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

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 [...]

GIMP Quicktips: Vintage Colours

Another GIMP tutorial. Based on the earlier Photoshop version showing how to get vintage colours using Curves. I’ve tried to recreate it almost exactly – even used the same photo. The recording process went surpringly well in Ubuntu. I didn’t even need to take it into Vegas for editing. Just recorded with Xvidcap at 640x480px [...]

Filed under: GIMP, Tutorials

Quick sky replacement with GIMP

Unexpectedly by Tordo

A slight change of pace for me – a GIMP tutorial. I don’t use GIMP a lot but I’ve found a lot of my experience with Photoshop is transferable. This is one such case. In Photoshop I would have gone to Select > Color Range then used the selection as a layer mask. In GIMP [...]

Filed under: GIMP, Tutorials