Free Web How to

There are many instances when you will want to simulate or mock up how a design would look printed out and photographed. It might be for a portfolio piece, it might be for a client to help them imagine a concept design, or it might just be for your own satisfaction at seeing how your work is going to look to the end user.

We all love Photoshop and its effects, but sometimes it's great to get your hands dirty when creating elements for your graphics. Ink drops can add a creative and energetic element to your designs. This tutorial demonstrates techniques to creatively work ink drops into your compositions.

In this tutorial, we're going to use some simple circles and gradients to make a cup of coffee viewed from above. The end result isn't that useful, but the process is interesting nonetheless.

Last week, I did an interview with an amazing designer named James White. One thing that I really like in his work is his use of retro style, so I decided I should explore that more. Following that idea, in this tutorial I will show you how to create a very easy, but really cool, 3D and geometric effect in Photoshop. After that, we will go a bit further and create our own retro Atari-style video game cartridge.

Explosions are cool. Seriously cool. So when I received some e-mails asking about how to create a break-apart, explosion effect, I knew it'd be worth making a tutorial on. Read on to find out how to break apart a body, then add some awesome lighting and glow, and nopattern style, to finish the image off.

In this tutorial, I will create an effect like the one in the header of the MSNBC.com website. This effect is a reader's-request tutorial.

If you have an effect you want to know how to achieve, just let us know in the comments and we will try to write a tutorial about it.

I'm a huge fan of James White's work. I love the way he plays with geometric elements and colors. It gives a retro feeling to the design, but at the same time he uses a modern approach. In an interview, he mentioned that he uses a Flash script to generate the vector shapes. Then he does the rest of the job in Illustrator and Photoshop.

Well, inspired by James's designs, I decided to figure out my own way of creating that type of effect in Photoshop. In this tutorial, I show you how to mix cool retro geometric shapes into your photos.

In this tutorial, we're going to create a metallic effect using layer styles and gradients that you can apply to different objects. We'll put it on a nice background and create a style for lettering that makes it look like it's embedded into the metal. You can download the sample PSD file from the link at the bottom of the tutorial if you'd like to simply copy+paste the layer styles.

In this tutorial, we're going to use the Path Tools in Photoshop to draw a shield-like shape. Then using some gradients, we're going to give it a metallic edge and shiny center. I actually made this tutorial when making the default icons for some posts here on PSDtuts, so if you go to the main listing on the site you'll see them in action.

Recently, Apple released a new iTunes video advertisement featuring the band Coldplay and the song, "Viva la Vida." As is usual with Apple ads, this commercial is very beautiful. The coolest thing is that this time they chose to use light effects with glows and sparks. As I'm a really big fan of this style, I thought it would be nice to have a tutorial showing how to create that effect.