How To Photoshop

This tutorial is in honor of my favorite living artist, the anonymous urban graffiti guerilla known only as Banksy. You'll need some of the stencil fonts, hi-res images, and brushes from this post, so download and install them before you get started or even open Photoshop. Be creative and make statements, that's the whole point. My apologies for the poor image quality, but my scanner is on the fritz - as soon as I have it running properly, I'll replace these images with more quality ones.

( Banksy-style Graffiti Tutorial )

Hiya folks, long time no tutorial!!

I offer you all a buttload of fonts, some stock images, and a cool brush set to accompany the ass-kicking tutorials I'm posting next. I apologize for neglecting this community, so I figured I'd come up with something very cool as penance, and I hope they're both insightful and inspiring - they certainly were for me. I know I'm taking the easy way out by posting images from a book, but hey - one day when I get the freetime I'll go back to the old way.

These two tutorials are really interesting, they are my tribute to graffiti artists and to my most favorite, the one known as Banksy. If you don't know who I'm talking about, read this post I made about him yesterday and all will be clear. Then go here and you can download the MP3 that was on the prank CD - I went to great lengths to get it. It might serve as a bit of background inspiration, you never know.

Behind the cuts are the downloads, yank any of the fonts you like and probably get all of the images as well. You'll need to download and install the brush set for the tutorial, so remember that one. To install a brush set, download and unzip it, then move the brush (.abr) file to My Computer > C:Drive > Program Files > Adobe > Photoshop > Presets > Brushes before you run Photoshop, because that's the only way you can install brush sets. Installing fonts is similar, the directory is located in My Computer > C:Drive > Windows > Fonts, just unzip the font files and move them to that folder - they'll be installed automatically.

( On to the downloads! )

The Displace filter scares the shit out of a lot of people, this is the best way to simplify it and show what it is capable of. Here I'm using a picture of myself with text over it. Then I'm adding a severe Drop Shadow to the text and essentially wrapping that shadow over the contours of the image beneath it, in this case that image being my face. You can do this with objects and not text, should you choose.

This is very useful for creating flyers and party invitations.

This is going to be the format for all future tutorials. All previous entries will be tagged according to category as I have the time to do so. Hope you enjoy this one!


( tutorial )

Happy Holidays everyone! I apologize for my absence in posting, life has been hectic to say the least.

Within the next two weeks, I will resume posting tutorials and tips, all with screenshot pictures to help things along - I promise.

As always, comments and tutorial suggestions are welcomed!

Take care and be well all!

Energy & light,
Jude

I know it has been forever since I've posted to this thing, life has been rather chaotic. So I come bearing gifts. Here you'll find my brushes, they're all for PS7. Hope you all can make use of them until I'm able to post more tutorials and such here.

Be well,
Jude

Happy New Year, Everyone!

Welcome all new members and new voyeurs, and a fond bow to all those who have been here for a while since my last post. I hope this finds you well, in good health and high spirits. I've got new tutorials and such already planned, it's just a matter of finding the time to get them in order and posted. I've decided that screenshots of the processes on a step by step basis is going to be the way to go from now on, everyone seemed to like it better when I posted accompanying images for the last round of tutorials. Freetime to keep this project up is hard to come by, but I promise to utilize some in the near future to get some new stuff out there for you all to sample.


Comment For Tutorial Requests!

As usual, the best way to let me know what you all want to see posted is to comment and do just that - let me know what you want to see posted. Posting access is not allowed to community members on purpose, as I have explained before. Anyone who wants to can leave comments to any post, conversely. I'd like to reiterate how and why this community is set up like it is. Posting access is limited to a select few people I know, even though I make the vast majority of the posts. All of the tutorials are indexed by category in the Memories section in order for you to better navigate them and find what you are looking for. If I just posted things randomly and in no specific order, you'd have to start at the beginning and work your way through with no direction whatsoever. I'm an organization freak, so this seems to be a better way of working it out to me. The list of categories you'll find in the Community Profile. If you request a tutorial that gets posted, you get the credit for it.


Help us out!

If you have suggestions on things I can do to make this community better, by all means let me know. You can comment here or email me at judebennett at livejournal dot com. Occaisionally I get questions that fall out of the area of my experience, so I'll begin posting them here. Speaking of, here's the first one, from playboibuunie:

Hi, i've tried many suggestions and i can't seem to fix my problem. Hopefully you will end my search in finding a solution.

Okay i screen capped a scene (frame) from a dvd i played on my computer to a file on my hard drive using PowerDVD. Now when i open the picture file in photoshop it doesn't look the same as the paused frame i capped of. What it looks like is the color is more blotchy on the clothes kind of like the resolution is all messed up. It's like squares all over the picture. Very subtle but definitely makes the picture look less sharp. I was going to show a picture on here of what it looked like but when i went to photobucket the picture was okay. Is there something i can change in photoshop so when i view the file it is normal. I don't know if i make sense but i'm new to screen capping so maybe it's just a setting problem on photoshop? i tried opening the file in paintshoppro too.

I was confuzzled by this, having never heard of such a thing happening before. If anyone has an answer for him, I'm certain he'd be grateful for it.

I thank you all for the support and for promoting this community, it is truly a labor of love for me and I'm happy to share what I know. Post your comments, requests, and/or questions as a reply to this entry, it's open to you.

Take care all, and be well!

Energy & light,
Jude

PS - A lot of you have asked for permission to add me to your friends lists as a result of this community. No one needs permission to add anyone, but since it's been brought up several times now I figured it would be fine to let it be known that my journal is open to anyone who wishes to read it, and anything I don't want viewed publically will be made private. Otherwise, help yourself to it and to any of my icons that you'd like to use for yourself, I'm not a credit whore - just take them.

The site that hosts most of the images for this community (photobucket.com) has "suffered a catastrophic raid failure". As a result, if you had a photobucket account, you have probably lost your albums. Once the site gets rebuilt, I will try and get the images uploaded ASAP, but as I am generally always busy, it may take me longer than them. All tutorials are still in place, and still doable, but the step-by-step images are gone. Sorry for the inconvenience, these things sometimes happen.

Energy & light,
Jude

These steps explain how to create embossed text effects using the Lighting Effects filter.
( Creating Embossed Text With Lighting Effects )