Ever wondered how to create that planets photographers make once in a while. Well Dirk Paessler explains that very well on his photo blog. The techniques you’ve got the use in photoshop and some advices. Technically it’s very easy, but you don’t have to make photoshop do all the work. A good eye for cropping is necessary!

Well give it a go. Tutorial : Create your own planets.

What to do when you’re out of Photoshop, the neighbors don’t have it and your in serious need to create.

Well there is always Splashup, an online powerful editing tool and photo manager. Lots of features from Photoshop. From creating separated layers, using blend modes, brushing to even using filters. And top of it all it’s very easy to use and free , works in every browser and you can save your files in progress.

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen.
A great and handy tool for any designer, a must when you’ve got lots of fonts and don’t know which one to pick. Go and check it out!

If you don’t want to spent money on fonts there are always other options like using free fonts.
Dafont.com & 1001 Free Fonts are just two examples where you can find a great amount of free fonts.
But they’re not all that good in quality. So it’s hard to get yourself a decent free font, that’s why smashing magazine picked 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design from all around the net. And they still bring you monthly, Free Fonts Of The Month.

The search for free, good quality texture resources has become an almost hopeless work. The moment when you’ve found a new source you’re happy, quality looks good and suddenly you see they want you to pay for them. Because there are so few for free it makes it even more hard to find the best. But here we are.

TextureKing

High quality textures, free for all use! Be aware that all the textures are zipped, so it does take you quite a time. But it’s worth it.

Grunge Textures

A very big and still growing collection of free and high quality images.

Textures on deviantART

Free textures in high resolution and good quality, you’ll be amazed. Be sure to search on ‘Popular’.

Luckily there are resources like patterns.
Resources a designer will hopefully never have to pay for. Good patterns are always fun to see in a design. And here we are again with the best, and only the best. Be sure to check out the pixel pattern tutorial. Have fun with them!

The Inspirational Gallery

A gallery full of unique and original borders, backgrounds, wallpaper patterns, etc.
The wallpaper-section is filled with tons of flower patterns, which is fun to use in your designs.
Yes, the site is pretty old and not updated in quite a while but the stuff is still good for use. And the best of it all, it’s free!

Kaliber10k

As they say for themselves ‘deliciously pixellated patterns’, what they really are. Around 950 patterns, again free for use!

10 Grungy Patterns

This is a collection of ten 1000×1000 pixels seamless textures. And they are free.

Pixel Pattern Tutorial

Brushes have become an almost-daily use for any designer.
Finding brushes might not be a problem, but finding decent ones is actually a true challenge.

Often you’ll be stumbling upon useless and overrated stocks. That’s why we collected the best resource-websites with photoshop-brushes to be found on the net. You’ll be amazed by the great amount of quality-brushes…

100 High Resolution Brushes - Size does matter in Photoshop, that’s why these PS’ers collected the highest resolution brushes.

Photoshop Brushes on deviantART - Probably the biggest source of brushes to be found on the internet. It’s best to search on popular.

Brusheezy - Not only a place to download brushes, but you can also vote for the best brushes.

500ml Brushes - Lots of image packs of several brush sets are available here.

Has the problem occurred to you too that you just can’t find the right icons to spicen up your layout? Well, your problem is over now! IconDrawer offers some great FREE icons, to use on your website/blog. If you are interested, you can buy some icon packs from the same website. To give an example of how much difference these icons can make, I’ve made a little blog layout with and without the icons.  Check it out by “read more”. Read the rest of this entry »

PSDTuts.com has one of the best tutorials I came across the last few months: How to create Advanced Glow Effects (which are very much the hype these days). It’s a little bit advanced, but really a must read. Just sample some of the techniques, you’ll be sure to use them in your next project.

I don’t remember where I found it, but I had this written on a post-it for two months now, waiting to be posted here on the Photoshopblog:

“Sick of the default gray background around your image? Select paint bucket, hold shift and click on the gray background, it will change to whatever color you have in your foreground color box.”

Of course I tried it, and it works. Great trick!

Massimo from the PaintBlog gives a video walktrough on how he speedpainted Adriana Lima (one of my personal favorits when it comes to supermodels …) in Photoshop, using merely a Wacom tablet and a reference picture. Awesome work!

Since quite a long time, I’m active on two different digital art communities, Deviantart and SXC. The first is more about creation, the second about the sharing of pictures (comes often to use when I need to spice up a webdesign with some goodlooking pictures). All of my pictures on SXC are released under a CC (Creative Commons) license, so others are free to use them in commercial or non-commercial projects. Of course I’m always interested to see what people do with these pictures. Especially my Tokyo and Hongkong pictures are clearly used a lot in some real-estate and entertainment magazines. But today I was amazed to see what a Deviantart member, FrozenStaRo, has done with this picture of the -breathtaking- Hong Kong skyline (be sure to check out the full view):

Awesome job! Would love to have a print of this piece on my wall ..