People are aware of the purpose of a wordpress theme, but what they are not aware of is how to identify a good wordpress theme. This is a prominent problem with majority of the people who require a wordpress theme for their blog. In order to completely achieve the purpose of using a wordpress theme, one has to select the right wordpress theme for one’s blog. In this article, you will know about some essential things that must looked for in a wordpress theme that you are searching to be used in your blog.

Flexibility is the essence of a good wordpress theme. This means that once it is installed on your blog, customizing it should not give you any difficulty. If the theme lacks flexibility in usage then it would make it cumbersome for you to customize the blog by yourself and you would most probably need to hire someone to do job for you. An ideal wordpress theme should also be apt for search engine optimization. To enable people to find their way to your blog, you have to ensure that keywords pertaining your blog are present in the related search results, thus bringing people to your blog for the information that you have provided for others. SEO customized templates of wordpress themes are ideal for one’s blog as these themes are naturally designed in a way that will help you in the optimization of the search results of your blog.

It’s easy to see why WordPress themes are so worthy of one’s attention. With the optimal theme, you can adjust all the nifty little widgets and codes, and also ensure better search engine rankings and loads of fresh traffic daily.

Design Yourself

The web is quite over-saturated with wordpress tutorials, but only a few of them really teach you how to make a GREAT WordPress theme yourself, here are our best picks:

In my opinion, these tutorials will help you to design your own web 2.0 theme that will blow visitors attention away, and be just as good as the ones offered on WooThemes and ThemeForest.

Need your PSD coded? We recommend PSD to WordPress Conversion from $99 only, offered by SramekDesign.com to our readers.

But, before you get overwhelmed with the design process, there are certain factors you need to consider to make the correct choice of WordPress theme? Here are five essential ones:

1. Theme Width and Columns

Generally, WordPress themes are available in 2-column or 3-column formats, with widths in the range of 500 pixels to 960 pixels. In case of non-profit purpose blogs, a 2-column theme can appear more compact and reader-friendly. Since you have fewer images of goods or links to other sites to display, you can throw light exclusively on the content without pushing readers away from your site.

A great portrait has the tendency to captivate and amaze the viewer. Photos, especially portraits, project emotions and the art to taking a quality portrait photo is not easily mastered. The following guide will allow you the ability to take quality portraits without the need of being a professional and you will be able to do it without spending a lot of time.

What’s a portrait?

A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer.

Source Wikipedia.org

Step 1: The Shooting Session

For a good quality portrait follow these steps:

A. Choose the appropriate backdrop:

In a portrait you want all attention pointing to the face of the subject. Choosing the proper backdrop can allow the focus to be set on the face. Avoid objects in the background or a busy background, choosing a background is an important step.

B. Don’t allow the background to stand out:

Going with a neutral color is the right choice and blurring it slightly will allow the subject to stand out even further. This is done by using a shallow depth to take the photo. You can do this by shooting the subject up close with a wider aperture setting on your camera or by the use of a zoom lens. If you do not know how to do this, it can be done later using you favorite photo editing software.

C. Keep the focus on the subjects eyes:

Keep the eyes at the center of the portrait and decide what type of mood you want the viewer to feel, you can use a semi profiled picture or a straight on pose, that is up to you and the mood you want your viewer to feel, the simple addition of a smirk or grin can accomplish this very well. The subject’s features if changed in the slightest can allow you to capture any given effect that you as the photographer wish to capture. For example, you can turn a woman into a monster, by touching nothing but the eyes!

D. Keep the lighting natural:

You will want to do this if at all possible to keep the skins natural warmth and color. A good way to shoot a portrait would be to do it outdoors with the sun at the subject profile. Too much sun in the background of the photo will result in shading and distortion of the features as well as the colors of the face. If you are shooting your photo indoors, be sure to use an indirect form of lighting this will brighten the room without the effects of flushing the face of its natural colors. This can be done by placing lighting around the subject without actually aiming directly on the subject because the result can be the same as an over lit outdoor photo, creating a flushed out look in the subject and losing the vibrancy of natural colors.

E. Practice makes perfect:

This is done by simply taking several photos, in the digital camera age there is no added cost to take extra photos, this way you can choose the photo that has come out best for you. This is no time to be shy, the professionals do it and you can too just simply pose your subject in different poses, with different lighting and practice with all of your colors. Experiment with lighting, background colors that are darker or lighter and depth and keep on shooting. Shooting too many photos is better than not having enough when you’re trying to find the one you like most, it is easier to find the perfect picture among 500 than it is to find in 5.

Step 2:  Portrait exposure Values

Exposure is defined as how much light actually gets to the cameras sensor. The exposure Value, otherwise known as EV is representative of the camera settings, this goes along with the shutter speed. The meaning of the number will be explained along with exposure compensation.

Two factors in Exposure:

How much light is getting to the camera sensor and the length of time the sensor is exposed. The length of time it is exposed depends on the shutter speed; the determination of how much light gets through depends on the aperture value. The EV represents how much light can reach the sensor, or in a sense how exposed it allows the sensor to be. The EV is dependent of how well the scene is lit. An example of this is the shutter speed and the aperture value allows the same amount of exposure in the dark or in the sunlight.

example of full artificial lighting

Each EV number is representative of aperture and shutter settings that ultimately have the same amount of exposure. Even though the EV number is the same for all aperture value combination and the shutter speed, the result of each photo can be different.

WordPress was first released back in 2003, whole 7 years ago and after tremendous changes and tweaks, one may assume that all the WordPress themes has already been released by now… You are wrong. To my joy, I discover dozens of new wordpress themes every day and it even though I think I had seen it all by now, maybe you haven’t? If you are starting a new blog, you might get overwhelmed by the idea that in order to make a good competition in the design blog sphere — you need a premium wordpress theme (aka “paid”). While is is of course correct and many respected blogs do use a custom made, customly tweaked, customly customized wordpress theme — a lot of beginners and even more advanced users are happy with the FREE WordPress themes they simply adjusted for their needs.

If you need an inbuilt gallery, featured posts section, admin panel, magazine style for tutorials and easy ads management, these WordPress themes could be the right ones for you. My point is — you can make your blog layout look premium, without premium damage to your wallet.

This is a rather easy way to create an originally beveled text, using Photoshop CS2. Before we begin, I should say that it would look best with Calligraphy and Handwritten fonts. For the example above I created a new 300 * 100 px layer (Shft + Ctrl + N) and filled it with black (Press ” D ” to choose the black colour, and ” G ” to select the filling tool).

Create a new layer and select the typing tool. Here we took the font called LaurenScript (click on the name to download it, free), Size 25 pt, “Smooth” settings.

Go to the upper menu, click “Layers” then “Layers Style” and “Blending Options”. Apply the following settings:

1. Select the black (#000000) colour for a shadow, using the “Multiply” mode. Set the angle to 120 degree, “Distance” to 14 px from the object, and also “Size” to 14 px. When these values are equal, the shadow effect looks more balanced, therefore we set “Spread” to 0% — which makes the shadow very delicate. You can skip the shadow if, like on the example above, you are using a black background. You you choose, however, pale or transparent background, this is how this bunch of settings is going to look (you not necessarily have to use text):

2. The Inner shadow gives a lot of depth to the object, especially if you use a large image nd not a text. this inner shadow creates the illusion of 3D and gives a more complicated look to the bevel emboss we will do later. Choose the black colour for the inner shadow, and set it on the “Multiply” mode, with the Opacity 50%. In order to make the inner shadow accompany the outer shadow, which I did first, we should set the Size to 14 px as well, Choke to 0% and Distance to 18 px. (for text it is better to set it to 18px, but for an object such as the box above – 14 px would look better). Using the same angle, which is 120 degree, will guarantee that visually we will get the impression of one light spot, and correct structure of a 3D object.

3. Adding t he outer glow will create a tiny light aura around the text. Set the blend mode to “Screen”, Opacity 75% (which are the default settings in most of the PhotoShop versions). Choose the white co lour #ffffff, (In order to change the colour click inside the colour’s box and pick another hue). Set the Elements Technique to “soft”, “Spread” to 0%, otherwise the glowing aura will cover the outer shadow. Size, again, 14 pixels. Leave the”Quality” on the default settings — “Linear contour”, 50% Range and 0% Jitter. This will give us a very delicate outer glow, almost invisible, yet interesting.. The more complicated a 3D object is, the more natural it looks on our flat screen.

4. Now to the most important part – the bevel and emboss. Without these settings you can never achieve a complete 3D style. Choose the “Pillow emboss” style, “Smooth” technique and set the depth to about 510%. There is very little difference between 500% depth and 1000%, however a very visible difference between 1% and 200%. You may like the look of lower depth capacity if you work with an object such as button, however, for a calligraphy text, generally, the more depth, the better. Also, I have chosen

Tutorial written by Elfdaughter

OK, this is just the way I do planet rings. I’ll assume you’ve followed my last tut on how to create the planet, and still have that PSD open.

Create a new document, a little smaller than you want the rings to be.

Fill the background layer with black. On a new layer, make sure your foreground and background coours are set to default, then run the clouds filter.

Then go to Filter – Distort – Twirl.

Set twirl to maximum.

Repeat that filter a couple of times.

You should now have a spiral shape with a few bits of cloudy areas around the outside, like this:

Now take a large soft eraser. and get rid of the cloudy areas around the outside, and part of the middle of the spiral, so you’re left with the amount of rings that you want. Now use Free Transform to squash the layer so the rings look like rings and not a spiral. You should now have something similar to this:

As you can see, I’ve pushed and pulled it around using distort and scale. The next step is to make sure it is completely desaturated by pressing ctrl+u and pulling the saturation slider right down to the bottom. Then go to Filter – Noise – Add Noise. Now, before we go any further, I’ll explain why the noise filter is important. Planet rings are not smooth, as I’ve seen a lot of people think. They aren’t made from gas, but from bits of rock and other space debris that are kept in orbit around a planet due to the force of that planet’s

Ok so here is my tutorial for my newest work Back at Sea! So sit back and learn how to create it.

Step (1) Get all the stock images that you would like to use.

Step (2) Start and erase this part of the image.

Step (3) When you are done with that place you sea in the background like so.

Step (4) Now that you have that done try changing the light on the front rocks with Photo Filter, and also Brightness and Contrast.
Then click OK.

Step (5) Make a new layer. Now we create the moon! Get the Cercal Tool at the top and make a cercal.

(back to pre school) Now make it white.

Step (6) Erase the moon now to the horizon line. Now put a Outer Glow on it.

Step (7) Now for the ship! The ship is a brush witch you can get here. Make a new layer and put the ship right over the moon.

Bonus Part: ok so here is something you can add with Flaming Pear. I use the Flood filter. As you can see!

So there it is my short tutorial so I hope you enjoyed it!

Tutorial by Dylan White at www.dylanwhite.net