» Photoshop- tutorial blog

If you design for print, and specifically for materials that will be printed on traditional offset lithography presses, you either already know about Total Ink, or really should know. In offset lithography, your designs are replicated on paper by little dots of ink of various colors (typically, Cyan / Magenta / Yellow / Black, or “CMYK”, and “spot” colors). These little dots of ink hit the paper in what is known as a halftone pattern. If you bust out your loupe and take a look at anything printed this way, you will see the halftone patter. It looks sort of like this:

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Without going into too much gory detail, anti-aliasing is the term used to describe how the edges of shapes get rendered with pixels. With anti-aliasing turned off, pixels are either just “on” or “off” and you see jagged edges. As we will see later, in some scenarios turning off anti-aliasing is the best option. With anti-aliasing on, the edges of shapes have semi-transparent pixels applied to give a smoother appearance.

But as you can see in Photoshop, anti-aliasing isn’t just “on” or “off”, you have options:

Strong, Crisp, Smooth….. But which one is best?
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Ever since CS, Photoshop has had a feature called “Layer Comps”, which is largely underutilized by designers. The concept of the Layer Comps is very simple, it’s just a quick way to take a “snapshot” of which layers are turned on and which layers are turned off in your document. Think “compositions”. Some Adobe Photoshop files get to be VERY complicated in terms of number of layers, and it can be useful and efficient to be able to jump back and forth between different “states” of your document.
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This tutorial is a guest post by Pixblix.com

1. Not every image will lend itself well to a repeating background. I like to select a portion of an image that already has a bit of a pattern to it and also has similar colors, say for example a group of flowers. For this tutorial, I’ve chosen an 800×600 portion from a picture of spring fruit tree blossoms. For now it is much easier to work with a larger image than a tiny one; you can resize the tile when it is finished. The objective of this tutorial is to modify the photo so that the bottom edge matches up with the top edge and the left edge matches with the right creating a seamless, repeating background when it is tiled.

   

2. Turn the photo inside out so that all of the corners are inverted to the center of the photo. Do this by choosing the Offset filter: (more…)

In our previous Christmas Photoshop tutorials roundup we learned a few simple techniques, lets take it a step further so you can create your own designs and list some Photoshop brushes you can download for free …

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As Christmas approaches us, there are lots of things that designers are required for; Christmas Cards, E-Cards, Wrapping Paper - why not make your own for that custom Christmas feel. Today lets take a look at some tutorials to help you with photoshop …

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Plugins and filters extend Photoshop by providing new funtionality and effects that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to achieve or by simplifying a process. There are lots of plugins that you can buy but in the TutorialBlog way we are going to be taking a look at the best of the free plugins …

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Pixel art is a technique that appeared when the early 2d computer games first appeared, the technique then seemed to disapear when 3d games became popular. Now with mobile gaming and a thirst for retro-cool, pixels are coming back. In this article we will take a look at some examples of great pixel art and then learn some of the techniques involved - all you need is any graphics program from MS Paint to Photoshop and lots of patience. Lets get cracking …

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