The 50 Best Photoshop Tutorials of 2009 By Callum Chapman Looking back this year (2009), we have had some incredible tutorials that have taught hundreds and thousands of people new skills in Adobe Photoshop. We’ve been searching the web from America to Germany to the UK and have managed to compile a list of the 50 of the very best Photoshop tutorials this year. Happy learning and wishing you all the luck in 2010! 1. Use various tools such as the Cloning tool to remove facial features and the Brush tool to create a realistic splatter merged with professional blending techniques to mould the paint splatter over a face. 2. Learn how to combine vector art with pixel art in this superb tutorial here at Six Revisions. 3. Learn to apply the Warp tool effectively (as well as a few other tricks) to manipulate real smoke to look like a skull. 4. 5. Use gradients and custom strokes to make flat objects appear three-dimensional – combine this with stock photography and textures to produce a vintage and very realistic radio icon. 6. 7. 8.
Adding a direct line-in to your car stereo for an iPod/mp3 player This instructable will show you how to add an auxiliary input, like a headphone jack, to your car so you can listen to an iPod/mp3 player/GPS or anything that has a line-out through your cars stereo. While I will be adding it on my '99 Chevy Suburban, it can very easily be done on almost all cars, SUVs, and trucks. Many of you will notice that I have a cassette player as well as a working radio in the car so an FM transmitter or cassette tape with a headphone jack might be the more logical answer. I have actually tried both, and while they both work OK the inconsistency and lower quality of the FM transmitter and the reliability and constant cleaning required of cassette player if you listen to your ipod more than a few times a month just don't cut it when you can have a high quality maintenance free direct line-in for a little bit more. I found the auxiliary input I wanted at Peripheral Electronics then bought it off ebay.
Web Design Review of Philosophersnotes.com I came across this site while doing research for GuruShot.com, our new Web2.0 quotes project. I simply love it, and I want to share it with you. PhilosophersNotes is a site that provides incredibly concise summaries of top personal growth books in just a couple of pages. Philosophersnotes.com is one of my very favourite designs of the moment. In this post, I’ll break down its design features and explain why it’s so darn great – and hopefully inspire you to apply some of the following six techniques in your own web design. Here’s the home page of PhilosophersNotes. Here are the features I see in its design (and the approach to design) that I think make it work. SimplicityPixel-savingDesign the contentFocusCall to actionPersonality Simplicity First of all, and most importantly, this site design is simple. Simple sites work better because (as “Save the Pixel — The Art of Simple Web Design” teaches), “Success is a function of Attention divided by Stuff”. Pixel-Saving Design the Content Focus
Japanese Develop Shut Up, Now Gun | News &Opinion A pair of researchers in Japan have developed "SpeechJammer," a prototype "gun" designed to compel people to stop talking, without physically harming them. The "gun" is actually a directional speaker, combined with an input microphone, a motherboard, and software, all combined inside a small box that can be either fixed or used as a portable device. It uses what's known as delayed auditory feedback (DAF), essentially turning people's own voices against them in disconcerting fashion, to compel loudmouths to clam up. The device was developed by Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University in Japan. The problem that the researchers were trying to solve was a cultural one: in some cases, one person can simply overwhelm another, dominating a conversation through sheer volume and persisting when it is their turn to let others speak. Did it work?
50+ Excellent Body Enhancement Photoshop Tutorials Making a photograph of a person look amazing adds an extra dimension of professionalism to your design. These photoshop body enhancement tutorials will help you transform your people pictures to stunning models in next to no time. Most techniques involve similar use of the photoshop tools. Inspiration and Full Makeover Tutorials Digital Cosmetic Surgery This complete transformation is explained in simple steps. Enhacement Examples Video showing virtual make overs on lots of different subjects. Eyes Changing Eye Color Change the color of a the eye something more appealling. Making Seductive Eyes This finishing effect can be used around the eyes once other eye touch ups are complete to make the person look sultry using shadows. Red Eye Removal Shows how to move from normal red eye removal to non distructive red eye removal. Apply Eye Makeup Apply eyeshadow, eyeliner and mascara. Non Destructive Eye Color Changing This technique is flexible using a mask and a hue and saturation adjustment layer. Nose Teeth
Is The $300 3D Printer Finally Here? Makible Thinks So MakiBox is a riff on the open source RepRap 3D printer that fits a print head and motor inside a box about the length and width (but not the thickness, silly) of a sheet of paper. The MakiBox kit will start at $350 while an assembled kit will cost $550. The project is being built by Jon Buford, a well known hardware guy in Hong Kong whose last claim to fame was this teeny tiny Android headphone extender. He runs a hacker space in China and works closely with prototyping houses on the mainland. He also runs, Makible.com, a hardware project funding site akin to Kickstarter. Project Page
Making Complex Selections in Photoshop - DesignFestival » For Web Design Trends | Inspiration | Design Theory | Colors | Web Fonts | UX | Photoshop | Tutorials and more Making precise selections in Photoshop is an essential skill that every designer needs. As a print designer, you will find yourself using selections to remove objects from their background to place within ads. As a web designer, you might extract an image and place it on a website with no background. So, what do you do when you have something that is extremely difficult to select with normal selection tools? Even with the masking and channels, you can’t make a precise selection consistently. You can try the quick selection tool, which does a great job of making a selection of the bulk of the image, but making a more refined selection is difficult with this method. In comes Refine Mask to the rescue. The Refine Mask menu is one of the best tools for refining your selection. Each view has its own purpose, but the best views for contrast would have to be On Black, On White, and Black & White. We can fix this by using the Smart Radius Slider. This is called fringe.
The 13 Most Important Numbers in the Universe - James D. Steins Cosmic Numbers - Popular Mechanics - StumbleUpon In the 17th century, scientists understood three phases of matter—solids, liquids and gases (the discovery of plasma, the fourth phase of matter, lay centuries in the future). Back then, solids and liquids were much harder to work with than gases because changes in solids and liquids were difficult to measure with the equipment of the time. So many experimentalists played around with gases to try to deduce fundamental physical laws. Robert Boyle was perhaps the first great experimentalist, and was responsible for what we now consider to be the essence of experimentation: vary one or more parameter, and see how other parameters change in response. Boyle discovered the relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas, and a century later, the French scientists Jacques Charles and Joseph Gay-Lussac discovered the relationship between volume and temperature.
- StumbleUpon I have been playing a lot with the Displace filter in Photoshop and I still get impressed with how powerful it is. Even though I have written some tutorials using it, I decided to try to recreate a different effect that I saw in one of the images submitted for the Daily Inspiration. It was a brick wall deformed like it was made of cloth. So in this tutorial, or a quick-tips I will show you how to create a curtain made of bricks or how to deform a brick wall as it was a curtain. To do that we wil use a few stock photos, layer adjustments and the Displace filter in Photoshop CS5. The technique is pretty simple and the tutorial won't take you more than 30 minutes to go through it. Step 1 Open Photoshop and create a new document. Step 2 Let's import another image, now of a girl opening the curtains. Step 3 With the Lasso Tool (L) or the Pen Tool (P) select the empty white. Step 5 Now select the hands/arms of the girl and the curtains. Step 6 Step 7 Go to Layer>Layer Mask>Hide Selection. Step 8
Configuring a Windows 8 Virtual Machine - TechSpot Guides With the launch of Windows 8's Consumer Preview, you're probably itching to spend some quality time with Microsoft's latest operating system. Although you may have already downloaded the ISO, we bet some of you haven't decided how you're going to install it. Considering you've just met, we assume most of you aren't ready to clear a dresser drawer for Windows 8. Dual booting is popular, but in our experience, rebooting into a separate environment is more trouble than it's worth when you're just trying to sample beta (err, "preview") software. Fortunately, running Windows 8 in a virtual machine solves all that: it won't remove your current OS, you can access it anytime you want without rebooting and it doesn't require any extra hardware. This write-up won't have much to offer folks experienced with virtual machines, but many users are still intimidated by them. So, what do I need? Not much! Got it. You'll be asked to name your virtual machine. Wait. Son of a... this won't work!
70 Best Photoshop Photo Manipulation Tutorials | Tutorials Creating photo manipulations using Photoshop isn’t as easy as you see here. But it’s a passion for many designers out here including me. One should have lots of patience and creativity to turn a simple photo into an amazing visual art. Sky is the limit when you open image in a photo editing too. Just imagine a different world and put the character over there. You simply have to experiment and play with different effects by making use of huge free brushes and textures collection to create your own world. Here we tried to pick and showcase 70 best photo manipulation tutorials of all time. For those, who don’t know what is Adobe Photoshop? The next generation, representing two decades of excellence. You may be interested in the following related articles as well. Feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts that our readers may find helpful. Don’t forget to and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates. Best Photo Manipulation Tutorials of All Time 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better - How-To Geek - StumbleUpon We’re big fans of hacking the Windows Registry around here, and we’ve got one of the biggest collections of registry hacks you’ll find. Don’t believe us? Here’s a list of the top 50 registry hacks that we’ve covered. It’s important to note that you should never hack the registry if you don’t know what you’re doing, because your computer will light on fire and some squirrels may be injured. Also, you should create a System Restore point before doing so. Otherwise, keep reading. Prevent Windows Update from Forcibly Rebooting Your Computer We’ve all been at our computer when the Windows Update dialog pops up and tells us to reboot our computer. There’s a couple of ways that we can disable this behavior, however. Prevent Windows Update from Forcibly Rebooting Your Computer How to Clean Up Your Messy Windows Context Menu One of the most irritating things about Windows is the context menu clutter that you have to deal with once you install a bunch of applications. Disable Aero Shake in Windows 7