Some people wanted to know how I did the letters in my last piece called “oil”.
I decided to write a tutorial.
First I have to credit Zilla774 for turning me on to the use of illustrator for 3D text when you don’t have a 3D program to render it. This is my rendition and expansion of his thoughts.
There are two programs required for this:
1. Photoshop CS2 (don’t know if you can do some of this stuff with earlier versions.)
2. Illustrator CS2
This is the 2nd part of the typography tutorials. Sorry about all the bad spelling in the last tutorial. I’m not a good speller and it was late… Hopefully it will be better this time 
Hopefully if you are reading this you have read my first tutorial. If you haven’t you can read it Here. Read the rest of this entry »
So I was looking at a Denny’s menu on Saturday and I saw that the whole menu was chocked full of drop shadows.
Although I use drop shadows myself, I really have to stress that there are things not to do when using drop shadows and other effects.
This article is dedicated to photoshop clichés. [please note these are my opinions, but they are shared by much of the design community.] Read the rest of this entry »
This is the truck from my vintage tutorial.
For this tutorial I am using the vintage truck from stock exchange:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/935065
The first thing to do is to extract the truck from the background. Now there really isn’t a good way of extracting an image from a complex background like this. Fortunately we don’t really need to be very careful, because of the extra image effect we will use later. Try to get as close the truck as you can. Read the rest of this entry »
This also goes with the vintage tutorial.
So what is a blending mode?
Well I actually don’t know the technical term for it, so I just say that it’s
an effect that you can use on a layer to blend it with the preceding layers.
There really is no wrong way to use the tool, just play around with it! After
a while you will get the hang of it.
You will find it on the small tool bar in Photoshop 7+
Here you can do a lot of fun things, so just cycle through the modes and see what happens.
NOTE: Each change to your blending mode is a change to the document so keep that in mind because if you do to many changes to the document, you can’t undo them.
This is to go hand in hand with the vintage tutorial.
Using layer masks:
Alright, so the alternative to using the erase tool is layer masks, which enable a GREAT feature. You can undo what you erased way later when you have made significant changes to your file.
How do we use layer masks?
Make a cube, any color.
Go to
» Layer » Layer Mask » Reveal all
This makes a new mask over the layer you created. Notice the new box in your layer palette? 
Now using the BRUSH tool, and having the layer mask selected click on the cube, and it should start erasing the cube. Cool huh?
The great thing about this is that it always remembers where you have erased, so to undo what you have done further down the road you just go back over the area with white.
Remember: ALWAYS use mask to erase something.
White means visible!
Black means erased!
Notice how the white and the black corrispond to the areas that are erased?
Try it with different brush shapes too!
