In this tutorial, we will be looking at a relatively easy way to create a realistic wine glass with a liquid in, a reflection, and a projected shadow. Let's start with a blank canvas. Create a new layer and then make a selection with the Rectangular Marquee tool. We want it to be the width of the wine glass, but only one pixel high. You may find it easier to zoom in. Like so: Next, choose a gradient that will go Gray-White-Gray-White-Gray. We chose the Gray (#dedede) and set it at 15% and 85%. The other three markers are White, at 0%, 50% and 100%: Try Server Intellect for Windows Server Hosting...

In this tutorial, we will be looking at one of the many new features introduced into Adobe PhotoShop Creative Suite 4, Content-Aware Scaling (or CAS). CAS uses a rather complex mathematical algorithm that decides what is important in an image, and what is expendable, when it comes to altering or discarding information upon resizing. However, it wouldn't be an Adobe product if you couldn't manipulate the function and use it to its best advantage. In this tutorial, we will explore a few ways of getting the best out of the Content-Aware Scale. We will begin with a sample image, such as: Before anything...

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a Christmas Bauble for your festive graphic decorations. We will start with a blank canvas and draw a circle with the Elliptical Marquee tool, then fill with green (or the color of your choice) on a new layer. Next, let's add a bit of glitter - goto Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Choose Gaussian and 5%, or as much or little glitter as you want: Now we want to give the Bauble a more spherical appearance. Goto Filter > Distort > Spherize. Choose 100%, Normal: We migrated our web sites to Server Intellect over one weekend and the setup was so...

In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to create a Christmassy Star for your festive graphic decoration. We will be creating the star from the basic star Custom Shape in PhotoShop. To start, let's go ahead and choose the Custom Shape tool and select the Star shape from the list: We will draw the Shape onto our canvas, holding Shift to maintain proper proportions, and we should have something like this: Now that we have a Path, we want to fill this with a solid color. To do this, first create a new Layer in the Layers Panel, then goto the Paths Panel (Window > Paths). You should notice...

This tutorial will show you how to create a Christmas theme composition, which can be used for eCards. We'll start off with a blank 400x300px canvas, and fill with the gradient of your choice: Need help with Windows Dedicated Hosting ? Try Server Intellect . I'm a happy customer! Next, make a selection in the shape of a Christmas tree, something like this: Next, choose a star shape from the Custom Shapes tool, and in a new layer, make all different sizes of it inside the tree selection. The Custom Shapes will be Paths, so when you're done, right-click the path in the Paths Window (Window > Paths...

With the increase in the popularity of AJAX web applications, we have seen similar animated GIFs around the web used when an AJAX process is pending to let the user know that it's working on something. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create these professional-looking animated GIFs. We chose Server Intellect for its dedicated servers, for our web hosting. They have managed to handle virtually everything for us, from start to finish. And their customer service is stellar. This example was created with Adobe PhotoShop CS3, which has animation features built-in, unlike older versions where...

Along with water, glass is a very hard element to replicate in PhotoShop, at least realistically, because it's appearance depends greatly on it's environment. In this tutorial, we are going to replicate the look of a house window, complete with the window pane and the reflection of the outside view. If you're looking for a really good web host, try Server Intellect - we found the setup procedure and control panel, very easy to adapt to and their IT team is awesome! We will start with a PhotoShop document with our two images on separate layers - we will need an indoor image, and an outdoor image...

It can be extremely useful to have at your disposal a whole library of eyes to use in different types of digital compositions. This tutorial will show you how to create your own eyes so that you do not need to keep thousands of stock images of eyes. If you're ever in the market for some great Windows web hosting, try Server Intellect . We have been very pleased with their services and most importantly, technical support. We will start with a blank canvas and then create a new layer. On this new layer, create a perfect circle by using the Elliptical Marquee tool and holding shift, then fill the...

In this tutorial, we will look at creating a magnifying glass from scratch. You can use this guide for any underlying image or text, to make it look as though it has been magnified somewhat. We migrated our web sites to Server Intellect over one weekend and the setup was so smooth that we were up and running right away. They assisted us with everything we needed to do for all of our applications. With Server Intellect 's help, we were able to avoid any headaches! We will start with a blank canvas with the text or image we will have underneath the magnifying glass: Next, make a selection with the...

As with allowing us to create our own brushes and gradients, etc. PhotoShop allows us to create our own Custom Shapes. A Custom Shape in PhotoShop is a vector graphic, which means it can be scaled without any loss in quality. The Shape has no major details or color, but can give us a great basis to start from, or even to use on their own in vector compositions. Once added to our document, we can rasterize the vector shape, and apply filters and styles to them. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create Custom Shapes from any graphic you open in PhotoShop. Yes, it is possible to find a good...