Tutorials added on December 17, 2008

In this tutorial we are going to create a beautiful scene that works well with fairy stories. You can also use it in some posters which require dreamy effects as well.

This tutorial shows how to add sunlight to any photo using the polygonal lasso tool, opacity adjustments, and layer blending modes.

Draw 3D Shining Text in Photoshop.

In December we asked few designers to come up with some creative, beautiful, memorable yet usable icon sets. Some designers had a tight schedule and couldn’t get work done in time, but three designers agreed and delviered their high-quality Christmas icon sets — right in time before the deadline. In this post we are glad to release three beautiful high-quality Christmas icon sets — you can use them for free without any restrictions whatsoever. You can use all sets for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

In this tutorial you learn how you can convert your normal text into magical glowing sparkles.

This tutorial explains how to take a photo with a dull background and create a realistic stylish studio background as seen in magazine advertisements.

Christmas is a holiday of love and family. It is the time of year when people come together to celebrate, when they realize that some things are more important than others. So why don’t you impress the people who are important to you with some unique Christmas cards or beautiful personal desktop wallpaper? In this post, we present 60 beautiful Christmas Photoshop tutorials. You’ll learn how to design Christmas trees, snow globes, snowflakes, Christmas candles, Christmas balls and much more. Some designers go even further, taking the time to draw Christmas illustrations or replace old icons with festive ones. Often, designers will draw Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and friends or create a Christmas theme for their website layout.

When working on GUI design, shapes are a great way to achieve a realistic look to your design. As the shapes are vector based, you enjoy the ability to resize them with minimal detail loss, which is a significant consideration in GUI design. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a detailed audio player from scratch. This tutorial will be a great opportunity for you to practice those Shape Tools and Layer Styles skills, with lots of adding and subtracting of Shapes. Enjoy!

NAPP instructor Matt Kloskowski walks you through all of the improvements made to Photoshop CS3's Curves tool.

The Pen Tool makes appearances across almost the entire Adobe product range. Its function and behavior varies depending on the application, but by mastering it youll find you work quicker, smoother and with better results. This guide will give you a comprehensive basis for working with the Pen Tool in Photoshop.

When I first started designing for the web (don't ask how long ago that was!) I was constantly finding websites that had a particular "look" that I didn't know how to reproduce. When you're a flat-out beginner you don't have anything in your mental repertoire to pull from — techniques and concepts that you can do blindfolded. Now that I'm working harder on icon design, I've found that the easiest way for me to get experience and learn is to try and reproduce the fantastic work that others have put together. It's only for learning, however, I absolutely do not advocate taking anyone's creative work and passing it off as your own.

Over the last few weeks, our readers have complained that we have been releasing “way too many freebies“. Apparently, we have been posting “too many filler articles” containing freebies that can be found elsewhere on the Web. We would like to make it clear that we do try to release useful things, and we do try to keep the high quality of these freebies and it has never been our intention to fill our publishing schedule with freebie posts. We are going to continue to release freebies from time to time (though not as often as we have over the last months), and we’ll make sure they meet our (and your) standards of high quality. Please let us know your opinion in the comments section below and in the poll below. Thank you. In this post we release two sets, a Light Blurs Photoshop Brushes, a set of 23 high-quality “light” brushes and Vector Photoshop Brushes Decoration Pack, a set of decoration brushes for Photoshop.

Learn how to create a sleek looking gaming layout using adobe photoshop CS3.

In this tutorial I will show you easy techniques to make an artistic mother nature design wallpaper in photoshop.

NAPP instructor Matt Kloskowski shows how to make quick work of making selections using Photoshop CS3's Quick Selection tool.

Tabbed boxes in sidebars on blogs seem to be popping up everywhere so in this tutorial I’ll be teaching you how to design a professional looking tabbed box.

NAPP instructor Matt Kloskowski shows how to use Photoshop CS3's new Clone Source palette for "what you see is what you get" editing.

NAPP instructor Matt Kloskowski shows how to use Photoshop CS3's new Black and White adjustment as an adjustment layer.

In this quick tutorial I’m going to be teaching you how to use the custom shape tool and a couple of layer styles to create a christmas star decoration.

NAPP instructor Matt Kloskowski shows how to adjust the exposure of specific areas of a photo using Camera Raw 4's Recovery slider.