You can download all the new brush sets and the textures below, but also make sure to visit Janita's site Seishido — and then help us spread the word about her amazing Photoshop brush resources. Oh, and don't forget to join her newsletter!

Download Brushset Nipponline (zip - 120 KB)
Download Brushset The Little Things (zip - 110 KB)
Download Brushset Workshop #1 (zip - 160 KB)
Download Texture #88 (zip - 450 KB)
For more brushes, see our Photoshop Brushes Page.



New Tutorial — Andy Warhol Pop Art Silkscreen Effect

Almost synonymous with Pop Art, Andy Warhol was a painter, photographer, filmmaker, and publisher. In the mid-20th century he produced iconic silkscreen paintings of subjects as mundane as soup cans and as glamorous as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. These remain hugely popular, and have sparked countless imitations. Creating your own Pop Art-inspired images with Photoshop is easy, and great fun, too.

The silkscreen technique forces paint onto canvas through a high-contrast negative stencil attached to the fabric. The resulting image features strong blacks from the photograph, which can be simulated using Photoshop’s Threshold adjustment. In Warhol’s hands, crude blocks of garish, striking color were added to selected areas, and images were often duplicated with alternative color schemes.

Read Andy Warhol Pop Art Silkscreen Effect — a sample chapter from the Photoshop Digital Studio Cookbooks, courtesy of O'Reilly Media.



New Tutorial — The Scraped Polaroid Picture Effect

In the 1970s, the photographer Les Krims produced a set of images on Polaroid instant film on which the wet emulsion had been scraped and distorted. First known as the Krimsograph, and widely known after its use on the album cover of Peter Gabriel’s 3, the technique is now more commonly called “SX-70 manipulation,” after the camera favored by many enthusiasts. After using a camera, enlarger, or printer to expose the film, you have a few hours to use all sorts of sticks, spikes, and scrapers to push the wet chemicals around to produce striking results.

When you look closely at a scraped or manipulated Polaroid, you will usually notice strong, colorful patterns where the artist has drawn and dragged the emulsion layers. To mimic this effect, you’ll have to imitate this physical and highly individual process in addition to adding an uneven, light-colored mottling where the film’s background sometimes shows through. The film’s blues can be especially vivid and its yellows somewhat weak, so portraits tend to be less popular than bright scenes with skies and fluffy clouds. But anything goes. Scraped Polaroids also tend to be small, glossy, and borderless.

Read Scraped Polaroid Picture Effect — a sample recipe from the Photoshop Digital Studio Cookbooks, courtesy of O'Reilly Media.

New Photoshop Brush Set 'Vintage Halloween' From Kirsty

Kirsty sends this in: "Hi everyone, I'm a bit early, but I've got a Vintage Halloween brush set all ready, the second in the Vintage Holiday series :) It can be found at the usual address of 500ml Brushes. Have fun!"

The Vintage Halloween set contains 5 brushes of Halloween images, including pumpkins.
For more brushes, see our Photoshop Brushes Page.

New Tutorial — The Van Gogh Effect

In the late 1880s, Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh created his most famous works in a brief period while living in Arles, in southern France. These included Provençal landscapes, indoor scenes, and vases of sunflowers.

Influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as by Japanese art, Van Gogh’s style is distinct and instantly recognizable. His work is characterized by thick swirls of solid color, as can be seen in many of his skies, but he also painted poplar trees and fields of waving crops.

In his sunflower paintings, Van Gogh limited his palette to golds, mustards, and contrasting blues, and he tended to compose the images within tight framing in order to focus the eye. The thick swirls form a backdrop for the slightly scruffy, withered petals of his flowers, outlined in prominent black lines.

Read Van Gogh Effect - Van Gogh's Sunflowers — a sample recipe from the Photoshop Digital Studio Cookbooks, courtesy of O'Reilly Media.
For more tutorials see our Photoshop Tutorials Page.

Photoshop Plugin Review From Jay Nelson

Here is the latest Photoshop Plugin Review by Jay Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Design Tools Monthly.

The Best Image Enlarger
Alien Skin's Blow Up ($199 or $179 for Photoshopsupport.com visitors) is a new entry in the field of software that intelligently increases the resolution of an image for use at larger sizes. Along with OnOne Software's Genuine Fractals and pxl SmartScale, Blow Up finds edges in an image and maintains their smoothness while increasing pixel dimensions.

But unlike the other two, it also adds realistic grain to other areas that makes the result look more real and less flat. They claim that this plug-in for Photoshop CS or later can scale an image up to 10 times its original size without stairstep, halo, or fringe artifacts.

Uniquely, it supports CMYK, RGB, Lab, Grayscale, and Duotone image modes, resizes multilayered documents without flattening, can create a new image when resizing, and works with 8-, 16-, 32-bit and RAW images. It's also really fast on multiprocessor Macs.

Newspaper technology expert Kevin Slimp used Photoshop, Blow Up and Genuine Fractals to enlarge several images and then surveyed people for their opinions. All agreed that Photoshop's enlargement was the worst, and almost all thought Blow Up's was better than Genuine Fractals'. Read his review.

Luxology imageSynth Plug-in for Photoshop - Texture Generator & Tiling Solution For Backgrounds

Exclusive $10 Discount On imageSynth Plugin Texture Generator
Our friends at Luxology have offered us an exclusive special discount. Simply enter discount coupon code psptimage during the checkout process at the Luxology site and you'll receive an instant $10 discount on the purchase of the imageSynth Photoshop plugin.

imageSynth is advanced technology that works within Adobe Photoshop for creating seamless textures and for creating high resolution images from low resolution sources using advanced image synthesis algorithms. Hence the name! imageSynth is included FREE with every purchase of modo. And now you can buy it standalone.

Developed in conjunction with the smart people at Allegorithmic, the imageSynth plug-in is a powerful ally to Adobe Photoshop for anyone wanting to create seamless tiling textures. The plug-in is simple to use and rewards experimentation. You can use imageSynth from Luxology to create an unlimited number of creative new images based upon simple seed images that you choose from your collection.

The resulting images are unique, and will tile seamlessly, making them ideal for use as backgrounds, brushes or texture maps. You can also take a low resolution image source and use it to generate a high resolution image that is based upon. This is a very powerful tool providing a myriad of creative solutions.

Go to our Luxology imageSynth Page to find out more (includes links to demos).

Adobe Announces Photoshop Elements 5

The Adobe website has posted information about the release of Photoshop Elements 5.0: "Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 software combines power and simplicity so you can do more with your photos. Instantly fix flaws or adjust color and lighting with new advanced controls. Quickly drop your photos into customizable layouts and show off your creativity with dynamic web photo galleries created using Flash technology. And view all your photos and video clips in one convenient place."

See the Photoshop Elements 5 page at Adobe for more features and news.
Photoshop Elements 5.0 - Special Offer - only $65.99 at Amazon.com.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4

Beta 4 has several enhancements and additions, including the achievement of full feature parity between the Windows and Mac OS versions of Lightroom. No matter which platform you prefer, you can now bring the full power of Lightroom beta to your photos. Lightroom Beta 4 also features: