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I love graphs. There is something gorgeous in aesthetically pleasing, visual representation of data. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to put some style into graphs generated in Adobe Illustrator.

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Step 1: The Column Graph

Not a lot of people are aware of the fact that Illustrator has a tool for generating graphs. While being very useful, the graphs it generates are not really visually interesting…

But let me first introduce you to the basics of this tool. You’ll find it on the tools panel just below the symbol tools. Click and hold the left mouse button over it, and it will reveal the list of all graphs it can create for you.

As you can seethere is a pretty big list of graphs you can generate. In this tutorial I’ll talk about three most popular types: column graph, pie graph and line graph.

So now, please select the Column Graph Tool and draw your first graph.

Step 1.1

After drawing the graph you’ll be greeted with a window that resembles a spreadsheet. Well in fact, it is a spreadsheet Just input some numbers in a horizontal fashion and click OK.

Step 1.2

We’ve got our first graph on the screen, now it’s time to give it some style. I’ll show you how to draw a shape which we’ll later use as a graphic style for the columns.

Close the spreadsheet and hide the layer with the graph, you won’t need it right now. Create a new layer, draw a square on it and fill it with a gradient (#DBF9FF to #00BCE0, angle: -137).

Copy the square, and double click on the shear tool (you’ll find it under the pencil and rotate tool) to shear the object 55 degrees horizontally.

Position it like in the picture below. Then draw a straight line as indicated in the picture. Select both, the sheared square and the line, go to Pathfinder and use the Divide option.

Delete the unnecessary part of the rectangle, play with the gradient settings (I just changed the angle) and you’ll be left with that:

To create the third wall, you need to draw a newrectangle, turn on the Smart Guides option (ctrl/cmd+U), copy the top wall of the cube and align it with the bottom of the front wall.

Then using the Smart Guides snapping feature, position each corner of the rectangle as indicated below.

You should get something like in the picture below. Delete the lower part of the cube, we won’t need it any more, and give the new wall a dark blue gradient (Irecommend using the Edit Colors option in the Color Guide panel for this).

To fake the cubestransparency we need to copy the front side and align it like in the picture below.

Now give the rectangle a pure white to dark blue gradient (#FFFFFF to #00B0D8, angle:0). Go to the Transparency panel, turn on the Multiply mode and lower the rectangles opacity to 20%.

In this step we’ll give some contrast to the cubes edges by drawing white strokes over them. So grab the pen tool and draw 1 pt thick strokes over the edges and adjust their opacity like in the picture below.

Now we’ll add a shine on the corner of the cube. To do so, take the Star Tool and draw a 4 pointed star. You can change the number of points by pressing up or down on your keyboard while you are holding the left mouse button. Position the star like in the picture and give it 80% opacity,

To add final touches to the star, draw two triangles with the Star Tool. Do it like in a previous step, just reduce the number of points to 3 by pressing the down arrow.

Position the triangles like in the picture. Select the bottomcentre points of each rectangle and delete them. Then put the triangles closer to one another. Select two rightmost points of each triangle, right click and select Join, do the same for two leftmost points. Then scale the joined triangles to get a thin pointy shape.

Duplicate the pointy shape. Give both shapes white color and position them like below.

Step 1.3

Style for the columns is ready. Now we need to take care of the most important part. Applying and configuring the graph design in Illustrator. There are four ways in which you can apply the style to a bar graph. Vertically scaled, uniformly scaled, repeating and sliding.

Now you’re probably wondering why didn’t I show the newly created style with the vertical scaling option? Let me show you.

Looks pretty bad… When dealing with more complicated column designs it’s always better to use the sliding option because it enables you to specify which part of design you want to scale and which you want to leave unscaled.

As you can see it looks good. Now let me show you, how you can prepare a design to be scaled this way.

Step 1.4

Lets get back to the cube we created a few steps earlier. To make our design scale properly using the sliding option we need todraw two things.

1. A rectangle which will indicate the boundaries of our design

2. straight line to define which part of the design will be stretched.

Draw the rectangle and the line just like you see them below:

Now group everything (ctrl/cmd+G). Go to the layers panel and put the boundary rectangle at the very bottom of the group (this is very important!), the rectangle shouldn’t have any fill or stroke, so turn them off.

Select the black line with the Direct Selection Tool. Go to View>Guides>Make Guides or press ctrl/cmd+5. We need to convert this line into a guide or else it won’t work. This is the only way to show the Illustrator where to stretch the design.

Now uncheck View>Guides>Lock Guides. It’s just for convenience, if the guides have been locked you wouldn’t be able to move the guide we just created.

Step 1.5

Select the group, go to Object>Graph>Design and click "New Design". Your design is now ready to be applied to the graph . You can also rename it by clicking the "Rename Design" button.

Delete the cube from the page area, make the graph we created earlier visible again and select it. Then go to Object>Graph>Column, select your design from the list, and choose Sliding from the drop down menu. Click OK.

Your graph should look similar to this. If your columns seem to be too wide, change the Column Width parameter in Object>Graph>Type.

Creating graph designs may be a complicated task. If you can’t do it, justdownload the source files. You’ll find a ready made column design outside of the artboard in "bar_final.ai".

In this last step I added a few touches. I made some lines invisible, and changed the font. I also added the orizontal lines by using the Tick Marks option in Object>Graph>Type>Value Axis.

The graph is ready, and what is the most important, it’s editable, you can change column values or add newvalues to the spreadsheet and it will work just fine.

It’s worth noting that design we created will also work withdifferent types of graphs:Stacked Column Graph,Bar Graph and Stacked Bar Graph.

Step 2 The Pie Graph

In this step we’ll try to get some nice glossy reflections on the pie graph.We’ll be using advanced 3D and lighting options, so don’t worry if things will get slow on your machine.

Take the Pie Graph tool, draw a new pie graph and input some numbers into the spreadsheet.

The following steps will be very processor intensive. If your computer is slow, you may have to wait a few minutes before the 3D effect renders. If it doesn’t, click "Stop", exit the "3D Extrude & Bevel" option and try again.

You can also decrease the "Blend Steps" parameter in the light settings. This parameter directly affects the quality and speed of rendering (the lower the faster but with less quality).

Step 2.1

Give the graph some colours, then go to Effects>3D>Extrude and Bevel and input values from the picture below.

To create nice reflections on our graph we need to round its edges by using the Rounded Bevel option from the Bevel drop down menu. Adjust the bevel to 4 pt height and make it Extent in. It is also essential to select the Plastic Shading, this is the option responsible for rendering lighting reflections.

Now you can notice nice little reflections on the edges of the graph, but this is just the beginning, we’ll make it look much better.

Click the "More Options" button to expand the window and make the light configuration visible. Now add two more lights. Position all three lights and give them all the same parameters like in the picture.

Do you notice thegorgeous big reflection on the side of our graph? It looks great, but it needs one more adjustment. If you zoom into the reflection you’ll see strangeartefacts in the color blending.

Actually it’s quite easy to fix, just go back to the Extrude and Bevel options (you have to do this by double clicking on this effect in the Appearance Panel after you select the graph) andincrease the Blend Steps parameter to 100. You mayincrease this parameter even more, but it has a great impact on the rendering time. If your computer is slow I advise you to keep the blend steps as low as possible.

Step 2.2 (Optional)

The graph looks good andis 100% editable, you may change the numbers in the spreadsheet and it will update. This step is optional because if you want to style the graph a little more you will have to redo Step 2.2 each time you update the spreadsheet.

Duplicate the pie graph and go to its Extrude andBevel options. Change the Surface Shading to Wireframe and click OK.

Expand the wireframe (Object>Expand Appearance) and delete every line except the top edges of the object. You should be left with something that looks like that:

You may have to ungroup the shapes a few times (ctrl/cmd+shift+G) because Illustator tends to group objects several times after they are expanded.

Then after your shapes are ungrouped, group them, to make sure they are all in one group.

Select the shapes, give them a white, 1 pt stroke with 50% opacity.

Duplicate the whole group. Make it 100% opacity, no stoke, white fill.

Take the rectangle tool and draw a new rectangle. Rotate and scale it like in the picture below. Fill it with white to black gradient.

Select the rectangle and the white filled group. Go to the Transparency Panel and from the drop down menu, click "Make Opacity Mask".

The graph is now ready Your outcome should resemble this:

Step 3 The Line Graph

Select the Line Graph tool, draw a new graph and input data into the spreadsheet.

Now we will create a marker design for the graph. Markers are those little rectangles located in places where the lines connect.

Select one of the markers, copy it and paste it.

Use the Ellipse Tool to create a circle, give it a white stroke and a dark blue to light blue radial gradient. Then select the gradient tool and click on the place indicated in the picture to move the gradients centre.

Select the circle and the marker that we copied and pasted earlier. Align them to their horizontal and verticalcentres. Select the marker and turn off any stroke or fill.

Now, this is very important, put the marker below the circle in the layershierarchy and group both objects (the circle and the marker).

With both objects (circle and marker) still selected go to Object>Graph>Design. Click "New Design" button, your design is ready to be applied to the graph.

Lets use the design we just created to style our graph. Select the graph and go to Object>Graph>Marker, select your design and click OK.

The graph is almost ready it just needs a few more tweaks. Select it and go to Object>Graph>Type. In the Graph Options select "Draw Filled Lines" and make them 3pt thick.

Then in Value Axis options select "Override Calculated Values" and in the Max field input a number higher than last number in your value axis. Mine is 10, so I input 12. Also select Full Width tick marks.

Go to the Category Axis and make it draw Full Length tick marks.

Your result should look more or less like this:

The last step is fairly simple. I played with some colours and stroke widths.Changed gradient to green on the second lines markers (I recommend using Edit Colors option in the Colour Guide panel for this), and added arrowheads to the main axes (Effect>Add Arrowheads).

You may also apply this style to the Scatter Graph and, to some extent, the Area Graph.

This is the end of the tutorial, as you can see Illustrator is capable of producing some nice looking graphs. I encourage you to read Illustrators help files. You will find there a lot of additional info about graph tools. And as always, try to experiment and have fun.

Download the source files Download the source files

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a beautiful clown fish illustration inside Adobe Illustrator CS4. This is an intermediate tutorial and it requires some pen drawing skills. Let’s begin.

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Step 1: Set Up

Open Up Illustrator and set up a new document, any size you like. I use standard 800 x 600 pixels. Rename "Layer 1" to "Fish".

Step 2: Fish Body

Select Pen Tool (P) and try to draw the main fish body path. This may take a couple of tries to achieve the needed result, don’t try to make it perfect, it should be a schematic fish shape. Pay attention to the head and caudal fin shape, the rest will be covered with other fins.

Step 3: Body details (a)

Press E to select the Ellipse tool and draw a small ellipse intersecting the head. Select the body path and this ellipse and press the Unite button in the Pathfinder palette to create a single path from these two.

Step 4: Body details (b)

Select the Pen Tool (P) and draw a path as you see in the image, after extracting it from main body path it will ad a little gap to the body for the mouth. Select the drawn path and the body path and click on the Minus Front button in the Pathfinder palette to extract it from the body.

Step 5: Body Color

Click on the body path that we achieved and fill it with a gradient from a dark orange ( I used #D2690B )to a brighter orange of your choice ( #FEA600 ). Adjust the angle of the gradient.

Step 6: Eyes

Use Ellipse Tool (E) to draw the left eye of the fish. Fill it with gradient from #FEA600 to #FE8800 with the same angle as the body gradient. Draw a smaller ellipse, fill it with black and place it on the top of the first one.

Step 7: Eye shadow

Press V to select the main Selection Tool and click on the bigger path of the eye to select it. Press Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + B ( Cmd + C and Cmd + B on Mac ) to make a copy of it and place it under the original. You won’t see any changes for now. With your copy selected, hold down the Shift key and drag the top left corner of the bounding box to make it bigger but keep the proportions. Go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur, enter Radius value 6.8 pixels, click ok.

Step 8: Mouth

Use Pen Tool to trace a path for the mouth. Select the body path and make a copy of it by pressing Ctrl + C ( Cmd + C on Mac ). While holding down the Shift key, click on the copy of the body and the newly created mouth path to select them both. Press Intersect button in the Pathfinder palette. Fill the result path with # FE8800.

Step 9 : White bars (a)

We’ve got to the most interesting part of the tutorial, we’ll now draw those nice white bars that make clown fish look so cute. Select the Pen Tool and try to draw a thick bar intersecting the body ( I’ve added a background to the illustration to make it easier to see ). Select the body path and make a copy of it(see how in Step select this copy and the bar path and press the Intersect button in the Pathfinder palette.

Step 10: White bars (b)

Repeat Step 9 two more times.

Step 11: White Bars (c)

Select a white bar, go to Object > Path > Offset Path and enter 4 pixels as offset value and hit Enter. Fill the resulting path with black. Make a Copy of the body path, hold down the Shift key and select the copy and the black bar path, press the Intersect button in the Pathfinder palette.

Step 12: White bars (d)

Repeat Step 11 actions on the rest of the bars.

Step 13: Left fin

Select Pen Tool (P) and draw the left fin path as you see in the image. Using Eyedropper Tool (I) click on the body path to apply the same gradient and options to it, adjust the angle of the gradient (-143). Use Pen Tool again to draw an intersecting, black path on the fin. Make a copy of the fin path, select it and the black path and click on the Intersect button in the Pathfinder palette.

Step 14: Right fin

The same way we’ve drawn the right fin in Step 13, draw the right one. Trace the fin itself then an intersecting black part and the cut the excess using Pathfinder. After that, select the fin and the black part of it and press Shift + Ctrl + [ (Shift + Cmd + [ on Mac) to send them back under the rest sub layers. Press Ctrl + G (Cmd + G on Mac) to group these two paths together.

Step 15: Right fin (b)

Select the group we’ve just made, press Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + B, to make a copy of i and paste it back. Move this copy to the left, rotate it clockwise a little and press Shift + Ctrl + [ once again.

Step 16: Dorsal and Bottom fins

Repeat Step 13 another three times to draw Dorsal and Bottom (anal) fin, don’t forget to adjust gradient angles to match to the rest of the shadows and highlights.

Step 17: Decorate Caudal Fin

Select Pen Tool and draw a path slightly bigger that caudal fin, try to match it’s edges to the black stroke near the white bar to blend these two paths together. Press Shift + Ctrl + [ once to send this path under the body path.

Step 18: Background (a)

Create a new layer under the "Fish" layer and name it ‘Background". Select the Blob Brush Tool (Shift + B), set no fill and a dark blue as stroke color (#21637A). Braw some random lines on the background, don’t pay to much attention to them, we’ll completely blur them later. Set another, brighter blue color (#2B93AF) as stroke color and draw some random lines again. Finally select a very bright blue color (#45D3F4) and fill all those white gaps.

Step 19: Background (b)

Select all blue paths that you’ve drawn using Blob Brush Tool, go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur, enter 37 pixels as Radius value and click ok. Lock this layer.

Step 20: Anemone (a)

Create new layer under "Fish" and name it "Anemone B". Select Pen Tool and draw a line, make it about 50pt thick and round corners. Go to Object > Expand and click ok. Fill it with a vertical gradient from #AA8B7E to #87695B. Select it and go to Effect > Stylize > Inner Glow and set the Mode to Normal, Color #D8D1B4, Opacity 75% and Blur 18px, hit Enter.

Step 21: Anemone (b)

Select Anemone tentacle path and create a lot of copies of it, Try to place them close to each other, reflect them, move up and down so they look different.

Step 22: Anemone (c)

Create a new layer above "Fish" layer and and name it "Anemone A". Repeat Step 21 once again to fill all free space under the fish with Anemone.

Step 23: Anemone Blur (a)

Select the closest to background tentacles of Anemone, go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur and enter 9.8px as Radius value, click ok.

Step 24: Anemone Blur (b)

Select a row that is closer to fish, or the next row of tentacles this time and also apply a blur effect on them but enter 3px Radius value this time.

Step 25: Anemone Blur (c)

Select some tentacles that are very close to the bottom of the image, those that hiding caudal fin and the white bar near the caudal fin and apply the same 3px (or 4) blur effect to them. This will add a macro effect to the image.

Step 26: Final Result

Our clown fish illustration is ready!

Download the Adobe Illustrator Vector File Download the Source Files

The mastery of color theory, relations and harmonies is one of the primary steps to uncovering the full beauty and potential of your images (in the realms of art, design and/or photography). Find out more in this simple, practical, colorful guide.

Quick Nav:

• Color Models
• RGB Color Model
• Color Harmonies
• Term Definitions
• Hue, Saturation and Brightness
• Conclusion

Color Models

Depending on your background and your purpose, you will view primary colors differently. There are three generally accepted models: RGB (red, green, blue), CMY (cyan, magenta, and yellow), and RYB (red, blue, yellow).

Primary color models can be divided into two categories: additive and subtractive.

The additive primary colors are obtained by light: red, green and blue (RGB). When combined, these colors create white. Scientists in the late 19th century established that color perception is best described in terms of the primary additive colors RGB because it is based on the human perception of colors.

The subtractive primary colors are obtained by the subtraction of light: cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY). They form the basis of printing colors and combine to form black, the K in CMYK. The second set of subtractive primary colors is: red, yellow and blue (RYB). This model is primarily used in art and design education, particularly painting. According to Johannes Itten, a Swiss color and art theorist, the primary use of this color wheel is for mixing pigments.

Color Model Application:

RGB: Photography, video/film and design.

CMYK: Print design.

RYB: Art, painting and design.

RGB and RYB Confused?

In regards to design, the purpose of the color wheel is to aid the creation of visually harmonious color schemes not to confuse you. I would recommend using the RGB model because it reflects human color perception correctly. Of course, you can experiment with both types of the color wheel.

Now that we’ve covered the various color models and their uses, we can proceed with confidence. We will be using the RGB color model.

RGB Color ModelPrimary, Secondary, and Tertiary Colors

In the RGB (additive) color model, the Primary colors are: red, green, blue.

The Secondary colors: cyan, magenta and yellow, are formed by the sum of two primary colors of equal intensity.

Lastly we have (six) Tertiary colors, which are comprised of mixing half primary color and half secondary color: orange, yellow-green (lime), cyan-green, cyan-blue, blue-magenta (purple), red-magenta (pink).

The additive and subtractive sets of tertiary colors RGB and CMY are exactly the same, just on different points of the wheel.

“The color wheel not only helps understand the relationship of different colors but also the classification of colors. It also provides a quick reference to the primary, secondary and tertiary hues.” – Mark Boulton

Color Harmonies

Monochromatic

Monochrome selections are simply one color from the color wheel.

Complementary

Complementary color schemes use colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel.

Split-complementary

The split-complementary color scheme is a variation of the complementary color scheme. In addition to the base color, it uses two colors adjacent to its complement.

Analogous

Analogous color schemes use colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Analogous schemes are often found in nature and are harmonious and pleasing to the eye.

Accented Analogic

Accented analogic color schemes are combinations of analogous and complementary color schemes. In addition to colors that are adjacent to each other, it uses a complementary accent at its opposite.

Triad

A triadic color scheme uses colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel.

Tetrad (double complementary)

The tetradic or double complementary color scheme uses four colors arranged into two complementary pairs.

Square

The square color scheme is similar to the tetradic, but with all four colors evenly spaced around the color wheel.

Warm and Cool Colors

The color wheel can be divided into warm and cool colors. Warm colors are vivid and energetic, and tend to advance in space. Cool colors give an impression of calm, and create a soothing impression. White, black and grey are considered to be neutral.

Term Definitions

Let’s take a look at the meanings of a few color-related words. These words can often confuse and be erroneously substituted for one another. This following list of definitions will help us proceed unambiguously. All definitions are taken, of course, from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Hue

The attribute of colors that permits them to be classed as red, yellow, green, blue, or any intermediate between any contiguous pair of these colors.

Saturation

A chromatic purity; freedom from dilution with white.

Brightness

The attribute of light-source colors by which emitted light is ordered continuously from light to dark in correlation with its intensity.

Tint

A variation of color produced by adding white to it and characterized by low saturation with relatively high lightness.

Tone

The color quality or value; a tint or shade of color; the color that appreciably modifies a hue or white or black.

Shade

A color produced by a pigment or dye mixture having some black in it.

Chroma

A quality of color combining hue and saturation.

Hue, Saturation and Brightness

Hue

In practical terms, hue refers to a specific tone of color. It is not another name for color as color can have saturation and brightness as well. For instance, colors with the same hue are distinguished with adjectives referring to their lightness and/or chroma, such as with “light green” or “pastel blue”.

Saturation

Saturation is the intensity of a hue from grey. At maximum saturation a color would contain no grey at all. At minimum saturation, a color would contain mostly grey.

Brightness

Brightness refers to how much white or black is contained within a color.

The image below (left) of Photoshop’s Color Picker shows the saturation and brightness of the cyan hue. The saturation is increased by dragging the picker horizontally towards the right of the box and decreased towards the left. Brightness is increased by dragging vertically towards the top of the box and decreased towards the bottom. The hundred percent mark of a hue’s saturation and brightness is the upper-right corner.

Examples for hue, saturation, and brightness are best shown in the hue/saturation adjustment layer. Each of the three is affected separately and the display sliders intuitively show the principles referenced above. See the example below (right).

Conclusion

Cognizance of colors and/or combinations that are pleasing, and savvy use of post-production tools are just two of the ways that comprehension of color theory, relations and harmonies is useful to us. We have already put this knowledge to use to improve and stylize images in How to Use Curves in Photoshop and Color Correction Basics in Photoshop.

We will continue to use color theory insofar as every photograph can be improved with the post-production tools within Photoshop, Lightroom, or other image-editing software. Specifically, a few adjustment tools where color theory knowledge helps include: Curves, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Channel Mixer, Selective Color—and the list goes on. The mastery of color theory, relations and harmonies is one of the primary steps to uncovering the full beauty and potential of your images.

In this tutorial, we’ll manipulate a photo with abstract elements to make it more interesting and active.

Materials Needed:

• Stock Photo of your choice. I have used iStock: Female &
  Funky Swirls.
• Cloud Brushes: JavierZhX
• Photoshop Action: Manicho.
• Sinedots 2

The Final Image

You can see the original full sized piece here. This tutorial is based off my original work shown in the full size image.

Step 1: Plan Ahead

First thing to look at is the angle of your photo and consider what direction your photo is already moving in. If you take a look at my final outcome, I chose a diagonal angle (already an active direction) since that is what fitted best with the subject.

I have also chosen to use the two main colours that were already on the stock photo—Greyscale (black/white/grey) & Blue. You may also want to add tones/ contrast at the very end but we will get to that soon enough.

Step 2: The Swirls

I have opened up the .EPS file for the swirls to a nice large size and cut out 3. Using our imagination, we can place them and rotate them to follow the direction we decided earlier on. Once you have them in a nice place turn all of the swirls greyscale (Shift+Ctrl+U). Make sure they are all on seperate layers.

The reason as to why I’ve told you to keep the swirls on different layers is because we will be editing them a bit, and you wouldnt be able to do that if they are all merged flat layers.

Swirl 1: This is the swirl on her left arm. Set the layer opacity to 50%. I really dont like having so much grey on the model—the base stock is what you have to either go around or try to “flow” through. I will be removing some of the swirl parts to make her body still show yet still have some swirl bits around her arm as if it’s joined to her or as if she’s jumping through it.

As you can see I have removed parts from her arm and stomach.

When you remove parts of the swirl you can use either or both of these tools: Eraser Tool with a Soft Brush and/ or the Polygonal Laso Tool. The Pen tool can be used to draw selections or masks too if you feel comfortable with it. I used the Eraser Tool for the stomach area and the hand, while I used the Polygonal Laso Tool for the arm.

Swirl 2: This is the swirl on her right arm. Set the layer opacity to 50%. This is pretty much the same as “swirl 1″: make it flow with her body in the angle shes jumping.

As you can see I have removed parts from her arm and hand.

.

Swirl 3: This is the swirl on her legs going up to the stomach. Set the layer opacity to 50%. Tthis is a bit more difficult then the other two as you may have to remove some more to make it look good and not “out of place”.

Step 3: Adding Some ColourCaution: Always Save a .PSD file of all the Layers !

Save your work regulary and keep all layers. Saving more than one copy with Save As… can’t hurt if you want to try different variations of your document.

To add some colour onto the swirls/ graphic just take a soft round brush and make a line curving inside parts of the swirls, this will make it look as if the colours were on it already.

This is just a base—the swirls and colour will look more refined later on.

Once you have drawn a few lines (if they are not close it’s ok to put them on the same layer but if they are close together put them on seperate layers. This makes editing easier.) use the Smudge Tool. Point the corners out making them fade around corners.

After you have smudged all the brush strokes, set those layers to Hard Light blending mode.

It will now look like the image to the right. It should have a nice ‘glow’ to it.

You can repeat this process for any other colors you may want to add, just be careful you don’t combine so many colors that nothing fits together.

Step 4: The Diagonal Lines

To create the lines in our image, we’re going to use the Polygonal Laso Tool. You can also try a pixel stretching technique, and rotating the stretched pixels if you’re comfortable with that.

All you have to do is click (outside the art) hold down Shift on your keyboard and click again over the other side of the art (while holding shift you will see it the tool works in nice angles) make a straight line down a few pixels click again then work your way back up to where you first clicked. It’s a diagonal line! Fill it in (with the paint bucket) once you’ve closed it off.

Create a few more stripes in various sizes and color.

All my diagonal lines are on top of all the other layers. I have also used different colours to fill in the lines, various versions of the blue colour that I selected – darker blue, lighter blue etc.

Now to make them blend more, merge the stripes. Duplicate (CRTL+J) the stripes and hide them (click on the eye next to one of the stripe layers). Set the new stripes layer to: Colour Burn. Now this will look a bit heavy on the eyes so get your Eraser Tool and set it to a really big size( “]” key) and remove 50% of the stripes in the middle like the image below:

Now Un-hide the other stripes layer, duplicate it and repeat the above step but with a layer setting of Overlay and erase a different area, but keep the stripes away from the stomach, face etc etc you can touch parts of the body with the stripes just dont cover the model in them.

If you want more intensity in colour if you haven’t got a lot then duplicate the original stripe lines and go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and set it to about 20 and layer setting to
Overlay move them to a part where there isnt many lines.

Keep an original stripe layer at all times while doing this. Once you’ve done all the stripes you can now add the stripe “lines” this is done by using the original stripe layer—select all the stripe layers (CTRL + Click the layer witht he original stripes). Go to Select -> Modify -> Contract, a small box will pop up, by the size of your image it will depend if you want nice small 1px lines put in 1. I will be using this setting (1 for 1 pixel lines). Once you click “OK” it will contract it for you, press delete on your keyboard.

Your original stripes are now 1 pixel lines. Do the same as what you did with the bigger stripes but you can set them to anything you like, I will be setting the layers to: Linear Dodge and Overlay. Don’t forget to keep an original handy but hidden. If you want your 1 pixel lines to stand out more you can try this, get any layer of lines duplicate them and go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and set it to about 2.0 to 3.0.

You can also duplicate the bigger lines to add to random areas, for example her right arm is facing slightly away from the angle I chose so I will add a little bit of the big stripes next/ near to it. Also her knee is facing downwards so I added a little bit there too.

Step 5: The Blue Gradient Lines

This Requires the Pen Tool. I am only using this to increase the intesity of the blue colours in the swirls.

When I use this tool I use the settings shown in the image below.

Make a new layer then select the Pen Tool and click on the end of a blue smudged area (on the swirl part) then click on the other end of it. You should have a line, click in the middle of it and click and hold CTRL (also hold the left mouse button down like when you click) and drag it to a rounded shape, click near the first point you created and do the same so it sort of looks like the image above.

Right click the path (the rounded shape you just created) and click Fill Path. Make sure you have the blue colour selected as your Foreground color. You should now have a blue shape with the pen tool paths still around it—just click delete twice to get rid of the paths. Once you have the shape by itself get the Eraser Tool and rub out the inner part of the shape then set the shapes’ layer to Hard Light like the image to the right. Duplicate it and move it down slightly. Do the same for the others.

Step 6: The Clouds

Use which ever cloud textures/brushes you want. I have picked 4 just to surround the model.

One more thing.

Keep the clouds at the angle you have chosen otherwise it might not fit in. Also remember whenever your doing a graphic with brushes, stocks, actions etc check with the artist for terms of use etc.

Step 7: Tones & Sinedots

I used a program called Sinedots II plugin for Photoshop to get the white lines across the model. You just download it, open it up in the filters menu and click random til you get a nice one that will fit in with the image. Duplicate it and blur it to 3.0.

Really, it’s that simple.

If you’re clever with Illustrator, you can probably create them using that software as well.

For the Tones, I like using “Photoshop Actions” or “Photo Filters”. Some are great, some aren’t so great. Here are some examples:

With this outcome merged everything and placed the merged image into a new canvas, duplicated the image twice and the one closest to the original I set it to Multiply (layer blending), then added the tone from Manicho (found in at the top of this tutorial) its “#42 Contrast Desat 3″ onto the second one, set that to Overlay, opacity 50%, duplicated that and erased the top and bottom grey corners to add depth to the model/ graphics.

Experiment with tones and the intensity of your image. Test out different color combinations to see what you can do with your own version of this!

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In this tutorial, we’ll be designing a clean website layout using the 960 Grid System. You’ll see how working with this system can streamline web development workflow, and how to work with a grid system.

Final Image PreviewStep 1: Create a new document

Start by creating a new document in Photoshop with a width of 1680px and a height of 1100px, then fill the background with a very light grey (#F9F9F9).

Step 2: Adding the grid

There are many grid systems available for use online, and there are good practices for creating systems of your own. The purpose of this tutorial is to ease you into a system if you haven’t tried one before. They can really make workflow a breeze, and are great for prototyping layouts.

Download the 960 grid system. Once you’ve downloaded Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System extract it and then open up the templates folder. Open up the 960 12 column grid in Adobe Photoshop.

Next we’re going to insert this grid into our document. Select the “12 col Grid” group, merge it then copy and paste it into our main document (you may be more comfortable directly editing in a copy of the template file provided in the system which provides guides of its own, this is more of a personal preference option on my behalf). The grid will be slightly small on height so stretch the grid vertically so it touches the top and bottom of the document.

Now we need a baseline grid. A Baseline Grid will help with areas such as spacing of elements and line-height. First create a new document 24×24px, delete the background, then draw a single 1px line along the bottom of the document. We’re going to define this as a pattern: Edit > Define Pattern and give it a memorable name.

Next return to your document and create a new layer. Fill this layer with the pattern, Edit > Fill this will create your Baseline Grid.

Finally we’ll mark out our working area using guides. Create a new guide View > New Guide, select vertical and create guides at 360px, 840px & 1320px the reason we put these guides is so we get a 960px working area between 360px and 1320px and a central line 840px.

Convienent Guides

If you’re working directly from the 960 Template file, convienent guides are already setup for you marking the grid and gutters. Just go to View > Show > Guides

Save as a Template.

You can save this document as a template and reuse whenever necessary, it saves a lot of time and the canvas height can always be changed to suit. Again, over time you’ll likely prefer the full grid system with the extra guides.

Step 3: Starting the design

Now that we have our template sorted we can make a start on the design, the design will be split into 5 sections:

1. Header
2. Callout
3. Content – Left
4. Content – Right
5. Footer

Step 4: Add the header

We going to start at the top and work out way down so the header is first. Grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool and select an area across the width of the
document and a height of around 120px—turning on the rulers will help or drag down till you have filled 5 of the horizontal markers, then fill this with a dark grey (#2C2C2C). This header bar will hold the logo and the navigation.

Step 5: Insert your logo

Next insert your logo into the top left, lining it up with the second column of the grid giving the site a padding of 40px, for this project I am simply using a font based logo of 50 pt Century Gothic filled with a light blue (#ADC7D9) separating the two words by placing the second in bold and in white (#FFFFFF). Next apply an inner shadow to your logo element. I reduced the inner shadow opacity to 25% and gave it the following values, Distance: 2px , Choke: 0%, Size: 5px

Step 6: Add navigation

The navigation is next on the list. To keep a simple clean look we’ll be using text based navigation. Select 18pt Arial and write out your navigation. Colour the active link which in this case is home in white (#FFFFFF) and fill the others with a light grey (#BBBBBB). Align these elements and place them into the center of the top header bar.

Step 7: Add the Callout

I call this section a callout because essentially that’s what it does—it calls out information about the page. Repeat the process for the header bar by selecting the Rectangular Marquee Tool but with a height of 240px then fill with the same light blue (#ADC7D9) as the logo. We’re are going to add a subtle gradient to the section so double click to bring up the Layer Style Panel and select Gradient Overlay. Choose the colour to transparent overlay then change the blend mode to overlay and reduce the opacity to 30%.

Step 8: Creating the Callout Background

As the company is called blue grid we’re going to add a grid styled background to the callout. To do this were going to use a similar technique to when we added the horizontal lines, first create a new document 25px by 25px. Once again delete the background to make it transparent and draw a single 1px line along the bottom and this time up one side and define it as a pattern Edit > Define Pattern.

Step 9: Adding the Callout Background

Create a new layer above your callout layer and fill this layer Edit > Fill with your new pattern.

Rotate this layer 15 Degrees apply a colour overlay of white and place over the callout bar. Create a new layer and merge it with the white gridded layer and name it.

Apply a blend mode of Soft Light to this layer. Select your callout bar area either with the Rectangular Marquee Tool or Control + Click the layer. Next select the Rectangular Marquee Tool right click (Control + Click) and choose select inverse then Delete. This will remove all of the grid that isn’t in the callout area.

The next step is to make sure that the gridded area only extends to the edge of the 960px working area so pop your guides up if they are hidden. View > Show > Guides, next add a layer mask to the grid layer.

Select the layer mask by clicking it then select the Gradient Tool (G) and choose a black to transparent gradient. We are going to use this to erase the grid that lies outside the main 960px area.

Make sure the gradient is set to Linear and is a black to transparent gradient. Start from the edges and drag the gradient in till it reaches the guides. Repeat this on both sides until you are happy with the look. You should notice that the layer mask should show the black gradient around the outside.

Step 10: Adding the Callout Content

Our callout requires a page callout, which we shall do in text select Arial 45pt (#2C2C2C) and write your callout highlighting any essential words by placing them in bold. Under this place a small introductory sentence in a smaller 17pt. and place these on the left hand side of the callout bar.

Step 11: Adding the Slideshow

Grab your Rectangular Marquee Tool and drawing out a section between the far right and the middle guide, make the height 8 lines of the callout bar leaving 1 on top and 1 below and Fill with Dark Grey (#2C2C2C). This will be the background of the slideshow.

Add a shadow to your slideshow background, double click to open the Layer style Panel select drop shadow change the colour to (#2C2C2C) select a Distance of 1px and a size of 10px.

Next you’re going to need some dummy content to place in the slideshow, I personally have taken a screenshot of my blog. Resize this so that it’s the same size as the slideshow then Select > Modify > Contract 10px , select the inverse of this as before and delete.

Step 12: Content section

To start off the content section we are going to add a subtle gradient, use your Rectangular Marquee Tool to select all the area under the callout, next select the Gradient Tool (G). Select a gradient from (#F0F0F0) to transparent and drag the gradient downwards. Don’t go too far as the background should return to (#F9F9F9) by the bottom of the page.

Step 13: Content – Left

Add an introductory paragraph in Arial 18pt #9C9C9C as well as styled link Underlined #A3BBCC.

Step 14: Adding a list of services

First add a heading for the section in Arial 25pt Bold #262626, proceed to add list items in 18pt Arial #9C9C9C to illustrate the bullet point you can either draw them out using the Elliptical Marquee Tool or use Alt codes Alt+7 colour these with the light blue (#A4BCCD) and align with the grid.

Repeat this to add any additional information.

Step 15: Content – Right

The right hand section of the page will show a selection of recent news. First add a title in the same style as those previous Arial 25pt Bold #262626 and align this with the header of the services section. This section will list our latest news, Create a header for the news post in Arial 18pt #A4BDCD and place content under it in Arial 16pt #9C9C9C. Repeat this for 3 stories then place a link underneath in Arial Underline 16pt #A4BDCD to the news page.

Step 16: Footer

Our last section is the Footer this will hold a login form, contact details and a few links. Start by selecting the bottom section of the document with the Rectangular Marquee Tool and fill it with Dark Grey (#262626).

We’re going to add the form now, first create a header Arial 20pt Bold (#FFFFFF) and place it on the left hand side of the footer. Then use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to create two rectangles these will be the input fields. Fill these will descriptions Arial 16pt #9C9C9C

Repeat this for the submit button but use the Rounded Rectangle Tool(U), then add an Inner shadow to these elements, drop the opacity to 30%, size and spread to 0 and the distance to 10px. Add a “lost-password” link in Arial 13pt Underline #A4BDCD.

Step 17: Footer – Right

Finally were going to finish up by adding some contact info, add a header Arial 20pt Bold (#FFFFFF) and line up with the form header, then add contact info below in Arial 16pt #FFFFFF.

Step 18: Check alignment and balance

Use the grid and the guides to check that everything is lined up and balanced, if not then adjust accordingly.

Step 19: Relax, you’re finished

Hopefully, you’ve gotten a small grasp of how you can work with a grid system, and customize a basic system of your own. I would strongly encourage you to experiment with these systems more until working with them becomes second nature for you. Over time, working with a grid will make your job as a designer much easier!

Download the PSD Download the PSD

April was an amazing month with spring creativity oozing from everywhere. Here’s Creative Bookmarks April!

Quick Nav:

• Photoshop Tutorials
• Illustrator Tutorials
• Web/Blogging Tutorials
• Freebies, Inspiration, & Resources

Photoshop TutorialsCreate a Retro Urban Gig Poster in Photoshop

In this tutorial, from PSDTuts+, you’ll learn how to create a poster for a dance party using a textured and retro look that has become so trendy.

How to Create an Incredible Typographic Illustration

In this two-part tutorial you’ll learn how to create a typographic illustration without using any photos. You’ll build this composition from scratch using Cinema 4D and Photoshop.
See Also: Part Two

Create a Sleek and Stylish MP3 Player in Photoshop

This tutorial shows you how to create a sleek and stylish MP3 interface using many of Photoshop’s tricks and effects that add depth and realism.

Create a Cosmic Sci-fi Poster Design in Photoshop

This tutorial, from WeGraphics, teaches you how to use Photoshop, Illustrator and Cinema4D to create a sci-fi inspired composition.

Clash of the Titans Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, from Abduzeedo, you’ll learn how to create a text effect inspired by the Clash of the Titans posters and artworks that will take you close to no time to accomplish.

Combine 3D Shapes and Vectors for a Dynamic Composition

This tutorial teaches you how to use brushes, custom shapes and stock imagery to create a dynamic and eye-pleasing piece of artwork.

Create a Vibrant Colorful Alcohol Product Ad in Photoshop

In this great tutorial from Creative Fan, you’ll learn how to create a vibrant and colorful ad that combines different types of stock photography for an excellent result.

Simple & Cloudy Portfolio Layout in Photoshop

This tutorial teaches you how to use Photoshop’s various tools to create a practical and effective portfolio layout with a cloud-type theme.

Create an iPhone App Website in Photoshop

In this tutorial, from Devise Function, you’ll learn how to creat a simple yet practical app website in Photoshop. Plus: The complete Photoshop file is free for download.

Add Brilliant Light Effects to Your Work with Photoshop

In this tutorial, from Design Instruct, you’ll learn how to use simple techniques and brushes in Photoshop to create an amazing composition.

Creating Retro Folded Typography Using Photoshop

Using real strips of paper as a model, this tutorial, teaches you how to create a retro-looking piece of type that uses Photoshop’s tools and techniques excellently.

How to Design a Speedometer Icon in Photoshop

In this excellent tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an extremely detailed speedometer icon in which you’ll learn many tricks and techniques essential to icon design.
See Also: Part Two

Illustrator TutorialsHow To Create Outstanding Modern Infographics

An outstanding, from VectorTuts+, proving that data can be beautiful. You’ll learn how to use graph tools and other techniques that will definitely come in handy.

Create a Grimy Text Treatment with a Pen Tablet

In this tutorial, on Vectips, you’ll learn how to get grimy and create a text treatment using Illustrator’s Blob brush, Live Paint, and a pen tablet.

Create a Simple Storefront Icon

This tutorial teaches you some simple techniques, such as basic shapes, effects and gradients to create a great looking store icon.

Vector Plasma Television

In this great tutorial, from Vector Diary, you’ll learn how to use basic shapes and gradients to create a realistic television.

Create a Typographical Logomark

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to go through the process of creating a typographical logo from scratch.

How To Design a Sweet Linework & Typography Combo

This great tutorial from VectorTuts+, inspired by the guys at Mulheres Barbadas, combines the use of Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop to create this brilliant illustration & type combo.

Designing a Typeface, With Illustrator and FontLab, from Start to Finish

This an excellent three-part tutorial that walk you through the process of designing a typeface from inspiration to completion.
See Also: Part Two | Part Three

How to Create a Baroque Pattern in Illustrator

Starting from a sketch, this tutorial teaches you how to create a stylish pattern with Illustrator in only ten easy steps.

Retro 3D Arcade Text Effect in Illustrator

Illustrator’s 3D capabilities are amazing. This tutorial tutorial teaches you how to use them the right way to create a retro, arcade-looking, typographic effect.

Web TutorialsBuild a Simple Image Slideshow with jQuery Cycle

Image slideshows can be a very useful technique to display multiple photos and maximizing space. This great tutorial, walks you through creating one of these using jQuery.

Coding Up a Web Design Concept into HTML & CSS

This tutorial on Line25, teaches you how to create a website from a Photoshop design into a coded website in HTML and CSS3.
See Also: How To Build Your Own Wordpress Theme

The Intricacy of Simplicity: CSS3

This great screencast and written tutorial combo explains how to create great looking effects with CSS3 instead of using images, therefore, allowing for much more flexibility.

Using Twitter’s @Anywhere Service in 6 Steps

Twitter recently released @anywhere, which allows you to easily integrate Twitter’s capabilities into your personal site. This great tutorial from NETTuts+ shows you how.

15 Useful HTML5 Tutorials and Cheat Sheets

HTML5 is a new technology that is changing and will continue to change web design. This is a great round-up of tutorials, from Web Design Ledger, that will help you embrace this new technology.

Grid-Based Web Design, Simplified

This is an excellent article/tutorial, from Design Informer, that explains and teaches you how to implement grids into your webdesigns. Not only is this article great; it’s custom design is incredibly impressive.

Different Stylesheets for Differently Sized Browser Windows

Also known as “resolution dependent layouts”, this tutorial by Chris Coyier, teaches you how to implement different CSS styles depending on the screen size.

How to Make a Screencast for Your Website

Screencasts can be a great tool to engage with readers or teach in-depth techniques. This helpful article, from Webdesigner Depot, gives some excellent tips on how to do it right.

Freebies, Inspiration & ResourcesTime-Savers: 400+ Stock Images, Retro Vectors

Stock images can save you valuable time to work on more important parts of a project. This is a great round-up that has collected over 400 retro-themed vectors for your use.

Subtle Grunge Textured Photoshop Brushes

This pack by Liam McKay comes with 42 high quality grunge brushes that are free for your use in any type of project.

Get Inspired

This is a beautiful collection from Media Militia that’s filled with inspiring artwork that is guaranteed to get your creative gears working.

World Cup 2010 Posters Inspired by African Pattern Heritage and Contemporary Football

The 2010 World Cup is rapidly approaching and with it being held in South Africa, not only can we expect the soccer games to be exciting; we can also expect to learn about it’s culture, music and aproach to art.

A Showcase of Creative Punctuation in Logo Design

The familiarity that we all have with punctuation makes their effectiveness as logos remarkably good. This is a great showcase of logos that use punctuation creatively to get their message across.

50 Beautiful Print Advertisements for Inspiration

Today’s ads are more than just advertisements. To stand out from the rest, they need to be works of art that capture the eye of potential costumers. This is a showcase of ads that accomplish that.

20 Clean White Letterpress Business Cards

This is a great collection of 20 clean white letterpress business cards that are sure to inspire. The white and minimal design of these cards, give you a sense of quality and elegance.

Evaluating a Graphic Design Curriculum

This is a great article where PSDTuts+ Editor, Sean Hodge, gives some great insight on evaluating the graphic design curriculum at your university.

An Interview with Jeff Starr

This is a great interview by Andrew Houle, with Jeff Starr, who co-wrote the book Digging Into Wordpress with Chris Coyier.

Get Featured in Creative Bookmarks

If you’d like to be featured in the next volume of Creative Bookmarks, simply send us your tutorial, resource, or article link before the end of the month. If we think it’s a top notch link, we’ll be sure to share it with all of our readers!

Email & Other Subscription Options

Today marks the 2-year-anniversary of Tutorial9. In so short a time, our community of designers and artists have helped ten of thousands educate themselves—and have shared hundreds of valuable resources to use freely in commercial and personal projects.

We’ve learned a lot in these two years, and today we’d like to celebrate self-education. Tutorials aren’t about how you can become more like someone else, but instead how you can teach yourself important skills, and then apply the right processes and your own ideas to the right project. We stand firmly on the idea that self-education is one of the most important principles of our time…when the world says you should be more like someone else, and when mediocrity is praised, we believe in striving to be the best you can possibly be in whatever interests you.

Tutorial9 is a platform that enables self-education, and doing what is right.

And we’ve learned a thing or two ourselves these past few years…

Tutorial9 Re-thought

We’re in the process of rebranding Tutorial9, and shifting some of our fundamental building blocks. Right now, we serve over 50,000 users a constant stream of new tutorials and resources, and we do a pretty good job at it. These tutorials however are often very specific. While they are useful teaching tools, they only offer a small slice of an overall practice at any given time.

In the new Tutorial9 we want to offer both small slices, as well as comprehensive sets of tools for entire projects. These Tool Boxes will provide all the necessary knowledge and means for completing complex projects of your own.

Want to create a WordPress theme from scratch? A WordPress Theme Toolbox might contain all the building blocks for designing a theme in Photoshop, putting it into code, and then offer a plethora of extras such as incorporating featured posts, or adding custom template files.

The idea here isn’t to show you how to build a specific site, but rather while you’re building a site using Tutorial9 as a reference where you can quickly find the right tool to get the job done. And this isn’t just a concept for website designers… For example, there could be tool boxes for:

• Model Photography – Forms needed, lighting setup, useful equipment
• Business Cards – Where to print, Coupons, Best Practices
• Retouching Photos – Photoshop Tools, Case studies, Enhancements

The possibilities are endless, but the idea is that for every project, a specific set of tools can be used to get the job done quicker and better.

New Look

There will be plenty of changes and improvements around Tutorial9 alongside Tool Boxes, but one of the most noticeable changes is going to be the new look. We’re changing everything to better reflect who we are, including our brand.

When we’re ready, it will be time to say goodbye to the old cloud, and hello to the new:

All of Tutorial9 is becoming more streamlined, faster, easier to use. We know how people use the site, and there are plenty of improvements we are making so that you waste less time, and find what you need more quickly.

When will it be ready?

We’re working hard to prepare the new Tutorial9 experience, but as you may imagine, there is a lot to be done. We’re in no rush to get this out before it’s ready, and there is a good chance you won’t see any big changes around here until late 2010. We can’t share any more details about the new Tutorial9 at this time, but we can listen to your thoughts about the current experience here. If you want to influence the new Tutorial9, please contact us and tell us what you’d like to see. We’ll definitely see a lot of people requesting one feature or telling us how another feature should be scrapped, and as usual, the truth will be somewhere in the middle. Your thoughts are important to us though, and do help us deliver a more useful experience.

Thanks for another great year folks!

Step 12: Creating the Meter – Polishing our indicator

Now we can make visible all our below layers and to pick up a nice color for our indicator. I´m going to use a very bright blue: #24fffc. This is just a matter of preferences and since we created vector shapes we can easily change their color in the future if we want to.

Now we´re going to scale our shapes down to make them fit inside our Dark Area using our “Light_Ambient” layer as the boundries of our transfotmation like so. Remember to hold down SHIFT and ALT keys while scaling

Now to get rid of the extra indicator at the bottom of our icon we can use 2 different techniques. We already saw how a Layer Mask can be very handy for that kind of visibility operations. However and since this two layers are pure vector shapes, we can take benefit of the tools provided by Photoshop to modify and transform shapes forms within Vector Layers. I´m going to show you this other technique.

First thing we need to do is to hide our “meter_shape02″ to have a cleaner vision of what we´re doing. Now we make sure our vector thumbnail from our “meter_shape01″ layer is selected (once again click on it and you will notice how the different contours of the vector content from layer are highlighted). Now we select the PEN TOOL by selecting it from the tools panel or by clicking the P KEY. Like we did when we substract the circle from our meter in the last step we need to set the PEN TOOL to that same behaviour and ensure that Shape Layers and not just Paths are selected as the default way the tool draw the objects.

Now, and once again using our guides and the boundries of our canvas as a reference we´re going to draw a triangle, starting from the center, then going to the bottom-left corner of our canvas, then to the bottom-right and finally by returning to the center of our guides like so:

Now, if you followed the instructions I provided for the degree rotation when creating our meter_shapes you will notice that there´s a little portion at the left-bottom and right-bottom parts of our indicator that aren´t totally hiden. You may consider that this could be a cool addition to the icon and you may want to leave it this way. However, for demonstration porpueses and going to get rid of those little squares too, just to show you how Direct Selection works inside Vector Layers composed by mutiple shapes.

So now, with our Vector Shapes still active we select our DIRECT SELECTION TOOL again (the white arrow) and we draw a nice selection of the bottom part of our triangle. This way we ensure we´re not selecting any other shape contained into the layer. Now we press CTRL/OPT+T to access the TRANSFORM TOOL and then by right-clicking we select the Scale option from the pop up menu.

Now we can transfrom its width by moving the horizontal sliders while holding the ALT KEY to force the transformation to start from the center or, as explained above, by setting around 105% the values for the width transformation in the TRANSFORM TOOL menu at the top of our window.

Now, depending on the rotation settings you used to create the “meter_shapes”, you may want or not to repeat this for the “meter_shape02″ layer. I think it looks just fine this way so I will leave “meter_shape02″ as it is but, again, it is up to you now you know the tecnique. Your icon should look like this:Step 13: Creating the Icon – The Arrow Holder

Ok, now it is time to take care of the part that will hold our future arrow in the center of the icon. First we need to do is to select the ELIPSE TOOL and to set the Foreground Color to White – #FFFFFF. Now, and as usual, we´ll use our guides as a reference to draw a circle holding SHIFTand ALT keys while dragging from the center of our guides. Make it around 75px Wwide and high but this, of course, will depend if you´re creating a 512×512px or not. Otherwise, make it nicely proportioned with the rest of the icon. We may name this new layer “center_wheel_big”. Now we change its Layer Style like so:

Now we´re going to duplicate this “center_wheel_big” and rename it to “center_wheel_small” and using the TRANSFORM TOOL and as usual by holding SHIFT and ALT keys we´re going to scale down this new layer to around 20%. Now we´re going to change its blending mode from the current ones to just a Bevel and Emboss effect like this:

Now we select both, “center_wheel_big” and “center_wheel_small” and by holding SHIFT key we´re going to move down a little these two layers having in mind we have to leave enough room for the arrow we´re about to create. New position should be something like this:

Once we move our “center_wheel” shapes we can group them inside a folder and call this new folder “meter wheel” or something that just make sense to you. Now we´re going to add some subtle style to each one of the layers. Go to the Layer Style window for any of the two layers and insert the following values. Once we´ve accepted the modification we just can copy the Layer Style by right-clicking the layer from the layers panel and chossing Copy Layer Style and paste it to the other “meter_shape” layer by right-clikcing this second layer and chossing Paste Layer Style from the pop up menu

Step 14: Creating the Icon – Adding the Numbers

Now I think it would a good idea to add the numbers all around our Dark Area. Once we add them we´ll have a clearest idea about how room we have to add our arrow and how big it needs to be. So, like previous steps, this could be different for you depending on the font and the size you choose for the numbers. For this tutorial I´m going to use Myriad Pro Semibold as the font at 12px for the size and with a -40 for the letter tracking. I´m using the same color we applied to the “meter_shape” layers #24fffc.

It is up to you how many numbers you add and the difference between the values from one to another, just keep all numbers nicely aligned at the sides and evently distributed all across their way. Pay attention to for example the difference between two and three digits numbers and how this affect its position and alignment. Keep explorig until you find something you feel it´s working with the rest of the icon. I ended with this distribution:

Once we have our numbers aligned we can apply some glowing. Just select any number and go:

Like we did before we now can copy the Layer Style from this modified number and copy it to the others by selecting them all at once and chosing Paste Layer Style from the pop up menu that will show up.

Step 15: Creating the Icon – The Arrow

Now we´re going to create a new folder and name it “arrow” . We place it just below our “center Wheel” folder and hide this last folder to have a better view of our working process. We set our Foreground Color to a nice and vivid red like #f71d1d and pick the PEN TOOL. Then we draw an rectangled triangle using the numbers we just created and our vertical guide as a reference and placing its hipothenus side in the opposite side of our vertical gide like so:

Now with our PEN TOOL still selected if we press and hold CTRL/OPT KEY we have access to the DIRECT SELECTION TOOL which can be used to easily reshape our vector form and set appropiate proportions to our arrow. In convination with the TRANSFORM TOOL we can scale, reposition, rotate and reshape our arrow until we find a position and a shape we´re comfortable looking at and that fits with the overall look of our icon. Since we´re manipulating a vector object we´re not going to lose any quality in the process, no matter how many times we transform our shape.

I did a little reshape to make it more simetric and also rotate it to make the arrow point at middle-lower values. I placed the arrow as follows:

Now we rename this layer to “arrow_shape01″ and apply the following Layer Style to it:

Now we duplicate our “arrow_shape01″, rename it to “arrow_shape02″ and we place it below our “arrow_shape01″. Now we clear its Layer style change its color to a darker red like #d20000 and move it by hitting the LEFT ARROW KEY once and the DOWN ARROW KEY twice from our keyboard

Now we´re going to add some lighting to our arrow by selecting the POLYGONAL LASSO TOOL ( L KEY ) and we´re going to create a selection like this:

Now we create a new layer above our “arrow_shape01″, name it “arrow_light”, press the D KEY, then X KEY to get back to our default colors and to set our Foreground Color to white, then we switch to the GRADIENT TOOL and with the following settings we draw a gradient like so:

Deselect your current selection. Now CTRL/OPT+CLICK on the thumb from the “arrow_shape01″ (the one is on top) and press CTRL+SHIFT+I to invert the selection, then hit BACKSPACE to clear those pixels. Now we low the opacity of this layer down to around 50%. We can make visible our “center wheel” folder now. Your image should look like this:

Step 16: Creating the Icon – The Counter

In this step we´re about to create the counter that displays the numbers simaluating a total count of whatever your meter is counting. First thing we need to do is to create a new folder and name it “counter” and place it above all existing layers. This is where our layers for this part will lay. It should be a good idea to hide our “center wheel” and “arrow” folders.

Now we change our Foregound Color to #111111, select the RECTANGLE TOOL and, using our guides as a reference point, draw a nice and proportioned rectangle by holding down ALT key while draggind our shape. Make it around 150px wide and 30px high like so:

Now go to add some Layer Style using the following values:

Rename this layer to “counter_shape01″ and duplicate it. Then rename the duplicated one to “counter_shape02″. We leave it above our “counter_shape01″. Now we set its fill to 0% and change its Layer Style to the following:

We can now make visible our below layers and, while holding the SHIFT KEY, move down the “counter” folder to an appropiate posotion like so:

Again I´m going to use Myriad Pro Semibold font for the numbers inside the counter. This time at 11px and with a letter tracking of around +130 to leave enough room for the sepearators we´re about to create. I entered 8 numbers and as usual we can take benefit of the TRANSFORM TOOL to align the row of numbers at the middle of the canvas (and the counter shape too). Now for the numbers we´re going to add the following Layer Style:

Now your image shoudl look like this:

Final step is to add the separators between the numbers. To do that we´re going to set our Foreground Color to #ffffff and we´re going to select the line tool, setting its weight to 1px. Now holding SHIFT KEY and between our first two numbers we´re going to draw a line using or “counter_shape” as a reference for its height. We can name this new layer to “single_separator01″.

Now we´re going to press CTRL/OPT+T to acces the TRANSFORM TOOL and holding down the ALT KEY we´re going to scale down its height to around 80%.

Now we´re going to add some layer style to our separator:

Now we´re going to repeat this process to create the other separators by duplicating our “single_separator01″ keeping an eye on the amount of space between numbers and ensuring we align each new separator at the middle of that space. Your image should look like this:

Step 17: Creating the Icon – Adding some more Lighting Details

We´re very close to finish the icon, actually we are not going to add any more objects to it. Instead, we´re going to make our icon more interesting by adding some more lighting details.

First we need to create a new layer between our “arrow” and “center wheel” folders and name it “light_focus”. This layer visibility will affect the arrow and all layers below but not our “center wheel” objects and above layers so this way we can play a little more with shadows and lights we already created for some of the objects laying on top of this layer.

Now we´re going to select our BRUSH TOOL again and with #ffffff color selected and with a brush diameter of around 300px and a hardness of 0%, we´re going to make a single click at more or less the following postition:

Now we change the Blending Mode for this layer from Normal to Overlay and we set the opacity down to around 50%. Now, and as seen in previous steps, we´re going to CRTL/OPT+CLICK on our “base_black” layer, then press CTRL/OPT+SHIFT+I to invert the selection and hit BACKSPACE to remove the possible extra pixels going out of bounds our Dark Area.

Now your image should like like this:

Good!. Now we could add some inner shadow to the Dark Area of our icon where the numbers and all the meter elements are laying. To do that we´re going to create a new layer just in top of all current layers and name it “inner_shadow”. We could just use the Inner Shadow effect from the Layer´s Style but we´re going to create our own effect by making some brushing instead. The reason for this is that the pre-made effect from Photoshop is too much perfect in my opinion since it is all generated from the edges to the center. We can make some tweeking to it but to get the effect we´re looking for we want our icon to look iluminated with some irregularities and to achieve that effect we want our shadow to be more “imperfect”.

So, once again, we CTRL+CLICK on our “base_black” layer, select the “BRUSH TOOL” and with our Foreground Color set to #000000 and a Diameter of around 300px and a Hardness of 0% for our tool, we start brushing all around our icon like so:

Once we finish the brushing we can now press CTRL/OPT+D to deselect our current selection and set the Blending Mode for this layer from Normal to Soft Light leaving its Transparency at 100%. Now your image should look like something similar to this:

Last thing is to add our main shadow, the one will simulate that the icon is standing on an surface generating its own shadow as a reaction of the lighting is coming from above. So, to do that, we´re going to create a new layer at the top of our locked Background layer and name it “main_shadow”. Now we select the ELIPTICAL MARQUEE TOOL and using our guides as a reference and holding the ALT KEY we draw our selection from the center to the sides like so:

Now holding SHIFT KEY we can move our selection to the bottom of our icon. For now, make the bottom the selection to match the bottom of the icon. With our Foreground Color set to #000000 we select the PAINT BUCKET TOOL by selecting it from the Tools Panel or by pressing the G KEY and we click over our selection to fill it with black.

Now we can deselect our current selection and go Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur… and set the value for the RADIUS about 10px. We click Ok and go Filter/Blur/Motion Blur…and this time we choose 0 degress for the ANGLE and about 120 for the DISTANCE and click OK. Now we can move down our shadow to show up a little more of the darkest area at the center. Now if we press CTRL/OPT+T we can see something to keep an eye on:

Notice where our TRANSFORM TOOL is drawing the boundries of our shadow?. It is indicating that our shadow is getting out of bounds of our canvas and that means if we save the icon as it is, specially as a PNG, that little part of the shadow placed outside our canvas will cause our icon to appear cutted at the bottom. This is a very common mistake when dealing with icon shadows and it is always a good practice to make sure our bottom shadows are not exceding the limits of the canvas even when they look just fine. Most of the shadows are very subtle at their endings and it´s easy to not to see that cropping issue until you export your icon as PNG.

Ok, so to fix this we´re just going to scale down a little our shadow using our TRANSFORM TOOL box to fit the shadow into the boundries of our canvas. Now you´re image should look like this:

Step 18: Creating the Icon – Final Touches

Now we could add the text that will indicate in some way the kind of meter we´re looking at. I originally created this icon as a server traffic indicator and I used the words “SERVER TRAFFIC and KPS” to make it more obvious but you can use your own creativity or imagination to make the icon indicates whatever you wish to show. For the text I used Myriad Pro Semibold font, all caps and this time at 3,16 px and placed at the center of the icon using my guides as a reference. I set the paragraph style to align text at the center as well. I putted these text layers inside a folder calles “text”. I also moved the text down a bit for a better positioning just like so:

We´re almost done!. The last step of this tutorial is very important. We´ve spent a lot of time creating the shapes, aligning them correctly and making the icon to look proportioned and nice but we didn´t pay much attention to one of the most important things when creating icons: COLOR.

Now, since we´re not going to make use of the guides anymore we can just press CTRL/OPT+H to hide them and to have a better view of the adjustments we´re about to do.

Let´s make our icon more vivid and easy to the eyes by just adding some adjustment layers in combination with layer masking. One of the advantatges of this way of working is that you can easily modify the global appearance of your icon without the need of go looking for specific layers to change the color for a certain effect or shape

So, first we´re going to create a new folder just at the top of all our existing layers and name it “color adjustment”. Now and for the last time we´re going to CRTL/OPT+CLICK on the “base_black” layer to create a selection of the Dark Area of our icon where the main color adjustment will occur. Now inside the folder we just created we´re going to click the Add layer mask button located at the bottom part of our layers panel

Now we´re going to add a new Brightness and Contrast adjustment layer by clicking on the Create new Fill or Adjustment Layer button located at the right from the previous Add layer mask button. We select Brightness and Contrast from the pop up menu. Now we´re going to set the BRIGHTNESS value to around 30 and the CONTRAST to around 60.

Now we´re going add a levels adjustment layer by repeating the previous process but this time choosing Levels from the Create new Fill or Adjustment Layer menu. This setting may differ if you are using different colors for your numbers and “meter wheel” shapes. Since we used a light blue color in this tutorial we want our icon to look a little “bluish” simulating that some light is emerging from the icon and it is affected by the color of the inside elements. So for this new Levels Layer we´re going to use the following values: RGB channel should be set around 8, 1 and 238 for the first, second and thrid slider respectively. for the RED CHANNEL should be around 11, 1, 255, GREEN CHANNEL will remain untouched and for the BLUE CHANNEL we go 0, 1, 240.

Now if you followed along this tutorial using the same settings your final image should look something similar to this:

Step 19: Conclusion

Besides the creation of the icon, my intention with this turotial was to show you some principles and good practices when facing icon design. First is to keep all your shapes correctly aligned using guides and by making transform operations percentually using the tool that Photoshop is offering to us.

Another good practice is to keep your work as much simple as you can, and to use all the nice features Photoshop has like we did with our personalized action. They only thing we need to know is what we want to achieve and which tools can make our life easier to make our idea happen.

Download the Source Files Download the PSD

In this detailed Photoshop Tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an amazing speed counter icon and also some nice tricks and tips you can apply on your daily basis when dealing with icon design in Photoshop.

Due to the length of this tutorial, we’ve split this post into 2 parts. You are still welcome to download the free PSD in part 2.

Materials Needed:

• Carbon Pattern

Step 1: Setting Up Our Document – Creating our Canvas

Create a new Photoshop document (CTRL/OPT+N) and set the different values for the input fields to the ones displayed in the image. I’m going to create the icon at 512×512px but you can apply the same concepts I’m going to show here to almost any resolution/size, you just had to keep proportions and to scale styles correctly.

Now you can just press OK or wait a bit and read the next Step.

Custom Document Presets

It is very handy to save presets you are planing to use over and over on your daily basis, isn’t it?. In the next step you’ll see how to customize Photoshop to remember your document preferences when working on different kind of projects.

Step 2: Setting Up Our Document – Creating and Saving Custom Presets

This step is kinda optional but its concept can be applied to everybody’s needs depending on what kind of designs you’re planning to create over and over as for example in this case, an icon designer that is constantly working on creating Leopard ready Icons.

Once you set up a document with certain values you can save them by clicking the Save Preset button then choosing a name for your new preset and selecting which values you want to preserve for future new documents.

In this case I’m saving all values used to create this file as a base for future projects that will involve 512px icon creation. So, the next time we want to start a project of this kind, all we need to do instead of writing the different values inside the input fields, is just to select the new custom saved preset and we’re good to go.

Step 3: Setting Up Our Document – The Proper Alignment

Now we’re going to take profit of the Photoshop’s GUIDE TOOL to align our icon and to be able to work from the center. This way we ensure to create shapes with proper proportions.

To do that we go to View/New Guide… and we insert 50% for the horizontal orientation and then repeat the process and select again 50% for the vertical orientation.

Step 4: Creating the Icon – Basic Shapes

Ok, so now we’re ready to start working on our icon. First thing we need to do is to set our Foreground color to #ebebeb, select the ELIPSE TOOL and make sure we have shape layers and not just paths or fill pixels as the behaviour of the tool.

It is important we set the settings mentioned above and displayed on the right before we start drawing our shape because the shape tool acts in a different way when these settings differ from the ones showed.

Now we can center our pointer in the intersection of our guides and with our SHIFT and ALT keys pressed, start dragging our shape from the center to the upper left corner of the canvas. When the shape is complete, rename this layer to “main_shape”.

Step 5: Creating the Icon – Styling our main_shape

To achieve the desired effect and with our “main_shape” selected go to Layer’s Blending Options and set the values as showed below for Bevel and Emboss, Gradient Overlay and Stroke.

Step 6: Creating the Icon – Adding more Shapes

Let’s add some depth to the base of our icon by duplicating our current “main_shape” layer, renaming it to “main_shape_02″ and changing its Blending Options from the current ones to the ones displayed as follows:

Once you have applied the new layer style press CTRL/OPT+T to scale down your “main_shape_02″ down around a 95%. Insert the values in the following fields from the TRANSFORM TOOL.

Step 7: Creating the Icon – Adding our Dark Metter Area

Now we’re ready to start working on the black area that will contain our meter indicator. Duplicate your previous “main_shape02″ and change its shape color from the current #ebebeb to #111111. Rename this new layer to “base_black” and scale it down as explained in the previous step but this time around a 98%.

Access to the Layer’s Blending Options and change the following values:

Now we finally add the carbon fiber pattern made by env1ro and we leave its scale at the default 100%.

Don’t worry if you don’t see any difference with all this blending effects applied, that will change once we start adding light details and other elements to the icon.

Step 8: Creating the Icon – Adding some lighting to our Dark Area

At his point let’s make our icon a little more interesting by adding some lighting effects into our Dark Area. Let’s duplicate this “base_black” layer, rename it to “base_black_lighting” and set its fill to 0%.

We can now clear its layer style by right clicking the layer from the Layers Palette and choosing “Clear layer Style”. Now we can add a brand new Gradient Overlay effect to the layer.

We press D to go back to our default colors ( White for the foreground and Black for the background respectively )then press the “Add Layer Mask” button located at the bottom of the Layers Palette to add a new mask. Make sure our new layer mask is selected.

- you will notice that because it appears focused with a white square if you compare it with the other minuatures located at the sides and, because the name of your document changes from standard layer to whatever layer is selected+layer mask at the top of your document window boundries - .

Now we pick the GRADIENT TOOL, choose the following settings and start drawing our gradient as shown in the next image. Use the bottom of your document and the intersection of your guides at the center as a reference to your gradient start and ending points.

Your icon shoudl like something similar to this:

Step 9: Creating the Icon – Adding more detail to our Carbon Pattern

I really like to keep all my icons as much editable as possible using just vector shapes and layer styles. However sometimes it is impossible to keep this way or working if you want to achieve certin effects that are very difficult to do with standard Photoshop vector tools. So to give more detail to the carbon patter added in step 7 we are going to work with rasterized content in order to achive the effect we want to see.

First thing we need to do is to duplicate our “base_black” layer and place it just on top from the original “base_black” so this copy will rest below our “base_black_lighting” layer.

Now, for our new “base_black_copy”, we uncheck all its styles from the Layer Styles except for the pattern overlay. We can do that by double cliking the layer and accesing its Layer’s Style Window or like as show here on the left by expanding its attached styles from the Layers Palette and clicking on the little eye icon at the left of every style we have applied in our layer.

Then we set its fill to 0%. Now we create a new layer just in top of our “base_black_copy” and we select and merge both ( CRTL/OPT + E ), the brand new blank layer and our “base_black_copy” and rename the merged layer result to “pattern_refined”.

Now for this new “pattern_refined” layer we set its fill to 0% again since it has been changed to 100% when merged. Now, we’re ready to get rid of some parts of our layer. First zoom in at around 1200% with the ZOOM TOOL ( Z KEY ) and select the MAGIC WAND TOOL ( W KEY ). Now apply the following settings to the tool and click on any black pixel as showed below.

Once we have our desired selection we press BACKSPACE to clear the selected pixels from the layer and we apply the following setting s to the Layer Styles of our “pattern_refined” layer. You will notice that since it is the result from a merge operation there’s no pattern overlay effect applied anymore.

Now your icon should look similar to this:

Do you see the strange pixelation that occurs specially at the top and bottom of the icon?. You can compare the smooth edges from the previous layer to this new “patter_refined” layer by hidding and showing this last one from the Layers Palette. This happen because the effects from the blending mode we previously applied are going out of bounds from the actual shape so we should fix this if we want our icon to be visualy consistent.

Since the pixelation only occurs at very edges of the layer, we can use a Layer Mask to hide those imperfections. To do that we are going to look for the “base_black” layer into our Layers Palette. Now we CTRL/OPT + CLICK on the little thumb showing the rounded contour of the “base_black” layer to make a selection of the shape. Now we go to Select/Modify/Contract and we set value for the contract selection to 2px. Now we go to the bottom of our layers palette and as show in the previous step we with our “patter_refined” layer selected, we add a new Layer Mask but this time, since there’s already an active selection, the new Layer Mask will only show the content inside our selection hidding those ugly pixelated borders.

Now your image should look like this:

Step 10: Creating the Icon – Adding some more lighting

Now it is a good time to add a little more lighting to our icon. We have spend a lot of time and did some efforts making our pattern to look really crisp and now we can take profit of that by adding some light that will emphatize that.

Let’s create a new layer just in top of everything and rename it to “light_ambient”.

First of all, and with our new layer selected, is to set our Foreground Color to white and to pick a really big soft brush (B KEY) by setting its master diameter to around 700px and its hardness to 0%. Now we’re going to place the middle of our brush (the contour you can see when you switch to the brush tool) approximately at the top edge of our canvas and click once. Like so:

Like in the previous step, we’re going to use our “base_black” layer as a reference for the selection, so once again we CTRL/OPT +CLICK on that layer and then we switch to the SELECTION TOOL (M KEY). Once we have selected the tool we hit the DOWN ARROW KEY from our keyboard around 10 times (or move the selection down around 10px) and then we do SHIFT+CTRL/OPT+I to inverse the selection and we hit BACKSPACE.

At this point your image should look like this

Nice. Now we CTRL/OPT+CLICK on our “base_black” again to change the selection to the original contour of the black shape and inverse the selection by doing again SHIFT+CTRL/OPT+I to get rid of the pixels outside the base shape we draw with the brush and may remain from the previous delete operation. We set the blending mode for this layer from Normal to Screen and set its opacity at around 25%.

We now can hit CTRL/OPT+D to deselect our current selection if it’s active yet.

As an additinal touch, we’re going to create a new Layer Mask (as explained in previous steps) by hitting the little icon located at the botton of the Layers palette and with our brush tool (we keep the 700px diameter) and #808080 selected for our Foreground Color we’re going to make single clicks all around the sides and bottom part of our layer mask from left to right as the opposite direction of the clock wheels. So, we start at 21:00, then 18:00 then 15:00. As explained in a previous image, we’ll use the boundries of our canvas to position the middle of the brush.

Now your image should look similar to this one below:

Step 11: Creating the Meter – Using Actions and Vector Tools

Many people don’t think too much about actions when using Photoshop. However they’re a very powerful help when you have to deal with tedious and repetitive tasks and it can save us a lot of time and effort.

We’re going to apply that concept in the cretion of our icon. As you can see from the finished image there are a series of little bars evently spaced all across the upper and at the sides of the inner part of the icon that serve us as a meter where the arrow moves in between as an indicator of whatever you want to indicate. It would be very tedious to create those little bars one by one and even more tedious to reposition them perfectly to create the visual sensation of continuity between marks. So, to do that and keep it as simple as possible, we’re going to create our own action that will make the work for us.

First we should hide all our existing layer in order to keep our vision clear. Now we’re going to select the LINE TOOL from the vector shapes menu and holding the SHIFT KEY we’re going to draw a line from the very top of our canvas to the very bottom just to keep shapes in proportion and nice. It is very handy to keep your guides visible. Set the options for the LINE TOOL as shown below. Color doesn’t really matter at this point, we will be able to change it easily since we’re creating vector shapes. For now I will use just #000000.

Now it would be a good idea to reposition our line just at the center of the image just to make sure all is perefectly aligned. To do that we’re going to take benefit from the TRANSFORM TOOL and, to be more specific, from its reference point feature. We first press CTRL/OPT+T to acces the tool, then we place the reference point for the object at its center (if it isn’t already there) and then, we set 256px (512px/2) for both, horizontal and vertical positions. This way we make sure that our object is at the exact middle of our canvas and we can perform the follwoing tasks without any visual imperfection.

Now we go to Window/Actions (or press ALT/F9) to make our Action Panel visible and we click on the little icon menu located at the top right corner of the panel and choose New Action. We can give a name to our action. Now we press Record.

At this point we’re going to select our DIRECT SELECTION TOOL (the white arrow) and we are going to make a selection including all the shape from our new line. Then we go CTRL/OPT+C to copy the shape, CTRL/OPT V to paste it and then CTRL/OPT+T to acces the TRANSFORM TOOL again.

Now we’re going to locate the rotation setings for the TRANSFORM TOOL and we’re going to insert a value of 9 degress of positive rotation. Now we can stop the action by clicking the Stop button located at the bottom of the Actions Panel.

Very close to the Stop button is where the Play button is located. Yet in your actions panel, make sure you have selected the very first operation of your new action (it should be the “copy” operation”). Now you can hit the Play button and see the action running. You will have to do that several times to complete the circle but it will not take much longer than a few seconds. Now imagine copying, pasting and rotating all those new lines one by one. Sure it takes several minutes to achieve to not to talk about those little mistakes everyone does when involved in repetitive tasks….

Now this would be a good time to rename this layer to “meter_shape01″. Now your image and layer should look like this. Remember we hide all layers below our “meter_shape01″.

Time to duplicate our brand new “meter_shape01″ and rename it to “meter_shape02″, then we hide this last layer and select our “meter_shape01″ again. With our Vector Mask selected (click on the thumb to make sure it is the same way we did for our Layer Mask in previous steps) we’re going to select the ELIPSE TOOL and set its behaviour to Substract From Shape Area. Now taking as a reference our guides we draw a circle from the middle holding SHIFT and ALT keys to make a perfect circle. For our “meter_shape02″ we should end with something like this:

Now we hide “meter_shape01″ and repeat the same operation for “main_shaoe02″ but this time extending our substracter elipse shape a bit more to the edge. You should end with something like this:

Ok, so let’s rotate our “main_shape02″ by pressing CTRL/OPT+T to access the TRANSFORM TOOL and, as we did for the creation of out action, we set the rotation value to 4,5 degrees for the transform operation. Now if we make visible our “meter_shape01″ we should see something like show here below:

CONTINUE TO PART 2

In this tutorial you will learn how to draw semi-realistic bamboo in Adobe Photoshop—perfect for textures and backgrounds.

Quick Nav:

• Tutorial
• Download the PSD (Source Files)

Step 1: Creating a New Document

Create a new document with 800 on 600 pixels, resolution 300 dpi and a transparent background.

Step 2: Making the Texture

For texture, we do a selection with the Rectangular Marquee tool and fill it with black. After that, go to Filter> Noise> Add Noise and set to 70%, Gaussian, Monochromatic.

 

Step 3:

Then go to Filter> Blur> Motion Blur and set to the Angle of 0, Distance: 62 pixels. Thus we have the texture of bamboo fiber, now press Ctrl + T and reduce the height only slightly, to compress the fibers.

As you can see we have two layers, one with the texture and the second empty.

Step 4:

Let’s hide the texture layer and make a rectangular selection in the base layer, with the same size as the texture, for wich we press Ctrl + Click on the thumbnail of the texture layer. Once the selection is made, fill it with black, and open the window of Hue / Saturation by pressing Ctrl + U, we choose a green color and press OK.

Now show the texture layer and set the layer blending mode to Hard Light and then merge the layers with Ctrl + Shift + E. Press Ctrl + T to change the shape of the texture, right click on the transform area, and select Warp. With this tool, we give to the texture, the curves of bamboo.

Step 5: Volume

Now let’s use the Burn tool to add shadows in the lower side of the rod, we have to configure the tool with low exposure and a medium hardness, for me it is more convenient to use a large size in the tool.

Step 6:

After adding the shadows, let’s add the lights to get the volume. Select the Dodge tool and use it in the top side of the bamboo, with low exposure.

Step 7: Intesection

Once we have the texture and the basic form we´ll do the intersection. We will begin reducing the size of the bamboo cane by pressing Ctrl + T, and doubled it to obtain two segments, we will drag one on each other and select the tip of the rod above.

Once we have the selection, press Ctrl + T to transform and right-click on the selection, select Warp and try to make the curves of the bamboo, if the texture is broken in the process, we can use the Clone Stamp tool to repair.

Step 8:

Now we will simulate the shadow, so we will use the Burn tool to make the shadows, as seen in the image, and then use the Dodge tool for the lights.

Step 9:

Let´s repeat the step 7, here i show you how to use the Warp Transformation.

Step 10:

As we did before, we add the lights and shadows, this operation must be repeat in both tips of each cane.

Step 11: The Branchs

To draw the branch, we will use the pen tool and then convert the path to selection, fill it with black, let’s create a new layer where you draw a black rectangle. Go to Filter> Noise> Add Noise and then go to Filter> Blur> Motion Blur, as we did before to create the texture of the fibers.

Step 12:

Now we select the texture, press Ctrl+T, select Warp Transformation and put it on the branch shape, press Enter and change the branch texture layer blending mode to Hard Light. Press Ctrl+Click on the branch thumbnail to select the branch shape, invert the selection pressing Ctrl+Shift+i and delete the excess. Then merge the branch layer width the branch texture layer with Ctrl + Shift + E.

Step 13:

Let´s add the volume to the branch using the Burn Tool and the Dodge Tool as we did with the cane. Also we have to use this technique on the bamboo to simulate the branch shadow.

Step 14:

Press Ctrl+u to open the Hue/Saturation window and configure the hue, saturation and lightness to match the branch with the bamboo.

Step 15:

Now let´s draw the second segment of the branch, use the Pen Tool to draw and fill it with black, use the Hue/Saturation Window to colorize it with a green tone and then, add the volume with the Burn Tool and the Dodge Tool.

Step 16:

Now create a new layer called Details, and select a texturized brush with a very big size and use it on the bamboo.

Step 17:

Press on the bamboo layer thumbnail to select it, invert the selection and delete the excess.

Step 18:

Open the Hue/Saturation Window and colorize the details with a green tone.

Step 19:

Reduce the deatails layer fill to 66%.

Step 20: The Leaf

Now let´s create two layers called leaf and leaf texture, using the Pen Tool we will draw the leaf and with the Rectangular Marquee Tool let´s do the texture as we did before for the bamboo and the branch.

Step 21:

Put the leaf texture over the leaf and hide it, then open the Hue/Saturation Window to colorize the leaf with green.

Step 22:

Now display the leaf texture layer, change the layer blending mode to Hard Light and reduce the fill to 47%. Press Ctrl+T, choose the Warp transformation mode as steps before and adjust the fibers to the leaf form, then delete the excess.

Step 23:

Before we merge the leaf texture layer and the leaf layer, with the leaf texture layer selected press Ctrl+m to open the Curves Window, for add contrast.

Step 24:

We will duplicate the leaf and use transformation to change the leaf form, and use the Dodge Tool for add some shine.

Step 25:

To create the background, we will create a new folder called “On Focus”, and we put in the folder, the bamboo, the branch and the leaf. Then we create a new layer called BG, where using the Gradient Editor, we choose a gradient from green to black, and we apply it with the radial gradient tool.

Step 26: The Bamboo Forest

Then we will duplicate the bamboo and rotate the duplicates changing the size, to create the “bamboo forest”.

Step 27:

After that let´s crate a new folder called “Back” where we will copy the bamboo and duplicate it decreasing the size to make a back layer of forest, then go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, with a radius of 1,4 pixels and we apply it to every layer of the “back folder”.

Step 28:

Now we create a new folder called “Front” where we will repeat the step before, but this time we increase the size of the bamboo, and we will add a gaussian blur with a radius of 3,8 pixels. In these tree steps, we have simulated a camera view.

Step 29:

Let´s create an adjustment layer of curves over the “back folder”, where we will decrease the light, obscuring the back of the scene.

Step 30:

Now we will select all the layers in the “Front Folder”, hold Ctrl while selecting to add the selections, all the canes in the front must to be selected when you add a curves adjustment layer, this way photoshop will create a mask in the layer, you have to be sure the adjustment layer affects only the bamboo in the front folder, if not, you have to invert the selection in the mask. In this adjustment layer, we will increase the light.

Step 31:

Let´s add a curves adjustment layer, go to the curves panel and press on the hand button, this button allows you to manually choose a light point on the image and drag up with the mouse to increase the curve, and then choose a shadow point and drag down to decrease the shadows and add contrast to the image.

Step 32:

Finally we create a new layer called “spot” and fill it with black, choose the Elliptical Marquee Tool and make a elliptical selection, then press the right button and select Feather option and write 30 pixels, press ok and then press delete, and finally we decrease the opacity of the spot layer to 43%.

Final Result:Download the Source Files Download the PSD

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Your Wordpress blog getting sluggish? Caching is a great technique for speeding up your blog and the Wordpress community has a lot of caching plugins to choose from. Lets review each one and find out which caching solution will work best for your Wordpress blog.

Quick Nav:

• What Is Caching?
• Benchmarking?
• WordPress Caching Plugins Compared
• Do It Yourself Caching
• What Not To Cache
• Final Results

What Is Caching?

Each time you visit your blog, Wordpress will go through a sometimes lengthy process to build everything you see. First it will process the PHP code which will make numerous calls to your database and finally output HTML for your web browser to display. On some blogs this could happen between 20 to 200 times per page! Wordpress has often been criticized as slow but we can change that by enabling caching.

If you enable caching only the first visitor will go through this entire process. The caching mechanism will save the data and then serve every subsequent visitor the final result. Thus speeding up Wordpress by a huge factor. Trust me, you want it and your visitors will thank you for using it.

Benchmarking

I will be using Apache Benchmark to grade the effectiveness of each caching solution. Apache Benchmark works by producing a large amount of requests to your website and then reporting back the average requests it was able to make per second, the average time it took per request and the transfer rate of data (among a lot of other data).

I will be running 1,000 requests at 10 concurrent or the number of parallel requests then taking the average of 3 tests ran at various times of the day. I will be using Wordpress 2.9.1 with a few popular plugins activated: Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, and Google XML Sitemaps. My test blog is running on a shared server with a low amount of normal traffic so the benchmarks don’t get too disrupted. I’ve loaded my test blog with an average amount of content, images, stylesheets and javascript files.

I’m not going to test on a fresh install of Wordpress because I want to simulate a real world every day blog rather than an unrealistic empty blog. This is the same reason I decided to host the test blog on a shared server. My goal is the average and most of us probably have our blogs hosted on a shared server with minimal optimizations specifically geared towards Wordpress.

No Cache

First we are going to run a benchmark with caching completely disabled. This will give us a control test to compare the performance of each plugin.

Yikes, 13.96 requests per second is pretty bad but I can’t complain. Wordpress is really slow without any performance tuning and my test blog is running on a $10/mo shared server account. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for. Lets see if we can get more out of this not so ideal predicament.

WP-Cachehttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cache/

WP-Cache is a simple and aged cache plugin. Although it has been around for a long time it also hasn’t been updated in a long time.

WP-Cache was an easy plugin to install but it does create a few files outside of the plugin directory and doesn’t clean up the mess when you uninstall. Some users may get the error message “sem_get” on the top of every page of their blog. Just edit the file wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and uncomment the $use_flock line. That will fix the error message if your server doesn’t support the sem_get file locking command.

WP-Cache is tried and true. Even for its age and lack of updates, WP-Cache is still a contender and a very light weight one at that. Overall performance and installation could definitely be better though.

WP Super Cachehttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

WP Super Cache is a very popular plugin once based on the previous WP-Cache plugin and it is routinely praised among many Wordpress communities.

Overall it was somewhat easy to install and uninstall. Cleans up its own mess when deactivating which is always nice. I got a “gzuncompress” error message only once after activating but it didn’t appear to affect operation of the plugin. You have to manually create an .htaccess file but at least it gives you some code to copy and paste.

This plugin has a long page of endless options and the user interface could certainly use some cleaning up. Be sure to follow the directions carefully after activating. Especially pay attention to the directions on creating a proper .htaccess file.

With Compression Turned On:

Be Careful Enabling Compression

If you enable WP Super Cache Compression and your server already has compression enabled or doesn’t support it then you will get a lovely blank page of death or just a lot of garbage printed on the screen. Use with caution.

Something seriously wrong is obviously happening when compression is enabled. Despite what the people say, WP Super Cache isn’t very super. In my opinion it is a complicated version of WP-Cache with only slightly better performance. With numerous reports of blank pages of death, I am hesitant to install this plugin on an actual blog. On top of it all this plugin doesn’t seem to play nice with others. Improper configuration and/or a bad plugin combination can lead to a drastic decrease your performance. It is sad but true.

WP Widget Cachehttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-widget-cache/

WP Widget Cache is a plugin geared toward those with heavier widget use. My test blog, only using the default widgets, may not have completely benefited from this plugin. The author recommends running this plugin along with either WP-Cache or Super Cache so I will run 3 tests: Standalone, with WP-Cache and with WP Super Cache.

WP Widget Cache was very easy to install and uninstall. Just clicked activate and since my wp-content folder was writable everything installed automatically. In order for this plugin to work you must goto your Widget settings and set the expire amount field on each widget.

Standalone:

With WP-Cache:

With WP Super Cache:

This plugin would be useful to those who use database intensive widgets on every page. Other cache plugins will process then cache your widgets for every page. This plugin will cache your widgets and serve your other cache plugins a copy as they save each page.

Some Widgets Should Not Be Cached

If your widgets are dynamic or change on every page then of course this plugin will be of little use to those widgets. Make sure you set the expiration to empty or 0 seconds on your dynamic widgets to prevent caching.

DB Cachehttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/db-cache/

The DB Cache plugin works very different than the others. Instead of building and saving your pages it saves the database queries instead. This plugin is available in many different languages.

Installation was very easy and the user interface is simple and clear. Cleans up great upon deactivating.

DB Cache is more for the server administrator. Caching pages, especially if you have a lot of pages on your site, can be very CPU intensive and they take up a lot of disk space. If you run and optimize your own web server then this plugin will be good to you. Although if your blog is on a shared server or has fewer than 500 pages then this plugin may not be as beneficial to you.

DB Cache Reloadedhttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/db-cache-reloaded/

DB Cache Reloaded is similar to DB Cache. In fact it is a fork of DB Cache because the author didn’t think DB Cache was updated quick enough. This plugin is also available in many different languages.

Installation was very easy and the user interface is simple and clear. Cleans up great upon… ok, ok it is really similar to DB Cache. Lets just call it DB Cache Reloaded… oh wait, it already is.

Just think of it as the same as DB Cache but better.

1 Blog Cacherhttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/1-blog-cacher/

1 Blog Cacher is a lightweight and simple caching plugin. Not very popular but I’ve seen it recommended on more than one occasion.

Installing this plugin was annoying. I had to manually create the folder wp-cache, move the file 1blogcacher2.0.php to the wp-content/plugins folder and move advanced-cache.php to the wp-content folder. The user interface is terrible and the options are not editable through the admin settings. Everything must be configured directly in the advanced-cache.php file. Terrible for a multi-user setup or those who don’t want to FTP into their account every time they wish to make a configuration.

I don’t think this plugin even works despite appearing to have done something by adding a message in my source. The author says its version 2.0.2 but it almost seems like a plugin that is still in beta. Easily the worst caching plugin I’ve encountered.

Hyper Cachehttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hyper-cache/

Hyper Cache is a new caching plugin out in the community. It is geared towards the everyday blog or those hosted on low cost shared servers. Also available in many different languages.

Installing was a simple upload and activation. This plugin has a lot of great configurations and organized appropriately in a clean user interface.

Hands down the fastest caching plugin I’ve reviewed and surprising for how light weight it is. It may just be me but my blog just seemed to click on rather then load with this plugin enabled. Definitely for those hosted on a shared server or who are looking for as much caching performance from a plugin as possible. The development around this plugin looks very active too. A definite must have plugin especially if you plan on configuring your own additional performance tweaks such as minifying, db caching or compression.

W3 Total Cachehttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

W3 Total Cache is the mother of all caching plugins. It is huge, well documented and packs in an impressive amount of performance configurations all into one plugin.

Installation was surprisingly easy. With all the options available I thought I was going to be here all day configuring this beast. After activating it automatically best guessed an optimal configuration. Great for those who just want to install and go.

If you’re looking for a plugin that does everything then this plugin is your golden ticket. From multiple methods of page caching, minifying, database caching, content delivery networks… this plugin does it all. They even have support request available and built right into the plugin.

Now to avoid sounding too much like a car salesman lets review the cons. First, it is huge. Even though disk space is becoming less and less of an issue there are some blog admins out there that either don’t have or want to spare the space. Second, it is fast but not the fastest caching plugin out there. Especially if you disable the minifying and compression built into the plugin. Then it runs on a more equal footing with the other plugins reviewed here.

Do It Yourself Caching

Who said you have to use a plugin to cache your blog? Caching pages yourself can sometimes be the best solution, especially for those high traffic and rarely changing pages in your blog. It does take a bit of manual labor though.

First create a folder called cache in your wp-content folder. Visit the page on your blog that you would like to cache then view the source. Copy the entire source into a file named relevant to the page you are caching. For example if I want to cache my about page I would name the file about.html and put it in my wp-content/cache folder.

From here we need to create a .htaccess file in your root Wordpress folder. Copy the following code into your .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^about$ wp-content/cache/about.html </IfModule>

Using mod_rewrite we are telling the server to deliver the contents of the wp-content/cache/about.html file when someone goes to http://yourblogurl.com/about. I suggest learning more about mod_rewrite before manually caching a bunch of your pages. A handy solution though because from here you can perform other tweaks directly to the file such as minifying. Manually creating the files will also save a great amount of CPU load, which is critical for high traffic servers.

Although it is a lot more work then using a caching plugin; caching pages yourself does deliver high performance. Just remember your manually cached pages will not and can not be updated through Wordpress and you must continuely update your cached pages by hand. This is a viable solution for those static high traffic pages but not an ideal solution for most bloggers.

Combining Plugins

Combining some of the plugins can lead to an increase in performance such as Hyper Cache + DB Cache Reloaded. Although some combinations will greatly decrease performance such as WP Super Cache + Anything. Try combining and see what works for you.

What Not To Cache

There are a few elements to a blog that you should avoid caching. Such as ads, feeds or any dynamic content obtained using php or a server side system. The whole point of caching is to save time by avoiding server side processes. If you have any content that needs to change for each visitor then you should avoid caching that page or content.

Don’t worry about your Google Ads or BuySellAds. Those ads are delivered using javascript and caching won’t affect the delivery of those ads. Most javascript based systems will not be affected by caching since they are client side scripts; not server side scripts. Although it is always good practice to double check to ensure your dynamic content is not being cached.

Final Results

Overall the best out of the box cache plugin configuration in my opinion is: Hyper Cache + DB Cache Reloaded. Despite the allure of W3 Total Cache’s professionalism and only slightly less admired performance, I prefer to retain some manual control over my blog. For those on a medium priced shared server or if you like the idea of installing and forgetting, the W3 Total Cache plugin will be your ideal choice.

A lot of people still use WP-Cache and WP Super Cache. They are still respectable Wordpress caching plugins but consider trading up for Hyper Cache or W3 Total Cache. These newer caching plugins prove better performance and install/config much easier and cleaner. Also the development communities around these newer plugins are much more active and attentive to their users.

I hope I’ve helped you in choosing the best caching solution for your Wordpress blog but this is only the beginning. There are so many more techniques to improve the performance of your blog. Caching is a great first step in preventing your blog from crashing during a flood of traffic.

In this tutorial we’ll make clever use of Illustrators built in 3D capabilities, gradients and opacity masks to design a Retro 3D Type Effect.

Quick Nav:

• Tutorial
• Download the PSD (Source Files)

The final image

This is what we will be creating:

Step 1

There are actually two ways to begin this illustration. You may draw all the blocky shapes with the pen tool or just download a blocky font like Arcade and Invaders from Space. I’m a man who values his time so I used the font instead of drawing.

Step 2

Duplicate the layer with the text on it. Name the original layer "text outline" and name the second one "text fill". "Text fill" layer should be on top of "text outline" in the layers panel.

Step 3

Make the "text fill" layer invisible and select all the contents of the "text outline" layer. Then go to Effec t > Path > Offset Path to make the text thicker. Type 5 px into the Offset parameter, leave the rest unchanged and click OK (you may need to input a higher offset value if your text is larger than mine).

Step 4

Fill the "text outline" layer with a creamy white colour like #F7F3DB. Make the "text fill" layer visible again and fill it with green colour like #96BD0D.

Step 5

Now we’re ready to take our typography into the third dimension. Select all the contents of the "text fill" layer and go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel.

Input: -18, -20, 8 as respective X, Y, Z values.

Set the extrusion to 10 pt and shading to Plastic. Extrude & Bevel the "text outline" layer with exactly the same parameters except the extrusion which should be set to 50 pt.

Align the layes, to obtain effect as in the picture below.

Step 6

Select everything (Ctrl/Cmd+A) and go to Object>Expand Apperance. Now we will take care of lighting and specular reflections on our type.

Select every front of every green letter (like in the picture below) and give it a smooth light green gradient fill with 94 degrees angle. Colours of my gradient are #88AD11 (dark) and #ACC658 (light).

Step 7

Make the same selection as in the step before, preferably by selecting one object filled with the green gradient and going to Select>Same>Fill Color. Now this is going to be a weird operation because of how Illustrator handles copying, pasting and putting grouped objects on different layers, so follow those steps precisely.

Make a new layer on top of the other layers and name it "front outline".

Copy your selection and paste it in front (ctrl/cmd+F).

Now cut the selection, and paste it in front again (ctrl/cmd+F).

Give the selection a white stroke and no fill.

Select the "front outline" layer on the layers panel.

Now with the selection still active, click the right mouse button and select Arrange>Send to Current Layer.

If everything went allright you hould see a white stroke over your green letters like in the picture below.

Step 8

Select every object on the "front outline" layer and group them. Change their stroke to 0,75 pt and opacity to about 50%.

Step 9

Make the "text fill" and "front outline" layers invisible. Pick the direct selection tool and select every front of every letter just like in step 6. Fill them with with a light creamy gradient (mine is from #ECE9D2 to #FDFCF7) with 94 degrees angle and give theam a really thin white stroke. 0,25 pt would be just right.

Step 10

Now we have to select every edge that is facing the top like in the picture below and give them a light brownish fill (#E0DDC8). This won’t be an easy process since Illustrator has a really weird manner of cutting 3D objects into milions of little bits and pieces… Just focus, be precise and remember that you can always save your selection by using Select>Save Selection.

Step 11

Before we proceed we need to tidy up the mess that Illustrator left us after Expanding the 3D efect. If you take a close look you will notice that every left facing edge of our leters is cut into 3 or 2 pieces. We will be filling those edges with a gradient in the next step, so each one of them has to be constructed of a single object, not three…

You need to use the Pathfinder to combine the edges into a single object. On every letter make a selection like in the picture below and use Pathfinders "Add to shape area" option and then click Expand, or just Alt+Click the first option to expand the shape automaticaly.

Step 12

Now if you merged all the unnecessary shapes you have to select every edge that faces left except for the inner edges of the letters. If you’re confused just do this like in the picture below. After selecting the edges fill them with a gradient from Step 9 (from #ECE9D2 to #FDFCF7, 90 degrees).

Step 13

Turn on visibility of every layer. Duplicate the "front outline" layer and name it "specular reflection". Select every object on the newly created layer and turn off their strokes and fills.

We’ll use this layer as a clipping mask for our reflections.

Step 14

Select the Ellipse Tool to draw a wide, white ellipse on the "specular reflection" layer and adjust its rotation as in the picture below.

Step 15

Copy the white ellipse and paste it in front (ctrl/cmd+F). Fill it with a linear white to black gradient and use the Gradient Tool to adjust the gradient to the picture below.

Step 16

Select the both ellipses, go to the Transparency palette, click the "triangle menu" and select Make Opacity Mask. Tick the Invert Mask option, adjust opacity to about 65% and select Soft Light as the blending mode. Your result should be similar to the picture below:

Step 17

Our typography is getting all shiny but we are not quite finished. There is one thing that we need to fix. The reflection should be visible only on the front of the green letters:

To fix the problem lock every layer besides the "specular reflection" and select the lower part of the typography (the space invader, L, O, V and E). Then rightclick, select Arrange>Bring to Front, and press ctrl/cmd+8 or go to Object>Compound Path>Make to make a compound path out of this selection.

With the compound path selected add the white opaque ellipse to the selection and press ctrl/cmd+7 or go to Object>Clipping Mask>Make. The reflection is ready.

Step 18

Now copy the white ellipse and position it over the top part of the typography. You also need to adjust its width so it fits like in the picture below.

Step 19

Select the top letters (Arcade), bring them to front, and make a Compound Path out of them just like in Step 17 (ctrl/cmd+8). Then select the compound path and the ellipse and make a clipping mask just like in Step 17 (ctrl/cmd+7).

Step 20

The typography is ready so now all we need is a background, actually I made mine in Photoshop, because it was quicker and easier to obtain the effect that I wanted.

Make a new Photoshop file, create a new layer, fill it with white. Go back to Illustrator, select everything (ctr/cmd+A) and paste it to Photoshop as a Smart Object.

In Photoshop, select the white layer, go to Filter>Distort>Lens Correction and set the vignette amount to – 60

To make the vignette less gray we will colorize it with the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. So create new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and input the following values:

Step 21

This is the end of the tutorial I hope you liked it, and learned a few new techniques. Here is the result

Download the PSD (or source files) Download the Source files

This Free Icon Pack is for use in your personal and commercial projects, and can be used without attribution. It may not be redistributed.

This icon pack contains 15 colorful .png icons, each 256×256px. The icons were designed by Aaron Ovadia of Photoshop Candy exclusively for Tutorial9.

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March was another month full of amazing tutorials, showcases and articles. Here’s Creative Bookmarks March!

Quick Nav:

• Photoshop Tutorials
• Illustrator Tutorials
• Web/Blogging Tutorials
• Freebies, Inspiration, & Resources

Photoshop TutorialsCreate a Dark and Surreal Poster Using Your Own Portrait

This tutorial was inspired by the work of digital artist Rob Shields titled “Keep Me in the Dark”. This tutorial requires the use of a tablet for you to give the photo a more detailed look.

How to Create a Highly Detailed Hi-Tech Power Button

In this tutorial you’ll create a hi-tech style button that can be used in many different places. You’ll learn to use Illustrator to create the vectors and Photoshop to make the great looking effects.

Super Easy Neon Style in Photoshop

This is a great screencast by Ash Davies that teaches you how to creat neon text with simple techniques and effects in Photoshop.

Arcadia 80’s VHS Style

In this great Photoshop tutorial, from Abduzeedo, you’ll learn how to create an 80’s inspired VHS image style.

Design a Tropical iPhone Advertisement

This tutorial shows you how to create a tropical underwater iPhone advertisement. You’ll learn how to use a variety of techniques in Photoshop to compose an excellent ad.

Create a Cosmic XBOX using Custom Brushes

This tutorial teaches you how to use custom brushes and other Photoshop techniques to create a cosmic looking Xbox composition.

Achieve Brilliant Lighting Effects in Photoshop

This tutorial teaches you how to use brushes, blending options and stock imagery to create a sexy composition with lighting effects.

How to Create a Distinguishable Textured Web Layout in Photoshop

This tutorial teaches you how to create a web layout using textures and effects from start to finish in Photoshop.

Create a Chalkboard Style Wordpress Layout in Photoshop

In this tutorial, from Devise Function, you’ll learn how to use Photoshop to create a chalkboard looking blog layout.

How to Make a High-Impact Fashion Poster in Photoshop

In this tutorial, from the up and coming Design Instruct, you’ll learn how to use basic shapes and effects to create a fashion poster.

Create a Colorful Space Scene in Photoshop

This tutorial, by Andrea Austoni, teaches you how to create a nice illustration inspired by the movie “Moon”.

How To Use Curves in Photoshop

This is a great article that shows you how to use one of the most powerful adjustment tools in Photoshop: Curves.

Illustrator TutorialsAn Illustrator’s Project: From Start to Finish

A very interesting tutorial, from Design Instruct, that takes you behind the scenes and shows you the illustration process from start to finish.

Create A Cute Creature Character From A Sketch

In this tutorial, on Vectips, you’ll learn how to use an array of Illustrator tools to create a cute creature; techniques that can also be applied to many other projects.

Create a Cool Vector Panda Character in Illustrator

I really liked this tutorial from Chris Spooner. In it, he uses basic shapes, gradients and subtle effects to make a very nice vector panda.

Create a Candy Inspired Vector Snowboard Design

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to put together a candy inspired design by cutting, splitting and joining vector paths to produce an intricate weave of basic shapes.

Create a Fun Print-Ready Doodled Business Card Design

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to combine fun doodles with a business card design to create a print-ready PDF.

How to Make an Attractive Vector Butterfly

This great tutorial from VectorTuts+, will show you how to combine shapes, blending modes and the gradient mesh to create a beautiful butterfly.

Don’t Be Constrained by Control Points: An Introduction to Extreme Path

This is a great tutorial by Grant Friedman from Colorburned, that shows you how to use Extreme Path, a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator.

Create Quirky Repeating Patterns

This tutorial teaches you how to create repeating patterns. The techniques you’ll learn can be applied to a wide range of projects, such as , textiles, T-shirt prints and more.

Web TutorialsFlexible Color Schemes in Layouts with RGBa

In this tutorial, from Build Internet, you’ll learn how to use RGBa to create a monochromatic layout in which all color is relative to the background color.

Design & Code a Cool iPhone App Website in HTML5

This tutorial on Line25, teaches you how to create an iPhone App website using new and interesting techniques with HTML5 and CSS3.

Top 5 Web Design Debates That Cause the Most Riots

This is a great article that examines five popular debates in which everyone has their own opinion and, therefore, they become online riots.

10 Features to Look Forward to in WordPress 3.0

This article, on Nettuts+, talks about the much anticipated release of Wordpress 3.0 and the great new features that will be included.

How to Create a Simple iTunes-like Slider

Sliders are a great way to make good use of space. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a slider that is similar to the one used in the iTunes store.

Personal Branding for Web Designers

A great article from Web Design Ledger that talks about how important it is to brand yourself efficiently.

Top 8 Dreaded Favors Asked of Web Designers

In this great post, Jacqueline Thomas talks about the eight most common annoying favors that every designer will be asked at one point or another.

The Future Of CSS Typography

This great article, by Inayaili de León, thoroughly covers typography on the web and all of the new features and effects becoming available to web designers.

Freebies, Inspiration & Resources22 Fresh High-Quality Fonts for Your Designs

This is a great collection of free and high-quality typefaces. The list contains 22 different fonts that can be very useful for any project that you have.

Halftones Pack – 55 Free Vectors, Brushes, and Images

This is a great freebie pack from Media Militia that’s filled with 55 different types of halftones. The pack is available as Photoshop Brushes, vectors or images.

The Work of Illustrator/Typographer Jessica Hische

Jessica’s work is absolutely beautiful. With some big name clients under her belt, her talent and creativity is undeniable. This is a great showcase of some her most inspiring designs.

50 Examples of Large Photography Backgrounds within Web Design

The creativity & absolute beauty of the each one of these sites is breathtaking. This showcase is sure to inspire!

50 Yellow Web Designs to Inspire You

An inspiring showcase on Web Design Ledger filled with yellow themed website designs that are absolutely stunning.
Personal Favorite: Strange Native.

40 Amazing Minimalist Website Designs For Your Inspiration

Less is more. This showcase proves that.

40 Beautiful & Creative Poster Designs for Your Inspiration

When you’re in a creative slump, one of these showcases will appear and completely knock the creative block out of you.

Heart Directed: A Gallery of Art Directed Blogs

Heart Directed is the brain child of Jad Limcaco that displays articles around the web that have been “art directed”.

Interview With David Airey

David Airey, the author of Logo Design Love, stands out as an expert in our field. In this interview, he answers some questions that any designer would find interesting.

Get Featured in Creative Bookmarks

If you’d like to be featured in the next volume of Creative Bookmarks, simply send us you’re tutorial, resource, or article link before the end of the month. If we think it’s a top notch link, we’ll be sure to share it with all of our readers!

Email & Other Subscription Options

In this Tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a Custom homepage for your WordPress Theme using Page Templates: Complete with a featured content slider, and customizable Widgets.

Quick Nav:

• Making a Template File
• Featured Content Slider
• JavaScript
• Custom Widget Areas in WordPress Templates

Materials Needed:

• Wordpress
• Text Editor
• Note: any text editor will work.

A lot of people I have seen asking about how to make a custom landing page for their Wordpress website. In most standard themes, the homepage is a listing of recent posts.

What if instead you want to display a separate landing page? Maybe your site isn’t a typical run of the mill blog.

The Structure

To have a custom template page for Wordpress to recognize, simply create a new PHP file, I named mine custom_home.php, and at the very top when you call the header as you normally do, include this little snippet with the name of your custom page, so it should look like this,

<?php /* Template Name: Custom Home Page */ get_header(); ?>

Upload this file to your Theme Folder.

Now, when you’re adding or editing a page in WordPress, you should see a new Template in the Template Dropdown (inside the Attributes box).

You can use it now, but it wont do much for you just yet, since this is a blank file.

How you develop your template is completely up to you. In this tutorial, we’re going to craft something based off the illustration below:

So go ahead and code this in HTML as you would any other page, keeping in mind that your header and footer should still be called with Wordpress,

<div id="main_wrapper"> <div id="featured_area"> </div> <div id="column_wrapper"> <div class="column"> </div> <div class="column"> </div> <div class="column"> </div> </div> </div>

Adding a Featured Content Slider

At the top of this page, we’re going to add a featured Content Slider using the awesomejQuery plugin Easy Slider 1.7 by Alen Grakalic. I love his plugin because it is very easy to implement and built really well. Go ahead and download and unzip the file. Move the "easySlider1.7.js" file into your theme folder (if you’d like to stay organized, placing it in a /js/ folder makes sense)

Jump back into the featured_area div we created earlier, and build yourself a little list of links like so,

<div id="feature_slider"> <ul> <li><a href="#"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/image1.jpg" alt="First Slide" /></a></li> <li><a href="#"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/image2.jpg" alt="Second Slide" /></a></li> <li><a href="#"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/image3.jpg" alt="Third Slide" /></a></li> <li><a href="#"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/image4.jpg" alt="Fourth Slide" /></a></li> </ul> </div>

Notice that the links point to nowhere for now, you can put any address you like there. Also, the image path points first to the theme directory, where you will be uploading this very file you are making, so simply upload your images into an images folder in your themes root.

Now we need to add a bit of CSS to handle the slider and columns. So open up your style.css located in your theme’s root and find a cozy place to add some styling.

Careful

If your theme already uses some of the ID’s and classes we’re trying to use, you may need to rename them. Otherwise, some styles may not work properly.

#main_wrapper{ width:940px; } #featured_area{ width:720px; margin:10px auto; border:1px solid #333; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; } #feature_slider{ margin:0 auto; position:relative; width:700px; } #feature_slider ul, #feature_slider li{ margin:0; padding:0; list-style:none; } #feature_slider li{ width:700px; height:250px; overflow:hidden; } #column_wrapper { width: 940px; height: 200px; margin: 10px auto; } #column_wrapper .column { width: 290px; margin-left: 15px; float: left; border: 1px solid #333; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; }

This is assuming that you are using slides that are 700 pixels wide by 250 pixels tall, naturally you can adjust at your leisure. Also note, we are installing only basic functionality of what this slider is capable of, feel free to add to it by examining the downloaded plugin files. We also set a wrapper for the columns and gave them each a width of 290px and spaced evenly.

The JavaScript

So we have a list of pictures and some styling to surround them, but they still wont do much without a final step. Open up header.php and inside the<head></head>

area, we need to both include the slider script, and call the function. So somewhere below <?php wp_head();?>

add the following;

<script src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/js/easySlider1.7.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(document).ready(function(){ jQuery("#feature_slider").easySlider({ auto: true, continuous: true, controlsShow: false }); }); </script>

What happens here is we call the plugin function and send in the arguments to override the default behavior, setting the slider to start automatically, and keep on going. We now have a sweet working content slider!

Add Custom Widget Areas

Now you can guess what comes next, we have three nice columns just begging to be widget friendly, so I think we shall comply. Inside each column, we will include the code to let Wordpress know they are ready to accept widgets. To do this, we will need something like this:

<?php if (function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar('WIDGET_TITLE')) : else : ?>

This first checks to see if widgets are activated, and if so will call the appropriate widget based on the argument passed in, currently it calls a dummy widget named WIDGET_TITLE, we will change that. But for now go ahead and add one of these inside each of the column classes:

<?php if (function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar('left_column')) : else : ?> <p><strong>Widget Ready</strong></p> <p>This left_column is widget ready! Add one in the admin panel.</p> <?php endif; ?> <?php if (function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar('center_column')) : else : ?> <p><strong>Widget Ready</strong></p> <p>This center_column is widget ready! Add one in the admin panel.</p> <?php endif; ?> <?php if (function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar('right_column')) : else : ?> <p><strong>Widget Ready</strong></p> <p>This right_column is widget ready! Add one in the admin panel.</p> <?php endif; ?>

Take note that all three must have unique names in order to function properly. Additionally, don’t go try and play with this yet because it won’t work! We still need to tell Wordpress we are making up our own widget areas.

So go now and open up the scary functions.php file, found once again in the root folder of your theme files. Once open, we are going to add this ugly chunk of code, don’t worry though we will step through it.

if (function_exists('register_sidebar')) { register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Left Column', 'id' => 'left_column', 'description' => 'Widget area for home page left column', 'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</div>', 'before_title' => '<h4>', 'after_title' => '</h4>' )); register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Center Column', 'id' => 'center_column', 'description' => 'Widget area for home page center column', 'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</div>', 'before_title' => '<h4>', 'after_title' => '</h4>' )); register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Right Column', 'id' => 'right_column', 'description' => 'Widget area for home page right column', 'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</div>', 'before_title' => '<h4>', 'after_title' => '</h4>' )); }

Alright, so it looks nasty, but all that happens here is Wordpress sees that we are creating our own areas capable of being widgetized. First it checks if we are allowed to register new areas and then creates a couple of sidebar arrays. Don’t worry, they will not become sidebars, that is just the name. Inside the array we identify a few values such as the name of the widget area and a unique ID to assign it for CSS purposes and the like. The description is, well, a description and then the weird stuff. The before and after widget attributes open and close a div element, and use a Wordpress magic to make sure the class and id are unique to each. The title before and after set, optionally, what surrounds the user entered title of the widget. This places it inside a set of h4 tags.

Not too bad right? And we are almost done! Go ahead and call the footer in at the very bottom of your new custom home page, and this will close up this page for now, yay!

<?php get_footer(); ?>

The Endgame

Ok now grab your completed file, custom_home.php (if you named it same as mine) and if you have not already drop it into your theme root folder and lets make this happen. Log into your Wordpress Admin area and be sure the theme you want is activated. Create a new page and name it ‘Home’ then be sure to set its template to the one we just made, like this,

Now head into the settings area and click on the ‘reading’ option. Up at the top where it asks you what the front page should display, click on static page, then choose your freshly made ‘Home’ page from the drop down menu.

Only one more stop! Hit up the widgets panel now, and notice you have three of your own widget ready areas sitting on the side begging for some content.

So comply! Fill them up and save it then visit you site and you should see an awesome custom home page now, enjoy it!

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Have you wanted to learn more about color correction? The focus of this tutorial is to help you delve deeper into color correcting to up the production value of your images. Learn a few simple techniques while creating.

I will be using Photoshop CS4 for this tutorial, but all of the features I will use are available in previous versions of Photoshop. Or in any decent photo-editing software.

Primary Color Correction

In this tutorial, our work will be primary color correction. “Primary color correction affects the whole image, utilizing control over intensities of red, green, blue, gamma (mid tones), shadows (blacks) and highlights (whites).”

Overview

Before we begin, you’ll want to be sure that you have at least a novice understanding of the following tools in your photo-editing program: Curves, Hue/Saturation, Photo Filter, and Black & White adjustment layer.

Quick Tip

Keep effects on adjustment or separate layers to enable quick alteration or removal at any time during the color correction process.

Monochrome and Sepia

A monochromatic image is one whose range of colors consists of shades of a single color or hue.

Step 1: First, let’s make our image grayscale. There are various ways to do this, but we’ll look at just two:

I think the best way is to use the Black & White adjustment layer. (This can be found at the bottom of the Layers toolbox.) What is so great about this adjustment layer is the ability to control the luminance of the 6 primary and secondary colors – red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow with the sliders. This is a very useful tool for fine-tuning the the tonal range of your image.

However, the Black & White adjustment layer is only in Photoshop CS3 and newer. So, if you’re using an older version, skip to the next step.

Step 2: Apply the Hue & Saturation adjustment layer. Click the Colorize checkbox and this will automatically desaturate and tint your image. However, the Hue is wrong. So set the Hue to 35. Now it’s starting to look right.

Step 3: Lastly, perfect color brightness of your image with the sliders in the Black & White adjustment layer. Use the eyedropper tool that comes with the filter to select the part of the image you want to alter and it will hightlight which color is in range. But be careful not to drastically change the colors or you’ll be in danger of posterizing the image.

Usually changes solely in the Black & White filter are not enough to correct the image; so apply a Curves adjustment layer on top and get your image looking right. (It’s best to do these steps last – after your color adjustments – so that you’re seeing and effecting the color-corrected spectrum.)

And, for sepia, you’re done.

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In addition, using other monochromatic color schemes are done the same way. Instead of setting the Hue to 35, move the slider to the color of your choice. You also could up the Saturation a bit to make the colors pop. (For the image below, I set the Hue to 295 and the Saturation to 35.)

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Bleach Bypass

A popular image treatment is the bleach bypass. In actual film-developing, this means skipping the bleaching process. This leaves a silver tint on the photograph, as if the black-and-white and color image had been combined. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Step 1: Apply the Black & White adjustment layer once again to your image. (Or desaturate with a Hue & Saturation adjustment layer.) Then, the only alteration we need to do is in the blending mode: change it from Normal to Overlay.

Step 2: Apply a Curves adjustment layer on top. A characteristic of most bleach-bypassed images is increased contrast. So add a contrast curve to your image. But be careful. Adjustments should be minor at this stage because the image has a lot of contrast. Make sure you’re not overexposing in the highlights or underexposing in the shadows.

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Extra: Often, another characteristic of bleach bypass, along with increased contrast, is graininess. If you like, take this effect a step further by adding some noise: Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Make sure it’s monochromatic.

Quick Color Theory

Before we begin working on our next style, we’re going to talk quickly about color theory.

Take a look at the color wheels below. You’ll notice the three primary colors in our RGB color model: red, green and blue. Then, in between those you’ll notice the secondary colors of CMY: cyan, magenta, and yellow. Secondary colors are formed by the sum of two primary colors: cyan is green + blue, magenta is red + blue, and yellow is red + green. Simple enough.

The secondary colors are opposite on the color wheel to the primary colors. Hence:

Red – Cyan

Green – Magenta

Blue – Yellow

Another six tertiary colors are created by mixing primary and secondary colors. But we don’t need to get into that in detail right now.

The primary and secondary colors, and their relation to each other, are important for us to know. In the Curves adjustment layer you can effect color in the red, green, and blue channels separately. So, for instance, any adjustments upward of the diagonal line in the red channel increase the red in the image. Lowering, below the diagonal line, increases the cyan. The other channels are the same: Upward in the green channel, green; lower, magenta. Upward in the blue channel, blue; lower yellow.

Blockbuster/Fashion Look

Ok, now that we got that covered, let’s begin. This style is used a lot in big summer movies, such as the Transformer films. It’s also popular in fashion photography.

First off, take a look at the picture above. In an effort to create this look, determine the color hue and tint of the shadows, midtones, and highlights. Most importantly, the shadows and highlights. You’ll notice that the shadows are very bluish and the highlights – mainly the part of the image containing the skin tones – are, well, the color of skin.

This is a complementary color scheme. Meaning the colors used, blue and orange, are opposite each other on the color wheel.

When working with humans in your compositions, you have to take the skin tone into account. You can’t have people turning green, magenta, or blue. That would look odd. Skin will always be between orange, orange-yellow (tertiary), and yellow. Therefore to complement the subject, generally use opposite colors: between cyan, blue or blue-violet (tertiary).

Now that we know this, let’s stylize our photo.

Step 1: Apply a Curves adjustment layer to your image.

Quick Tip

Nearly every colorist starts color correction with the shadows; then the highlights; and lastly the midtones.

Step 2: In the color dropdown menu, change from RGB – which affects the overall brightness and contrast of the image – to blue. We’ll work backwards up the list, starting with blue and ending with RGB.

What we’ll want to do is bring the lower end of the curves slider up. This will increase the blue in the shadows. Next, to compensate for our first adjustment, we’ll want to decrease the blue in the highlights – taking it towards yellow – so that the skin tones stay closer to being correct.

Step 3: You’ll notice that the image has quite a purple tint to it. This is because the green and red channels are at equal intensity. To get a more blue color you can either go to the green channel and raise the shadows, or go to the red and lower the shadows. But there’s a difference here and you would do well to note it: If you were to raise the green shadows, the image would get slightly lighter and loses contrast. If you lower the red shadows, the image gets darker and gains contrast. The first is subtracting color and the second is adding.

In most cases, you’ll want to go with the option that subtracts, not adds.

And that’s what we’ll do. Go to the green channel, and bring it up just enough to take the purplish-tint out of the image. This is where you can decide between how much blue-violet or cyan you’d like in your blue-tinted shadows.

Step 4: At this point, you may need to go back to the blue channel and make sure the skin tone looks good. Not too blue and not too yellow. Adjust the highlights and midtones until you’re satisfied.

Step 5: Now we can go to the RGB or master channel. Finalize the luminance and contrast of your image. All I had to do with this image was lower the shadows.

I’m sitting pretty with a great look.

Step 6: Lastly, you can complement your image with one more filter. Increasing the blue in the shadows flooded the image with a bit too much color. Add a Hue & Saturation adjustment layer and drop the saturation to around -10.

The change is ever so slight. But, it’s perfection. And now you’ve got a blockbuster or fashion-style image. Smashing.

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Bronze

Like in the film, 300, you can give your image quite a cool bronze look. This is similar to a sepia effect; however, the image shouldn’t be monochrome. Vibrant colors and those opposite to the bronze tonal region are still visible and actually stand out nicely, while the lights and the darks take on the bronze tint.

Let’s use a picture with more colors and a larger tonal range. It’ll be easier to see what’s happening.

Step 1: Start by applying a Photo Filter adjustment layer to your image. Change the filter color to Sepia and set the density between 90 to 100 percent. Make sure the preserve luminosity box is checked.

Step 2: Add a Hue & Saturation adjustment layer next. Desaturate the image anywhere from -10 to -50. Do what looks good to you.

Step 3: Add that trusty Curves adjustment layer. The bronze-style looks quite good with extra contrast. Make a nice contrast curve.

Step 4: An optional step, one which I think looks good, is to add a little diffusion. You can achieve this by duplicating your image layer (and keeping it under the effects). Next, apply a gaussian blur to the layer. Do not blur too much! If you put too much blur, your final image will look like it’s from a dream sequence – very soft.

For this picture, I’m using a 2.5 pixel blur.

Change the blending mode of the blurred image to Overlay. You’ll notice how contrasty your image gets. To keep it from getting too soft, change the fill anywhere from 25 to 50 percent. Then, compensate for the contrast accordingly with your curves layer.

That’s it for the big, bold, bronze look. This kid is vicious on his scooter. Watch out.

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Conclusion

Bear in mind that there are many ways to achieve these looks and styles. There is no correct process or proceedure. Different colorists use different tools. To each his own. Find out what works best for you.

Also, remember that each picture you add these effects to will react differently. You shouldn’t expect these settings – or one specific procedure – to work equally well on all your pictures. It will vary due to the levels or amounts of shadows, highlights, colors, and contrast, etc.

The tendency can be to go overboard with effects. Do your best to use them sparingly and appropriately. When in doubt, less is more.

Go out and take your knowledge further by emulating styles and effects you see in magazines, films, or on the web. That’s a great way to learn. Have fun.

If I were forced to give up all but one image adjustment tool, I would keep curves. Hands down. The curves adjustment tool is an integral part of every professional’s knowledge base and image editing package.

Even if you’ve taken a good photo, chances are it can be improved or it needs to be adjusted to work in a collage or collection. Or even to just to intensify a mood. You can always make a good thing better – and curves is a one-stop-shop way to do that.

With curves you are able to:

• Adjust the over-all contrast or tonal range
• Adjust the local contrast or tonal range
• Adjust the color

Let’s jump in and find out how. It’s simpler than it looks.

Overview

The idea behind Curves is all about re–mapping values. A pixel starts out at a certain brightness, and you change it to be brighter or darker.

The curves box opens as a straight line because you haven’t made any changes yet. That means that the brightness values before and after are the same. You will effect a change by changing the shape of the curve.

The points from left (bottom) to right (top) affect: blacks, shadows, midtones, highlights, and whites. By altering the position in these regions will affect the corresponding tonal range of your image. Leaving the line in the center will leave the tones unchanged.

You begin altering the brightness values by clicking once somewhere on the line. This will establish a “point”; this point can now be dragged to a different place within the grid, which causes that tonal value to change, either lighter or darker depending on whether you drag it up or down. The reason it’s a curve is so that the change blends smoothly throughout the image. An abrupt change in value can be very noticeable. The increasingly gradual change of the brightness values on either side of the change permit a very smooth and believable adjustment.

It’s important to note, however, that you can’t increase contrast in one region without decreasing it in another. The curves tool redistributes contrast. Therefore think of the image having a contrast allocation or budget and you need to decide how to best spend it.

Also, the curves tool will preserve the tonal hierarchy (unless you use uncommon negative slopes). That means that the brighter parts of the image will stay brighter even after your conversion – just maybe not by the same amount.

Quick Tip

Keep effects on adjustment or separate layers to enable quick alteration or removal at any time during the color correction process. (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves. Or at the bottom of the Layers panel.)

S- and Inverted S-Curves

Rollover Image

The S-Curve and the Inverted S-Curve are two curves most commonly used. The S-Curve adds contrast to the midtones while subtracting from the shadows and highlights. The Inverted S-Curve does the opposite.

Often in photography, it’s difficult to expose your image perfectly. Brightness or darkness in tonal ranges can benefit from optimization. The S-Curve is often useful in these cases – not to mention, quick and simple.

Empty Tonal Range and Histograms

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One very useful and important function of curves is to correct empty tonal ranges – in the histogram edges (blacks and whites) or gaps in between (shadows, midtones, and highlights). An under exposed image can be helped by pulling in the black and white points to correct the exposure.

Or if there are gaps in between the tonal peaks you can decrease contrast in specific parts of your image – thereby freeing up the contrast to be used in the more visible areas of your image.

Clipped Highlights

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Images containing a bright light source, such as the sun, can often be harsh or posterized (also called color banding). Posterization of an image entails conversion of a continuous gradation of tone to several regions of fewer tones, with abrupt changes from one tone to another. This can create an unrealistic look, and often a smoother transition to white is preferred.

Correcting Color Balance

All curves thus far have been applied to RGB values of luminosity. But they can also be used on individual color channels to correct color casts in specific tonal regions. Often the color in an image is correctly balanced, but due to reflection or a light source with a varying temperature or color, you may see unwanted tints in a tonal region. Changing the white balance or adjusting the overall color would inadvertently harm the other tones. So we can selectively increase or decrease the amount of a color cast in the red, green, and blue channels to achieve perfect balance.

Any adjustments upward of the diagonal line in the red channel increase the red in the image. Lowering, below the diagonal line, increases the cyan. The other channels are the same: Upward in the green channel, green; lower, magenta. Upward in the blue channel, blue; lower yellow.

RGB color images should be thought of as being comprised of a composite channel and three grayscale channels containing the values of the three colors – red, green and blue. This is shown in the example above of the red on the left, green in the middle, and blue on the right.

Window > Channels to see this on your image.

Rollover Image

You can see in the image above that there is a slight blueish cast in the color tone. Not to mention, the image is slightly washed out (improperly exposed).

As you can see, the sky is already quite white, so we won’t want to effect the highlights and above. By lowering the curve in the midtones and shadows, without effecting the highlights, we solve the exposure problem. Then we’ll get rid of the blue color cast: By lowering the blue in the low end, we eliminate the problem and the gowns go to black – as they should be.

Note

If precise color adjustments aren’t required, simple color balance correction might be easier (Image > Adjustments > Color Balance).

Blending Modes

Also, curves adjustment layers (Layer>New Adjustment Layer> Curves) can be set to make curves only apply to a channel – such as Color and/or Luminosity – which allows for further, varied control. Another benefit is that it can make your adjustments more subtle through use of the opacity controls for the layer.

Notes

Practice makes perfect. The more you use the tools and techniques available to you the better you’ll get, improve your photography, and have fun.

Here are some things to remember when using the curves tool:

• Minimize use of the curves tool, as anything which stretches the image histogram increases the possibility posterization.
• Avoid the use of the curves tool on an already altered image.
• Perform curves on 16-bit images when possible. (Image > Mode > 16 Bits/Channel)
• For extreme levels of color correction, consider applying curves using LAB mode.