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The Photoshop Blog offers the latest Photoshop news and software updates, Photoshop tips and tutorials, and random thoughts from graphic artist and Photoshop expert Jennifer Apple.




March 08, 2008

You Suck At Photoshop has become wildly popular, so get the latest installment now, plus I've found lots of free tutorials and even a nice Adobe CS3 icon set. Start your downloads!

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
Designers wanted
Happy Cog, Apple, Amazon, Flickr, Woot and more are looking to hire great designers.

LightroomNews
SLIDESHOWPRO FOR LIGHTROOM UPDATED
SlideShowPro for Lightroom has been updated to 1.1.4. This 1.1.4 release of SlideShowPro for Lightroom will likely be the last build in the 1.1 chain before moving on to 1.2. The latest version brings SlideShowPro for Lightroom up to date with the latest version of the Flash component, and fixes a few bugs that popped up after the 1.1 release.

Enfuse for Lightroom
Enfuse is an open source blending program that creates images similar to tonemapped images, but without the halos. It doesn’t require HDR images to do the tonemapping either. Normally it exists as a command line, multi-platform application, but Export Plugin creator Timothy Armes has created a front end for it for Lightroom.

Smashing Magazine
Free Fonts Of The Month: FF Unit, M+ Outline, GeoBats
Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to. This month we’re glad to present you M+ Outline, GeoBats, FF Unit Rounded Bold and IPAP Fonts Family. Please read the license agreements carefully - they can change from time to time.

35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets
When it comes to icons, web designers and graphic artists have an excellent opportunity to showcase their craft, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A sweet, nice icon set is a perfect showcase of designer’s work and a powerful instrument to build up your reputation online. Below we present 35 incredible free icon sets which you can use for your web designs or your desktop to spice up your posts with some nice illustrations or enrich your desktop with outstanding dock icons. Some of the listed icons can be used in web designs, some of them are supposed to be primarily for desktop. So hopefully everybody will find something useful.

John Nack
No, seriously, you *do* suck at Photoshop...
Heh--in the vein of sites like AwfulPlasticSurgery.com, now we've got the Photoshop Disasters blog--chock full of image manipulation mishaps. It's good to indulge in a little schadenfreude now and then, and with phrases like "the culturally-ravaged, post-wardrobe-malfunction neo-fundamentalist, sexual dystopia we live in," it has to be good. (Wasn't that the Smucker's slogan?) [Via Lori Grunin] Speaking of sucking, You Suck at Photoshop #8 has been posted, getting Fergilicious with 3D layers.

PSDTuts
How to Break Sunlight Through the Clouds
In this tutorial I will show you how to turn an overcast day into a stunningly dramatic scene with sunlight breaking through the clouds. This technique can be used for other applications as well. I originally came up with it when I needed to create shafts of light coming through a canopy of trees. The best part of this technique is that the beams are created from the actual imagery so they look very realistic. Lets get started...

Seriously Cool Photoshop Explosion Effect
Explosions are cool. Seriously cool. So when I received some emails asking about how to create a break apart, explosion effect, I knew it’d be worth making a tutorial on. Read on to find out how to break apart a body, then add some awesome lighting and glow, nopattern style, to finish the image off.

Creating a Cool Yellow Helmet Icon
Construction icons have always been popular on screen and although those dotcom ‘under-construction’ pages have mostly vanished from our screens, the trusty ol’ yellow helmet icon
still has its uses. In this tutorial we’ll be creating our very own icon from a photograph.

How to Create a Simple & Sleek Web 2.0 Site Footer
Since Web 2.0 hit the internet, footers have become more important than ever, and there has been some great looking work done downstairs. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to produce a sleek looking site footer in Photoshop.

Create a Brilliant Vector Lighter
We all know and love Photoshop for its pixel based manipulation. In this tutorial I decided to look into Photoshop’s vector capabilities, combined with gradients, layer modes and layer styles to produce a great looking, almost photo-realistic lighter.

creativepro.com
Photoshop How-To: Reflective Liquid Type by Al Ward
There are plenty of tutorials on creating type that looks like it's made of metal or liquid. This how-to combines the two for an effect that really shines.

Turn Color Photos into Duotones in Photoshop by Chad Neuman
You can transform one photograph into a wide variety of duotones to use in print or on the Web.

PluginsWorld.com
Magic Denoiser by ImageSkill: plugin for Adobe Photoshop
Amazing image denoising Photoshop-compatible plug-in designed by ImageSkill Software that has a simple and intuitive user interface with only a few controls and adjustments. It is very fast, supports 16-bit images and allows a user to get dramatically improved the look of images without blurring the edges and fine details. Plug-in produces excellent quality results just removing the noise preventing image features unchanged.

Brusheezy
Flowery Scribble Photoshop Brushes - by punksafetypin
Some flower-like thingies I scribbled on a piece of paper. Photoshop 7 and above.

Hi-Res Spraypaint Photoshop Brushes - Set Two - by Blog.SpoonGraphics.co.uk
The second of the two part set of large 2500px spray paint photoshop brushes from www.Blog.SpoonGraphics.co.uk, extremely useful for creating the distressed/grungy look. The set includes six more brushes consisting of splatters, drips and fine sprays.

BittBox
Celebrating 3 Million Visits: Come Win Some Free Stuff
The Box has just surpassed 3 Million visitors, and in celebration, it’s time for some free stuff. I know I didn’t celebrate 1M or even 2M visits, but 3M in less than a year-and-a-half is a number I never expected to hit this quickly. One of my advertisers, Flashloaded, has signed on for this special occasion to offer up some free Flash Components to 3 lucky BittBox readers. Contest rules after the jump.

PixelPerfect
PixelPerfect - Creating A New Scene
Bert delves deeper into re-touching with Photoshop and shows us how to create two moody scenes from different images.

As always, a special Batgirl thank you to James Jean
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SiteGrinder Photoshop Plugin - Create Websites Instantly

There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.

Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.

Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.

Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.

Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.

Photoshop CS3 Upgrade Options And Bundles From The Adobe Store

Photoshop CS3 Extended is ideal for film, video, and multimedia pros and for graphic and web designers using 3D and motion. Get the full version for US $999, or upgrade for US $349. The standard version of Photoshop CS3 is available for US $649, or as an upgrade for US $199. See all upgrade options at the Adobe Store. See our CS3 Resource Center for free Photoshop CS3 tutorials.

Photoshop Extended is also available as part of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, which combines all-new CS3 versions of Photoshop, Flash Pro, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat 8 Pro. Upgrade options for customers in Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Asia can be found at the Adobe International Store.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Available At The Adobe Store

There are tons of new features in Adobe Lightroom 1.0 that you won't find in the beta version. From Clone and Healing functionality to metadata browsing, you'll be able to free-up post-processing time like never before. Get it now at the Adobe Store. Customers in Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Asia can find special pricing and offers at the Adobe International Store. For free Lightroom tutorials see our Lightroom tutorials page.

Photoshop Masking Plugin Fluid Mask 3 - $15 Discount Special

The 4 1/2 out of 5 star review of Fluid Mask 3 at MacWorld begins by saying that this "Photoshop plug-in takes the pain out of extracting backgrounds," and goes on to recommend the latest version, stating that "Fluid Mask 3.0.2 is a very effective tool for separating objects from their backgrounds. It offers a variety of useful features for tackling almost any difficult image, from wispy hair to complex foliage. Online video tutorials and live training sessions help ease the learning curve."

Our friends at Vertus, the makers of Fluid Mask 3 Photoshop Plugin, have set up a special exclusive discount for PhotoshopSupport.com. Just follow this discount link and instantly get $15 off your purchase of Fluid Mask 3.

Fluid Mask 3 is designed for photographers, image editors, graphic designers and all those who take digital image editing seriously. In a streamlined interface and workflow, Fluid Mask 3 instantly shows key edges in the image and provides comprehensive easy to use tools that work with difficult-to-see edges and tricky areas like trees & lattices. Features include: