10e20 Blog

Starburst are a great way to lead the eye to the focus of a design or an image. I have 2 simple ways that you can go about doing them.

One works off of the Distort filter and the other is a few repetitions of the Transform and Rotate commands.

Option 1 (easy to do, but lacks control)

Step 1. Set up your document and create a new layer. On this layer make rectangle selections that span the height of the page by using the Marquee tool, and after the first selection hold down shift to add to that selection.

Step 2. Fill the selection with color. Do this by using the Paint Bucket tool or better yet go to Edit/Fill and choose the background or foreground color.

Step 3. With the same layer selected go to Filter/Distort/Polar Coordinates and select Rectangular to Polar.

Sometimes you may want to really express the feeling of a picture by emphasizing certain areas or saturating colors and exaggerating outlines.

Sumi-e is a style of ink and wash painting developed in China during the Tang Dynasty.

Literally ink painting, it is an art form that strives to distill the essence of an object or scene in the fewest possible strokes.

When you are looking for that artistic approach to enhance your photos try these steps to push the color and texture by using some basic filters and search for the essence in your latest photographs.

You may not get the photo looking like a Chinese Ink Wash, but some of the treatments will look pretty cool and when used in a combination with other processes can be very useful.

Touching on a bit of a previous post on photo retouching and how it has become a rising industry for all sorts of clients, we now have a cool new editing toy from the Perception Laboratory, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The Perception Laboratories Face Transformer allows you to alter the age, race and sex of an uploaded image. You can even convert the image to a few famous artists styles…oh and even an ape man and a drunk.

I gave it a try with my mug-shot of a drivers licence photo- if you have a better photo I suggest using it.

Begin by uploading the image and answering 3 questions on age, sex and race to register the image.

Next center the mouth and eyes on your uploaded image to match the samples alignment.

“Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.” - Vincent Van Gogh

Color effects everything in our lives- it can send a positive or a negative message. It can be soothing or it can create a disarming stir. Marketers have know how to manipulate with color for years. When I say Campbells soup can, you most definitely visualized a red soup can and the label. Red excites, it energizes.

The old masters of painting have been studying color and its effects for centuries. Van Gogh sought not to mimic reality but to use colors that let him be more expressive. Why not tap into that hard work and borrow some color schemes from Vermeer or Kandinsky for your next project or personal photography?

With Photoshop’s Match Color Tool you can do just that to all your personal photos. Made to reproduce the colors on a batch of images, finding other cool and useful applications for these tools is what makes Photoshop, or any tool, great!

I recently came across this article in the New York Times technology section called “Looking Perfect, One Pixel at a Time”. This article talks about the booming cottage industry of photo retouching and the types of clients they work for and the reasons people or companies seek out these services.

Everything from human vanity (the obvious dominating service), restoration of damaged photographs to age progression for police agencies and missing persons reports.

Yup Phojoe.com even did an age progression of Elvis (sans the drugs and junk food and maybe if Betty Ford was around).

Some clients ask for ex lovers or spouses to be removed from a photo…does anybody remember the fine people of Lacuna, Inc.? Cause that’s were we are heading…slowly.

OK- so you have some cool new images you have been working on or maybe the latest photos of the family, and you feel the world should be able to see them.

Instead of risking imprisonment and going into your local museum with a framed piece and a tube of glue like Banksy (more here) you could follow this tutorial and send the images off to your friends and family and say, “Hey-My works in the Louvre and MOMA!”. Then they will say, “Yeah-right…” and you can all share a laugh.

You will need a photograph of some people in front of paintings or framed work at an exhibit from a museum or gallery- the more famous the better (museum not the people)! But this can be tricky since most museums do not let you take photos inside. Some cool ones do, but for ridiculous reasons most don’t. You can always sneak one or two in before the security gets all up in your face.

Photoshops Drop Shadow Layer Style is a great tool to add a quick and easy cast-shadow on something. However the tool assumes that you are adding the drop shadow to a flat surface, which is not always the case.

Sometimes you will need to add a different Perspective to the drop shadow layer.

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a realistic drop shadow that can be applied to any layer.

Step 1. Create the document and place the object you want to add the Cast Shadow to on its own layer.

Step 2. Apply the Drop Shadow to the layer by going to Layer/Layer Style and then select Drop Shadow. Just create a general shadow and be sure that the Distance is greater than a 1.

The distressed, rough design look is in stark contrast to all the glossy gradient styles. This trend definitely has its roots in the streets and expressiveness and can be quite fun to create some funky graphics.

This tutorial is a simple practice in Masking and creating some new Brush settings. You can use this technique as a frame for an image or add it into your designs where you see fit to convey that feeling of raw rebellion. Check out some fine website examples from Design Meltdown.

Step 1. Create a new document and make a new layer with a solid color fill of your choice. If you are working from a photograph or an image you can start with that instead. Basically we will be beginning from what we want to add the grungy frame to, which is our mask.

Sometimes you want to get that text to pop off the page or screen. With this tutorial I will go over a simple technique to give your text that 3D angled effect to really make it standout.

Step 1. Create your word with a large, bold typeface and fill it with black. Rasterize the font by going to Type/Rasterize.

Step 2. Slightly tweak the height of the font a bit larger than normal. Go to Edit/Transform/Scale and move the top or bottom out slightly.

Step 3. Go to Edit/Transform/Perspective and use the sliders to give your text a slight perspective and angle. I angled my type a bit down on the left and up on the right. I also made it recede out to the right, larger on the left.

Step 4. Duplicate your text layer and fill the top layer with a solid color.

Using photographs inside your text can add a new dimension to your design work. It can really accentuate that feeling of whatever it is you are trying to convey. Lets face it, pictures are worth a thousand words and well… words are words. So it is a win-win situation.

Sure, sometimes it won’t work. The font needs to be fat enough and the size large enough to show some of the image being masked as well as remaining legible. Here is the basic technique to create a Mask for your image to fit in your text.

Step 1. Create a document with both the Text and the Image on separate layers. Position the image on the top layer above the text.