This tutorial was originally posted on loreleiweb.com and moved for technical reasons. Ok, yesterday I posted that old gold pic I made and Dale asked for a tutorial so here we go… in case you forgot what am I talking about, we are going to make this text effect:

So… Make a new canvas, and fill it with black color (#000000). Please note that this tutorial will only good against dark, ideally – black background. We leave a dark border around the text, which is invisible to you now, though if we take a lighter hue for the bg, you will notice that the effect looks different, a lot less interesting.

Next, type a word on your canvas. Make sure you use a very bold font. We used ‘Yikes!’ for this tutorial.

Go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Blending Options, and apply the following settings:

you can use our texture image, just download the PSD file and pull it from there, or alternatively load it yourself. Click HERE to download the pattern image.

Do not skip this step, else your gold will look too dull without soft shades that this pattern overlay gives. If you do not have the pattern image, you may use ours, from Herringbone Text Effect – yes, I used the same one, how creative.

This is what you got so far:

Now, take the eraser tool, round, 9px, and draw a straight horizontal line in the middle of the text, as shown on the image below:

That’s it. Your result is ready. Hope you enjoyed the tutorial, please ask any question below or just download the psd file and analyze yourself.

After there were a few complaints about the previous action we released where people could not get the colors to work right, we decided to fix this bug with out new “PSWISH Action 4 pro”, which works on fixed colors defined in the action itself. You are going to love this one, really. Any boring, dull, lifeless shot you have can be turned into a vivid, professionally retouched photo, just like you sometimes see in photography showcase galleries but have no idea how they have done that. So what does this action actually do? First of all, it fixes contrast, so dark photo become vibrantly yet naturally bright, however, we don’t use any mask layers to fix the dark fields. Next, it adds light rainbow overlay of colors that blend in perfectly with the content of your original photo. lastly, it adds very mild grain / sand effect, which as you know is very popular among professional photographers.

If you want to share this action, please link to this page, and not to the direct download. Also, needless to remind not to sell, offer free or redistribute this action under your own credits. All credits for this action creation are reserved to LoreleiWebDesign.com. Photos used below are stock photos are are used for demonstration purposes ONLY.

Click on the following examples, to full view. As always, downloading is 100% free.

Although we post a lot of tutorials that teach you how to turn your ordinary photos into professional shots, many of us still get stuck and end up playing actions. It only takes seconds and the result is often very impressive.

With so many ideas and experience I have, I decided it would be a shame if I won’t release a set of actions to help the readers of PSwish.com and LoreleiWebDesign.com, so here is my first release, PSWISH 3 Action (pro). Please note that this action is for personal use one, and cannot be resold or redistributed on other websites.

Instruction:

• The action will work best with LIGHT photos. Any area that is slightly dark will turn black.
• The final result’s color scheme of the photo is determent by your Background and Foreground colors set before you played the action. Play with different variations to see what works best for you. If the results turn to be too dark or too reddish, set both foreground and background colors to lighter hues. Alternatively, hide the dark clouds layer when the action is finished playing (which makes the shot significantly lighter yet keeps the professional touch the action applied).

I use CS3 so I had no chance to test it on CS2 or lower, if anyone does, please drop a comment below so that other users will know if it’s suitable for other versions or not.

What you can do with this Photoshop Action?

This is idea for retouching photos with dull colors, or those that turned to be too light and as a result — uselessly boring. It will help you to turn any ordinary shot into a professional, “old school” photo with very strong contrast, slightly cold colors and grainy texture that is pulled from photo itself, and applied without using any additional grain effect. Like I said, if the result turns to be nearly black, this means your colors were too dark, because if you hide the clouds layer (should be one before last) — you will get good results but without this beautiful dramatic dark grain.

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Looking for nice looking web 2.0 gradients could be a pain. Most of them just won’t look good when it comes to implementing them into your design. Luckily, some talented people out there do take the time and effort to release free Web 2.0 gradients for anyone. Thanks to Jakub Nowaczyk, you can obtain a free PSD file of the Tango gradients. 9 splendidly looking gradients, idea for use in web design and any sort of graphic that need to look truly sleek.  The gradients come in 9 classic colors – Butter, Orange, Chocolate, Chameleon, Sky Blue, Plum, Scarlet red, Aluminium light, Aluminum dark.  Installation:

Put the .grd file into the folder:

MAC: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Presets/Gradients

or

WINDOWS: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop\Presets\

To load a file, go to the Gradients palette, then click the small arrow in the top right corner and choose one of the gradient sets collections from the menu. Enjoy!

Download | Release Page

OK, here is a text effect I came up with yesterday while making some crappy design and since it turned out pretty nice, I decided to make a tut about it. So, we will be making this nice oily text:

So, start off by making a new canvas, and fill it with a dark background colour, we used black.

type the word u like… we used customized GauFont PopMagic.

go to layer >> layer styles >> blending options, and set the following settings:

• Inner Shadow

• Inner Glow

and also…

• Bevel and Emboss

• Contour Line Inside

• Contour

• Satin

• Colour Overlay

After all these settings, u will have this:

Now, duplicate your layer.

Select the upper (copied) layer and go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur, and apply THIS BLUR

Reduce the opacity of the blurred layer to about 70%.

That’s it, hope u like the result, please post any questions u have!

Please note, when buying the psd, after you proceed with the checkout, you must click “return to merchant” button, in order to go to the download page!

A lot of designers are going out of their way to create something special in the CSS of the wordpress theme that will make an impact.

But the fact remains, no CSS trick will ever compete with what Photoshop (or Illustrator) can provide in web layout, especially in such a competitive area like wordpress themes. Here is a selection of truly, incredibly breathtaking WordPress Themes that you can not only worship and admire, but also download 100% free and use for your blog. Enjoy!

1.  Puteulanus WordPress Theme [demo]

2.  Deskspace WordPress Theme [demo]

3.  Blogging Cream WordPress Theme [demo]

4. Fresh Citrus WordPress Theme [demo]

5. Modern Poison WordPress Theme [demo]

6.  Notepad Chaos WordPress Theme [demo n/a]

7. CreativeArt WordPress Theme

[demo]

8. Twilight Saga WordPress Theme [demo not available]

9. Ariclare WordPress Theme [demo]

10. My Bay WordPress Theme [demo]

11. Grunge 2 WordPress Theme [demo]

12.  WPcoda WordPress Theme [demo]

13. Royal Orchid WordPress Theme [demo]

14.  Vietproblog WordPress Theme [demo] (drag the lamp in the demo, awesome effect!)

15.  Mill WordPress Theme [demo]

There are quite a few trends in web design right now. Some still use a lot of twirly flowerly ornaments, others, following the trends dictated by psdtuts.com and abduzeedo.com have proceeded to glowing lines and starry psychedelic effects but the problem remains with creating the shape in the first place. While some designers, like myself, prefer working with Photoshop shapes, it looks like brushes are still a far more popular and accessible tool for many, so here are the top 10 brushes releases for Summer 2008, which can help you greatly in your artwork or web design.1.  Twirly Glowing Lines Photoshop Brushes

2. Abstract Glowing Lines Photoshop Brushes

3. Scanlines Photoshop Brushes

4.  Da Vinci Tarot Cards Photoshop Brushes

5. Old Maps Texture Photoshop Brushes

6.  Victorian Botanical Photoshop Brushes

7. Enchanting Flowers Ornaments Photoshop Brushes

8.  Slightly Oriental Ornament Photoshop Brushes

9. Halftone Grungy Photoshop Brushes

10.  Bubbles Brushes for Photoshop

This is yet another very small freebie made in Photoshop in less than 10 minutes, but I am sure the outcome will be used on hundreds of blogs! All I did was drawing a circle, applied styles I previously posted and added a bit of a gloss. That’s all. The feed shape itself was a bit tricky but like I said, it didn’t take long at all. In the zip folder you will find 3 icons without shade and 3 with shadow (as you see on the previous picture, all in PNG format against transparent background so they are more than read-to-use. Hope you like them!

FREE DOWNLOAD (124 kb)

There are so many tutorials and guides online that teach you how to make effective use of the web 2.0 design. While most these tutorials are useful, at the same time they kill the originality in web design. For example, most “guides” tell you that web 2.0 is about having a glossy badge, stripes background, and bold fonts. Result? There are countless hundreds of designs with badges, stripes and bold big letters… and they are no different from one another. It does not matter if you make a web 2.0, web 1.0, or web 75.0 design, it all comes down to being original and memorable.

However, if can’t really find anything particularly original to symbolize your design, it’s “safer” to go with the current trends of web design. So here is a very small fragment of web design layout, and how to turn a regular layout into a web 2.0 layout.

This is what we had…

And this is what we are going to do…

We are going to work in Photoshop, using nothing but layer styles; focusing on mild gradients and shadows.

Start off by using the Rectangular shape with rounded corners, and drawing a… rectangle.

What we need to do first is give our rectangle some depth and life. Following the principles of web 2.0 design, only shadows, outlining and light gradients will give us this effect. So go to layer styles, and drop a little mild shadow. We used #96aed6 for this purpose.

To give the shape a little depth (so it won’t look like a flat object), add mild inner shadow, with darker tone (we used #304f82 )

Lastly, its important to add a little outlining. We will use the #FFFFFF white color, since our shadows from both sides are darker, we want to have a light and semi visible line that will contour the shape.

And this is what we got…

However, this won’t give us enough depth. We want to make this rectangle even more visibly curved, as it does not touch the surface evenly, but adding more shadow using the layer styles, or, making the shadow stronger won’t give us the desired effect. Use this horizontal divider offered by dezinpolio.com and add it to the middles of your shape, so that it will “fade” towards the corners, as shown below:

Now, remember we mentioned the bold letters? Web 2.0 makes a good use of fonts, preferable very easy to read, slightly cartoonish and bold. We had a hard time choosing a suitable font and decided to go with “Cooper Std”.

We are doing to add a very mild shadow (#5674a7) and light gradient from white at the top (#ffffff) to light blue (#cdd9de) …

This will give us a very cute baby design.

Web 2.0 is also about a good proportion and while designs are particularly asymmetrical, others are so to speak obsessively symmetrical. I prefer the second type, as it takes less originality and taste to create, all you need is a sense of proportion. Let’s say we add a few buttons at the bottom and side corner of our design…

Does this look good?

No, it doesn’t because the tabs look way too chaotic, so we will make sure the line of the left side tab,”meets” the line of the bottom tab, like this…

Now it looks proportional.

In case you wonder why we missed a step, the layer styles for tabs are almost identical to the ones we used for the main rectangle and same goes for the font and layer styles of the “tabs”. For learning purposes, you can download the PSD file and analyze the process. Remember that all these semi visible gradient, and 1px outlines is often what makes the difference between great web design and amature attempt in designing. Good luck!

After the successful release of “Precious Heart” on my other blog,

I decided to make a sister icon with a clover leaf. When I was in Prague last time I saw such an impressive variety of Swarovsky glass and it inspired me to make a graphic with similar structure, deep and subtly sparkling. Anyway, the download is free and you can use it any way you like The preview image is desized, otherwise blog template gets reformatted, you can previous the full version here.

Download FREE