Mastering Photoshop: Noise, Textures, Gradients and Rounded Rectangles - Smashing Magazine

Advertisement Often, it’s the little details that turn a good layout into a great design; details such as subtle textures, shading and smooth shapes. Photoshop contains a vast array of tools for embellishing a design, but choosing the right one isn’t always easy. Being the obsessive-compulsives that we are, we’ve conducted a huge range of experiments to determine the benefits and disadvantages of each technique. Noise and Textures Subtle noise or texture on UI elements can look great, but what’s the best way to add it? Number of layers used: fewer is better.Ability to scale: if the document is resized, will the effect maintain its quality? 1. Probably the most obvious method for adding texture to a shape is to create a normal bitmap layer, fill it with a color, select Filter → Noise → Add Noise, then apply a mask or Vector Mask to match the element you’re adding noise to. 2. Unfortunately, the noise can only lighten or darken the underlying elements. 3. 4. Which Method Is Best? 1. 2. 3. 4.

Top Places to Find Free Photoshop UI Kits Online Ready made Photoshop UI kits are useful resources for web designers to quickly put together website or application interface designs with buttons, menus and input fields. There’s plenty of high quality free UI kits available across the web, but it’s sometimes difficult to know where to look. This post rounds up the best websites to find great quality UI sets, with a selection of samples from each. Dribbble isn’t just a place to see what designers are working on, dive into the archives and you’ll find stacks of useful resources that designers have posted for free download. Examples: Hanna UI Kit Sticky Butterscotch UI Kit Blaubarry Free UI Kit Simple UI Kit Designmoo is a community for discovering and sharing free PSDs, vectors, textures and patterns, with UI elements making up a fair share of the fantastic resources available to download for free. Simple UI Kit Bloom UI Kit User Interface Elements Colourful UI Elements Pack FreeUIKits is a website dedicated to sharing free UI and GUI PSD files.