – the Paragraph palette. Here it is:

Let's find out, how much more to the right we need our text to be. I usually do this quick and simple – with Info palette open and visible I just make a rectangular selection and note what it's width or height is (I know, I know about the Ruler tool, I just somehow didn't get used to it).

Select the first line of text (2 lines in my example, first line + header). And now modify the 'Indent first line' value, set it to 130px as we determined earlier:

Look what happens to our text:

It's almost what we need to do! But how about the remaining lines that need to wrap around the picture too? Here's what we do: Use the Text tool and place the text cursor at the end of the first line (here I am referring to the actual body text, not the title):

And now hit Enter. This will insert the 'carriage return' symbol, and the second line of text is now a separate line. And of course it is indented as set before, i.e. 130px:

Repeat the process for the remaining lines, and here it is – our text wraps around the picture nicely!

Hope this was interesting, and good luck with your designs! :)

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Designing Corporate Teaser Graphic, Part 3: Finishing Touches

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:27:00 +0000

(Please see the first and the second part of this tutorial before you will read this one)

So, in this tutorial I explain how I made this corporate-ecommerce-style teaser graphic. Here’s the final result:

In this part of the tutorial we will put finishing touches onto our design and make it look completed.

Step 1

First we have to add some depth to our background. With all this realistic card picture our background now looks too plain and boring:

Of course, the best way to add volume to the picture is some lighting simulation. Which is of course basically a change of color from light (yellowish green in our case) to dark (dark saturated green).

Grab the Gradient tool (keyboard G) and lets create a 3-color gradient, I made this colors out of our base green background and ended up with something like this:

Switch to the base layer, that is our green background. Then create a new blank layer (Cmd+Shift+N) and apply the gradient, starting from the lower part of the card and dragging up towards the edge of the teaser:

Nice, eh? I like it!

Step 2

Now I wanted to add even more depth to the picture, so I decided to apply a little ‘inset’ effect to the whole teaser.

Duplicate the base layer – select it in the Layers palette and hit Cmd+J on the keyboard. And now drag the layer all the way up, so that it is no longer inside our teaser group. Why would we need that? It’s now hiding everything we have created! Well, one more cool trick for you to see…

Now apply this layer effect to our green background (that is Inner Shadow and please note that I modified the contour slightly too!):

And now we make the same thing like we did in the first part of our tutorial – set the Fill property of this layer to 0%:

We now have this nice inset over our teaser…

Step 3

Now it’s time to place the text – nothing special here, I decided not to apply any effects. Why? Because every composition needs contrast, and with all this graphically intensive (patterns, 3d objects, etc) picture the best way is to provide something plain and simple. And that is how I chose our text to be.

It’s obvious that it can be a bit hard to read for some people, so I had to apply just a simple and quite subtle drop shadow, like this:

Again, please note that I do not use black for my shadow, that would be thick and dirty, not really what I wanted.

And by the way, this text is Myriad Pro Bold Condensed, Condensed and just Regular – it sometimes gives a very nice effect to vary the weight of the characters.

Step 4

Now we need what I call “an action item”. Something really really clickable, so that any user could tell for sure: “This is where I should click to see more about it”. So of course we need a button saying something like “BIG SALE!”

This button is rather simplistic, I made it with a couple of layer effects and a highlight overlay:

Highlight is basically a black to white gradient set to screen mode with it’s lower half cut off, and then made into the same shape as button, but contracted by 1px. This is not a good explanation of course, but the fact is you can use your favorite button style instead! Or let me know and I will make a separate tutorial on how to make buttons like this.

Step 5

We’re almost finished with this! I decided not to stop on the achieved result and make just one more improvement to the picture.

So I selected the pattern-overlayed world map and gave it a sheer wide shadow, just to enhance the depth of the background a bit more, here’s the “before and after” image:

The settings for the shadow go like this:

Alright, now it’s finished!

Time to have some rest? Well, that was just a part of website design. So you can take a 5 minute coffee break and then get back to work!

Just kidding of course

Hope this was of value to you and good luck with your designs!

Here are the links to all 3 parts of this tutorial:

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Designing Corporate Teaser Graphic, Part 2: Realistic Objects

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:18:00 +0000

Here we will continue the work on corporate teaser graphic started in the first part of this tutorial. Please take a look at the outcome once again:

In today’s tutorial we will add the phone card with a properly rendered shadow.

Step 1

Take a phone card scan. Mine supposedly comes from a client, but for our educational purposes we can take this: phone-card.psd.zip (I have found this using Google Images):

We need to cut this out of the white background, so let’s do it. Grab the Rounded Rectangle Tool (keyboard U), and make a couple of test rectangles to find out what the corner radius is. I made a couple with smaller and larger radius’ and found out that a radius of 20px works best:

Note, that some yellow still visible on the sides – but that’s OK, now we can be sure that this outline will be clean and straight.

Pick the Path Selection Tool (keyboard A), and select the rectangle, then press Cmd+C. In the Layers palette select the card layer and paste the vector shape Cmd+V. Now go to the main menu Layer → Vector Mask → Current Path. The phone card image is now cut out from the background with it’s outline as clean as possible:

Now duplicate the masked card layer into our main document (refer to the ~~previous tutorial~~ how to do that).

Step 2

Now we will rotate and place the card according to our composition.

Place the card inside the teaser group if not already. You will see that our vector mask applied to the group cuts off all unnecessary leftovers nicely:

Now press Cmd+T and start transforming the card. When you place your cursor near the corner handles, it turns into a small rotation arrow, so you can rotate the image by dragging in different directions. Also, don’t forget to use the Shift key when resizing the image – this ensures that your image has fixed aspect ratio, i.e. it’s not distorted or stretched in any way. Place the card like shown on the following picture:

Finally hit Cmd+Enter to finish transformation.

Step 3

Our card looks somewhat too plain, so we will add a little gradient overlay to it.

Switch to Gradient Tool (keyboard G), and set your gradient like this (both sides black #000000, and one side 100% transparent):

I tried with a black-to-white gradient, but it happened to over-lighten the top of the card (which is light-yellow already) so I chose to make only darker overlay.

Create new blank layer on top of the card (Cmd+Shift+N). Make a gradient with lower part dark and upper part transparent:

Set the blending mode of the layer to Overlay. Now it makes our yellow card more alive and a bit more 3-dimensional. The only problem is that our dark overlay is not only over the card but over everything else. That’s easy – just hold the Option (Alt on PC) key and click the dividing line between the card and gradient layer. Your cursor should turn into this little ‘8 thingie’ and your gradient layer will now only overlay the card layer and nothing else:

Step 4

Now to enhance the realism even further, we will add a shadow to our card. Simulating proper shadows isn’t as easy as it might seem, believe me. Huge studies exist on the subject of proper simulation of highlights/shadows/reflexes/ambient lighting etc.

But basically what you need to know to render a decent shadow is quite simple things. First, shadows are never black. Unless of course the environment around your object is pure white and your object is black or white too. In any other case the shadow’s color is a composition of the environment’s dominant color and your object’s own color. How to apply this to our card?

Load the card as selection – Cmd+Click card’s vector mask in the Layers palette. Create a new layer Cmd+Shift+N and place it underneath the card layer. Now pick the color for our shadow – it should be something between the yellow (card) and green (background) - mine is #2E3B05. Fill selection with that color Option+Backspace:

I turned the card layer off so that we could see our shadow. Now I turn it back on and use Free Transform to shape the shadow properly (rotate it, squeeze it and use Cmd+clicking the handles to shear-transform it):

Step 5

Now the second principle of realistic shadows: The more is the distance from the object, the more blurry and transparent a shadow gets.

So we grab the Blur tool (keyboard R), with a radius of about 45-60 and start working on the upper (more distant) part of our shadow:

Great, we made our shadow blurry, now it’s time to make it more transparent. Grab the Gradient Tool (keyboard G) and use the default black-to-white gradient.

Click the Add Layer Mask button while staying on the shadow layer. And now add some gradient to the mask, so that the blurred edge of the shadow becomes more transparent. Here’s the shot of my mask:

Cool, now our card looks quite realistic and 3D!

While our teaser looks almost finished, make sure you do not miss the 3rd final part of this tutorial, where I’ll tell you about the little things that make big difference!

Stay tuned and good luck with your designs!

Here are the links to all 3 parts of this tutorial:

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Designing Corporate Teaser Graphic, Part 1: Pattern Effect

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:10:00 +0000

In this tutorial you will learn how to make this corporate-looking teaser graphic. It could reside in the sidebar of some e-commerce website or something like that. Though you maybe will not replicate it in your design “as-is”, I hope to show you some useful techniques.

Step 1

Create a base shape. Let’s pretend we have some website design in the works, and we have a clearly outlined space to place our “special offer” teaser. I assume my website design has blocks with rounded corners (for some reason I tend to make these more often than just plain rectangles). Pick a Rounded Rectangle Tool (keyboard U), set the Corner Radius to 6 in the top toolbar and make a base rectangle for our teaser:

I decided to make my teaser green (#7AB82F) to compliment the rest of the design, yours will probably be some other color.

Step 2

OK, now it’s time to pause that clicking a bit, step aside and think about what our composition will be. I assume we are making our teaser for a phone cards store. It’s quite a lot of these stores all over the internet, and phone cards they sell are used to make cheap international calls, all this is a huge industry with a lot of money in it – but that’s not really what we need to know. Basically, what we need to know is that there are 3 elements to be included in our teaser: a phone card (photo supposedly provided by the client), some text like “Sprint Phone Cards. International Calls Now Even Cheaper” and a button saying “Big sale!”, which takes to the page with discounted products.

I decided to include one more thing into this teaser, a world map (it’s international calls we’re talking about, right?)

Usually I jot down a composition like this on a piece of paper, really rough, just to sketch some idea. You saw the outcome image in the beginning of this tutorial, so you know what composition I came up with

Step 3

Let’s start with the background, namely the world map that has this cool pattern effect. This is some neat technique I use quite often, with different patterns and outlines, always adds professional touch to design.

I spent some time searching for a world map in vector format, you can grab this one that I have found (I made a PSD file with vector shape so you don’t have to mess with Illustrator): world-map.psd.zip

Open this document in Photoshop, and Right-click your map layer in the Layers palette, and then choose Duplicate Layer… And then select the name of your main document in the Destination dropdown menu:

Now it’s time to place that world map onto our teaser. Hit Cmd+T on the keyboard and resize the map to your liking, and then place it over the top right corner of our teaser.

Now 2 questions: 1) why it’s blue? and 2) it spreads outside the teaser area!

No worries. 1) The color doesn’t matter! You’ll see why a bit later. 2) We’ll deal with it like this:

Step 4

Whenever you are working on an isolated part of the design (some sidebar section, header, etc) it’s always a good idea to secure it from the rest of the design.

Let’s select both our layers and group them together hitting Cmd+G. Then select the base layer vector mask thumbnail like shown:

Grab the Path Selection Tool (keyboard A) and select the base shape, and copy it Cmd+C. Select the group in Layers palette and paste the shape we have in clipboard Cmd+V. Then go to main menu Layer → Vector Mask → Current Path. Voila, we have a mask over our group! Did you know this? Now whatever goes on inside our group won’t interfere the rest of our design:

Step 5

Now let’s create that diagonal stripes pattern. Maybe you want some other kind of pattern, or wider stripes – you can learn the technique and later make whatever you want.

Create a new document, about 200×200 pixels in size. Now grab the Line Tool (keyboard U, or make it Shift+U to cycle through all vector shape tools), I did my pattern with 1px wide lines.

Make a line while holding your Shift key, this ensures your line has an angle of 45 degrees. Now select your line with the Path Selection Tool (A). Press Cmd+C and then Cmd+V – now you have two lines. Use your keyboard Right key to nudge the second line 4-5 times. The goal here is to determine the spacing of our future pattern. Repeat this process of copying and pasting a couple of times, just make sure you make the same number of nudges to the right. Once again, you can use this method later creatively and make it completely to your liking – try different line widths or spacing between the lines:

Now let’s define our pattern. Zoom in real close, like 800%-1200%. Grab the Marquee Selection Tool (M) and start with a halftone pixel of the topmost line. While selecting keep your Shift key down (square selection), try to identify the pixel on the lower line that stands for our first pixel. Just look at the picture:

Define the pattern in the main menu: Edit → Define pattern. Now lets check our pattern. Reset the selection clicking anywhere on the document and go to the bottom of the Layers palette, and click New Fill Layer button, and select Pattern…

My pattern is OK, no pixels clash and it repeats itself smoothly. The only problem now is that our lines are black! No problem at all. Remove the pattern layer completely and make square selection once again, as we did when we defined our pattern. With selection still active, double-click the color thumbnail of the layer and set it’s color to white. Now you may define a new pattern, this time white. Of course, make sure your Background layer is not visible, so that you have transparent space between the lines.

Step 6

Now it’s time to return to our world map. Switch back to the main document and select the map layer.

Now click Effects button in the bottom part of Layers palette and select Pattern Overlay… Select our new pattern in the pattern dropdown menu:

We still have one problem though – our map is still blue! Well, it’s easy. Now we will use the Fill slider in the upper part of Layers palette (ever wondered what it does?). Set the Fill to 0%, and you’ll see – while the contents of the layer became completely transparent, it’s effects still render properly. I.e. our pattern is now visible while the blue map became transparent!

That’s why I said that the map color doesn’t really matter to us. I event did a couple different patterns to show you how flexible this approach is.

And of course, you can try the other layer effects too! For example, you can have the bevel effect without the type (letters embossed on some background), and many other uses exist.

We will continue with this teaser graphic in the second part of this tutorial…

Hope this technique was valuable to you and good luck with your designs!

Here are the links to all 3 parts of this tutorial:

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Text Done Right

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:49:00 +0000

While most designers use text every day, it's amazing how many of them still don't do it right! I'm going to show you some examples of "good" and "bad" ways to treat your text.

Let's suppose we already have a menu bar of our website.

What we need to do now is to put some menu items onto it. Grab the Text tool (keyboard T), click and type in something like "OUR SERVICES". My text here is Myriad Pro Semibold 12px with letter spacing set to -10. Here it is:

Nothing complicated, right? Wrong! If you look close enough, this text is clearly not OK. Just zoom in and look at these problem areas:

Awful, isn't it? Don't blame the font. Fonts are designed for print use in the first place and may not render properly on screen. Don't blame Photoshop either! Adobe is continuously doing a great job improving the rendering of type in each version of Photoshop. Yet it's still not perfect.

So, what should we do now? Easy. Click your line of text and place your cursor at the first problem area. What we need to do is to kern these characters. (Here's the definition of kerning for those who never heard of it before). Hold your Option/Alt key on keyboard and press Left and Right arrow keys a couple of times. The space between the letters will increase and decrease, and this is what we need:

Zoom out and then back in a couple of times to see if you got it right. Just really pay attention to how your text looks on pixel level. How do you know when it's right? Just use your eyes! It's quite obvious, here are some examples:

"Man, do I have to tweak every single piece of text in my design? This will take me days!"

Well, while this might seem like a lot of work at first glance, it's not. Once you get used to it, you just don't notice it. Once again, the whole idea is to pay attention to how your text is rendered on a pixel level. Sometimes it will be OK straight out of the box, and sometimes not, and when it's not – you now know what to do :)

Selections Beyond The Basics

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:22:00 +0000

Alright, we all know how to use selections. The easiest and most used is Rectangular Marquee (keyboard M). You just click and drag and there you go – you have rectangular area selected and bordered with 'marching ants'.

Now it's time for some advancements (for those of you who think they already know ins and outs of this tool, I recommend to skip to Part 2 of this tip - I have a trick I bet you didn't know yet :) ).

Part 1: Some Keyboard Aerobics

Press these keys while dragging:

	Shift – Maintain aspect ratio, i.e. square if rectangle, circle if ellipse, etc.
	Alt/Option – 'Start with center', i.e. the point where you click will be the center of selection
	Shift + Alt/Option – Square from the center point

By the way, these work with all shape tools too, like Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle Tool, etc.

If you already have selection active, you can easily alter it using these keys (hold the key while you click!):

	Shift – Add to selection, i.e. both your existing and new selection become one
	Alt/Option – Subtract, i.e. your new selection is cut out from existing one
	Shift + Alt/Option – Intersect, i.e. result is the part of existing selection that is included in new one

By the way, these work with all Lasso (freeform selection tools) too!

Part 2: Never too late

Now I can show you the cool trick that works with Marquee (keyboard M) and shape tools (keyboard U), and some others too:

	I pick my Rectangular Marquee, and click and drag as usual
	Now I change my mind and think: 'Oh, I should have started a bit lower!'
	No worries, I just press (the trick!) Space bar and move my mouse down – my selection follows the move, while maintaining it's form!
	I let go the Space bar and finish dragging. Cool, I placed my selection right where I wanted! :)

By the way, works with Text tool if you prefer to outline your paragraph boundaries before you start typing...

TheSkinsFactory

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:23:00 +0000

Sometimes you stumble upon some design and think: "Oh, now that's nice." There's a lot of nice design in the world, really.

But then you see something that blows your socks off. You don't say it's "nice". You just sigh out loud: "Oh man!..."

Check out The Skins Factory if you never saw them, or if you did not visit them for a while. Or just take a look at this, isn't it crazy?... Oh man...

Advanced Cut-Out Techniques

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:42:00 +0000

While numerous ways of cutting an object out of the background exist, the most simple and straightforward way is to use Photoshop's Magic Wand tool. Of course, we're talking about the case when our object is placed on an easily distinguishable background, most often solid color. Even if you already know how to do this, you will find a little trick that takes this method to a new level, so read on:

Step 1

I use a little graphic piece as an example, something like a "special offer" banner ad. It's not exactly an ad, just a prominent graphic to grab user's attention an direct him/her to the offer's page. I call such things "teasers" for an obvious reason. Say we have some basic stuff already to start with:

I made this one using 3-color gradient background and a line of text set to Myriad Pro font face. Here's the snapshot of the gradient if you want it exactly like mine:

Step 2

Now grab a good photo of Motorola RAZR. I took mine from Google Images, which is most probably a "no-no" for commercial jobs, but this is just for practice purposes. What we need to do is to cut the cell phone out of the white background. Load the image into Photoshop, and grab the Magic Wand tool (You can just hit W on the keyboard).

Check the settings of the tool, mine happened to be the default with Tolerance set to 32:

Great, now what we have to do is just click the white background and it will load as a selection:

Step 3

As we now have our background selected, some people will tend to remove the background completely by deleting it. But please don't do it! Use the top menu to Invert the selection (Select → Invert or hit Cmd+Shift+I), and as you now should have your object separated from the background, create layer mask using the Add layer mask button.

Now we have our cell phone cut out, I used solid color to fill the lower layer so you could see it.

Step 4

Now many of you who have already spent some time using Photoshop, are inclined to stop reading and claim that you knew all this stuff already. You are free to do so, but this way you're about to miss a cool little trick. Here it is:

In most cases you will have this problem when cutting out an object from the background. As you can see, the borders are far from perfect, they still have plenty of white "halo" as I call it.

This is even more likely if you are using low-quality photos, which is sometimes the case. I'm gonna show you how to overcome this problem:

Click the layer mask thumbnail (the black and white one):

Then go to Filter → Blur, to soften the edges of the mask. Sometimes you will even need Gaussian blur with a big radius, this can depend on the size of the whole picture. The general idea is to wash out the edge.

And then hit Cmd+L to bring up the Levels dialog. Now it's where the trick starts. You grab the middle slider and move it to the right:

Notice that the edge to our object now becomes more sharp and accurate as you you move the slider right!

Beware though, this trick can eat the edge completely, it you get too far. Just tweak it a bit back and forth to catch the right position. Now the white halo is completely terminated, and we have a cleanly cut out object!

Step 5

You can Right+Click the cell phone layer and transfer it to your main working document using Duplicate layer... and selecting the name of your main document as Destination.

I got caught in the process, adding things here and there and my teaser graphic ended up like this:

No cool special effects here, just a photo and typographic composition – simple things that bring out the message and do not overwhelm the user with tons of pointless eye-candy graphics :)

Hope this mini-tutorial was helpful to you, I was very glad to share the practical knowledge. As the task of cutting out objects is very common, many approaches exist and you have to choose the one that will work depending on the case. So please indicate in comments if you are interested to hear about the other methods as well...

Stay tuned for more and good luck with your designs! :)

Creating an Eye-Popping Banner Ad in Photoshop

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:14:00 +0000

An attempt to create "real-practical-value" style tutorial. This is the effect I actually used for creating banner ads, and clients say they actually make people click, so enjoy and I hope you will learn something from it. http://nobstutorials.com/tutorials/20071010/banner-ad-tutorial/ Also, I am very pleased to know that this is my first tutorial approved on Pixel2Life.com, the website which I truly love and respect for continuously bringing in quality stuff!

Tutorials Section on Vladstudio.com

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:46:00 +0000

I just got this awesome link from a friend today and thought I should post it to my weblog:

http://www.vladstudio.com/photoshoptutorials/ Excellent tutorials, almost all made in "how-you-did-that" style which I like a lot. I really think we should have more of these, like

Here's my design (some webpage, wallpaper, or something)
Here's how I did it (not necessarily step-by-step, but more importantly the main concepts and "tricks" that the work is based on)

Nice stuff, must see!

Short tips

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 04:16:00 +0000

Text Done Right

While most designers use text every day, it's amazing how many of them still don't do it right! I'm going to show you some examples of "good" and "bad" ways to treat your text...

Selections Beyond The Basics

Alright, we all know how to use selections. Now it's time for some advancements...

Mini-tutorials

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 04:15:00 +0000

An Alternative Approach To Sharpening

We all know that Photoshop has a set of pretty decent Sharpening filters, so "why bother?" you can ask. Well, there are some up- and downsides in any method, so why not learn about one more?

Text Wrapping Around the Picture in Photoshop

If you were ever wondering, how to make your text wrap around a picture in Photoshop, you are not alone. Learn how to do it in a simple and elegant way...

Advanced Cut-Out Techniques

While numerous ways of cutting an object out of the background exist, the most simple and straightforward way is to use Photoshop's Magic Wand tool...

Tutorials

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 04:05:00 +0000

Designing Corporate Teaser Graphic, Part 1: Pattern Effect

In this tutorial you will learn how to make this corporate-looking teaser graphic. First part describes how to create pattern effect in the background

Designing Corporate Teaser Graphic, Part 2: Realistic Objects

In this second part of corporate teaser tutorial you can learn how to apply proper realistic shadow to an object

Designing Corporate Teaser Graphic, Part 3: Finishing Touches

Third part of this tutorial tells about the little touches that can make a big difference in your design

Creating an Eye-Popping Banner Ad in Photoshop

Real world example of making a banner ad both to client's requirements and high visual standards

Starting a weblog

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:27:00 +0000

This is first post in my new design blog.

I almost have written "my photoshop blog" in the first sentence, but then had to backspace that. What I mean is that this weblog is going to be more about design than about Photoshop. And also, why Photoshop alone? I'm a hardcore Illustrator fan since version 9, how about that?

I decided to start this blog while working on my website, nobstutorials.com. I'm still not very clear about what it will be, about the design and the whole picture. I registered that name planning to start just a simple tutorials website. Tutorial websites were dime a dozen already then, and there seems to be twice for the same amount today. But what do they have? Cool metallic sphere tutorials? Well... When was the last time I was asked by a client to design a cool metallic sphere? Ridiculous.

When I was starting in webdesign, I discovered tutorial websites. While absolutely blown away at first, I was becoming more and more disappointed after 100+ tutorials or so. They all started to seem the same - pick this tool, apply that filter - whoops, here we have this cool effect. Not to say that it wasn't helpful. But that thing I call "secret magic" remained the same. I knew how to do the effect, but I wasn't able to tell why it is done that way, it was just a recipe that should be performed as given, or the effect will not appear. And more importantly, I wasn't able to create good designs! I knew how to make cool metallic spheres. But I didn't know how to make a cool website for a client. My works looked amateurish.

Since that time I had a dream that someone created a website that could take a newbie who is desperately dreaming of successful design carrier and take him/her to real professional level. Maybe such site exists, and I just did not find it. I just see pieces of valuable information here and there all over the internet. So I decided to start my own website and just try to create something helpful. I don't know how far this will go, we'll see. But I'll try! :)

Cheers, and come see me soon :)