We take you step by step in our tutorial for making a moon in Photoshop to fit neatly into a night’s sky. This could be part of a photo composite, for example, when turning day into night.

Step 1 – Form an oval selection

Open a blank document using square dimensions of 20 x 20cm and set Resolution to 250 pixels/inch. Start a new layer and use the Elliptical Marquee tool to create a circular selection in the centre of your canvas.

Step 2 – Apply Clouds filter

Make sure your Foreground swatch is black and your Background swatch is white. With the selection active, go to Filter>Render>Clouds. This mixes white and black together in a random but soft pattern.

Step 3 – Adjust Brightness/Contrast

Head to the Image menu and down to Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast. Boost the Contrast slider up to around 80 and the Brightness slider to just over 20. This will increase the strength of the highlights and shadows in the Clouds filter.

Step 4 – Spherize

Now go into the Filter menu and under Distort select Spherize. This makes the moon appear rounded. Set the Mode to Normal and Amount to around 70%.

Step 5 – Layer Style 1

At this point it’s worth selecting the Background and pressing Ctrl/Cmd+I to turn it to black. Double-click on the moon’s layer to open the Layer Styles dialog. Apply the Outer Glow style set to white and give it a Normal blend mode. Set Opacity to 60% and boost Size to 200px to create a soft, gradual glow from the moon’s surface.

Step 6 – Layer Style 2

Staying inside the Layer Style menu, add the Inner Glow option. Set its colour to black and lower Opacity to 50%. Set Technique: Softer, Choke to 0% and Size to 130px. Mode needs to be set to Normal. Hit OK to apply these two layer styles.

Step 7 – Paint white clouds

Create a new blank layer and then Ctrl/Cmd-click on the thumbnail of the moon’s layer to reselect its outline. Select the Brush tool and set Hardness to 0%, Opacity to 70%, its colour to white and Diameter to 300px. Paint over the surface of the moon to increase the size of the white areas as well as reducing the black spots to grey. When you’re done, select all your layers and go to Layer>Smart Objects>Convert to Smart Object. Now you can drag and drop this into a composition, while being able to re-edit the moon whenever you need to.

Just Mobile has a reputation for producing well-made, stylish accessories for your iPhone and iPad – their Horizon wall mount is no exception. This solid slab of aluminium has been milled to perfection and the result is something you can trust to hold your iPad up on the wall.

There’s a little bit of DIY involved when it comes to getting the unit up and running, and although screws and raw plugs are included, you’ll need a power drill and screwdriver to ensure a perfect installation.

The Horizon comes in two parts, one of which slides onto the plate you’ve just screwed into your wall, hiding all of the mountings, which creates a minimalist design creatives will love. Also included are two rubber inserts – one for the original iPad and one for the iPad 2, to ensure your device has a snug fit whichever generation you’re in posession of.

As you’d expect from Just Mobile, there’s a huge focus on aesthetics and they’ve definitely got it right. The aluminium perfectly complements the iPad and the mount itself has a slim profile, so it doesn’t look hugely out of place once it’s all installed.

To top it off, Just Mobile have ensured there’s full access to the dock connector for charging and syncing, and have included a small push button on the front of the mount that presses the home screen button. Whether you’re looking to save some space, use as a mounted playlist, or show off art or photos in a makeshift digital frame, mounting your iPad on the wall has never been easier or sexier.

Apply Image can produce variations of contrast that other adjustments just aren’t able to offer. This particular method may not be the most commonly practised one, but it certainly shouldn’t be dismissed.

Apply Image uses the Channels in an image to alter which colours are affected. Just like many effects performed in Photoshop, we need to start with a duplicated Background layer. The Apply Image option can’t be applied as an adjustment layer, so creating a duplicate Background layer lets us remove the effect later on. Drag the Background layer onto the Create New Layer button.

Move to the Image menu and down to Apply Image. Inside the pop-up options there is a list of Channels and a separate one of Blending Options. Set the blending mode to Soft Light, and then flick through the three Red, Green and Blue Channels to see the image take on different moods.

If you’re not taken by the standard black or white case options for the iPhone 4/4S, you can personalise them with a photo of your choice.

Bonusprint’s new dye-sub printing service puts any photo onto the surface of a case and can be done in less than five minutes.

Turnarond time once ordered is five working days, and cases cost £16.99 each ($27.00US approx, excludes p&p). Give it a try through the Bonusprint website.

iClone is a quick and easy to use visualisation tool enabling you to create complicated character animation without all the usual messing about with key frames and 3D modelling software.

Its rendering acts in real-time, so images are realised at around the visual level of most videogames, but its streamlined interface means it leaves out many tools professional animators will find indispensable. That said, by treating animation and character modelling a bit like Lego, it can very quickly build up and edit full scenes.

Version 5 includes a raft of new features. Users can now add rigid and soft-body dynamics to any objects in your scene. You can give objects weight, friction and elasticity that behave just as they would in real life – falling to the ground, bouncing and falling over when hit. If you define the objects as soft bodies, they’ll deform and bend as though made of rubber or cloth.

iClone’s physics simulation is easy to set up and works reasonably well. It’s the fastest way to give objects in your scene realistic motion, but you’ll need to play around with the settings to get exact results.

Character animation has been made even simpler with Body Puppeting options, offering the ability to quickly lay down animation tracks for any body part, just by moving the mouse around.

There’s also a new Mixmoves system providing animations for everyday movements like standing up, sitting down and moving around. These can be blended seamlessly together to create more complex sequences.

iClone’s new rendering tools enable you to give your scenes a hand-drawn, cartoon look. You can edit the colouration of your objects and the black lines around these in this view, giving a basic level of control over the whole effect.

However, you can also add colour tints, blurs and lighting effects – all of which can be combined in Photoshop-style layers, helping to understand and build quite complex looks from the ground up – getting away from the severe videogame appearances of previous iClone animations.

If you spend an extra £79 ($99) you can add motion capture to the iClone5 feature list with the Mocap plug-in. You need to own a Kinect for Xbox you can use its camera (mounted on top of your computer) to record animation by capturing their own movements and applying them to characters.

These movements can be saved to a library for later use and the results, considering the present limitations of Kinect motion capture, are fairly impressive.

In short, iClone5 is a very fast way to get storytelling animations done, but those animations are limited in their quality. You can only export them as video or still images, not as animated 3D assets, so you can’t currently integrate the package into more professional pipelines – although an update to 3DXchange due early this year looks likely to change this.

Microstock provider Fotolia has unveiled the top three selling stock photos of 2011, generating six-figure incomes and resulting in over 10,000 downloads.

“The best photographers and artists in the world upload their images to Fotolia because they know we successfully market to international buyers around the globe,” says CEO Oleg Tscheltzoff. “Whoever is looking for affordable stock imagery can find millions of photos, vectors and videos in high quality at affordable prices on Fotolia.”

Ordered by the number of downloads, these images can range from prices of £0.63 to £18.90 per picture. This size of image determines this.

And in order of most downloads…

Purchase this image by Yuri Arcurs from Fotolia

Purchase this image by Articular from Fotolia

Download this image by Itestro from Fotolia

Wacom have announced the last and latest DVD tutorial release in their ‘Meet the Masters’ series. The third volume in the series focuses on 3D and motion design and is ideal for creatives in 2D/3D media and entertainment.

Running for approximately two and a half hours, the 3D and Motion Design tutorials show users new and interesting ways of how to use both an Intuos4 tablet and the numerous 3D options available in Photoshop to create fantastic digital creations.

The four main tutorials available are as follows:

User-friendly guides for getting to grips with Photoshop’s 3D options in 20 minutes

Workshops on how Wacom tablets can be useful when working with After Effects. Users will learn how their tablets can be used for motion capturing and as a painting tool.

Introductory guide on how to set up and use SketchBook Pro with a Wacom tablet.

ZBrush crash course that shows users how to sketch spheres, unify skin, polysculpt and polypaint.

The DVD features lessons with picture-in-picture footage of the trainer working with their Intuos4 pen tablet, enabling viewers to learn from their techniques up close. The watch & work mode enables viewers to follow the tutorial displayed in a small window on-screen and practise at the same time.

If this has peaked your interest, then see what you’ll experience for yourself.

The complete series contains over 10 hours of professional tutorials from international experts, on how to make the most of the Wacom Intuos4 drawing tablet. Each volume is purchasable separately at a cost of £26.95 here.

The entire collection of volumes one to three is available at £69.95 and available with the Intuos4 & Meet The Masters DVD bundle here.

MasterClass Volume 1 includes 3.5 hours of digital image processing, image retouching, image management, beauty retouching and photo optimisation, up to and including crash courses in Lightroom and Aperture.

MasterClass Volume 2 includes 4 hours of drawing and painting in Photoshop, photo illustration, fashion designs in Illustrator and using Corel Painter.

MastClass Volume 3 focuses on Photoshop’s 3D options and motion design, and covers lessons in After Effects, SketchBook Pro and ZBrush.

Advanced Photoshop 92 is on sale from today via ImagineShop or in stores

Main features

Striking type effects
Learn how to create our stunning cover image

Photoshop to WordPress
The basics of design and slicing

Self-publishing
Create your own art book

20 ways to make money with Photoshop
Earn cash from your design skills

Also inside…

Designers reveal their 2012 resolutions
Studio profile: Raw
Reader’s Gallery
The Raster Group’s 50th Chapter
Interview: Tim McDonagh
Workshop: Master pro compositing
Tool focus: The Transform options
Workshop: Paint sci-fi characters
Trend focus: Vinyl toys
Workshop: Creative retouching
Workshop: Decorative vexel art
Product, app and book reviews
Top 10… Scanners

Advanced Photoshop comes with a free disc, packed with essential resources:
Tutorial project files
75 minutes of pro video tuition
20 landscape photos
180 brushes
Textures
Steampunk photo pack
WordPress theme worth $39US
Wallpapers
Inspirational images from the online gallery
Links to our social networks

Mishmash is the global music video remix competition for 2012, launched by Getty Images, helping to inspire and foster video creatives of the future.

This unique competition offers film and music creatives from around the world complete creative freedom to produce their own short video, using a wealth of Getty Images’ content. Entrants will receive critical acclaim from leading industry professionals in the process.

Renowned for both its leading collections of still imagery and first-class media content, Getty Images has more than 825,000 commercial quality, creative and editorial video clips, as well as an extensive music catalogue, which contains a growing collection of over 140,000 pre-cleared original music tracks by some of the world’s best independent artists.

Entrants are invited to enter one of three categories: short story, music video or video art, constructing a video of between one and three minutes long.  Participants have access to content from across the entire Getty Images collection, such as Universal Studios, Warner Brothers Film and Barcroft Media, as well as iStockFootage and Archive Films.

Once completed, all videos will be uploaded to the Mishmash  website for creatives from around the world to view and rate the videos, ahead of the jury’s deliberations.

“We are thrilled to announce that Mishmash is back for its third year and are  looking forward to seeing how creatives from all over the world use Getty Images’ content, to produce such fresh and innovative work,” says Andrew Saunders, Senior Vice President, Creative Content, Getty Images. “This year’s Mishmash competition will once again enable some of the worlds up and coming creative talent to showcase their talent and also demonstrate why the evolution of online video and multimedia is still a growing and highly engaging communication platform.”

Mishmash is open to entries from around the globe, with the competition being run across three regions: EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa); the Americas and Asia-Pacific. A global grand prix prize of US$5000 will be awarded, as well as a first place prize package in each of the regions which includes US$2000.

In addition, there will also be US$1000 awarded to the best entry in the United Kingdom. The public will also have a chance to have their say, with a cash prize being awarded to the entrant who picks up the most public votes through the Mishmash website.

The competition, which is open until 29 February 2012, will be judged by some of the world’s leading music and film production professionals, including Ignacio Oreamuno, President at I have an idea, Nate Lanxon, Online Editor at Wired, and Leading Bollywood film producer Aashish Singh from Yash Raj Films.

Supply your entries at here

Photographers and digital artists can look forward to the upcoming plug-in release from Alien Skin. New features in the soon-to-arrive Exposure 4 include Group Presets for applying changes to multiple sliders at once.

Another great feature that will benefit artists is a new texture simulation process that, instead of an artificial texture overlay, uses high-resolution photos.

As well as a redesign that means the plug-in is easier to use and understand, Exposure 4 plans to be much faster on Mac and Windows platforms.

For more information on this new product and a preview of effects and features, check out Alien Skin’s official blog.