Photoshop Friday
Posted by Jennifer Farley | November 30, 2007
I’d like to introduce a new regular feature where we could showcase people’s Photoshop work and spread a little link love. Based heavily on the wonderful Illustration Friday idea, which I first saw mentioned on Tara’s Graphic Design Blog.
So here’s the plan. Every Friday, a new theme or quote will appear on this blog. Participants can then create a composition in Photoshop based on this, and the interpretation is entirely up to you. It might be a photograph you’ve manipulated, an illustration created from scratch in Photoshop or whatever you like. I’ll put a link to the image and your site here the following Friday. This is entirely for fun and I’d love to see work from people of all levels - novices and pros alike. If you already have created a Photoshop image that’s appropriate to the topic, feel free to use it. Closing time for entries is the following Wednesday.
What I’m looking for:
A composition created in Photoshop based on this weeks theme.
The link to your site or where your image is located. (please don’t send the actual image).
If you don’t have a web page and would like to get one, wordpress and blogger are free and easy to set up. I can also link to your Deviantart or Flickr page.
So to get the ball started … this weeks theme is;
“Castles In The Air”
p.s. Contact me or comment if you have any questions or suggestions.
Photoshop Code of Ethics
Posted by Jennifer Farley | November 29, 2007
Scott Kelby has an interesting post about his own personal code of ethics when using photoshop. I would certainly agree with most of them and have similar thoughts myself.
One “rule” he mentions is ;
(1) This may sound silly, but I absolutely hate cropping in Photoshop, and go out of my way to avoid it. I want to do my composing in the camera, so if I wind up having to crop later in Photoshop, I feel like I didn’t “Get it right in the camera,” and it drives me nuts.
I also aim to get the best possible shot to begin with too, but sometimes I find I can improve the picture enormously by doing a tight crop - particularly with pictures of people or a picture taken very quickly, without time to compose the way I’d like to. I also find that now I’m using an 8 MP camera, that the images are so large that if I’m not happy with a landscape oriented picture, I’ll actually crop it into portrait shape just to make sure I see only what I want. In fact, I love cropping. There, I’ve said it!
Any of you guys have some Photoshop ethics you’d like to share?
Photoshop Tutorial: Adding a motion blur and using a layer mask
Posted by Jennifer Farley | November 28, 2007
In today’s short video tutorial, I’m going to run through how to create the effect of a motion blur in Photoshop. This is pretty easy to do using filters such as the, ahem, “motion blur” filter. If you apply the motion blur to the whole image, then the whole lot looks blurry so for that reason I’m using a layer mask to reveal only the parts of the image that should be blurred. This gives a more realistic appearance to the blur. There is nearly always two ways to do things in Photoshop, so what you see here before you is one method. All comments and suggestions are welcome!
Superb Time Wasting Resource from Jib Jab!
Posted by Jennifer Farley | November 26, 2007
I don’t know if I’m the last person on the internet to come across this, but the Jib Jab website is a fantastic website bursting with VERY cool e-cards (they actually call them “sendables”) and movies that you can put your OWN face onto. They’re really funny too.
So if you’re struggling with a really important deadline and KNOW you should be working hard, here’s the perfect piece of website fun to aid your procrastination. Basically all you have to do is upload a picture of yourself or your friends and family, the online software allows you to draw an area around the head and thus you become a star of the movie.
The video below features myself and my beloved in action doing the Charleston.
Photoshop Tutorial : How to use the Trim Command
Posted by Jennifer Farley | November 23, 2007
The Trim command in Photoshop provides another way to crop an image. The Trim command works by removing unwanted parts of the image - you can specify which parts. The image crops by trimming surrounding transparent pixels, or background pixels of the colour you specify. Here’s a quick tutorial showing you how it works.
Web Design Inspiration : Feeling Distressed
Posted by Jennifer Farley | November 22, 2007
The “distressed” look has been around for a long time and it is a style of design that I really like. I think it’s fair to say that this look tends to be reserved for creative or music related sites as well as extreme sports sites. Generally you won’t see a textured, distressed look on a big corporate or banking website.
The distressed look doesn’t come from a grunge-y font alone. Designers applying this style to their sites use textured elements in their work to remove the clean and shiney computer look. It often gives a “printed on trashed paper” feel or the idea that the website has spent the night sleeping on the street.
The following are a few samples of sites that I like and keep in my “morgue file” for inspiration.
Please feel free to let me know about some of the distressed looking (and I don’t mean sites from the late 90’s that desperately want a redesign) websites you like.
-
About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
