Posts filed under “Tutorials”
Project 365 2011 – making my mosaic
After taking a photo every day for a year, I thought it would be worth a few extra hours putting it all together in to a nice looking mosaic. I think the easiest way to do this is using Google’s Picasa program. The problem with this is that you need to have all your photos [...]
Freelensing help and tips
After a year running the Freelensing group on Flickr, helping and getting feedback from people experimenting with different cameras and lenses, I thought it would be good to have a bit of a round-up of tips and tricks. Flange focal distance Or: why you should try a Nikon lens on a Canon body Coffeeground and simon.hucko [...]
Create a randomly coloured grid in Illustrator
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 [...]
MSN Live Messenger to Illustrator
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 [...]
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 [...]
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
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 [...]
Darkening the Sky and Super-Sharpening in Photoshop
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 [...]