Web Site Designers

In the following Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to create a semi-realistic MacBook Pro from scratch. First, you will learn how to use the grid and the snap to grid for an easier workflow. We’ll start with some simple vector shapes and several warp techniques along with a bunch of basic tools. Next, we’ll add some color using the Layer Style properties. Finally, we’ll use Layer Masks…

The creative process is not a linear one. As artists and designers, we often set off in one direction only to decide that the proper solution lies somewhere else completely. Unfortunately, many of the creative software packages we use (Photoshop in particular) can be pretty unforgiving when in comes to making changes late in the game.

Sure, we’ve got “Undo” for a quick change of heart, but often we don’t realize we need to make an adjustment until several steps (or days) later. Luckily, Photoshop has some great features built in that allow us to work in ways that protect our precious pixels—truly freeing us to do our best work.

Nature provides great inspiration for digital art, and water is one of the most visually impressive aspects of nature. Many photo manipulators choose to work with water as it’s fluidity, opacity and reaction to light are all great foundations of art. Water also brings with it tremendous energy. The splashes, waterfalls and flows offer a wonderful basis for exciting compositions.

With so many free Photoshop brushes being shared around the web, it can always be a bit tricky to sort through the masses to grab those true quality packs that are available. So we have once again, sought to help out our readers by doing some of the work for you. With designers constantly on a quest to build up their arsenal of resources, we dove into the web and came up with a few choice treasures for you to check out.

For those of us in the business of designing the web, one area of resources that always prove invaluable to have in our design arsenals is tutorials. Learning how other web designers have crafted their designs, and which tools they always rely on can always help to guide us as we are either developing or honing our own skills. So we search the web for useful tutorials. Well today we have done the searching for you.

Valentine’s Day is around the corner and designers are eager to try out their creative skills. With the holiday comes a time of bright colors, attractive graphics and shimmering effects which can make for some romantic manipulations. We have collected some very useful tutorials, which will help you use Photoshop patterns, brushes and much more to create awesome Valentine’s graphics of your own.

Endless layers in Photoshop. Overstuffed image folders. That jQuery plug-in that has 12 files associated with it. Hundreds or thousands of individual pieces go into making a website. No wonder we go off the deep end when we can’t find a closing div — er, section tag.

We work with a ridiculously large number of things, and how we organize them (or choose not to) is often left to personal preference. But our messy habits result in confusion for the designer or developer who inherits your work. Does it really need to be this way?

It goes without saying that high-quality PSD files are some of the most precious resources for a designer. This is the reason why even the most skilled and experienced designers are constantly on the look out for new PSD files to add to their toolboxes so they are armed and ready for whatever their next client or project has to throw at them.

Layer Styles are nothing new. They’ve been used and abused again and again. Despite their ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, many designers do not yet realize the full potential of this handy menu. Its beauty lies in our ability to create an effect and then copy, modify, export, hide or trash it, without degrading the content of the layer.

Below we present, step by step, several practical techniques to help you refine your designs, increase productivity and reduce layer clutter. You will find more useful Photoshop techniques and tutorials in our hand-picked selection, Best of Photoshop on Smashing Magazine.

   Creating something out of the ordinary by combining two or more elements is not a new concept in the graphic design field. Photo manipulation is a true example of such collaboration that almost always brings astonishing results. Photo manipulation basically is a technique combining graphic design and photography. In photo manipulations, the photographs are [...]