Tutorials added on September 22, 2008

In this tutorial Allan Macdonald, a designer with Volvo Truck Corporation will guide you through a simple and effective technique he has developed to produce easily adjustable tape drawings using Photoshop. By using this technique you will be able to produce easily scalable, and accurate representations of your design that can be used to refine proportion and check packaging. Tape drawings are images produced by designers over a technical package, used in order to make sure that the final design is will actually meet the packaging requirements. This image is in turn used by the modellers to begin the clay modelling work. As such these images used to be produced in quarter scale on a special material called Milar, with the line work being achieved using special tapes. This allowed the designer to make modifications in real time as the design progressed. Today however with powerful computers, and printers capable of printing car side views in full size, the traditional tape drawing has been overtaken by computer generated images. This tutorial will focus on how to use Photoshop for this technique, although you can also apply a similar technique in Adobe Illustrator. The picture above shows a typical sketch that you may use as an underlay for such an image.

In this tutorial Hussein Al-Attar will guide you step by step the techniques he has developed for creating digital renderings in Adobe Photoshop. The version he has used in this tutorial is CS2 although any recent version of Photoshop will suffice. You do not need a graphics tablet to achieve these results here as Hussein only works with a mouse. The most important technique he will show is how and why to select areas that must have sharp edges. To do this he will show how to use either the Pen tool or the Polygonal Lasso tool. Hussein says "If you choose to use the Lasso tool you may have some problems when it comes to selecting curved areas. A good idea would be to reduce the distance between clicks when selecting your curve. Although not a perfect solution, it allows you to work reasonably accurately and fast."

Quick simple thumbnail sketches are most designers tool of choice when it comes to thrashing out ideas. With these you can try a whole multitude of ideas in a very short space of time. Whilst the earliest of these are usually for the designers eyes only, it is of course good if the boss understands what you are drawing when he passes by. By employing some simple shading techniques, your thumbnail sketches will become good tools for explaining your 3D thoughts in a clear way.

Jonathan Tatum is a BA graduate from Coventry School of Art and Design (UK) and MA graduate from Umea Institute of Design (Sweden). Currently working for Menard Engineering UK, he has had previous experience in the studios of Land Rover, MG Rover and Jaguar cars. He is also the 2005 winner of the Interior Motives award for Best Conceptual Interior. In this tutorial he will take you through the process he uses to create polished Photoshop renderings. A lot of the techniques used here are an extension of the techniques he has learn't from Harald Belker’s video tutorial.

With this tutorial, we will try to give a fast view of the quick rendering. Through these 10 steps we will have a global vision of the process, always considering that the number of steps can vary, depending on the shapes complexity and the final quality level we want for our work. Although our intention is to centre this tutorial in Photoshop, we must explain that the process is the same if we work with Painter because the layers work in an analogue way with both tools. This tutorial does not try to explain with detail each one of the mouse moves, but it starts from the basis that you have at least the basics of Photoshop and is not needed to explain how to get, for instance, a new layer, or what is the use of the Levels dialog box.

This tutorial will explain the way to obtain a half-an-hour sketch by using a superposition technique. You can use this technique as an easy way to explore the volumes and shapes without the needing of a study of the reflections (although they can be shown). One of the main advantages of using this technique is that you must not be worried about colours, but about light and darkness.The background can be changed even once finished the sketch and you will obtain a different look drawing. Although we will centre our explanation in the sketching process, you can spend on it a little time more and get an interesting render.

How to combine a traditional markers technique with digital composition in Photoshop to create a complete rendering. The author is Joshua Hoffeld, a graduate from Art Center College of Design in Transportation Design.

This tutorial shows a technique for creating a sketch in Photoshop very quickly (max 15 minutes) and includes some general tips about digital sketching in Photoshop. The author is Giangiacomo Barbero, an Italian designer graduated at the Istituto Europeo di Design.

Here Andy Wong will guide you through a technique he has developed to produce well composed renderings using Adobe Photoshop. Andy at the time of writing is studying for a Bachelor of Industrial Design (Honours) at Monash University, Australia and will graduate in December 2006. He has also had previous work experience at Ford Australia.

This tutorial is made for photoshop cs3, in older versions you can't create animations in photoshop and you will need to export your signature to imageready to create the animation. The steps in both photoshop and imageready remain the same, so you should be able to follow the tutorial even when you use imageready To get stared we first need to create a signature which we can animate, not all signatures need animations so its a good idea to first decide what kind of signature you want. My idea is to animate a gun so it looks like it is shooting.

In this tutorial you will learn to create an abstract signature like the one you see above, the only thing you will need are some C4D renders and basic photoshop knowledge.

Websites include many elements that the user can interact with. One of the most popular elements are buttons. They get the user to interact with the website. Using a web 2.0 badge and pill box style button you can create an affective button that will get the user to click on it. Providing support content that will also help get the user to actually click on the button. In this tutorial I will show you how to make a web 2.0 badge and pill box button. Adding effects to make it more appealing, and adding support content.

Remember - reading and doing is the best way to learn…anyways…Today I will be talking about and even giving some tips about the “way too famous” Glossy text EFFECT.

Today’s tutorial was a request by Kirk from Smallest Photo. As you all know, the way I do or show it isn’t the ‘only’ way, it’s just my way and I’m open for any other tips or suggestions. As always I had fun doing this and I’m always happy to share stuff like this.

When you are starting a project its nice to have the domain setup, and get some viral buzz about it. Instead of having a boring splash page, you can have a very cool and interesting splash page. This design may not go with your colors for your site, but its principles can be applied. In this tutorial I will assume you have a basic knowledge of photoshop. I will be using some photoshop brushes, you can find good ones any where on the net, but I found the best ones on Deviantart.com.

Another small batch of tips for those that are knee deep in creating graphics through custom shapes and layer styles. Shine a Light on the Subject: In lighting sometimes you want something to appear as if it's being lit from a single source. A linear gradient overlay can do this but it gives a uniform look to the object. Simply switching the gradient from linear to radial focuses the light in a particular area.

Hey there everyone - I have been quite busy and havent had much time to be creative.. I hope no one suspected that I gave up my blog. Anyways, in this tutorial I will teach you how to create/design a nice sleek glossy button using PHOTOSHOP!!

Here is another web 2.0 logo design tutorial! Here is another popular style with a shiny box. A good tip with doing web 2.0 designs, and logos is try to keep the shiny/3d/etc effects on one to two elements of the page. Over doing it wont be good for usability and it will make it look very cluttered. There is a general rule to use about one or two shiney elements and leave the rest not so done up. With light shadows here and there to create the realistic effect. Adding subtle drop shadows will give the polished effect, and will make your designs look great. Well, lets get started!

Nowadays Web 2.0 style becomes more popular. Every day tons of sites which has simple, bright and very interesting things, appear in Network. There are no standards about creating any Web 2.0 elements, but we have several typical features, for example and clean colors, many gradients. Today I want to show you how to create Web 2.0 styled button using Adobe Photoshop CS2.

By using just a few simple effects you can turn your digital images into realistic photo prints. This tutorial is an adoption of Photo-Realistic Fireworks tutorial from SixThings.