A fun idea to do is create an abstract picture, you can do anything you want to it. One fun idea is the add a fire look to a picture, here is a step by step way to do it: First thing's first, get a nice stock photo. I used a stock photo of an eye from deviantART.First of all I opened the photo and resized it to 75% of it's original size. 1. After you've opened your photo up, duplicate the background layer then apply Filter > Distort > Twirl and use the default setting. That should have just distorted it slightly. Now change the layer mode for your duplicated layer to Lighten. That will have made the eye look a little bit alien-like. 2. Now brighten up the picture a little bit by adding in a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast...) Now this is the part where you choose the fiery color for your photo. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map. I changed the layer mode for this layer to Linear Light and lowered the opacity to 85%. 3.Ok, here are some nice optional effects.Before adding effects like these, you'll probably need to flatten your image (Layer > Flatten Image) then duplicate the one remaininglayer. First, I applied Filter > Artistic > Rough Pastels with the default settings. Now change the layer mode for this layer to Lighten and maybe lower the opacity if you see it need sit. I lowered the opacity to 70%. 4. To finish this tutorial off, I flattened all the layers, applied Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen, faded the sharpen to about 40% (Edit > Fade) then I added in a little bit of tech and grunge.



Photoshop CS2 is able to create an Automated Task. When you have a whole bunch of repeated tedious task to do on a whole sets of photos. Eg: resize a whole stack of photos to a specific resolution. It is easy enough to do: First, open up the desired photos with Photoshop or simply just drag and drop the photos onto the Photoshop main stage. This is the photo which I will be using. It is actually a 20001333 resolution photo and now the view is actually 25% of the actual size. Now is to open up the Action Window. Go to Window > Action or simply press the shortcut key Alt + F9. The Action window will looks like what it is in the above image. We have everything ready and now is to do the trick. Click on the "Create New Action" button as where is shown on the above image A New Action window will come out, the Name of course is the name of your this Automated Task, here as I am doing photo resizing so I will give it the name "Resize". Everything just remain as it is and click on Record Just for your information, the Function Key is actually for you to set the shortcut key to this Automated Task. Anyway, I will not set anything here. Now the Record button has turned active (red color), and from now on whatever action you do will be recorded. I will start doing the resizing now. Go to the Image > Image Size or with the shortcut key Ctrl+Atl+I. Here I will resize to the above figures. Click Ok. The image has now been resized. What I need to do has actually finish. In actual tedious task of course it won't be that short but here it will be enough as an example. Click on the Stop Recording button as where is shown on the image. Now you have your Automated Task set! .To show on how it works. Simply open another photo or drag other photo onto the Photoshop main stage. In the above image I am now using another image. Now on the Action window, select on the "Resize"(or the name you gave for this Automated Task), then click on the "Play Selection" button as where is shown on the image.

Digital art is a fun thing to experiment with, you have all probably sometime seen picture that is entirely made of text. Here's how to do it... 1. Go to "Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold", and move the slider left or right, untill you get satisfying picture... 2. Open the notepad, and type the words you want ito it like this: 3. Next, copy that text, and paste it in new text layer you have created. After that, set up style and size of font, and rotate text untill you are satisfied. 4. Next, right click on text layer, and click "Resterise Layer". Select the template layer and with the magic wand at a tolerance of 32 select the white area. Go to select>similar to select all of the light areas and then select the text layer from the layers palette. Next select text layer, and hit delete to clear the excess text and drag the template layer into the bin icon. Back the image up in white by making a new layer (Go to "Layer -> New Fill Layer -> Solid Color") with a white fill and dragging it underneath the text layer.

When you are doing photo effects you can create those images that sometimes ipods use, the first thing you should do is de-saturate the photo. Change the levels so the range is closer. (Basically slide the black and white sliders towards the gray slider.) Create a new layer. Fill it with #fb4700. Set blending mode to Hard Light. For the Person Duplicate the photo. Take out the background by either the selection tool. Create a new layer. On that new layer, take the character, and paint the person black where you want it black.Set the person layer to blending mode overlay. This will have the part that is not black come through to reflect that red and orange colors. For the Graffiti create new layer just below the layer with the solid color set to hard light. Take a black grunge brush and start grunging the layer. Then again add grunge with the color set to white. Take the eraser tool and take a grunge brush. You can then delete some of the grunge on the layer. Create new layer above all. Set the foreground color to #e6ff8e. Grunge this layer a little. Use it for accents.

when you are creating photo effects you can change the color of a photo without acutally selecting the color. At the botton of the layer palette click at the icon - create a new fill or adjustment layer(a ball half white/half black) and choose Hue/Saturation. At the Hue/Saturation window, choose any color at the edit, as an example yellow; Point at the image, with the eyedropper, the color that do you want to change. Move the Hue slider and choose a color. Now , with the shift key, fix the color(eyerdropper +) where the changed was not good .......... click OK. With the mask active, paint with the brush(with the set foreground black) where is no good(at that example the face and arms).

Adding texturing and smoothing texture out is helpful to photos. To add a seamless texture you would start with a simple ground texture here - 320x320 big. As you can see when we try to make a horizontal pattern an ugly seam is visible. We'll try to fix that. Go to the filter menu and choose filter/other/offset.. Our texture is 320 wide so +130 value for horizontal -that will move our image 130 pixels to the right. After that we can notice seam -place where ends of image meet. What we have to do know is make seam unvisible by overpainting cloning parts of image and so forth. I covered seam mostly with 1px brush picking colors with eyedropper tool When done, we have to move image to its base position by moving it 130px to the left -choose filters/other/offset.. and write "-130" value. Now we can see how it works. Repeating texture gives us nice pattern without seams. We can of course do the same thing vertically when needed. Ok, hope it's good enough for doing some textures...

Images on layouts are just as important as the layout itself. A fun one to would be the Alert Icon: Project09 tutorials photoshop Alert Icon Step 1 Create a new layer, and select the polygonal lasso tool. Draw a triangle as shown on the left. When you have the selection, smooth it by 6. Step 2 Set the foreground color to #FFEB90 and the background to #FF7131. Select the gradient tool, then choose the radious mode. Click and drag from the top to bottom inside the selection, using the gradient tool. You should see something similar to mine on the left. Step 3 Open up the layer styles box for layer 1. Add an inner shadow with these settings... Blend Mode: Overlay Color: Black Angle: -90 Distance: 2 size: 1 Leave the rest of the settings as default. Step 4 Add an outer glow with these settings... blend mode: normal opacity: 33% size: 9px Spread: 0 Add an exclamation mark using the text tool. Set the color to black, the to size to 48, and set the font to Times New Roman. That will give us a nice thick character. Open the layer styles box for the text layer and add outer glow with these settings... Blend mode: normal opacity: 13% spread: 25 size: 8 Step 5 Create a new layer. Select the rectangular marquee tool and set it to subtract. Cut the previous selection in half, leaving the top half. Contract the selection by 2 then smooth it by 4. Fill it with #ffffff (white) and set the opacity of the layer to 54%. Step 6 Deselect the selection by pressing ctrl+d. Create a new layer. Hold down your ctrl button and click the first layer we made, in the layer palette. This should create a selection around our triangle. Make sure your still on the top layer, which we just created. Set the foreground color to black and stroke the selection, this will create our border. Congratulations! Your finished!