Dizzy Blog

50 of the Best Photoshop Tutorials of 2010

itay101 — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:39:32 +0000

Create a Nature Inspired Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

Here’s a quick (around 1 hour) intermediate tutorial for creating a nature-inspired photo manipulation. The resulting image is beautiful and ethereal, and the techniques used could easily be combined to create other images with similar surreal imagery.

Create a Magical Four Piece Stardust Composition

This beginner Photoshop tutorial shows how to create a photo composition with four faces and a nebula-style background. Total completion time is around an hour, and the techniques used could easily be adapted to creating other compositions.

Create a Realistic Panoramic Matte Painting in Photoshop

Here’s a photomanipulation tutorial that will show you how to create a matte painting (like those used in movies for set backgrounds that would be too expensive or difficult to create). It’s aimed at intermediate Photoshop users, and takes between five and eight hours to complete.

Create a Devastating Twister with Photo Manipulation Techniques

This photo manipulation tutorial shows how to combine a variety of images to create a tornado destroying everything in its path. It’s an intermediate-level tutorial, which should take about four hours to complete.

Use Photo Manipulation and 3D Layers to Design a Surreal Cover Art Illustration

In this intermediate tutorial, you’ll learn to use things like the Vanishing Point filter and 3D layers to create an amazing photo manipulation. It also explains how to keep text layers editable, which can be a huge time-saver if you need to make changes to the design.

Reader Photoshop Tutorial: Sisters by Marcos Torres

This tutorial from Abduzeedo shows you how to create a macabre vintage photo manipulation of some particularly creepy sisters. Instructions are clear and easy to follow, making the tutorial suitable for beginners.

Reader Tutorial: Planet X Matte Painting in Photoshop

Here’s another matte painting tutorial, this time showing a desolate sci-fi scene with a city in the distance. The tutorial is easy to follow and the end result is quite stunning.

Creating an Ecological Fairy Tale Wallpaper

Here’s a relatively simple photo manipulation tutorial for creating a fairy tale-style wallpaper with floating islands. Instructions are straightforward, though sparse in places, making it best-suited for intermediate users.

Create a Grungy Scene with Colorful Lights in Photoshop

Here’s a grungy photo manipulation tutorial that makes use of compositing, blending, and filtering techniques. The lighting effects in this tutorial could easily be applied to other photo manipulations.

Make a Divinely Dark Zen Composition in Photoshop

This tutorial shows how to create a photo composition with a selective coloring effect. It teaches us the Color Range command, and uses image adjustments, warping and blurring to give the finished image a sense of depth and motion.

Create an Ink-Splattering Knight Composition

This tutorial shows you how to create a grungy knight photo-manipulation by combining images and textures.

Creating Funny Big Head Characters in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create giant heads from portrait photos (kind of like the Red Queen’s head in the new Alice in Wonderland).

Giving Your Photograph an Antique Look

This tutorial from 10Steps.SG shows how to create an antique effect on any photo, including texture overlays and recoloring techniques.

Create a Surreal Vintage Futuristic Design with Photoshop

Here’s a tutorial for creating a grungy vintage-style poster, but with a futuristic twist. It teaches you to create light streaks from scratch, as well as how to use a variety of Photoshop tools.

Create a Fantasy-Horror Scene in Photoshop

If this creepy little girl rising from the pages of a book doesn’t give you the chills, I’m not sure what will. This tutorial will show you how to create her by combining a number of images and textures.

Design a Grunge Vintage Poster in Photoshop

Here’s a tutorial for creating this cool grungy vintage poster, with circle cutouts. It teaches you a variety of techniques related to using textures and adjustment layers.

Create a Vibrant Colorful Alcohol Product Ad in Photoshop

Here’s a fantastic photo manipulation and compositing tutorial for creating a stylish and bold alcohol ad, that could be adapted to other beverages.

Digital Painting and Drawing

Photoshop excels at digital painting and drawing, especially when used with a tablet. Here are a handful of tutorials to get you started.

How to Paint a Fantasy Portrait from Scratch with Photoshop

Digital painting can be intimidating for a lot of Photoshop users, even if you’re perfectly comfortable doing photo effects and manipulations. It just seems so much more complicated, especially for those who don’t think they have any fine art abilities. But this tutorial from Psdtuts+ shows you exactly how to create a fantasy portrait painting, from scratch. The fact that it’s aimed at beginners and can be completed in about 2 hours only makes it better!

Draw a Pirate Character in Photoshop

This tutorial from Psdtuts+ shows how to draw a pirate caricature based on a hand-drawn sketch. The entire process takes five or six hours, and is best for intermediate Photoshop users.

Concept Art: Create a Sci-Fi Interior Using Digital Painting Techniques

Sci-fi concept art is a popular subject for digital painting. It’s also one that can be intimidating for a lot of users, especially when the image you want to create exists only in your own head. This tutorial is a great introduction to creating sci-fi concept art, aimed at intermediate Photoshop users.

Create a Photo Realistic USB Cable in Photoshop

Here’s a beginner tutorial for creating a realistic-looking USB cable. The tutorial should take just over an hour, and the result is fantastic. The tutorial itself is broken down into very easy to follow steps, with plenty of illustrations.

Text Effects and Icon Designs

While text and icon designs are often done in Illustrator rather than Photoshop, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of great Photoshop techniques for creating either. The dozen tutorials below prove it.

Easy Casino Style Sign in Photoshop

This tutorial from Abduzeedo shows how to create a lit-up sign like those seen on Vegas casinos. It’s a simple tutorial with very specific step-by-step instructions, suitable for beginners.

Super Easy Typographic Portrait in Photoshop

Typographic portraits are a cool design style, but can seem incredibly complex and time-consuming to create. Not anymore! With this short tutorial from Abduzeedo, you can quickly create a typographic portrait from virtually any portrait photo.

Create a Wooden Social Media Icon Quickly with Photoshop

Here’s a simple tutorial for creating a wood-textured social media icon that would be right at home in a grunge or similar design. The end result is quite gorgeous, and it’s quick to create.

How to Create a Detailed Briefcase Icon in Photoshop

Here’s a simple tutorial for creating a detailed, textured briefcase icon, suitable for beginners.

Create a Harry Potter Style Text Effect in Photoshop

This tutorial shows you how to create 3D style text like that used for the Harry Potter movies.

Creating Retro Folded Typography Using Photoshop

This tutorial shows you how to create multi-colored, textured lettering with a convincing folded-paper effect.

Create a Funky Retro Wavy Text Effect in Photoshop

Here’s a fantastic tutorial for creating retro-style textured lettering with wavy coloring evocative of the 70s.

How to Create a 3D book Icon in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create an awesome little book icon, entirely from scratch.

Modern 3D Text Effect

This tutorial explains how to create a smooth, modern 3D text effect.

How to Create a Simple and Elegant Text Effect

The text effect shown in this tutorial is definitely simple and elegant, as well as versatile and easy to create.

How to Create a Mysterious Poster Design with 3D Text

This tutorial shows you how to create an awesome 3D text effect for posters or other artwork, that could be easily adapted to almost any word or short phrase.

Create an Awesome Funky Text Effect

This tutorial will show you how to create some amazing lettering with lighting and other effects.

Web Design Tutorials

Website design mockups are often created in Photoshop, especially when a lot of textures or patterns will be used. Here are a dozen tutorials to get you started.

Make a Simple and Slick Accordion Menu in Photoshop

This tutorial from Design Instruct will show you how to create a stylish and polished website menu that can be used as part of a larger design or as a mini site on its own.

How to Design an Elegant Website in Photoshop

This tutorial shows complete, step-by-step instructions for how to create a soft, stylish website design mockup in Photoshop. The end result is sophisticated and elegant, and would be perfect for a design portfolio or an ecommerce site.

Create a Professional Corporate/Business Template in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create a very professional website design in Photoshop, perfect for a corporate website. The end result is polished enough for even the most conservative industries, but the color scheme gives it a bit more of a modern edge.

How to Design a Health/Nutrition or Fitness Website in Photoshop

This tutorial shows you how to create a casual, funky health-focused website design. The overall design could also be adapted to fit other industries.

How to Create a WordPress Theme in Photoshop

This tutorial shows how to create a three-column WP theme that includes a headline space for featured articles and an ad-ready sidebar.

Design a Textured Outdoors Website in Photoshop

This tutorial shows you how to create a dark, textured layout. The techniques used could easily be used for other design styles. Also linked is a second tutorial for coding the design.

Create a Gnarly Snowboarding Themed Web Design

This tutorial, from Chris Spooner, shows how to create a cool blue website design with some nice texture effects and a snowboarding theme.

Make a Stylishly Elegant Portfolio Design in Photoshop

This tutorial from Design Instruct shows how to create a sophisticated portfolio design with a number of textures and patterns.

Create a Web Application Website Design in Photoshop

This tutorial shows how to create a polished and professional website design for an application. The end result is suitable for a wide variety of app types, and could easily be adapted for even more.

Creating a Stylish Blog Design Layout in Photoshop

Here’s another tutorial from Chris Spooner, this time for an elegant blog layout.

How to Create a Distinguishable Textured Web Layout in Photoshop

This tutorial teaches a variety of Photoshop techniques, including how to create letterpress-style text and complex shadows, in the creation of this stylish website design.

How to Create a Clean and Professional Resume

This tutorial shows you how to design a simple, modern online resume.

Typography Mania

itay101 — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:29:00 +0000

by weeviraporn by ackmanu by Jason Permenter by cory schmitz by di • by sundholmdesign by sowieso by Nick Sherman by micahberger by The Day Group by christopher Paul by Cuba Gallery by ??? by Viktor Hertz by marco_puccini by mbshrbwj by christopher Paul by von_brandis by Maeker by evanembee

45 Mobile Web Designs To Show You One Of Future Trends

itay101 — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 07:04:40 +0000

1. Victoria’s Secret Pink

2. Alex Buga

3. Vondi

4. University of Alabama

5. Virgin Blue

6. Toy Soldier

7. Wegmans

8. Design Quest

9. iWeathr

10. Marina Yachting

11. Dolce & Gabbana

12. Vimeo

13. WVU Today

14. Burger King

15. Sony

16. YellowPages

17. Singlehop

18. McDonald’s

19. AOL Money & Finance

20. Nclud

21. Procab Studio

22. Marcel Muller

23. Pixanimal Studio

24. Android and Me

25. Erskine

26. Mashable

27. Productive Dreams

28. Far From Fearless

29. Twitter

30. Just Creative Design

31. Nike Lab

32. Print Fancy

33. Ammy Stoddard

34. Plaveb

35. Coosh

36. HTC

37. Lexus IS F

38. CWTV

39. Deviant Art

40. MySpace

41. Smashing Magazine

42. Wacom Bamboo

43. Flickr

44. Digg

45. Mobilize Media

Snowfall Effect

itay101 — Mon, 31 May 2010 15:00:22 +0000

Fake that elusive snow-fall. Fed-up with waiting for that next snow-storm? Can’t seem to get a decent shot because of that dim light? Enter Photoshop. This tutorial will help you add some realistic snow to your winter landscapes. You’ll learn to use the “Levels” adjustment tool and you’ll pick-up some creative uses for Noise and Motion Blur.

Final Effect preview

We’re using Adobe Photoshop CS5 but this will also work on earlier versions of Photoshop.

1/3 The Document

Start by opening the image you want to work on (obviously). Click the New Layer {} button to create a layer for our snow. Give it an easy to remember name.

2/3 Snow Base

We need to fill the layer with a black color. Go to the “Edit” menu and click on “Fill…”. Choose “Color” from the drop-down menu and pick a black color. To create the base for our snow go to the “Filter” menu, “Noise” submenu and click on noise. Set a high noise amount and click ok. Add some blur on top of the noise. Go to the “Filter” menu, “Blur” submenu and click “Blur”. At this point we have a lot of noise and pretty much no snow. Using the “Levels…” command we’ll get rid of most of the intermediate shades of gray. Go to the “Image” menu, “Adjustments” submenu and click on “Levels…”. The “Levels” dialog box will display a graph (the histogram). Directly beneath the histogram you will see three sliders: a black one, a gray one and a white one. You’ll have to drag the black one (leftmost) to the right. Toy around with these until there are a lot of white dots on a black background . To get rid of the black, change the blending mode of the snow layer to “Screen”. The “Screen” blending mode will set the opacity of all the pixels that are pure black to 0. Time to add some motion blur to make the snow look more realistic. Go to the “Filter” menu, ”Blur” sub-menu and click on “Motion Blur…”. You need to change the angle of the snow and the blur distance. If the angle is close to 90 degrees it will look like there’s no wind, so be careful about the direction of the blur.

3/3 Adding Depth

In order to give some depth to the snow duplicate the snow layer by right clicking it and clicking “Duplicate Layer…” Select the “Snow copy”layer. Go to the “Filter” menu, “Pixelate” sub-menu and click on “Crystallize..”. Adjust the size to anything between 5 and 8. This step will make our snow look random. Add another motion blur to the crystallized snow layer Finally, duplicate the base Snow layer and drop its opacity level by a bit. Now, drag it around using the Move Tool {}. This ensures there are enough snowflakes in our scene.

30 Charming Websites of Restaurants and Wine Bars

itay101 — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:00:39 +0000

Free Download: Floral Outlines

itay101 — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:00:12 +0000

“Floral Outlines” - 10 design elements of outline florals. It can give you unique, fresh effect in you graphics. For example you can use dots, not line for borders. Size: 0,4 mb License: You are free to use it for personal or commercial purposes. You are not allowed to share this set as is. You can share only 30-40% of elements from this set, with direct links to this page and to vectorlady.com. Also you are not allowed to sell it on stock sites as your own. Homepage: http://vectorlady.com/floral-outlines Download floral outlines. mirror: MediaFire.

Improve Your Workflow Using Symbols and Adobe Fireworks CS4’s Multi-Page Functionality

itay101 — Mon, 31 May 2010 09:00:13 +0000

Video Tutorial

Screenshot

Identity Portfolio by Forma Branding

itay101 — Mon, 31 May 2010 08:43:21 +0000

Fantastic Identity Portfolio by Forma Branding, a Studio from Argentina.

Forma Branding

Create a Distressed Vector Typographic Poster Design

itay101 — Mon, 31 May 2010 08:42:31 +0000

Follow this step by step walkthrough of my recent design process for the ‘Spectrum’ poster. Starting with custom made type in Illustrator, we’ll move our vector graphics into Photoshop for some serious distressing with Photoshop brushes, blending modes and more! The Spectrum poster takes inspiration from the old ZX Spectrum computer of the 80’s, the feature of the design is the custom made abstract type, which is mixed with a full spectrum of colours then grunged up to the max with textures and muted background tones. The overall theme is a cool mix of 80’s retro and modern day grunge. Start work in Adobe Illustrator. Create a new document and begin fleshing out the basics of the custom typography with the Pen tool. Hold Shift throughout to maintain strict angles between each line. The topic of the poster is Spectrum, so the word is designed as recognisable as possible while adhering to the angles of the paths. Aim to follow each letter from the previous to form one continuous line. However it’s inevitable that extra additions will be needed in places. The word Spectrum is split in half to help compose the design and to add that extra touch of abstractism. Finish off the paths until you have a complete and recognisable word. Drag out a few guides to match on key points of the path. Use the Direct Selection tool to drag paths into place to line up the typographic design. Remember to hold Shift to constrain those angles. Once all the type has been aligned and tweaked, take a step back to review the design as a whole. If all is looking good, increase the stroke weight of the path to thicken up the linework. Select the typographic design and go to Object > Expand. Select just the Stroke checkbox to convert the path lines to solid shapes. Fill the type with a light grey or reduce the opacity, then lock the object in place (CMD+2). Next use the Pen tool and trace each segment of every letter. Using Smart Guides (CMD+U) will be a huge help in speeding up this process. Continue tracing segments of each letter. Every time the lines of the type changes direction, create a new shape. Once the whole selection of type has been traced, unlock the original and move it to one side. We’ll now work on this new version that’s made up of lots of individual pieces. Set out a simple rainbow colour scheme of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Use this sequence to fill each segment of the type design as you follow the path. Duplicate the type and move it to one side. Replace the coloured fills with black to white gradients on the duplicated version, then adjust the angles of each gradient so the direction flows according to the orientation of the pieces. From within the Gradient palette, select the small black and white handles from the gradient editor and replace them with a colour swatch according to the solid colours of the original type design. The first block is red, followed by orange, so the first block’s gradient will run from red to orange. Basically each gradient should flow from the previous colour to the next. The design should naturally flow seamlessly through the colour spectrum, with the exception of some intersecting shapes, which should be filled with the closest available colour gradient. Create a new document in Photoshop, being a poster I’m using A3 dimensions of 297×420mm at 300dpi. Import a subtle background texture, such as this high res paper file from Shutterstock. In order to maintain the editability of each segment of the type design, we’ll need to import each piece separately. Draw a box around the design and select it along with the first piece. Paste the first object into Photoshop and render as Pixels. Switch back to Illustrator and select the next shape and container box. The container box will ensure all the pieces are aligned exactly, rather than defaulting to the centre of the document. Build up the layers with each individual piece. Select all the type segment layers and change the blending mode to Linear Burn. Group all the pieces together (CMD+G). Double click the layer of one piece to open up the Layer Styles window. Add a large Drop Shadow set to Color Burn. Reduce the distance to zero, but increase the spread and size to extend the burnt effect far beyond the edges of the type. Right click this layer and select Copy Layer Style, then paste the layer style onto the rest of the type segment layers. Add a Layer Mask to the Group of type segments, then use a Watercolor Photoshop Brush to rough up the type. Edit the brush to a low opacity to give multiple levels of tone, and rotate the angle from within the Brush options box to add variety to the texture. Distort the edges of the type slightly by adding cloned areas next to the edges of the words using the Clone Stamp tool. These cloned areas will also be affected by the layer mask of the parent group. Make a selection around the whole canvas and fill with black to create a border. Change the blending mode to Overlay at 60% to blend the border with the background tones. Add a layer mask and distort the clean edges with a Watercolor brush. Finally, add a small credit or title to the poster design in the footer area. I’ve titled the design ‘Spectrum’, with the date 1982 being the launch date of the ZX Spectrum.

Graphic Design by Maude P. Lescarbeau

itay101 — Sun, 30 May 2010 17:00:14 +0000

Fantastic Graphic Design by Maude P. Lescarbeau, a Designer from Canada.

Maude P. Lescarbeau