10 Excellent Open Source and Free Alternatives to Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a given in any designer’s wish list, and it comes with a host of features that allow for excellent and professional photo editing. The biggest obstacle to any designer who wants Photoshop is the price, which can be prohibitive. Fortunately there are a number of open source (and completely free) programs out there that do much of what Photoshop can, and sometimes more. In this collection, you will find 10 excellent examples of open source and free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop. This guest post for Six Revisions was written by Daniel Shain from LaptopLogic.com. GIMP stands for “GNU image manipulation program”, and it is one of the oldest and most well known alternatives to Photoshop in existence. If just having the feature set isn’t enough for you, there is an alternative based on GIMP known as GIMPShop. 2. Krita has been lauded for ease of use and won the Akademy Award for Best Application in 2006. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Your favorite open source/free image editor?
Brush Fonts Brush fonts are hotter than ever and we are seeing them more often on professionally designed websites. Thick, bold and beautiful… their relaxed, casual feeling and sexy curves make them a perfect fit for designers who want to break the mold and steer away from the typical serif and sans serif font choices. Some of them crossover into the script font world, while retaining their thick lines and curves. These types of fonts are also now widely used for logo designs and packaging as they easily bring added interest and creativity. Here are 20 beautiful brush fonts that you may wish to use in your designs. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Do you know of any other great examples?
Making Complex Selections in Photoshop - DesignFestival 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. If you are a photographer, you might make a selection to remove blemishes or other unwanted features from an image. 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. We can fix this by using the Smart Radius Slider. This is called fringe.
25 New Illustrator Tutorials That Will Make You A Master Of Vector Art Just because you can usually get a similar effect in Photoshop doesn’t mean the end result will be as good as using Illustrator (depending on the project). If you are like me (and I will bet most of you are) you will go ahead and use PS because you know it much better even though the final project will not be as good or as functional as it could be. Well it’s time to buck up and get this learning curve completely out of the way so you make the right choice next time. Below are some sweet Illustrator tuts that will leave you in vector heaven once your done. Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular photo editing programs that has ever been created. This tutorial teaches you how to make a portrait of William Shakespeare in Illustrator using text. Article Link Advertisement A very interesting tutorial, from Design Instruct, that takes you behind the scenes and shows you the illustration process from start to finish. Article Link Article Link Article Link Article Link Article Link Article Link
50 awesome free fonts for professional design This post is a roundup of latest free web design resources released during the month of March. This collection includes patterns, icons, themes, and… Continue Reading → These days many artists are collaborating with big brands in order to reach a mass market. As well as interiors, artists and designers are… Continue Reading → This post is a roundup of latest free web design resources released during the month of February. Continue Reading → Mastering Illustrator Effects Have you been missing out the Illustrator Effects? Did you know it is a powerful tool for creating symmetrical shapes or adding texture to vector paths? For example, with just one simple effect, you can turn a polygon path into a flower shape. You can also make paths look sketchy with the Scribble effect. Read this tutorial to learn how to save time by using Illustrator Effects and work more efficient. Arrowheads Let's start with a basic effect, the Add Arrowheads. Appearance The great thing about using Illustrator Effect is the ease of changing its appearance. Without The Effect? Without the effect, the arrow shape will get distorted when the line is stretched. Round Corners Draw a rectangle shape, go to Effects > Stylize > Round Corners and enter a radius value. Without The Round Corners Effect? Round Corners is one of my favorite effects. Zig Zag Effect Draw a straight line, go to Effects > Distort & Transform > Zig Zag and enter a value for Size and Ridge Per Segment. Wavy Line Badges
Download FREE mp3 songs or Softwares or ebooks,Movies,Games ringtones and almost anything 25 Free Adorable Hand Drawn Fonts For Your Designs Hand drawn fonts or fonts in that style can really add a personal effect if used in the right way. The use of hand-drawn images, icons and fonts are popular in website designs specially blogs for personalizing and giving a unique and artistic touch to designs. In this post, we present a list of 25 useful fee hand drawn fonts design. We hope you will enjoy this wonderful showcase and feel free to share your opinion with us! Other useful related links: 1. Clementine Sketch 2. James Fajardo 3. Take Out The Garbage 4. DJ Gross 5. McCoy - Hello Lori 6. Jerry's handwriting 7. Just Me Again Down Here 8. HandVetica 9. Rock Show Whiplash 10. Luna Bar 11. Arcanum 12. FFF Tusj 13. Octember Script 14. Peixe Frito 15. Vtks Animal 2 16. UglyQua 17. Roughage 18. Against Myself 19. Two Turtle Doves 20. Windsong 21. WC RoughTrad Bta 22. Barnes Erc 23. Pappos-Blues 24. Waste Of Time 25. Sketchbook
40 Tutorials and Techniques for Creating Business Logos Tutorials August 31, 2010 A logo alludes to its company’s identity in its appearance and visual impact; that’s how it starts branding. Seeing how important it is, we designers must not underestimate the potential of this simple graphic, and instead hone our skills as much as possible in creating and polishing logos, as well as understanding what makes logos work. These following logo design tutorials either show you what processes went behind the logos you see on the Net today, as well as guide you on how to create new ones of your own. Some even teach you how to make enhanced versions of popular logos, or present your logo in a way that looks more realistic. Go through this collection and improve your logo designing skills through them; we hope they help you make your next logo designs pop and sparkle like wow! Firefish Photoshop Tutorial This is a simple and straightforward tutorial. Create Rainbow Logos With Warped Grids Drawing a Good Logo The Amazing Spiderman Sikbox Logo Design Process