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Create a Very Simple Orb With Photoshop

Step 1) New Document

Create a new document. 500px by 500px with a transparent background should work nicely for this tut.

Step 2) The Basics of the Circle

Select the Circular Marquee tool from the Tools menu. At the top, select Style: Fixed Size. Set the width to about 256px by 256px.

Click the canvas. Keep the mouse button held down to move the circle around. Release the mouse button when you have it where you want it.

Step 3) The Gradient for the Base

Select the Gradient tool and create a gradient with these specifications:

Fill the circular selection with this new gradient.

Step 4) A Simple “Highlight” Effect

Now, create a new layer. Select it and click the thumbnail of the first layer while holding down the Ctrl key. (BUT MAKE SURE THAT LAYER 2 IS STILL SELECTED!)

This will create the standard “Marching Ants” effect around the circle. This is your selection.

Now, select the Circular Marquee tool again, but this time set the mode to “Intersect with selection.”

Set the Style to “Normal”

Now, draw a circular selection over the blue circle as shown below.

That will create the space for our highlight. A good highlight gradient is shown below. Create it now.

Once you have your gradient created, fill your selection with it – starting from the top.

Step 5) Giving the Circle Life – Color Dodging

At this point, I like to do a little Color Dodging in the center of the blue circle. To do this, select Layer 1 and then select the Color Dodge tool. Set its range to “Highlights” with a size of about 150-200px. You can adjust this to get the effect you want.

Color dodge the blue circle by clicking and moving the mouse slightly. Be careful not to overdo it.

Step 6) Background (optional)

At this point, you can add a background (or anytime really) and change your orb to match it. The settings below work well on a black background.

Here is one possible outcome. This is our orb with the settings above placed against a background that is the subject of another tutorial…

MS: GDT

The NEW Photoshop CS3 Toy: The Quick-Selection Tool

New Photoshop CS3: Quick Selection Tool

: Wednesday, May 16th, 2007
: freetime

Photoshop Quick Selection Tool that just included in Photoshop CS3, this selection tool is like a Magic Wand tool with brush option. You can use the Quick Selection tool to quickly paint a selection using an adjustable round brush tip. As you drag, the selection expands outward and automatically finds and follows defined edges in the image.

Quick Selection Tool Options

• Selection Options (A): Select the operation for quick selection whether New , Add or Subtract .
• Brush tip size (B): You can select brush diameter, roundness, angle or tip size sensitive control similar to brush shape setting in Brush Palette. You can also use “[” or “]” key to decrease or increase brush diameter just like working with regular brush. but please note that the quick selection tool brush are special brush tool that not include in Brush palette. So you can not select its brush from brush palette or save brush preset. To save quick selection tool brush, you have to use Photoshop Tool Preset instead.
  
• Sample All Layers (C): Checked to creates a selection based on all layers instead of just the currently selected layer.
• Auto-Enhance (D): Reduces roughness in the selection boundary. Auto-Enhance automatically flows the selection further to-wards image edges and applies some of the edge refinement you can apply manually in the Refine Edge dialog with the Smooth, Contrast and Radius options.
• Refine Edge (E): Click Refine Edge button to open define edge windows. You can further adjust the selection boundary or view the selection against different backgrounds or as a mask. (See also Refine Selection Edge)

To Make a Selection with Quick Selection Tool

1. Select the Quick Selection tool.
2. Specify one of the selection options in the options bar: New, Add or Subtract . New is the default option if nothing is selected. After making the initial selection, the option changes automatically to Add.
3. Paint inside the part of the image you want to select. The selection grows as you paint. To subtract from a selection, click the Subtract from option in the options bar, then drag over the existing selection.

If updating is slow, continue to drag to allow time to complete work on the selection. As you paint near the edges of a shape, the selection area extends to follow the contours of the shape edge. If you stop dragging and then click or drag in a nearby area, the selection will grow to include the new area

Tip: To temporarily switch between add and subtract modes, hold down the Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac) key.

Note: To change the tool cursor, choose Edit » Preferences » Cursors » Painting Cursors (Windows) or Photoshop » Preferences » Cursors » Painting Cursors (Mac OS). Normal Brush Tip displays the standard Quick Selection cursor with a plus or minus sign to show the selection mode.

Fusion Text

		created for photoshop 6.0 ++ open a new image (for example 500 x 500 px) – with black background.       create a new layer and write with orange the text.
		create again a new layer and set the foreground colour to black and the background colour to white (or press “d“). and use the filter / render / clouds… . after that use filter / sketch / chrome … with this recruiting: detail = 4; smoothmess = 6; set the 3. layer (chrome – layer) to colour dodge.
		go to the layer 2 (!) and rasterize the layer (klick with right mousebuttom an the layer and then on rasterize the layer) .after that duplicate the layer 3 time . (you should have now 4 text-layers, which are between the chrome – layer and the first layer ) go to the layer 3 and use the filter / blur / motion blur … . with this recruiting: angle = 0; distance = 100; so, go to the layer 4 and use again motion blur … . but now with this recruiting: angle = -45; distance = 100; finally go to layer 5 and uset again motion blur … . but now with other recruiting: angle = 45; distance = 100; the result schould be like this.
		now you have to marge down the text – layers (go to layer 5 and press ctrg + e, do this 3 times). – now you have to have 3 layers (layer 1 = black; layer 2 = text / fusion; layer 3 = chrome; ) go to layer 2 and use the filter / blur / gaussian blur (radius = 3). press ctrg + u (hue / saturation) put down the colorize – box and play with the recruiting to get a good colour. so,now create new layer between the chrome – layer and the text / fusion layer. write with black the same word. you should have 4 layers.
		set the layer’s opacity to 60 %. -now you are ready you can play with ctrg + m, ctrg + b and ctrg + l to get a better result. questions and criticism send to gfx4ever . translation in english by lab / tech – thx to

Midnight Stars Text Effect in Photoshop

It’s about time to produce a new tutorial and I was thinking about something that no one has done before me and came to realize that most of the themes have already been touched upon. It’s pretty hard to come up with an original idea that no one ever thought about before, but since I made it at night, I thought… has anyone ever made a “midnight text effect”? I did not find it anywhere on the Internet, so here it is, you can see the example above.

What will you need for this tutorial?

First of all, you need to download the Moon Star Font. Click on the image to go to the download page.

Installation of the font in Windows is very easy: unzip the font you have downloaded, open the folder with the downloaded font. Now, go to Start > Control Panel > Fonts. Drag and drop the file from your downloaded folder into the fonts folder in your control panel. It will take a few seconds for the font to be installed. Once the mini-window with progress bar got closed, you can access this font from your Photoshop.

So, once you have installed the font, click on the image to download / full view. It will guide you step by step how to set the layer styles correctly and what colours should you use. To make your life easier in case of a failure, I am offering a FREE .PSD file of this tutorial, for Lorelei Web Forum members only. Please note that you need to be registered or logged in to access the download. Enjoy!

FOUND ON: TopTut.com

Simple Page Curl Using Photoshop

Intro:

Make a page-curl in photoshop. We’re going over the same techniques Microsoft used for there MSN Hotmail to Windows Live Hotmail switch. Below is the final result of this tutorial.

Step 1:

Open up a screenshot of some sort for the background. I took a screenshot of my Gmail inbox and cut the a piece out of it which I set to a smaller image size. If your lazy you can also use my picture I have so far below.

Step 2:
Now move a different screenshot ontop of the Gmail screenshot (I used the same steps as above for this screenshot), though you have to make sure that the height of this screenshot is bigger, since we’re going to rotate it a bit.

Flip this screenshot horizontal, Go to > Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal.

Press Ctrl+T to go into transform mode, and rotate the upper screenshot like the preview below, by using one of the corner squares.

Step 3:

Select the pen-tool and make a path like below.

We’re going to need the selection of this path now. So Ctrl+click The Pen-tool shape layer in the layers window to make a selection of it. Then hide the Pen-tool shape by clicking the eye icon infront of it. Select the Top screenshot (let’s name this screenshots MSN screenshot from here on on), then press delete on your keyboard to delete the the part inside the selection we just made. And that should leave you with this.

Move the MSN screenshot a bit to the left, like on my next screenshot. We’re going to make the shadow first since we only need the MSN screenshot base for this. Duplicate the MSN screenshot and move the duplicated screenshot below the original MSN screenshot (NOT below the Gmail screenshot!). Make a selection of the duplicated layer, Set the foreground color to black, make sure you have the duplicated layer selected, then hit Alt+Backspace to fill the selection with the black foreground color. Then move the layer to the position I have it below, Note: I’ve also rotated it a bit.

Take out a hard edged eraser tool , and delete the part that’s sticking out of the top of the original MSN screenshot.

Now Lower the opacity of the duplicated layer to 21%, which should leave you with the following.

Step 5:

Add the following blending options to the Original MSN screenshot.

Step 6:

Now for the finnising touch we’re going to add a shine at the left edge so it looks like a page-curl. Set the foreground color to white, make a new layer called Shine, and take out the gradient tool with the foreground to transparant gradient

Gradient tool:

Foreground to transparant gradient:

Make a selection of the MSN screenshot, then make a gradient from left to somewhere to 3/4 of the msn screenshot, below is the exact gradient you have to make.

Lower the opacity of this shine layer to 63%, that will leave us with the.

Step 7:

Now this is a nice final result but to make things more realistic we’re going to place another MSN screenshot on the right, that would make the whole piece more realistic (this isn’t done on the MSN site). Use the same MSN screenshot as before since, but now use the right part without flipping horizontal ofcourse. Place the screenshot like below.

Then move it under the Page-curl layer, and delete the left part with the same technique we used earlier (pen-tool selection).

And now we’re finished with this tutorial , looks pretty neat huh?

Reduce Photoshop File Size by 75 percent!

Photoshop seems to me like a marvellous software, in my opinion isby far the best out there… is the most powerful, versatile, the greatest. But it still has a problem since previous versions, the weight of the files is huge, we could think that for the information it has the size is reazonable but…

Did you know that we can reduce the weight of the PSD up to 75%?

This is something to think about, if we can reduce so much the information in a PSD it would be because this format is not very optimized, right?. Most people think that’s why there are files with compression, TIFF or JPG… but they agree that keeping the original files in PSD format is much more comfortable than working with TIFF (i don’t think we need to compare it with JPG).

Well, how can we do this? Something as simple as hiding the layers before saving the file, if after that you compress it with Winrar or Winzip you will save a lot more.

Here you have the information of the experiment:

1. Normal PSD: 49,2 MB
2. PSD saved with the hidden layers: 38,9 MB
3. PSD saved with the hidden layers and zipped: 11,5 MB

The new version of Photoshop CS3 is out and we still have the same problem… we will have to wait a little more. Now, if you have to send a PSD via ftp or email… you have no choise than doing this.

FOUND ON: SOSNEWBIE.COM

Drill Kit Navigation Menu

Preview: Drill Kit Navigation Tabs.

Step one: Start with a large black canvas. Make a new layer set titled Drill Kit Navigation Tabs. Choose the rounded rectangle tool and set the radius setting to 4px and anti-aliased checked. In a new layer draw a black round rectangle using the rounded rectangle tool. (width: 163 x height: 27) Add the following layer styles: Inner Glow, Gradient Overlay, Stroke.

Step two: Add your first navigation using font Verdana, bold, 7pt, sharp and #FFFFFF for color. Add the following layer styles: Stroke.

Step three: Add the following layer styles: Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, Satin, Gradient Overlay, Pattern Overlay, Stroke.

Step four: Choose the custom polygon tool and choose the third arrow shape found on the pallette. Now in a new layer add a white arrow. (width: 29 x height: 21) Cut out the top and bottom part of the arrow. Add the following layer styles: Gradient Overlay.

Step five: In a new layer draw a white rectangle inside the tab. (width: 154 x height: 13) Add the following layer styles: Gradient Overlay, Stroke. Set the layer’s blending mode to Soft Light.

Step six: Again in a new layer draw a white rectangle inside the tab. (width: 154 x height: 13) Add the following layer styles: Pattern Overlay. Create a new layer and merge with the white rectangle layer.

Step seven: Move the white rectangle layer inside the tab. Set the layer’s blending mode to Color Burn.

Step eight: Duplicate the end part structure from step four. Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal.

Final: Drill Kit Navigation Tabs.

Simple Chains Using Photoshop

This latest tutorial in adobe photoshop has instructions to draw a chain using link that are tied together.

Here we will teach you how to make Hanging photo in chain in photoshop.

[1] Goto custom shape tool and do these settings.

[2] Draw it like it is in the image given below.

[3] Make selection and fill black to it.

[4] Do the Transform selection. (Ctrl-Shift-I)

 

[5] Make Contraction as shown below in the image.

[6] Delete the area of the selected part as in the image below.

[7] Make it white and backgruund of your choice as I have taken.

[8] Apply these settings to give it a real look.

[9] Your image will be like this.

[10] Make a layer as in the next image and merge them.

[11] Your image will be like this as mine.

[12] Make selection and delete the selecton with the Lasso tool.

[13] Delete the area.

[14] Make the copy of the layer and do the same process as we have done earlier.

[15] Make your image as shown below by taking a file & arranging chains in this hanging way.

[16] Now take the eraser tool and erase the part which is shown in the image below.

[17] Apply it on the other chain also and fit it on a wall it look attractive as like this one.

Found On: Adobe Nerds

Glassy Navigation Menu

Preview:

Glassy Tab.

Step one:

Start with a large white canvas. Make a new layer set titled Tab. In a new layer draw a #F6FF00 rectangle, this will be the core of your tab. ( width: 150px x height: 18px) Add the following layer styles:

Inner Shadow

Inner Glow

Gradient Overlay

Stroke