I guess we are on a roll posting about the latest free video tutorials from Watcandlearnphotoshop. Free however is nice . Their latest free video tutorial show how to posterize an image using Photoshop, a simple but nice tutorial that basically explains how the Poster Edges filter works.

Turning your images into illustrations isn’t as difficult as you might think. In this video tutorial, you’ll learn how to make your images look cartoonish in just one simple step.

Watch the tutorial

This is one is one of these photoshop tutorials that although they might not be for everyday use, they can help you understand the use of the various Photoshop tools. Once again it’s a free video tutorial from Watch and Learn Photoshop.

Today’s tip is a two-for-one for those of you who want to know how to extract a person from an image. After learning how to do this, you’ll also learn how to turn that person into a statue in just a few simple steps.

Watch the tutorial

Choosing matching colors for a design is one of the most important steps for every design. There are a lot of ways to choose your colors based on color theory, however there are a number of online color tools that can help you create color schemes for your graphic or web design and make your life easier. Here is a list of some of those tools.

EasyRGB: Creates a 12 colors scheme from an RGB value.

Color Blender: Calculates midpoint values between two colors.

Color Schemer: Creates a set of 16 matching colors from an RGB or HEX value.

Palette Master: Creates a 42 colors palette from a base color.

ColorBlender: Creates a set of six matching colors. It also provides the option of saving the “blend” as a Photoshop Color table or as Illustrator colors.

Color Schemes 2: Creates sets of four matching colors using various color schemes techniques (Monochromatic, Contrast, “Soft” contrast / Triade, “Double-contrast” / Tetrade, Analogic colors).

Colour Lovers: Not a color tool but an online community where users share their color palettes.

ColorMatch5k: Creates a 6 color palette from a base color. (Doesn’t seem to work with firefox)

4096 Color Wheel: Helps you find and choose web-smart colors.

Color Palette Generator: Creates a color palette (up to 49 colors) based on an image.

Color Calculator: A handy tool for identifying color harmonies.

Color Toy: A flash tool that creates a nine color scheme from an RGB or a HEX value.

Color Palette: Creates a 10 colors palette from shades of the base color.

Technicolor: Creates a 12 color scheme from a base color.

ColorMixers: A very nice color schemes generator.

ColorMatch Redux: Creates a nine colors scheme that can be exported as a .act (photoshop color table) or .ai (illustrator colors) file. Based on ColorMatch.

I Like your Colors: Type in a URL and “I Like Your Colors” will extract colors the web site uses, complete with hex values.

ColorCombos At color combos you can find color combinations at the library but you can also test a color combination of your own to see how it looks on screen by using the “combo tester” tool.

Colorzilla: Colorzilla is a very nice Colorpicker and Eyedropper firefox extension. (Thanks Kate).

Adobe has released the first issue of the second Volume of Proxy, Adobe’s free quarterly interactive design publication. You can find it and download it at Adobe’s Proxy site. At Proxy’s site you can also find and download the four issues of Volume 1.

This latest issue includes a Photoshop Vanishing Point filter tutorial, an interview with Alex Gelman, tips on converting InDesign projects into websites with GoLive, an interesting article about Illustrator’s Live Trace and Live Paint, an article about automation in Photoshop and much more.

Istockphoto announced yesterday that they have reached an agreement with Getty Images and is now part of the Getty Images family. According to the reports Getty paid 50 Million $ to acquire IstockPhoto. I have mentioned IstockPhoto before in my Cheap Stock Photography post, but here is a small presentation. IstockPhoto was the pioneer in microstock photography, they have launched almost six years ago and created a community of contributing photographers, that, allowed them to sell stock photos in very affordable prices (0.5$ at first). Since then they have grown and they now have a library of almost 625.000 royalty free photos and illustrations. Getty Images on the other hand, is the leader in professional stock photography and the dream of many professional stock photographers. They accept only a handful of contributing photographers each year and only accept the best of the best.

What I find interesting is that most professional stock photographers that contribute to Getty, Corbis, Alamy and all the other traditional stock photography agencies, used to flame and are still flaming the contributors of the microstock agencies like IstockPhoto. Their main point was that microstock photography devalues photography and threatens their livelihood. Here is an example of that at the PDN forums. I really wonder how are hey going to react to this.

Here is a part of the announcement:

Recently, in a rainy, sleepy suburb in Seattle, I met someone that shared my passion for iStockphoto and my drive to see it succeed. Over a greasy breakfast, he talked excitedly about how our community has created a new market, a culture of participation serving a vast audience. Our talk developed into a wide-ranging collaborative discussion about industry trends, size, consolidation and personal values. We dished a fair amount of gossip, too. After three hours passed in a blink, it was clear how naturally and sincerely our relationship was forming. We continued our dialogue as I detailed our community philosophy for site and feature enrichment, development of artist portfolios, international expansion, localized content and continuous improvement of our technology and methods. “This community is the most important development in the picture business this decade”, he declared. Yes, Jonathan Klein understood us. He “gets it.”

In Getty Images, we have found our perfect partner. On February 9, in the early hours of the morning, iStockphoto agreed to join the Getty Images family, functioning independently with the benefits of Getty Images, yet, very importantly for them and us, autonomy. They will nurture and encourage our pioneering spirit so that our entrepreneurial culture will continue to thrive.

By the way, although currently I don’t have an active portfolio at IstockPhoto, I have been accepted as a contributing photographer. I guess that means that I can now proudly say that I am a Getty contributing photographer.

I have mentioned StockVault in an earlier post about sites that offer free stock photos. Now it’s time to take a closer look at this really useful site.
Let’s start with the site’s aesthetics, since my lost post StockVault has gone through a major redesign. The new look of StockVault is really fresh and pleasant in the eye with nice use of colors. But that’s not really what is important about StockVault, the most important is what it actually offers designers and webmasters. So what here is a list of what you can find at StockVault:

Free Stock photos personal and non-commercial usage.
Free Photoshop Brushes
Photoshop and Web Design tutorials
Design related articles
Photopacks for commercial use
Design related Directory

The most useful from all of the above for most people would be the Gallery with the free stock photos. The gallery contains a total of 3,214 free stock photos (mostly around 2MP in size) for personal and non-commercial use. The highlight of the gallery is the textures and backgrounds sub gallery that holds more than 1000 pictures. Textures in my opinion is one of the most useful kind of stock photos for designers and it’s not that easy to find high quality textures and backgrounds. Another really interesting subcategory filled with useful pictures that you should definitely take a look at is the Objects subcategory. Besides the free stock photos, StockVault also provides asPhotopacks that can be used for commercial projects. Each photopack contains 25 photos and the price is really affordable, even cheaper than most cheap stock photo agencies like dreamstime and istockphoto.

Don’t forget to check the tutorials section, where you can find photoshop, dreamweaver and CSS tutorials. By far my favorite tutorial is the one titled Showcasing Your Work, nothing fancy but it sure is effective.

As a conclusion StockVault is a great resource for everyone interested in Design.

This tutorial is going to show you a way to create halftone custom adobe Photoshop shapes. These shapes can be used in many design projects like logo design, flyer design or even as a background for another design element. They are very versatile because of their vector nature which means that they can be used at any size. Here are a few examples.

Let’s start
1) Create a new document. For this tutorial it is necessery to work on a very large file to have good results so I used a size of 3000*3000 pixels

2) Choose the custom shape tool

Make sure you have Paths Selected

3) Choose a custom shape that you want to transform to a halftone photoshop custom shape. For this tutorial I used this flower like shape.

Devamını Oku..

Brusheezy is a new site offering large collection of free photoshop brushes. Currently there are a total of 148 free brush sets under 15 categories such as abstract, nature, space, splatters etc. What I like about the site is that users can comment on the brushes and contribute their own brush sets. There is also a patterns section at the site however it currently has only 6 patterns for download. Nonetheless it is a very useful resource for all Photoshop users.

Posting about this site reminds me that its about time to update my Free Photoshop Brushes resources page.

Photoshop brushes can give a really nice touch to your Photoshop designs. From one comment left at one of my previous posts about Photoshop Brushes I found this new site that is a directory of available brushes for download from various artists. I have added it to the list but since the post is quite old I thought of blogging about it as well. The site is GetBrushes. It has a nice categorisation of the brush sets and each brush has a description and details information which makes the database easily searchable. Each brush set has a screenshot, which is nice and you can also rate the brushes, a feature that if used wisely will be very useful for people looking for good brush sets. If I find some time, I am planning to create a couple of brush sets to contribute. In the meantime visit GetBrushes

Ningengirai.net offers a small but really nice collection of Photoshop brushes. In total there are 8 large brushes sets available for download plus 3 sets of 100*100 pixels brushes that are mainly for icon creation. My favorite of all the brushes sets that Ningengirai offers is by far the Decadent Boxes brush set. It’s really small (just four brushes included) but they are really nice. Along with the brush sets Ningengirai offers for download the image packs from which he created those brushes.

Below is an example from the Decadent Boxes brush set.

You can find the brushes here.

Also check out the rest of the site as well, they offer some more goodies for download like textures and Photoshop gradients.