Photoshop

Create a glossy Ombre text effect using a gradient fill, two simple filters, and some Layer Styles. Read more at TexTuts…

Too much time in the sun can cause issues with your skin. You can see the blurring on the nape of the model’s blouse from her overly airbrushed neck. I’m not sure when throats became unseemly, but here we are. Thanks Violetta for the find. The original was sent within an Nordstrom newsletter. The post Nordstrom: Nice Neck appeared first on PSD : Photoshop Disasters .

Users coming from InDesign will see much different behavior when using text wraps in Illustrator. Jeff Witchel goes through the wrap options, including how to first create a wrap, explaining what the invert wrap option does, and showing users how important stacking order is when working with wraps.

Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes writes, “This presentation of Hidden Gems was popular enough to get a second session added and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I don’t touch CC (as that’s all still a “hidden gem”), and instead focus mainly on CS6 (though I also show some cool stuff in CS5 and CS4… and people really seemed to appreciate that).”

“Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.” [Brave New World] [Via John Dowdell]

In this quick tip tutorial, we will show you how to use Photoshop’s automated features to combine several photos to create a seamless panoramic photo of a room. In the process, we will show you how to use several Photoshop tools including Auto-Align, Auto-Blend Layers, Geometric Distortion Correction, as well as Adaptive Wide Angle. Let’s get started!

(Above) Here’s a behind-the-scene shot from Friday’s shoot.  This is a three-light shoot: Two 4-foot strip banks above (with Elinchrom strobes), and there’s one additional softbox in front (you can see the light-stand right behind my laptop) that’s putting some extra light on the engine — it was a little dark in there with just the two strobe directly above the bike.I asked my Creative Director Felix Nelson if I could shoot his Harley, but he was doing some serious tinkering with it at home and it wouldn’t be ready for days, so he suggested calling our guitar player (Felix is the bass player for Big Electric Cat), Tony Llanes since he builds custom choppers.He didn’t have one available, but his cousin had this “Big Dog!” chopper and he came rolling up on it Friday and I was like, “Oh Yeah baby!” Only had  1-1/2 hrs to light and shoot this and his buddy’s sports bike (the yellow one seen below), but I got it done in time to attend my son’s sports banquet that night, so it’s all good. :) Above: Shooting from down low with a 14-24mm lens. Above: More wide angle 14-24mm shots.Above: You can see the two extra backlights in this shot, used strickly to make the background solid white — even though they weren’t turned on for any of the shots I’ve shown so far. Above: Here’s what it looks like with the two background strobes turned on. You can see why I left them off for nearly the entire shoot — I think this particular bike, because of its color, looks better on the dark gray background. Above: The Sport Bike looks great on the solid white background, so here it look appropriate (so this is a five-light shoot: The same two strip-banks over head; the one small 27″ softbox in front aiming at the back half of the bike, and the two bare bulbs with reflectors to make the background solid white. Above: Here’s a view from the backside. Since I’m not shooting it straight on, the lighting definitely looks different (in fact, I had to brighten it in post to get it this bright). Above: Here’s Tony (lead guitar player for Big Electric Cat) posing on the Big Dog. I didn’t change the lighting — it’s just the lighting for the bike, so it’s not the greatest portrait lighting, but I think it’s still looks decent (but if I was lighting this as a portrait, I would have added two kicker lights in the back aiming at him. Anyway, there’s a quick look at the shoot. I’m doing a tutorial for the NAPP member Website on the retouching and finishing for getting rid of the apple-crate box the bike is sitting on, and on getting rid of some of the spots, specs, dust and junk. Hope you all have a fantastic Tuesday! :)

In this tutorial we will create a realistic rainbow and add it to our photo. This is an easy Photoshop tutorial, aimed at beginners with detailed explanations at each step. Final Image As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating: Step 1 Open file “Sky”. This will be our base image on top of which we will create a realistic rainbow. First let’s create a new layer by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Alt + N. Now select the Rectangular Marquee Tool and create a selection as shown in the image below. Step 2 Select the Gradient Tool (G) and click on the icon shown below to edit the gradient. The following window (called the Gradient Editor) will appear. The little arrowhead icons underneath are the colors that form the gradient. Click just below the gradient representation to add new colors. You can also click on the colors and move them around after you have created them. Double click the arrowhead icons to change the color. Add the colors shown below to your Gradient Editor window and click OK. They are in order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, magenta, cyan. Make sure you still have the Gradient Tool selected. Click and drag in the selection while holding shift to create a gradient with the colors you chose previously. Press Ctrl + D to deselect the layer. Step 3 Make a duplicate layer (Ctrl + J) of the gradient layer just to have a backup in case something goes wrong. Turn off the visibility of the original gradient layer by clicking on the eye icon at the left of the layer in the layers palette. Select the Eraser Tool (E), select a soft round brush and erase the left and right edges of the gradient as shown in the image below. You could also use a Layer Mask to hide the unwanted parts of the gradient, but the Eraser Tool is simpler to use. Step 4 Now let’s add some blur in order to disperse the colors. Choose Blur > Gaussian Blur and enter a value of 20px. Make sure the layer is deselected (press Ctrl + D just to be sure) otherwise you’ll get unwanted effects. Step 5 We are almost ready with our rainbow. Let’s add some curvature to our rainbow. While on the gradient layer press Ctrl + T to enter Free Transform. Right click on the gradient and from the drop down menu choose Warp. In order to bend it in a nice fashion choose from warp options (in the upper Options Bar) Arc and play a little with the Bend value until you obtain a nice curved rainbow. Press Enter after you’re done. Step 6 Let’s increase the size of our rainbow and position it a bit better. Press Ctrl + T to enter Free Transform and modify the size and position to make it look like mine in the image below. To symmetrically resize hold the Shift key while dragging on the corners. Step 7 It looks very nice now but the effect is still a bit strong. Change the blending mode to Color and lower the Opacity of our rainbow layer to 51% for a softer effect. Step 8 It looks nice enough as it is but I think that a bit of glow will make it look better. Duplicate the rainbow layer by pressing Ctrl + J. Double-click the layer to enter Advanced Blending options. Use the following settings: And We’re Done! Here’s how the final image should look. If you want a more artistic effect and not a realistic one then consider increasing the opacity of the rainbow layer and/or give the rainbow a bigger arc effect (Step 5).

You will learn how to create a water horse in Photoshop. The techniques are fairly simple so that you can apply the same idea to your future artwork with other effect such as fire effect. (View This Tutorial)

In this week's free Deke's Techniques episode, Deke begins the process of using the Puppet Warp feature in Photoshop to animate the wings (and comic balloon speech, of course) of this fierce bird of prey.Puppet Warp allows you to bend and twist parts of your image whilst leaving other parts in place. By applying incremental warps to the wings on multiple copies of this bird, he sets up the flapping wing animation (and bird squawking) that he'll put in motion in next week's episode. Meanwhile, I have three key takeaways from this week's movie: Read more »