CategoryPhotoshop

February 17, 2016 — To help you boost productivity, save time, and, obviously, nerves, in this article, Cosima Mielke has picked some valuable Photoshop resources, plugins, and scripts for you. Some of them will speed up routine tasks so you can concentrate more on your actual work, others build a bridge between Photoshop and code so your design mockups can benefit from the best of both worlds. Read more…

February 4, 2016 — In this article, Manuela Langella will teach you how to work digitally on an image you draw by hand. You will be able to distinguish how Illustrator works with Live Trace and with the Pen Tool. Two different results from the same image, the first close to hand-drawing, the second more of a cartoon style. First you’ll need to know how to manage your drawing in Photoshop and which are the best ways to prepare it for Illustrator. If you are not comfortable drawing in Photoshop, don’t worry! You can download her drawing in high-resolution, skip the Photoshop step and go straight to step 2 to begin with Illustrator. Read more…

June 19, 2015 — Even though Photoshop is still a long way off from being able to create the high-end and cinematic animations of such programs as After Effects, it still has enough power to create complex animation. In this article, Stephen Petrany will share advanced techniques to help you create complex animations. He’ll look at the Timeline panel and the different properties that can be animated, and explore the roles that adjustment layers, filters and smart objects can have in animation. Because the topics and techniques in this article are advanced, a moderate level of Photoshop knowledge is expected. Read more…

May 18, 2015 — Are you designing at “Retina” resolution in Photoshop? In this article, Murdoch Carpenter will walk you through the problems he faced in creating Retina mockups to be displayed on a tablet device. He will then explain a way to work that is easier and gives you better performance. This is about Murdoch’s experience with Photoshop, but it could be applied to Illustrator and other software. Throughout this article, he will use the @2x and @3x notation. These represent the Retina buckets for iOS. A great example is the app’s icons. Read more…

October 15, 2014 — With the display of the iPhone 6 Plus being even more detailed than that of the iPhone 4, we will need to provide 3x assets. The numbers 1x, 2x and 3x are also called “scale factors.” Of course, Android developers have always had to deal with many different sets of assets. Still, designers are finding themselves questioning their production workflow. In this article, Karsten Bruns will focus on iOS, but you could easily extend this approach to Android and the web. Hopefully, the methods described here will simplify your workflow. Read more…

July 3, 2014 — Photoshop can be used for so much more than just retouching images or manipulating photos. You can create your own textures . In this article, Stephen Petrany will present a foundation of techniques to help you build custom textures. He’ll go over three Photoshop features that he relies on to do most of his texturing — filters, layer styles and brushes. You’ll see that creating high-quality textures for art or design doesn’t require the talent of an artisan painter. All it takes is a little understanding of Photoshop and knowledge of the tools and how to manipulate them to get the effect you desire. Read more…

November 16, 2013 — Many designers and design teams make the mistake of thinking that their work is done once they’ve completed the visual design stage, and this is where Specctr can help. Specctr is a plugin for Adobe applications, which transitions a visual design to production by enabling you to specify form and function. It automatically generates a specification and creates a blueprint for the design, which saves a lot of time! Read more…

July 25, 2013 — Automation saves precious time on repetitive tasks and helps us solve certain problems more quickly and easily. Kamil Khadeyev has known about Photoshop scripts for years but decided to really dive in a few months ago. He had avoided it because he thought it was the domain of smart math-minded programmers. He was wrong, and today he’ll show that, although it requires some basic programming skills, scripting isn’t hard to grasp. Read more…

July 9, 2013 — As creators of products that will be consumed on Retina devices, we have to optimize our design and development workflow accordingly. Upon failing to find a tool that fits my design team’s workflow, Artiom Dashinsky created a set of two time-saving Photoshop actions for slicing graphics for Retina and standard displays. The great feedback from his team inspired him to share it with other designers. Read more…

April 22, 2013 — As a teenager aspiring to be a Web designer, chances are you were given Adobe Photoshop as your vehicle for designing the Web. No matter which version you had, undoubtedly you know someone who can “trump” you by having adopted an earlier version. We designers take much pride in this, in case you hadn’t noticed. Let’s face it: Photoshop is the software we’re identified with, and its place in Web design history is substantial. Read more…