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Considered difficult to master, actions are often overlooked by most Photoshop users. It’s true that actions are not as simple to use as layer styles or even as Photoshop plugins, and that the concept of automation has always be beyond the scope of most users.
But if you take a closer look at Photoshop actions, you will find that they are easy to understand and can help you automate your hard work, such as applying a series of repetitive changes to a group of images, for example.
An action no more than a recording of a series of tasks performed in Photoshop. Once created, you can apply that action on an image or a series of images. You can even make an action to create an image from scratch.
The following list is a gallery of free special, color, photo and text effects actions ready to download an use in Photoshop. Although these Photoshop Actions are free, please read the terms of use in each download page.
Grunge, dirty, gritty, slimy, rusty, shattered, dripping, torn, worn, and whatever you think that you may frown upon in real life, is an awesome resource for creativity.
An incredible amount of photo effects, text effects, brushes and textures are available for free access on the web.
This list is a compilation of sixty grunge and distressed effects resources for Adobe Photoshop. Go and get your hands dirty with them!
How can we define what’s a photo effect? That was my main concern when I started the research to build this list. Despite of this situation, I had one thing clear: the final result had to be quite different from the orignal picture and be recognized as a post production photo manipulation.
That idea would leave all kind of complex photo retouching and subtle color correction out of the discussion. I’ve already gathered some of those tutorials in my Guide to Photoshop digital makeover and 70 horror, blood and gore photoshop tutorials and brushes articles.
When I was a kid, I was a compulsive painter of punched eyes, missing teeth and bloody scars on almost every magazine or newspaper photo I found.
Time passed by and I didn’t become a special effects makeup artist like Tom Savini or Rick Baker, but I still enjoy a nice horror movie with some decent gore and splatter effects.
Lately I’ve been noticing that many Photoshop artists are mastering the horror makeup techniques and believed that it was time to gather a nice (er, sort of…) list of Photoshop tutorials filled with gore, splatter and blood. Some previews have been blocked just because the final effect was too explicit. Have some fun with your photos, but don’t scare your kid brother too much, please.
Let’s dive today into a sea of brushes. Hundreds of thousands of sets are lying undiscovered like pirate treasures all over the web. Due to this phenomenally vast amount of Photoshop brushes available, directories are becoming very popular lately.
Designers are collecting them like mad. Not to mention that finding the most unique or bizarre set is a must.
And believe me, in this case, size does matter… So, here’s my contribution to all the Photoshop brushes starving hordes of designers and artists, including myself: 100 Awesome High Resolution Photoshop Brushes. And don’t forget to check the list of brushes sites and directories at the end of the article!
How about a fun effect for your incredibly boring photo albums? Creating a old comic book effect for your photos is easy and the results are visually appealing. More fun is achieved when adding captions to your photos using comic book fonts and design elements.
This tutorial will show you how to give a comic book look to your photos using a couple of filters and some additional decorations.
This is a collection of ten 1000×1000 pixels seamless textures. These textures were created using Filter Forge plugin. And they are free. Yes, FREE.
Filter Forge is an amazing new Photoshop plugin that lets you create your own filters (Standard and Advanced editions) or to run already created ones (Basic edition) from a gallery of more than 2500 user submitted filters. You can read a tutorial I wrote about creating a rocks textures using Filter Forge, to learn more about this plugin.
You can also download a 30 days fully functional demo version of Filter Forge and try it yourself. Or you can download any of these ten huge 1000×1000 grunge, rusty and dirty textures.
For some unknown reason, each time we try a new graphics application, we feel the uncontrollable desire to apply the most cheesy effects to beautifully designed typefaces. These so called text effects or type effects are carefully hidden guilty pleasures that most designers enjoy to try, but would never dare to apply in real life work.
For those like me that love text effects and have the courage to admit it, here’s a thorough guide to the best 80 text effects available on the web.
To some these may be not the best tutorials on the web, but certainly they are some of the best around. I had to eliminate those that looked nice but had very little preview images. This guide includes 78 Photoshop tutorials and 2 impressive collections of Photoshop Actions, plus 3 books on the subject.
If you have created a cool text effect and you believe it should be mentioned in this list, just leave a comment with the link to your tutorial or resource in the comments section.
Some weeks ago, I came up with this very easy effect while playing with a picture posted by Nicole at Digital Photo School Blog, which is, by the way, a cool, fun, and very friendly photography blog and forums.
After opening that picture at Photoshop, I started playing with filters and Smart Blur caught my attention. It gave some kind of vectorized or plastic look to the picture. After that, I applied a couple of filters more, ending up with this result.
This is a nice and easy effect with great looking results. We are going to learn how to create a watercolor text effect painted over a wet paper. The results are very nice and you can try this effect with different color schemes or underlying papers. Perhaps scrapbooking fans will consider this effect for their hybrid scrapbooking projects. Read the rest of this entry
Fake images are all around us. Almost every fashion model or artist photo is digitally beautified prior to its public release. Sometimes this goes too far and the photos are so fixed that leaves almost no traces of the original natural beauty of the subject being retouched.
This digital enhancement of human faces and bodies is called Digital Makeover. It usually involves techniques such as skin smoothing, red eye removal, hair color replacement an so on. Read the rest of this entry
This is something I always wanted to do. I’m turning 44 this year and I must admit that I still listen to progressive rock with passion.
And this is precisely what I love about Photoshop. You can turn anything you like into brushes and start writing about something that you normally wouldn’t, in your blog.
Sadly, it was only when I started this brush set that I noticed that except for a couple of bands, no one had a steady logo over time. Even YES had different logos. But there were cases like PREMIATA FORNIERA MARCONI, KING CRIMSON, MOODY BLUES, and even JETHRO TULL, that didn’t even keep the same typeface on two albums. On the other side, groups like ELO, YES, GENESIS, PINK FLOYD and some others, at some point of their history, had very renown logotypes.
No matter how good the photos we take are, we always feel the urgent need to turn them into a drawing effect. The standard installation of Adobe Photoshop gives you a wide range of artistic plugins that have very specific names, but fail to deliver when used with the default settings.
That’s the case of the Graphic Pen plugin. The resulting image is far from acceptable. Perhaps it looked good, many years ago, when it was part of the revolutionary Artistic Effects collection published by the now defunct, Aldus Software. But now, with the vast amount of artistic effects plugins and applications (such as Gertrudis Pro, the best one in my opinion), you should have to find a way to make the most of those plugins.
In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Photocopy and Sharpen More filters, and the Overlay blending mode to archieve colored ink drawings.
I’m quite sure that many of you had the chance to try those wonderful Triazzle™ puzzles that are being sold at toys stores all over the country. Triazzle™ puzzles were invented by Dan Gilbert, a Graphic Artist, Product Designer and founder of the Dan Gilbert Art Group, after a request from the National Aquarium in Baltimore to create something special for a new exhibit. That original puzzle was never released, but some years later the DaMert Company expressed their interest in that original brain teaser and shortly they began a collaborative work to produce one of the best selling products of its kind for many years.
Rumor has it that Photoshop CS3 will offer some 3D capabilities. There is no official list of features, but it seems that you will be able to open most popular 3D objects formats (objects, not scenes though…) and presumably, have access to thier color and texture properties. But as of this writing the only official word is that these 3D capabilities are not active in Photoshop CS3 beta preview.
UPDATED: Added an extra tip!
This is the scenario: You are a skilled Photoshop artist, or perhaps you are a great photographer. If that’s not true, then you may be a cool designer or at least have some nice Photoshop tips or tricks that nobody knows. And you need money.
No matter what your skills are, if you are capable of creating something with a certain appeal with Photoshop or even other graphics application, there are many ways that you can turn that into money with certain ease.
It’s Christmas time and, as every year, it is a good opportunity to provide some quality resources to my seasonal graphics starving visitors. Not much to say in this case. I built this list gathering some new (and old) Christmas related tutorials, brushes, cliparts and icons. I tried to keep a high quality standard, but in some cases you will find some simple, yet nice, resources that can be of a great help for a quick work.
All these resources are free for personal use. Be sure to read the terms and conditions of each one of the resources site, specially when downloading free icons, before trying to publish anything on print or on the web. Click on each image to go to that tutorial or download page.
This time I will commit myself and try to expose an nice illustration technique in a few steps instead of the usual massive explanations I love to write. This tutorial explains how to create some glowing lights brushes using the Lens Flair filter that comes in the default installation of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and previous versions.
This technique is amazingly simple, but the resultant brushes are so cool that you will likely spend your saturday nights experimenting with brushes dynamics and blending settings instead of hanging around with a bunch of bums.
It is well know that most designers daily Photoshop duties include the creation of an aqua or chrome beveled text, retouching a face, color correcting a photograph or, at best, the design of a nice background pattern to mention just a few. So, I’m pretty sure that you have managed to build a nice collection of Photoshop plugins for digital photography or special effects.
Finding resources that explain how to program a Photoshop plugin is a extremely difficult task. Why? Just because there is little information on the web. You may ask yourself "Is that possible?"
Well, most people agree that creating an Adobe Photoshop plugin is a gold mine business due to the popularity of this software. I don’t know if that is still true, but that was true not so long ago.
It is very common to find tutorials about making page curls. Many of those tutorials are great, but the final effect is very unrealistic, not because of the quality of the tutorial, but due to the 3d nature of the effect. If you feel the urge of creating 3d paper effects, I suggest you to take a look at the superb PageCurl Pro plugin from AVBros to take care of all your 3d paper effects needs.
Filter Forge is an incredibly powerful new Photoshop Plugin. It’s simply amazing. It gives you the power to create your own filters (you must run them from inside Filter Forge though) without any programming knowledge at all. Some technical knowledge about procedural textures and image processing helps a lot but it is not indispensable.
For those who never heard about it, Relief Shading is a cartography rendering technique where a three dimensional appearance is given to the topography of a map. The execution of this technique is quite complex and it is usually achieved using special map rendering software.
Despite of that, many articles have been written about Relief Shading in Photoshop. These articles are somewhat complex and are usually directed to cartographers and map artists. That’s because they use very precise topological data and any change in the representation can result in misleading cartographic information. Read the rest of this entry
There is plenty of software to build virtual Lego models with your Mac or PC. These applications use properly defined Lego parts data in the form of 3d objects to help you create a lego scene or instruction booklet of a Lego model. Just for fun, I decided to render some of those bricks and turn them into Photoshop brushes.
These are the programs I used : LDraw (not exactly a program but it is long to explain), MLCad (to distribute a group of bricks all over a virtual floor), L3P and L3PAO (to translate MLCad file into a POVRay file) and POVRay (to render the scene). These applications are free, but they are somewhat difficult to use if you are technically challenged.
After rendering the scene, I opened it with Adobe Photoshop and started to create each brush.
A couple of nights ago, when I was updating this site, it came to my attention that, with the time, I have been able to build a little collection of exclusive downloads such as Adobe Photoshop brushes, layer styles, backgrounds and other interesting stuff that some time ago was password protected and now is open to everyone.
So I came up with the idea of creating a section in this blog where visitors could easily find these downloads. This initial post will showcase all the previous downloads available and from now on, each new download, made by me or created by an external designer or artist exclusively for The Photoshop Roadmap, will be announced in this section.
With Squizz, designers create easily an infinite range of samples, then apply new fabric instantly to existing models. This HandsOn demonstrates how you apply any kind of fabric to a model, so you can display new designs with your existing model.
Squizz is the ideal tool for sampling garment designs, interior designs, home furnishing, accessories etc… You can build a catalogue without producing any sample!
Enrique Flouret, Arch. Keeping The Photoshop Roadmap interesting since 1999. In June 2006 the blog starts.
