Create a randomly coloured grid in Illustrator

Gerhard Richter - 4900 Colours: Version II

I stumbled across this work by Gerhard Richter – 4900 Colours: Version II (his other Colour Charts are great too) on ffffound and fell in love with it. Taking the randomly coloured grid concept a bit further (in the graphic design sense) is the Pet Shop Boys album, “Yes”, seen below. I thought it would [...]

Filed under: Tutorials

MSN Live Messenger to Illustrator

MSN Live Messenger drawn-conversation in progress

If you’re anything like me, you can often communicate better visually with images, rather than text. When chatting on MSN with my trusty Wacom tablet, often half the conversation is in drawings, especially when the other person enjoys drawing as much as I do. The problem with these drawn-conversations is that it can be difficult [...]

Filed under: Resources, Tutorials

Fire photo: Get a white background in 3 steps

Occasionally for a print or website, you might require images with a white background. Usually these are easy to find, take or mask yourself, but for some things it can be more difficult. Fire is one example. It would be very difficult to try and mask out flames from a fire photo using the pen [...]

GIMP Tutorial – Textured Text

Time for another GIMP tutorial. This time based on the Photoshop Textured Text tutorial. In this one I blend the text with a wood background. This technique is very useful in general. For example you can use it for blending objects into a background or for making a grungy text font. Watch below or in [...]

Filed under: GIMP, Resources, Tutorials

Design idea: simple colorful brush objects

A recent OXO Tower brochure had a clever design idea, but unless you live in the London area and have a particularly keen interest in the OXO Tower, it’s unlikely you’d have seen it. I thought this idea was too good to let slip away into obscurity, so here it is and here’s one way [...]

How to: make a skin for Launchy

Launchy, an application launcher for originally for Windows, is now available on Linux. Both are identical until you start downloading third-party skins. Many skins work on Windows but have strange graphical glitches and errors on Linux. It seems the Linux version is a bit more strict in the way it reads the layout of files. [...]

How to import Camera Raw presets into Lightroom

How to import camera raw presets into lightroom

When I started using Lightroom, I thought it would be very handy to be able to import all my Camera Raw presets into the developing room. Afterall, I’ve spent the past couple of years developing them and they’re the same options as far as I could see. Wrong. I thought it would be a matter [...]

Filed under: Photoshop, Tutorials

Darkening the Sky and Super-Sharpening in Photoshop

Final photo

In this tutorial I’ll show how I processed this image using the easiest way to darken the sky for dramatic effect and some super-sharpening to bring out more detail in the photo. The photo I started with was okay, but nothing particularly interesting. The exposure was good, but the real scene was more dramatic. I’ve [...]

Filed under: Photoshop, Tutorials

Downloadable Photoshop Action: Slight vintage colours with Gradient Map

Download the Slight Vintage Photoshop Action (1.3kb)

I stumbled across this technique by accident while playing with Gradient Maps a while ago. It’s a simple way to add an attractive, non-uniform tint. Click the icon to download the action. If you want to know what the action does, then read on. How it works Start off with the basic image Add a [...]

Adding a “lomo feel” in Photoshop

Camera Raw settings

Back in 2007, Flickr friend Philippe (or p*) asked me to have a go at adding a “lomo feel” to one of his photos. So the challenge is I attached a raw file of the shot…you go bananaz on it (by bananas I mean you go nuts w the lomo feel + light leak or [...]

Filed under: Photoshop, Tutorials