Posts made in December, 2009

This is a very tutorial for making colorful text, ideal for any kids decoration or web sites. we will be making this..

So, start off my creating a new canvas, 500*400, and fill it with the white color.

Using the “Fertigo” font, type any word you like, and choose the “bold” text.

Go to Layer Styles panel, and load the following settings..
Gradient from dark #5f001f to light bordo – #8e082c

and this is what we got so far..

Now to the more complicated part.

Make a new layer.
Select a brush, hard round, approximately 35px wide, but this fully depends on how thin is your font and how close are your letters.

Select any colour (preferably bright) and simple doodle over the letter.

Using the same layer, chose other bright colors and go over each and every letter like this.

This tutorial is mostly for advanced users, as it will require a lot of “manual labor”, brightening small areas in the face, adding hair from another picture, etc. If all these steps won’t be done neat, you are risking to make a funny monster, rather than a mermaid… anyway, this is what we will do:

Unfortunately a PSD file of this tutorial is not available at this time but as soon as we release the PSD membership club, I hope to include a file with this effect as well. Star of by taking a photo of a brunette girl. We used a downsized wallpaper of this woman:
http://vetton.ru/models/6406.html

Duplicate the photo so that you will have 2, or even 3 layers. If anything goes wrong, you can always pull out an intact layer and you can start allover again.

Select the upper layer and go to Filter >> Distort >> Diffuse Glow.
This will give your photo a nice dreamy effect for a start.

Next step is to colorize your photo. As you know, mermaids tent to have blueish face (they have drown, don’t forget! ) and greenish blond hair.
So, press Ctrl + U to colorize your photo (entirely) and apply these settings:

This is what you got. Mildly glowing and blue colored face. if you don’t wish to go ahead with your Photoshop skills and create a mermaid, you can stop here, this result may look good if you want to add mystery to your ordinary shot.

Next, select the Dodge Tool in Photoshop, about 3px with a soft edge, and go over the inside of the eye, lightening the eye balls and the eyes themselves, but try not to touch the contour of the eye, in order not to make the entire area too pale.

Wordpress is fun and blogging can, at some point, turn from a weekends hobby to a full time business online. Sounds familiar? But if you do consider making your blog a business, or at least taking it to a professional level, you will need to enhance your platform with some plugins. galleries to showcase your work, easy to manage contact form, and finally, ads management — plugins make the life so much easier, adverts will be removed automatically once expired and images will automatically be resized to optimize your blog for faster loading — that means YOU save a great deal of time and can us this free time to make more content or work offline. Here is a list of 100 Best plugins that you absolutely must have in order to smoothly run a creative, professionally looking WordPress blog. However, the great thing about the new wordpress version is that you can add these plugins even if you do not host your blog on a paid web hosting, i.e. WordPress.com hosted blogs can benefit just as well.

1. YouTube Videobox Widget

With Youtube Video Box Plugin you can add unlimited number of sidebar widgets to display Youtube videos in XHTML valid format.

This plugin also allows you to easily customize width and height of the videos directly in your widget panel. Optional function that enhances this plugin gives you the ability to chose colors in YouTube and enable or disable them in your widget panel. This plugin is ideal for those of you who wish to display several videos in easy-to-manage widgets, yet maintain a XHTML valid, SEO friendly website code.

Compatible with any java / ajax powered plugin, doesn’t affect the loading time and thanks to its’ lite structure, will not crash your site.

2. Akismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

3. WP Ajax Edit Comments

WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.5+) allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

4. OpenID

OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account. XRDS-Simple is required for the OpenID Provider and some features of the OpenID Consumer.

5. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. I featured this plugin some time ago already, but this is totally related to comments.

6. Comment Rating

Allows visitors to rate comments in Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments are displayed differently.

7. Clicky

While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.

8. Twitter Avatars In Comments

Self explaining comment title, plug-in that uses Twitter to show avatars in comments in WordPress blogs.

9. SI CAPTCHA for WordPress

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or regiser, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WPMU and BuddyPress compatible.

10. Old Post Promoter

Old Post Promoter will choose posts at random from your published collection and change their publication dates so that they will appear on your front page and in your RSS feed.  Note that this does not work if your permalink structure includes dates.

11. TinyMCEComments

This plugin turns the comment field from a primitive into a WYSIWYG editor, using the internal TinyMCE library bundled with WordPress 2.0 or up, without the need of another separate installation. Functions that only available to writers like adding images were removed and will not show up in the toolbar.

12. CommentLuv

This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

13. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

14. Theme Options

This plugin manages theme customization. Everything is managed in the WordPress Backend. Code snippets can be activated, copied, created, deactivated, deleted, edited, and uploaded. For comments you can highlight different comments based who wrote them and where they are, also nice feature to automatically add “about author” section.

15. WP-Paginate

WP-Paginate is a simple and flexible pagination plugin which provides users with better navigation on your WordPress site. Starting in version 1.1, WP-Paginate can also be used to paginate post comments!

16. @ Reply

This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.

17. IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!

This is what we are going to do today, this very simple tutorial will lead to an awesome effect!

Start off by creating a new canvas, 450*250 pixels. It doesn’t matter with what colour you fill it as we will overlay it with a gradient effect later.

Make a new layer, and fill it with a gradient overlay, to do so, just go to Layer >> Layer styles >> Gradient. Organize the colour buckets as shown on the picture below, here are the colours you would need, from left to right:
#020e60 … #fefefe … #020f5e… #020e60

Select the typing tool and type a word right over the whitish line. Don’t choose a slim font, we used “Spin Cycle” here, download it free at dafont.com

Go to Layer >> Layer styles >> Blending options, and apply these settings

Blending options:

Drop shadow:

Inner shadow:

Inner Glow:

Bevel and emboss:

Contour: http://www.loreleiweb.com/preview/newtutie/9.jpg

Be sure to copy all the settings correctly, else it won’t look the same, especially the gradient and bevel settings.

Texture:

Colours for inner gradient overlay, from left to right:
#000000 … #909090 … #fdf7f9 … #a7a7a7 … #787878 … #ffffff

Gradient Overlay:

Step 1. Create a new canvas, we used 430*300px, but you may want to use a different size depending on your layout size.

Step 2. Select the gradient tool and using two colours – #000000 and #454545, draw a line from top to the bottom, making your background gray fading to black.

Step 3. Choose the elliptical marquee tool, and draw an ellipse, as shown on the picture below.

Step 4. Make a new layer (Shft + Ctrl + N) and using the bucket tool with any colour, fill the ellipse.

Step 5.

Go to Layer >> Layer styles >> Blending Options and apply the following styles to your ellipse.
Drop Shadow
Inner Glow
Bevel and Emboss
Color Overlay – (colour used: #4cd302)
Gradient Overlay (black #000000 and white #ffffff)
Stroke

After having applies these settings, this is what you should get:

Step 6. Duplicate the ellipse layer (it would automatically have same Layer style settling). Make sure the upper layer is selected, and click Ctrl + T (to transform the layer). Hold the Shift button (in order to keep the ellipse’s proportion and re-size the upper layer a little.

Press ‘Enter’ to apply the modifications.

Step 7. While the upper layer is still selected, move the smaller elipse towards the edge of the bigger ellipse.
Then, reduce the opacity of the smaller layer to about 60%.

Step 8. Make a new layer.
Go to Custom Shapes and select Arrow 6 shape (comes default with Photoshop CS2. Draw an arrow as shown on the illustration below. If you are not managing to make both arrow’s ends to meet the sides of the ellipse, just draw a bit bigger arrow and then using the Ctrl + T option, resize it and move to the desire position.