Step 1

To start, click the little button by the foreground/background colors and a menu should open up, click the middle one.

Now we see a new dialog with more options:

1: Select the gradient you want and the angle (direction) and repeats (how many times the gradient repeats.)
2: Style of gradient, Linear, Rectangular, Sunburst, and Radial.
3: These options apply to Rectangular, Sunburst, and Radial.
4: You can apply a texture to your gradient.
5: Previous and current gradient.

Now let’s select Edit and another dialog opens up, here you can edit the selected gradient, make a new one, and other things. Let’s get started!

New Gradients

For this part I am going to make a new gradient and play with the colors and get one I really like. So, once you are in the Edit dialog, press New and type on a name. It can be anything really. It’s helpful if you want to edit it in the future.

Now we can edit the colors. See the new crayon-type icons under the Gradient section? Click the first one, and then click the white box right under “Location”. Choose a color and click OK.

Do the same thing with the other pencil-icon on the right.

Now, see the diamond shape icon on the top? If you drag this around to control which gradient has more color, so with my colors, if I moved the diamond left, there would be more blue and less purple. I am moving it all the way to the right for now, but you should see what looks good. Most of the time it looks just fine in the middle.

Let’s add more colors!

Another thing you can do is add more colors, double click in-between the two pencil-icons to add a new one.

Let’s make things see though…

We can also make things transparent, so in the transparency panel (under) double click again to add another pencil-icon and move it to match the one above. Lower the opacity.

And you should get something like this when you use the gradient! Cool!

Ribbons

You can also make ribbon like textures with gradients, with as many colors as you want. Let’s take a look how:

Make a new gradient and add lots of pencil-icons (even numbers), two pencil-icons with one color, like this:

Now move every other gradient close together until they become a solid like. If you don’t get it, look below and see what I mean.

You can move them around until you get a good pattern, but they can be a lot of fun to use. Change the angle and repeat to get some new effects.

Glossy Effects

Using the same technique as the ribbon, we can make some glossy effects!

Conclusion

Hope you learned something new today. Have fun making new gradients!

Step 1

Create a 800×400 image and fill it with #ff6601. Then make a new layer and select everything. Use the ellipse selection tool and make a selection like the following.

Step 2

Make a new Raster Layer. Fill it with the Radial white-to-transparent gradient.

And set the blending mode to Overlay. Set the opacity to 20.

Step 3

Make a new layer and add your desired text. I choose Arial and make it bold with a font size of 150 and tracking of -0.070. I made the color black.

Keeping the selection on (don’t de-select), press Ctrl+Shift+F to remove the floating layer. Then, make a new Raster Layer and move it under your text layer. Expand the selection by 7 pixels, and fill it in with white.

Step 4

Keeping the selection selected, make another layer and move it under your white-text layer. Expand the pixels by 15 pixels, and fill it with the same color as your background.

De-selecting, go to Effects > Artistic Effects > Halftone, and use the settings below. You can, of course, play around and see what looks best.

Conclusion

This is a simple technique, but one that looks really cool. I got inspired by this by a box I found in my house, one  Kit-Kat box. Turned out pretty well! Enjoy.

.1 Laced Hearts

.2 Relistic Clay Pot

.3 Broken Clay Pot

.4 Boosting colors

.5 Chex Pattern

.6 Chibi Elf

.7 Double Outlined Text Effect

.8 The Warp Tool

.9 Deform Tool

.10 Pencil Scene

.11 Stained Glass Cat

.12 Time Machine

.13 Cartoon Animal

.14 Web 2.0 Layout

.15 Web 2.0 Layout #2

.16 3d Email Icon

.17 Ring Icon

.18 Scrapbook Tags

.19 Stripes from Photos

.20 Make an Egg

.21 Glossy Orbs

.22 Pearl

The other way is to drag the Photoshop Plugin file (normally a .8bf file) and copy it to the C:/All Programs/Corel/PaintShopPro/Plugins folder.

I hope you have fun downloading and installing Photoshop plugins! I’ve gotten some really useful ones (such as the Nvidia Normal Map Plugin) and I don’t need GIMP anymore to use plugins!

Files Needed

Faux Snow Font

I actually got inspiration from the Christmas background on Cloudica’s website doing the holidays, so I thought I’d try my hand at it, and see where I got. Well here it is! It’s gonna be more of a quick tutorial because I wanna get this out before Christmas is over. Remember, if you don’t get it right the first time (mostly using the pen tool), keep trying and tweaking. I had to, in order to get the results.

Step 1

Make a 400×500 document with a #1f2b2b-#3b585e radial gradient with the start point near the top.

Step 2

Now this is the harder part, getting a good tree shape with the pen tool. I had to do it quite a few times, so don’t worry if you don’t get it on the first try. Just get something you like, and that’s fine. Now, for the colors, when using the pen tool set the color to a custom gradient (settings below) of #a9cead-#54bb56-#1d4a1e.

As you can see, I also have a drop shadow. The following settings create a nice, simple, soft drop shadow.

Step 3

Let’s start by creating the snow (on a new layer). I’m gonna tell you how to do one, and you can do the rest by your self (to keep this nice and short). It’s fairly easy, but can take some time to get a good result. Using the pen tool on Freehand (mode) and a color of white, draw a snow shape and tweak it until it looks good. This is a cartoonish image, so it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should at least look normal.

When your done, select the surrounding area with the rectangle selection tool, and then click the selection. This will select the snow. Now press Ctrl+Shift+F and contract the selection by 3 pixels (Selections > Modify > Contract). Fill it with a light gray-white gradient. De-select.

Then do three more…

Ok that’s over! Take a breath, lotta work huh? Well it’s over, so you can rest easy. For now … *evil laugh* As you can see I added the drop shadow on each of those. IF you do them all on the same layer, do them all at once. If each is in a separate layer, wait to the end and apply it to snow layer #1, and then simply go to all the other snow layers and press CTRl+Y to repeat the drop shadow.

Step 4

What’s a tree without a trunk? A truckless tree of course, but we don’t want one of those, so let’s make one! Make a new layer and drag it under the green tree layer. Then fill it in with a custom brown gradient of #241e12-#58574d.

Then make a new layer and make a skinnier rectangle and fill it with white, set the layer blending mode to Overlay, and lower the opacity. If all that is confusing, take a look at this:

The drop shadow is optional, since the bottom portion won’t show, but the sides will.

Step 5

One more step for the tree and we are done with it. Make a new layer right above the green tree layer and use the freehand pen tool and make an white shape like below (lower the opacity to around 15, and set the layer’s blending mode to overlay!)

I hide most of the snow layers so you can see it. It looks better with the snow visible!

Step 6

Now let’s add some ground. Make a layer above the trunk (oh yeah, merge the trunk highlight layer with the trunk color layer so you have one layer) and make a ground shape like below. I used the dodge tool (right click!) to make it gray at the bottom.

Step 7

Now  make a layer under the snow layer (and under the trunk layer) and do another hill-shape with the pen tool, but make the color #39555b. Again, use the dodge tool (right click!) to make it dark on the bottom. I also lightened it up a tab on the top-left (left click!).

Step 8

Repeat step 7 but with #2e4a50 instead, which is a little darker.

Step 9

Now let’s make the background a little more interesting. Make a layer and move it just above the background layer. Using the pen tool, make a selection like in the following screenshot, and set the opacity to Overlay and Opacity to 8.

Step 10

Using the Faux snow font, and the letter “E”, add a snow flack and copy and paste it 3-4 times. Then copy it and resize it (Shift+S, turn off “All Layers”, size 80% x 80%), then resize it again and copy it a few more times. Be creative

Conclusion

Add some text and call it done! Now for the text, I added some and expanded the selection by 3 pixels and applied the drop shadow I did for everything else. One drop shadow to rule them all.

Download .pspimage file

Files Needed

Faux Snow Font

Step 1

Make a 300×300 document and fill it in with #c01904. Make a new layer and call it Box; and select the Selection Tool and set the shape to Square and make a selection. Fill it with #168de4. This is what I have.

Move it where you want it in-case it’s not centered or placed properly. Save the selection to the alpha channel. De-select.

Step 2

Make a new layer and call it Ribbon. Using the selection tool, set to Rectangle, make a tall-vertical-skinny selection, like the one below, and fill it with #d02114. Move it to the center of the present.

Load your selection from the alpha channel and press CTRL+SHIFT+I to invert the selection, to select everything but the cube, and press the delete key on your keyboard (make sure your on the ribbon layer!). This will get rid of that access ribbon we don’t need.

Step 3

Now I found out there isn’t enough space on top of our image so we gotta fix this. Go to Image > Canvas Size and put the width on 300 (we don’t wanna change the width), height on 350, and in the placement tab make sure top is 50, and the rest 0. You can also press the middle-bottom arrow button.

Now go to the background color layer and fill the empty space in with the dark-red color (use the dropper to select it). Now make a new layer and drag it to the top.

Step 4

Select the pen tool and under mode, select “Freehand Draw”. Now make a shape simular to the one below. This will take trial and error, it took me several times to get a good design. Also be sure to have the color red of the ribbon selected.

And this is what it looks like when your done. It’s much smoother.

Step 5

This step is for tweaking. It will take some time to tweak this to look just right. Move around the nodes to make the shape look better, and you can CTRL+Click (left mouse button) to add more nodes for even more control.

Here I duplicated the layer and mirrored it (Ctrl+M) and merged them together (top layer > merge > merge down).

Now I added a small lump in the center, sort of like at knot.

And now I added a nice soft drop shadow, it makes it look more 3D and help distinguish it from the rest of the present.

Step 6

Now add a new layer. With the pen tool again, set the color to a black-to-transparent gradient (you might have to set your foreground color to black FIRST before going into the gradient panel). Make a shape like this and tweak it accordingly. And when your happy with it duplicate and flip it and put it on the other ribbon.

Step 7 – Side-step

I felt like the ribbons were to big to resize each layer my 80% and move them up a little bit (make sure “all layers” is turned off in resize options!).

Step 8

Ok lets start on shading. Get the dodge tool and set the opacity to 40, softness to 0, and size to 230. Then click several times in the middle of the box layer. Do the same thing on the bottom-right corner.

Click the middle ribbom stripe later and do the same thing along the sides, but change the size to 70 and right click. What I did is drag my cursor down from outside to middle, sort of to make a triangle shape with shading. This might sound confusing so ignore it and just darken the sides. Ahaha …

Now click the top ribbon layer and left-click to make the tops lighter. Make several passes, each pass moving the cursor up to cover less and less of the actual image. Then make one right-click sweep on the bottom.

Step 9

Make a new layer and put it above the box layer. Load up your selection from the alpha channel and de-select half if it with the selection tool set on Eclipse. Use these gradient settings and fill it in.

Set the layer blending mode to Overlay and lower the opacity to 34.

Step 10 – Side-step

Again I gotta change those ribbons. They are to tall! The more I look at them the more I have to fix them. That’s ok though, might teach you how to change stuff during editing. I just clicked D on the keyboard and dragged the top node down a bit to make it smaller.

Step 11 – Last touches

Just a few more things to do to fix it up. Gonna be quick, grab your hat!

Drop shadow added to the center ribbon and blue box.

Letter “E” snow-flake font added, set to overlay, and opacity lowered.

Added a background gradient and dodged the upper-left corner. Added a star burst (same settings same as step 9).

Conclusion

There you have it, a brand spanking new present! Now don’t open it until Christmas ^-^

Step 1

Open a image of a car (the side photographs are much easier) and duplicate the layer. Hide the top one and move to the bottom one. Press D on your keyboard and drag the right node over to the left to distort the image.

Step 2

Hide the bottom layer, select and unhide the top layer, and erase everything but the wheels and fenders (and leave some areas surrounding the wheels).

Step 3

Now unhide, but don’t select, the bottom layer. Use the selection tool to select each wheel and move it above the smaller/squished wheels. Depending on your picture, the wheels should fit right into the spots. But don’t be temped to stop here.

Step 4

Use the eraser tool (put hardness up to 70%-100%) and erase the surroundings.  Don’t erase the wheels or fenders. You’ll notice a huge difference, there’s just no way to show this on a text tutorial; so compaire the previous image to the next one.

You’ll notice big differences right behind/in front of the fenders.

And that sums up this tutorial. I hope you liked it. For a tutorial on how I did the wheels, click here.

Step 1

Make a 500×500 document with a background of your choice (we won’t be using it later anyway). Make a new raster layer and add some text (I am using the letters “ST”) at font size 400 and tracking at -0.080 (or what ever size/tracking that makes your font fill the document). For the text fill, use a paper gradient that comes loaded with Corel Paint Shop Pro.

Step 2

De-select the text selection and go to Effect >Texture Effects and use the following settings:

Now do it again but change it to a brick texture.

Step 3

Duplicate the layer and lower the saturation (Shift+H) to 0.

Step 4

Now edit the curves (Adjust > Brightness & Contrast > Curves) and make a shape like this:

Step 5

Now set the layer blending mode to Overlay:

And you should get this result:

You could stop here if you want to, but there are more steps to make it look more convincing. Merge the overlay layer down to the color layer so you have one background layer and one text lay

er.

Step 7

Now we are going to delete the areas in-between the stone to make them look more like blocks. This might sound confusing, or you might be thinking of something different (bad explaining, sorry) so take a look at the following screenshots to see what I mean.

If you can’t see it click the image to make it bigger. Now you just have to work your way around the image and delete all these areas. Here is my finished result:

Step 8

Go to Effects > 3D effects > Inner Bevel and use these settings:

Step 9

Now for a background add a grunge image on the bottom layer, duplicate it, make it gray (see step 3) and set the blending mode to overlay (Step 5). And you get a rather cool text effect.

There are lots of wonderful brush sets for photoshop in the web… too many to install them all just to see what they look like! now you can have the preview of a set without having to install it…

ABR Viewer Official Website or Direct Link.

How To:

This quick how-to will show you how to install brushes. It can be time consuming, depending on how many brushes your installing.

Step 1: First download and extract your PS brushes (Google might help finding brushes).

Step 2: Open ABR Viewer and go to File > Load Brush Set and find your .abr brush file and click OK.

Step 3: Go to Export > Thumbnails and choose a location (I choose the folder with the .abr brush in it). Then drag the brushes you want to use into Paint Shop Pro.

Step 4: These brushes are pretty small, but you gotta make sure your brushes are smaller with 1000×1000 pixels. Then go to File > Export > Custom Brush and name it the name of the .abr brush (you don’t need to, it’s just good to). Your done!!

Well that sums up this quick-tut. Hope you learned something new and exciting!