photoshop
Blog Banner for a Personal Blog
Dec 16th
The brief was for a blog banner, for the month of December. However, since the blogger resides in the Southern Hemisphere, the banner had to reflect the fact that although it was Christmas, it was also in fact summer. Come to think of it, it *is* rather stupid that we Southern Hemisphere dwellers give one another Christmas cards with snow and reindeer and snowflakes on for goodness sake, when to us, Christmas has more to do with barbequeing, lazy days by the swimming pool, oppressive heat (in most cases) and long daylight hours, spent enjoying the beach.
This particular blogger is a huge fan of the beach, so I used it as the starting point for my design. Now this is not the final one that the blogger chose for this month, but the end result was based on this, and featured her and her family inserted onto my clean and spacey virtual beach, with a slightly enhanced Christmas tree, and different text. I liked this version, purely because it’s a clear indication of my taste. Clean lines, with a bit of whackiness thrown in for good measure.
Possibly Related Posts:
- 3 Hours Sleep
- Spontaneous Purchase or Constant Reviewer?
- Turmoil
- Baby Shower Invitations
- The Ultimate Freelancers Distraction
Do You Have Gravatar?
Sep 8th
What is a Gravatar you ask?
The word is an amalgamation of the words Globally Recognised Avatar. Think of it as your Facebook profile photo, without the photo. It’s an image to represent you online, when commenting on blogs etc Each email address ‘persona’ that you have, can have it’s own image. So for example, when I comment on graphic design specific blogs, I use my graphic design identity. When I comment on photography blogs, I use my professional photography email address.
It’s just another way to show your identity online, and keep all your branding in line.
Here’s a gravatar that I’ve just done for this photography website.
It’s in keeping with the Photo Super Hero theme and colours, and now when the admin comments, the comment will be decorated with this cute button. Fun huh? Sometimes I am amazed that I get paid for having this much fun!
Technorati Tags: Graphic Design, Gravatars, Design for Web
Possibly Related Posts:
- 3 Hours Sleep
- Spontaneous Purchase or Constant Reviewer?
- Turmoil
- Baby Shower Invitations
- The Ultimate Freelancers Distraction
Freebie Frame No. 7
Apr 10th
Here is one that I call ‘purple frame’. It’s actually the first one I did when I was planning the month of giveaways. Hope you like it. I was thinking of wedding photos when I made it, but you can use it for anything it lends itself to!
Enjoy!
Purple Frame
To Use:
- Click image to download (downloads served by Mediafire)
- Unzip and open in either Photoshop (Tested in CS through CS4) or Elements
- Open your chosen photo (that you want to frame) and drag your photo between the ‘frame’ layer and the ‘background’ layer
- Enjoy!
Possibly Related Posts:
- Turmoil
- Baby Shower Invitations
- The Difficult Concept
- Freelancers: What are your best work hours?
- Resources for Graphic Designers: Graphic River
Freebie Frame No. 4!
Apr 5th
Here is free layered photoshop file number 4. I call it “Black and Silver Flower Dots”.
Free for you by MacNessa Design!
To Use:
- Click image to download (downloads served by Mediafire)
- Unzip and open in either Photoshop (Tested in CS through CS4) or Elements
- Open your chosen photo (that you want to frame) and drag your photo between the ‘frame’ layer and the ‘background’ layer
- Enjoy!
Possibly Related Posts:
- Turmoil
- Baby Shower Invitations
- The Difficult Concept
- Freelancers: What are your best work hours?
- Resources for Graphic Designers: Graphic River
How To Amuse Yourself When the Internet is Down…
Mar 24th
…or at least your connection to it, has been terminated by your evil ISP, who cut you off at the knees if you so much as breathe near your bandwidth limit. What the hell are bandwidth limits for anyway?
Okay, so here’s what I’ve been up to…
I photoshopped my backside off to create a range of freebies, for you. Yes that’s all of you millions out there logging in everyday to view this page, wringing your hands in despair at my lack of updates, wondering if you should send out a search party.
Or at least that’s how my vivid fantasy was playing itself out in my head until I logged in this morning using a borrowed 3G modem, and got a stats update on email.
Anyway, yes, coming very very soon, like say April 1st (not an April Fools Joke I promise) I’m going to start giving away free (awesome wonderful) Photoshop Templates. At least one a day for a week. So please send out riders, fire arrows with this message onto an obliging tree nearby, and spread the word. Free, cool stuff, coming here, April 1st.
Until then I’ll be doing copious amounts of housework, researching new ISP’s using mainstream means such as the phonebook, or the newspaper, or a magazine and maybe fiddling around with a playstation 3. Or housework. I can’t decide.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Turmoil
- Baby Shower Invitations
- The Difficult Concept
- Freelancers: What are your best work hours?
- Resources for Graphic Designers: Graphic River
What is This Software Used for? Adobe Photoshop.
Mar 12th
Who hasn’t heard of Photoshop? The term has become so widely used that often someone will talk about ‘photoshopping’ something, even when they’re not even using the original program, but rather one of the attempted competitors! It’s a term frequently heard in and around movies, TV and of course main stream media.
Photoshop is the ulitmate image manipulation, and generation program. It is commonly used to edit bitmaps. If you’re unsure what ‘bitmaps’ and ‘vectors’ are, please read this post.
Photoshop can be used to alter the colour in scanned images, until they are corrected. It can be used to build up tremendously complex images from a blank white background, or for it’s more mainstream purpose of image manipulation, and photo retouching.
It’s one of my favourites, and I can easily get lost for hours in all the amazing bells and whistles that it offers. There are so many add-ons available for it too, created by other designers, and easily plug-in-able, that one can easily spend far too much time simply experimenting. Although having said that some of the best works were created by accident, so best we just enjoy! At this stage there is no other in the market place to closely rival it, and if there is anyone out there with a program that they say ‘Can’ rival photoshop, they’re welcome to send me copy to test!
Remember that Adobe offers massive student discount to creative students wishing to buy their products, so be sure to shop with your student card in hand, to take advantage of any potential special offers.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Turmoil
- Baby Shower Invitations
- The Difficult Concept
- Freelancers: What are your best work hours?
- Resources for Graphic Designers: Graphic River
Did you see it? Huh? Didja?
Feb 11th
So, like I hope that the gazillions of you out there reading this avidly on a daily basis, noticed my new mini header?
Yeah, like totally rad man. (Ooh, I think I just made teenagers in a ten mile radius cringe).
Anyhoo, then there’s this little 125×125 baby that I threw out today.
Yeah, like I’m not exactly sure where all this green is coming from. It’s probably my inner desire to save the planet, or maybe this particular green has something to do with the fact that I love camouflage, or men in uniform. That and I sorely miss watching Army Wives every monday night since we had our DSTV turned off on purpose to ’save money’.
Oh well, at least I have my beloved photoshop and blogging to keep me busy!
If you’re getting a kick out of this 125×125 and would like me to design one for you, drop me an email okay? It’d be my pleasure. I’ll do it in exchange for a little linkage from you.
Here’s a photo that I took yesterday, that I’m getting a big kick out of working with at the moment. I’m designing a series of posters around it, in various states and forms. In some of the posters all the warm colours are in, others the colder ones etc.
It’s a zen thing for me, working on this kind of thing.
So what’s your zen thing?
Possibly Related Posts:
- Turmoil
- Baby Shower Invitations
- The Difficult Concept
- Freelancers: What are your best work hours?
- Resources for Graphic Designers: Graphic River
Wow, New Wordpress.
Dec 20th
So I just upgraded to the new 2.7 Wordpress, and frankly I’m impressed.
It’s far more streamlined. Very Web 2.0-ish.
Cleaner.
Tidier.
But not so ‘new’ that I don’t know where to find stuff. Geeky though I may be, I’m still a chick.
_______
So with all the great weather we’ve been having, I’ve been taking ludicrous amounts of photographs of the kids in the water.
Heck, yesterday I got *into* the water *with* my camera (I know, shudder, gasp, how could I) but Reebok* (my eldest *not his real name) was under strict instructions not to splash, and Nike* (the youngest *not his real name) was doing a great job of kicking under the water anyway.
One of the new tricks I’ve been trying is ‘blueing’ the water of the pool. While the OPU (other parental unit aka my husband) has been doing a sterling job of keeping it clean and sparkly, on occasion it does tend to lean towards the greener side of ‘aqua’ and it’s probably exacerbated by all the foliage that overhangs it, the light etc anyway. So I had to find a way to blue the water, without making the kids look blue!
Meet my new best friend…the Magnetic Lasso tool in Adobe Photoshop (I’m running CS). Simply drag that baby around your happily swimming child (the bits above the water anyway) click on >Select >Inverse (to deselect your cherub, and re-select all the water around them) then run the ‘Cooler’ Action from The Pioneer Woman’s awesome SECOND free set of Photoshop Actions, and voila – beautiful blue sparkly water now with half the chemicals! 
FYI I also ran her ‘Sharpen THIS’ action from the same set, and just painted on where I wanted to sharpen the waters’ splashy bits, to make it a bit more sparkly.
Go forth and be creative folks!
_________
Also, given that at this time of year, one is prone to expect many family and friends, or general guests, if you are in need of temporary sleeping arrangements be sure to check out sleep number bed that link, for an affordable range of air beds and mattresses etc.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Turmoil
- Blog Banner for a Personal Blog
- Do You Have Gravatar?
- Marketing Postcard
- Never Sacrifice Quality for Price
