All posts by
Pen Tool Mastery with Photoshop
Over the years, many students have told me they hated the Pen tool, or they hated Photoshop’s Pen tool. My answer was and remains: “You don’t have to love the Pen tool. You have to master it.”
A Beginner’s Guide to Creating Vector Art in Photoshop
Photoshop is known as an image editing and manipulation application. Since the advent of the world wide web, it’s become a powerful website prototyping and design tool. Although Photoshop’s type design features aren’t as robust as those in Illustrator and InDesign, it’s type tools are good, and improving. Type isn’t the only vector toolset in Photoshop, however.
5 Keys to Successful Logo Design
Refreshed, revised, or a new from scratch, at some point every business wants a logo. However, most small businesses seem to settle for poor, or ill-conceived marks that do not properly represent their brand.
Using Photoshop Cutout & Poster Edges Filters to Convert a Photo to an Illustration
In almost all cases using Photoshop filters or third party plugins alone won’t turn a photograph into a digital painting. With some finesse and finagling, however, we can get pretty close. Today we’re going to combine filters, layer blends and some masks to give our photo a painted look with Surface Blur, Cutout and Poster Edges.
Texturizer Unchained
In part one of this tutorial we explored Photoshop’s Oil Paint filter. Today we’re going to add texture to our painting, to give it the look of oil paint on canvas. In addition, we’re going to take a look at Photoshop’s Texurizer filter, a robust and perhaps underused tool, found under Filter > Filter Gallery > Texture > Texturizer in Photoshop CS6+, and under Filter > Texture > Texturizer in Photoshop CS5 and earlier. So let’s have some fun.
Getting Creative with Photoshop’s Oil Paint Filter
Filters, whether they’re native to Photoshop, or purchased add-ons such as those provided by Topaz, or OnOne, are designed to supplement your design workflow, not become it. Filters can provide creative inspiration, too, but, as I see it, their main function is to replace lengthy, tedious tasks.
Best Free Photoshop Brushes
Our online creative community has a long history of sharing resources such as Photoshop brushes. Prior to writing this piece, I scanned my massive PS brushes folder. My oldest brushes date back to 2001. All of them were free downloads from generous creatives wanting to share with other users.
Demystifying the @font-face Rule
I introduced you to using Google Fonts on your website in my last tutorial. Today we’re going to discuss serving up your own web fonts using the @font-face rule.
Choosing the Right (Free) Web Font
Note: This article assumes you are somewhat familiar with typographic terms. You should also be familiar with scripting HTML and CSS, as you need to paste a few lines of code into the web page’s header, and set a font-family rule in CSS. In the web’s early days web designers used only web-safe fonts, because they were almost certainly available on most home computers.
Optimizing PNG & GIF Files for the Web
In the previous article I showed you how to optimize JPGs for the web. In this tutorial I show you how to create GIF, PNG-8 and PNG-24 files. While the method is similar, results differ in terms of file size, colour reproduction and even usefulness.
