I’ve been compiling Photoshop resources for about nine years for this site, always focusing on specific subjects. Some of these compilations became very popular, such as The best 80 text effects on the web, 100 wonderful Photoshop photo effects tutorials, or 40 Extravagant Surreal and Fantasy Scenes Photoshop Tutorials, to mention just a few of them. But all of them turned out to be constrained to a single subject, be it a very general one or to something more specific such as 30 Fascinating Video Game Inspired Photoshop Tutorials and Brushes, or Spectacular Superheroes Themed Photoshop Tutorials.

What about learn how to actually use Photoshop? There are hundreds of resources that teach you how to master the different Photoshop tools or commands. You probably never noticed many of those just because they look boring and have no flashy images to capture your attention. But believe me that these tutorials can teach you some unbelievable tricks that will ease your way to become a Photoshop pro.

Some time ago, I wrote a tutorial showing how to create a papercraft text effect based on a design created by Mario Hugo for Wired Magazine.

This time, I created another text effect based on paper craft. A popup paper craft effect such as those found on kids books. The process is fairly simple. A couple of gradient layers and the bending of a shadow is enough to give the basic effect of a paper cut word inserted on a folded paper.

Hope you like this effect and share your results in the comments section of this post. There is a lot of room for enhancement of this effect by playing with paper textures and brushes.

25 tileable textures for your multimedia, web, 3d, game or print designs. Bricks, stones, furs, metals and other materials. These tiles were created digitally, so you won’t get the dirt and impurities normally found on scanned images.

Lettering design is probably the area in which artists have most noticeable pushed Photoshop to the limits. Designers such as Tony Ariawan, Alex Beltechi, or Nik Ainley have been contributing lately to the Photoshop community with tutorials explaining how they create their excellent work of art.

This is a compilation of the best of lettering design tutorials created using Photoshop with the assistance, in some cases, of other illustration and 3d software.

My first video game console was an Atari Super Pong. A brand new one, not a retro gadget purchased on Ebay. It was 1976 and I was a kid. Opening that white box with deep black strong lettering and blue stripes was an unforgettable experience.

A year later, my brother bought a Fairchild Channel F console. Colors! Higher resolution! Controls! Loads of games!

But that was it. The era of the personal computer started at home with an Apple II+ and we never bought another console after that. In fact I only played video games at the arcades when on vacations.

32 years later, I purchased the third console in my life for my kids. A Nintendo Wii with two sets of controls. Although my kids didn’t go nuts, they were incredibly happy.

I’m having so much fun playing Mario Kart and Wii Sports that I decided to compile a list of 30 Video Game Inspired Photoshop Tutorials and Brushes for this new roundup of Photoshop resources.

Yeah, real life situations are my source of inspiration. Have Fun!!

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a slimmed down version of Photoshop. As irreverent as this may sound, it is more a feature than a drawback. Photoshop Elements shines in simplicity and power at the same time. Photoshop Elements is mainly oriented to amateur designers and casual photographers and it lacks all the print production features among many other tools. On the other side, it offers a number of simplified tools aimed to the beginner or casual user but with the same professional results you can achieve with a full version of Adobe Photoshop.

This article is a compilation of some of the best Photoshop Elements tutorials around the web and some of the best Photoshop Elements web sites. If you know about any Photoshop Elements tutorials that have not been included here, please share them with us by leaving a link at the comments section.

I always stated that Photo Effects and Text Effects were the most popular Photoshop topics around. When I decided to create this list I thought that I’d have a hard time to find tutorials with a reasonable quality.
Well, that was not the case. In my way I found Mysterious woods inhabited with magical fairies, dragons and mythical creatures flying on fantasy night skies, magic crystal balls, hats and other objects hidden in strange houses. Making it short, an immense amount of imaginative scenes that filled my senses and made my work not only easier, but enjoyable too!

Superheroes illustrations and posters are always related to cool special effects, fast and explosive action scenes and artistic illustration techniques. It is a surprise that not many Photoshop artists decided to create tutorials about this topic. Yes, you can find a lot of superheroes signatures tutorials that rely on an image created by another artist or speed painting demonstrations that have little or no value other than making us villain green with envy.
Despite of that, here’s a list of spectacular superheroes themed Photoshop tutorials that don’t require superpowers to complete.

Some years ago, the cool people at Photomorphix sent me five awesome high resolution rustic backgrounds to offer for free to my visitors. In the last few years, Photoshop Roadmap had an explosive growth and these backgrounds got buried under a lot of new resources.

For more cool royalty free ultra high resolution digital backgrounds, textures and stock photos for the photoshop artist, photographer and graphic designer, just visit Photomorphix web site and I’m sure you will like what you will find there.

I’m sure we all share the frustration of trying to get some acceptable results from the Watercolor Photoshop Plugin that is bundled with the default Photoshop installation.
As with most of those plugins, to achieve reasonable results you have to go farther than applying a single plugin. These 15 watercolor effects Photoshop tutorials will show you how to create beautiful watercolor paintings from your photos.

Portrait effects are no longer constrained to vignettes or simple stencil effects. This area has vertiginously evolved to an unbelievable level of creativity and complexity. So, don’t expect to find your average two step special effect. Many of these require a lot of work, which in the end will result in a lot of Photoshop techniques learned.
As usual, don’t try this with your average bad quality family photos. These effects require good quality high resolution images to obtain optimum results.

You know what I like most about twitter? That it has the power of RSS feeds while keeping the conversational (and fun) aspect that made chat and email so popular.

Twitter has become so widely adopted that as a researcher you can find very useful info in real time. And fortunately, technology and design are two very popular subjects in Twitter. For this article, I selected a group of 20 great Twitter accounts you should follow to be up to date, and in contact, with top quality Photoshop, Photography and Design informational sources.

An outstanding collection of 60 unique paper backgrounds, in high resolution image files. Each image shows a different type of paper that can be use in as a background in your favorite layout software.

Each one of the 15 different paper textures is presented in four styles. The plain texture, scanned from original high quality papers, plus three different folding effects for a total of 60 high resolution backgrounds. The folds and creases were applied using AutoFX Crease plugin from the DreamSuite Series I Collection

These textures are free and can be used in your commercial works. More information here. If you use any of these textures in your website, a link to Photoshop Roadmap will be appreciated. You can’t sell these textures.

In this selection of Photoshop tutorials, we are going to explore the creativity behind posters creation. Blending typography with images in a creative way, the proper usage of color and the effective communication of the message are, without a doubt, some of the most important lessons we can learn from poster design. Let’s check some interesting movie, music and art posters Photoshop tutorials.

Some time ago, I wrote this article for PSD Magazine. It was published in a special Photoshop Starter issue of this magazine on January 2007. For those who didn’t have the chance of reading it, here´s the full article:

The Color Replacement brush is a tool that lets you paint with one color over another color, keeping the brightness and contrast of the image. This way you can easily change the color of an object without using complex masking and color correction tools.

We are going to replace the color of these beach parasols from blue to red and leave the yellow part untouched.

It is true that Photo Effects is perhaps the most popular Photoshop topic today. And it is also true that after we applied an effect to a photo, we are tempted to "wrap it up" like a gift.

Adding frames to photos is a way to enhance the image in an artistic way. This article is a selection of some beautiful frames, edges and borders Photoshop resources you can apply to your photo albums.

Two years ago I wrote some articles and compilations about Photoshop plugins: How to apply a texture with Squizz Photoshop plugin, Create a wet and muddy rocks texture with FilterForge plugin, Programming Photoshop Plugins, 5 unique Photoshop plugins you should be aware of, and 3D plugins for Photoshop.

This time, I decided to gather a list of 15 incredible and absolutely free Photoshop plugins. And when I mean free, I mean it. You can use them for your commercial projects. Of course, you cannot sell or redistribute them without written permission of their authors. These are only a handful of plugins that stood out from the rest. But there are lot more free plugins around there, and one of the best sources to find them is The Plugin Site free plugins list. I simply had to check each one from that list and decide which one was worthy to be included in this list. Enjoy it!

I’m passionate about textures. I’ve already published some compilations, such as 30 free paper backgrounds and textures at my Creative Closeup blog and 10 grunge, rusty and dirty tileable textures at this site.

Now it is time for a new roundup of incredibly cool high resolution textures. These textures belong to different authors. All of them can be used in commercial projects, but it is safer to check the term of use of each texture before doing so.

There’s an interesting book called Crumble, Crackle, Burn: 120 Stunning Textures for Design and Illustration that comes with 120 high resolution textures on a bundled DVD.

A couple of months ago I wrote an article for my Creative Closeup blog about 20 Irresistible Gadgets You´d Love to Own. One of those gadgets that caught my attention was a cute little CD printer: DYMO DiscPainter. The article was a hit and generated a lot of traffic, specially from Reddit and StumbleUpon.

The nice people at Dymo were so pleased with this mention that they sent me one to try it. I was instantly hooked on it. The ease of setup and use of this printer is amazing. Believe me, the installation was a breeze and within minutes I had my first CD colorful label printed.

Last year, I compiled a very popular list of 80 Photoshop Text effects. Since then, a lot of new and spectacular text effects tutorials have been created. Not much more to add to this statement. Just take a look at this new roundup of 30 Awesome Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials.

The Photoshop Roadmap publishes a good amount of tutorials and downloads each day. For some, the load of information of this site is overwhelming, for others, well, not enough.

So I set up different ways and frequencies to be up to date with the contents of this site:

Wired Magazine introduced on the September 2008 issue a new headline design created by Mario Hugo. This cool headline design struck me with its beauty and simplicity. So I decided to turn this effect into a Photoshop tutorial. Although the effect is a bit different, all credit should be given to Mario Hugo.
Since he designed a custom typeface for these headlines, I had to find some similar typefaces to apply this effect. The first and obvious choice was the popular Baby Teeth font. Fortunately there are a lot of free alternatives, and one of them is Disco Deck by Iconian Fonts.

This article is a compilation of the most cheesy effects in Photoshop. But instead of showing some ugly examples, I tried to find some of the best and coolest works using these effects. These examples prove that when correctly applied the results are far from cheesy.

As time went by, the need for more complex, better looking and usable effects began to prevail. Tutorials writers replied with a new wave of awesome, eye catching well designed tutorials with loads of cool ideas inside them.

But if you take a closer look at Photoshop actions, you will find that they are easy to understand and can help you automate your hard work, such as applying a series of repetitive changes to a group of images, for example.

An action no more than a recording of a series of tasks performed in Photoshop. Once created, you can apply that action on an image or a series of images. You can even make an action to create an image from scratch.

The following list is a gallery of free special, color, photo and text effects actions ready to download an use in Photoshop. Although these Photoshop Actions are free, please read the terms of use in each download page.

Time passed by and I didn’t become a special effects makeup artist like Tom Savini or Rick Baker, but I still enjoy a nice horror movie with some decent gore and splatter effects.

Lately I’ve been noticing that many Photoshop artists are mastering the horror makeup techniques and believed that it was time to gather a nice (er, sort of…) list of Photoshop tutorials filled with gore, splatter and blood. Some previews have been blocked just because the final effect was too explicit. Have some fun with your photos, but don’t scare your kid brother too much, please.

All the brushes featured on this article are free to use on personal, non-commercial, projects, but, as usual, check each download page to read the usage rights for each brush set.

Designers are collecting them like mad. Not to mention that finding the most unique or bizarre set is a must.

And believe me, in this case, size does matter… So, here’s my contribution to all the Photoshop brushes starving hordes of designers and artists, including myself: 100 Awesome High Resolution Photoshop Brushes. And don’t forget to check the list of brushes sites and directories at the end of the article!

This tutorial will show you how to give a comic book look to your photos using a couple of filters and some additional decorations.

Filter Forge is an amazing new Photoshop plugin that lets you create your own filters (Standard and Advanced editions) or to run already created ones (Basic edition) from a gallery of more than 2500 user submitted filters. You can read a tutorial I wrote about creating a rocks textures using Filter Forge, to learn more about this plugin.

You can also download a 30 days fully functional demo version of Filter Forge and try it yourself. Or you can download any of these ten huge 1000×1000 grunge, rusty and dirty textures.

For those like me that love text effects and have the courage to admit it, here’s a thorough guide to the best 80 text effects available on the web.

To some these may be not the best tutorials on the web, but certainly they are some of the best around. I had to eliminate those that looked nice but had very little preview images. This guide includes 78 Photoshop tutorials and 2 impressive collections of Photoshop Actions, plus 3 books on the subject.

If you have created a cool text effect and you believe it should be mentioned in this list, just leave a comment with the link to your tutorial or resource in the comments section.

This digital enhancement of human faces and bodies is called Digital Makeover. It usually involves techniques such as skin smoothing, red eye removal, hair color replacement an so on.

And this is precisely what I love about Photoshop. You can turn anything you like into brushes and start writing about something that you normally wouldn’t, in your blog.

Sadly, it was only when I started this brush set that I noticed that except for a couple of bands, no one had a steady logo over time. Even YES had different logos. But there were cases like PREMIATA FORNIERA MARCONI, KING CRIMSON, MOODY BLUES, and even JETHRO TULL, that didn’t even keep the same typeface on two albums. On the other side, groups like ELO, YES, GENESIS, PINK FLOYD and some others, at some point of their history, had very renown logotypes.

That’s the case of the Graphic Pen plugin. The resulting image is far from acceptable. Perhaps it looked good, many years ago, when it was part of the revolutionary Artistic Effects collection published by the now defunct, Aldus Software. But now, with the vast amount of artistic effects plugins and applications (such as Gertrudis Pro, the best one in my opinion), you should have to find a way to make the most of those plugins.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Photocopy and Sharpen More filters, and the Overlay blending mode to archieve colored ink drawings.

UPDATED: Added an extra tip!

This is the scenario: You are a skilled Photoshop artist, or perhaps you are a great photographer. If that’s not true, then you may be a cool designer or at least have some nice Photoshop tips or tricks that nobody knows. And you need money.

No matter what your skills are, if you are capable of creating something with a certain appeal with Photoshop or even other graphics application, there are many ways that you can turn that into money with certain ease.

It’s Christmas time and, as every year, it is a good opportunity to provide some quality resources to my seasonal graphics starving visitors. Not much to say in this case. I built this list gathering some new (and old) Christmas related tutorials, brushes, cliparts and icons. I tried to keep a high quality standard, but in some cases you will find some simple, yet nice, resources that can be of a great help for a quick work.

All these resources are free for personal use. Be sure to read the terms and conditions of each one of the resources site, specially when downloading free icons, before trying to publish anything on print or on the web. Click on each image to go to that tutorial or download page.

This time I will commit myself and try to expose an nice illustration technique in a few steps instead of the usual massive explanations I love to write. This tutorial explains how to create some glowing lights brushes using the Lens Flair filter that comes in the default installation of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and previous versions.

This technique is amazingly simple, but the resultant brushes are so cool that you will likely spend your saturday nights experimenting with brushes dynamics and blending settings instead of hanging around with a bunch of bums.

It is well know that most designers daily Photoshop duties include the creation of an aqua or chrome beveled text, retouching a face, color correcting a photograph or, at best, the design of a nice background pattern to mention just a few. So, I’m pretty sure that you have managed to build a nice collection of Photoshop plugins for digital photography or special effects.

Finding resources that explain how to program a Photoshop plugin is a extremely difficult task. Why? Just because there is little information on the web. You may ask yourself "Is that possible?"

Well, most people agree that creating an Adobe Photoshop plugin is a gold mine business due to the popularity of this software. I don’t know if that is still true, but that was true not so long ago.

It is very common to find tutorials about making page curls. Many of those tutorials are great, but the final effect is very unrealistic, not because of the quality of the tutorial, but due to the 3d nature of the effect. If you feel the urge of creating 3d paper effects, I suggest you to take a look at the superb PageCurl Pro plugin from AVBros to take care of all your 3d paper effects needs.

Filter Forge is an incredibly powerful new Photoshop Plugin. It’s simply amazing. It gives you the power to create your own filters (you must run them from inside Filter Forge though) without any programming knowledge at all. Some technical knowledge about procedural textures and image processing helps a lot but it is not indispensable.