With so much of the world looking for subtlety in effects for logos and icons, it can sometimes be hard to know what is the right way to use the many exciting Photoshop filters and effects in the right way from a design perspective. The ‘Gloss’ effect is becoming an important finishing touch to many designs, especially now smart phones are driven by app icons that need to look perfect in order for it to get noticed. Developers are starting to notice why a good, finished design is essential.
May 042011
Apr 272011
Here are some of the must know tips for any Photoshop Guru. Once you have a few of these under your belt, your colleagues will be referring to you as Obi Wan.
These Tips and Tricks work similarly in previous versions of Adobe Creative Suite.
10 Shortcuts to make your life easier
1. Shift + Tab
Most people known that Tab will hide the palettes and toolbar (If you didn’t there’s one bonus tip) but Shift + Tab will only hide the palettes. This will help those on smaller screens.
2. Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Z
If you are using products such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, DreamWeaver, PHP or Blender then there are a number of new groups now available on LinkedIn which you might want to join.
For those who haven’t heard of LinkedIn before it is a business networking site with over 70 million members of all levels, and can be a great place to network, find new opportunities and learn from the community (plus it’s free).
The groups which have just gone live are listed below:
Apr 122010
For the last 20 years Photoshop has been the leader in “digital image manipulation” but the reality today is that this description no longer does it justice, when it is capable of so much more.
Photoshop CS5 takes the time and frustration out of making precise image selections and masks, providing you with a faster way to extract subjects from their backgrounds and create realistic composites. New intelligent selection technology offers better edge detection and faster, more accurate masking results of complex subjects, like hair. Automatic color decontamination helps you eliminate background color around the edges of a selection, resulting in more seamless compositions when placing extracted subjects on new backgrounds. Experienced Photoshop users know that the best selections are created by constantly adapting the selection technique for differences in the subject’s edges—one method for hair and another for the edge of a building.
Feb 162010
Every so often i come across sites that give away free icons, textures, etc. I particularly look out for free textures, as i use them in my 3D and actionscript work.
So i thought, let’s put it in a blog and share it around. Here are a list of web sites that i have found.
If anyone has any others, let me know.
Nov 252009
Using Photoshop generally means using a brush at some point, and not just for painting. Several tools within Photoshop also use a brush – Eraser, Dodge, Burn, etc. Here are some useful shortcuts when using a tool that uses brushes…
Click, let go and shift – click elsewhere in your document and you will get a straight line
Click and hold with your mouse button, then hold the shift key, and then move your mouse – you will be constrained to horizontal/vertical lines
Nov 172009
If you are looking to test your skills on Adobe’s CS4 range then you might want to take a look at our free skills tests. These are available for Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash and ActionScript as well as some other subjects and more details can be found here.
