By Steven Snell

Humans have always had an infatuation with the air above us and the space around our planet. With Adobe Photoshop we can create new images or enhance existing photos to include the sky and space as a backdrop. There is virtually no limit to what can be done with some Photoshop skills and a bit of creativity.

As you will see from the tutorials featured here, some of the most entertaining and practical Photoshop creations and manipulations deal with the sky and space. Whether you are looking to make adjustments to the sky in the background of a photo or if you want to create an exploding space scene from scratch, Photoshop can meet your needs.

From this collection of tutorials you’ll learn all kinds of tricks that can be applied to your own work. Some of them are ideal for realistic photo manipulation and others are more suited for fun and experimentation. Take some time and explore the possibilities when working with the sky and space.

You may also be interested in some of our other collections of Photoshop Tutorials:

• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects
• 70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials

Space and Planets

Really Cool Eclipse Effect in Photoshop
Photoshop master Fabio Sasso shows you how to create this lighting effect.

Space and Planet Tutorial
Create a very cool look with just some simple Photoshop effects.

Make a Real Planet
Here you can learn how to easily create a fairly realistic planet.

Deep Space Nebula
Create a colorful nebula space scene.

Space Lighting Effect in 10 Steps
This tutorial shows a colorful, creative light effect ideal for space and dark backgrounds.

Space Scene Design
Create a scene of planets and lights by starting with a simple background image.

Painting Planets
Using a texture you can create a realistic planet.

Planetary Masses
Using brushes you can create a nice, textured planet.

Planetary Rings
Give a planet an extra touch with some simple rings.

Creating an Awesome Space Effect
This tutorial makes interesting use of some images for the space effect.

The Beauty from the Outside
A combination of images and Photoshop effects create this scene.

Alien Invasion Photoshop Tutorial
What is space without aliens? Learn how to add a UFO to a simple picture of the skyline.

Planet Tutorial
Create a planet pretty easily starting with a texture.

Explosions

Creating Fireballs and Explosions
Learn how to turn a typical roadside photo into an apocalyptic battle scene.

Create a Space Explosion from Scratch in Photoshop
Using no photos and a variety of effects in Photoshop, you can create this very realistic looking explosion.

Fiery Explosion
Another way to reate a realistic explosion with no images.

Fiery Photoshop Space Explosion Tutorial
PSDTUTS brings us more fiery goodness, this time starting with a simple downloaded image of a planet.

The “End of the World” Photo Manipulation
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to turn an ordinary picture into a cool apocalyptic image.

Explosion Effect
A gradient map and some simple effects are used to create this explosion.

Exploding Planet
Not a realistic type of explosion, but still useful for some purposes.

The Sky

Super Slick Dusky Lighting Effects in Photoshop
Turn a regular sunset photo into something special with this effect.

Vintage Clouds
An ordinary sky becomes a much more dramatic scene in this tutorial.

Ray of Light
Use rays of light with a silhouette-like photo.

Add a Realistic Rainbow to a Photo
Sometimes you may want to add a rainbow when there simply isn’t one in the photo.

Basic Graduated Neutral Density Filter
A subtle yet powerful effect for skies in photos.

Add Dynamic Lighting to a Flat Photograph
The sky in your photos can be drastically improved with Photoshop to create a more striking image.

The Orange Sky
This tutorial takes an image of the skyline as the starting point and gives it more character.

The Magic Night
This tutorial uses several different images to create this sky and the reflection on the water.

Warm Golden Sunsets with Gradient Maps
Turn an unspectacular sunset picture into something more special.

Clouds from Above
Clouds can be used for a lot of different types of work.

Mysterious Moonlit Landscape
A combination of photos and brushes are used for this tutorial.

Sleeping Sun
This fantasy art tutorial will help you to create an interesting image of a fairy.

Planet Integration Tutorial
This tutorial takes an image of a planet and implements it into a landscape photo.

Create a Starry Sky in Photoshop
Adding some stars to a sky is a practical trick that could easily come in handy.

Adding Fireworks to a Photo
Fireworks can be taken from one photo and dropped right into another.

Realistic Fog and Mist
Create realistic fog in just a few steps.

Quick Sunsets
Take a photo shot during the day and give it a sunset effect.

Create a Stunning 4th of July Collage
Using a few images you can create a festive collage.

The Soft Sea Light
Create a planet on the horizon of the sea.

How to Break Sunlight Through the Clouds
When working with images of the sky, adding a sunlight or ray effect can create a completely different look.

The White Tree
Create a more interesting and dramatic sky in the background of a photo.

Mysterious Lightning
This tutorial uses a few different photos to create the scene and some Photoshop touches for the lightning.

Illustrations

Mysterious Lighting Effect Tutorial for Photoshop
Create a dark, cartoonish sky scene.

Create a City Skyline
A fun, cartoon skyline.

Cartoon Sky
Create a simple cartoon sky that could be used for many purposes.

Creating a Fantastic Fantasy Night Sky in Photoshop
If you’re after the fantasy look as opposed to a photo-realistic look, this tutorial is for you.

Nature’s Sunshine
In this tutorial you’ll create a wallpaper of a fun sunset

Video

Creating Clouds
This video tutorial will show you how to create realistic clouds with brushes.

Space Planet Tutorial
Another helpful video tutorial that will show you how to create a space scene.

Create Stunningly Realistic Planets
This video will show you how to get the realistic look with Photoshop.

Related resources

You may also be interested in some of our other collections of Photoshop Tutorials:

• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects
• 70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials

About the author

Steven Snell has been designing websites for several years. He actively maintains a few blogs of his own, including DesignM.ag, which regularly provides articles and resources for web designers.

Link to the original article…

Times when online-shops were boring and unattractive are over. To attract customers’ attention designers tend to design online-shops according to the atmosphere it has to create. An online-store in which retro-products are offered is designed in a retro-look. And shops which are aiming to attract young customers are designed in vibrant colors and modern style. Furthermore, interactive browsing through the store, implemented with Flash and JavaScript, gains on popularity as well.

This post showcases 45 examples of creative and unusual designs of online-stores. Being creative doesn’t necessarily mean that the designs are successful since unconventional approaches often increase the time users need to climb the learning curve and figure out how they can achieve their goals. Still, how can you present your products in a distinctive way and how to design a truly unique online-store? Let’s find out.

Trendy design elements such as wood background, textures, handwriting, collage and grunge are quite popular. Reflections, shadows and similar elements from the times of vivid Web 2.0 are used rarely; however, designers of t-shirt- and children’s cloth-stores seem to have a different opinion on that matter for some reason. Disclaimer: we are not related to any of the stores presented below.

Please notice: we don’t know if creative design approaches result in better sales. This post is supposed to provide you with some interesting ideas and approaches which you can use in your future projects, not with recommendations for the most effective online-store-designs.

Showcase Of Creative Online-Shops

ShopComposition
ShopComposition uses a sliding navigation at the top of the site. Users can choose the content they would like to read. This store has an integrated blog and some further projects (such as picture-a-day) to attract customer’s attention. JavaScript in use.

Feel the Power
Actually, Feel the Power sells t-shirts and underwear — just like thousands of other online-stores out there. However, the site is completely Flash-based and offers its visitors a beautiful and attractive navigation via an animated wheel. One click opens a large preview of the selected product. Although Flash is used, the navigation is extremely easy and simple. Apparently, music in the background is supposed to create a good mood.

Yellowood
If a company produces Yellowood wood decks, then it probably should have a yellow design with wood in the background, right?

uShops
uShops welcomes its visitors with a price tag which is supposed to communicate the idea of the site — the online marketplace to buy and sell stuff.

Free People
This store aims at female teenagers. In such stores handwriting and vivid imagery are common.

Nerve
Nerve is an Ajax-based music store with vibrant colors, nifty JavaScript-effects and beuatiful hover effects. Nice and memorable design.

Bisley Perfect Order
This store is partly Flash-based and is designed in a retro-look. The main page is right-aligned for some reason. On the left there is a wood background with a coin.

Klassiker in Acryl

Simple Treasures

Habitat Shoes
Habitat Shoes sells shoes. However, it first sets up the perfect atmosphere for the store and offers its visitors to select one of the illustrations which stand for the different accessoires in the store.

ShoeGuru
ShoeGuru places its products in the middle of the page and uses horizontal scrolling for navigation. Notice that only the product is presented to the visitors — and nothing else.

Accentuate Clothing

Cosmicsoda
Cosmic Soda sells t-shirts and uses distinctive design decisions to attract its target group. The search box and newsletter box are somehow crooked, there are dozens of dashed lines, blue illustrations and a paper sheet background.

Etsy
Among dozes of distinctive features Etsy has an appealing navigation menu with icons and vibrant illustrations. The creative approach of the design is hidden in its functionality. For instance, it is possible to sort and filter products by colors. It is not done via a text-based search engine, but using the integrated interactive Flash-interface.

Threadless

TasteBook

Loworks

LadyBugs Picnic
LadyBugs Picnic with feminine touch, handwritten elements and, of course, bugs!

Martique

Mozilla Store
A distinctive fan-shop for geeks and nerds.

PodShop

Rock Pillars

Rotofugi

Chop Shop

Pink Koi Fish

Akachanwear
In this store the choice of illustrations directly indicates what the store is about.

Axid

A better tomorrow

Baby Wit
The design seems to be hand-drawn and incomplete which somehow fits to the items the store sells - baby clothes and accessoires. The design perfectly fits to the atmosphere it needs to create.

Dirty Coast

Fox Cubs

Holly Hue

Jacobi Jayne

Kidsmodern

Lekmer

General Robots

Service is good for you

Sound Provisions

Soïa & Kyo

Teetonic

Wavehouse Shop

Trendy Tadpole

Related articles

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• Shopping Carts Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
• Hand-Drawing Style In Modern Web Design: Vol 1
• Hand-Drawing Style In Modern Web Design: Vol 2
• Vivid Imagery In Modern Web Design

Link to the original article…

By Dustin M. Wax

Look at what you’ve made. Beautiful, isn’t it? But does it work? For whom does it work? Of course you can use it, but can anyone else? In short, is it functional?

At the heart of every piece of practical design, whether it be a website, product package, office building, manufacturing system, piece of furniture, software interface, book cover, tool, or anything else, there is a function, a task the item is expected to perform. Most functions can be achieved in a variety of ways, but there are some basic elements a designer needs to take into account to create a product that best fulfills its intended function.

These are the elements of functional design, the process of responding to the needs or desires of the people who will use an item in a way that allows their needs or desires to be met. Functional design is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, it describes products that work well to perform their assigned tasks; as a process, functional design is a set of practices guided by the principles that produce that positive outcome. (Functional design is also a computer modeling technique, but that’s not what we’re discussing here.)

In order to create a product that works, there are seven questions you should keep in mind about the product you’re designing, who will be using it, and how they’ll be using it.

1. Consider the product’s goal.

Consider the screwdriver. The goal of a screwdriver is pretty straight-forward: to drive screws. Although there’s certainly a lot of room for innovation in screwdriver design — there are screwdrivers with more ergonomic handles, ratchet-assemblies, magnetic tips, and exchangeable heads — ultimately everything in a screwdriver’s design is aimed towards the accomplishment of that single goal: driving screws.

Ultimately everything in a screwdriver’s design is aimed towards the accomplishment of that single goal: driving screws. Image source.

Now, consider a website like Amazon.com. What is the goal of Amazon’s website? Amazon has a lot of different uses, some intended by Amazon and its designers and some not intended — you can look up reviews, compare product prices while you’re in a store considering a purchase, promote your brand by leaving lots of reviews, scam shoppers by creating fake storefronts, collect images of book covers for a school project, search book text for half-remembered quotes, and so on.

For the folks at Amazon, the website has one purpose: to sell stuff. All the features that allow those other uses were put in place as ways to sell more products.

But none of those are the reason the site was built. For the folks at Amazon, the website has one purpose: to sell stuff. All the features that allow those other uses were put in place as ways to sell more products. (And it seems to be working!)

2. Consider who will be using it.

Perhaps the single most important consideration in the design process — and the one most often forgotten — is the intended audience for the product. What works perfectly well for one user might be completely dysfunctional for another. And if the hoped-for users fall more into the second category than the first, you’ve got a problem.

Think about the way your parents or grandparents use their computers. Anyone with a bit of tech-savviness has probably fielded dozens of "tech support" calls from family members who are simply baffled by things like adding an email account to their email program, downloading family pictures from the Web, or dealing with a too-full hard drive.

Since CNN’s web-site is supposed to be used by huge and versatile audience, it has to work equally well for all its potential users if it’s to accomplish its goal.

Why do people have so much trouble with their computers?

• They don’t know enough about how computers work.
• They don’t have enough experience with computers.
• They don’t have time to figure things out.
• They don’t enjoy tinkering until they find a solution to a computer problem.
• The manuals are written in a dense, uninviting language that they find boring and difficult to comprehend.

Considering the kinds of problems they have can give us a clue about the kinds of questions designers should be asking about their audience.

• What kind of knowledge do your users bring with them?
• How much experience do they have?
• What kind of time do they have? Are they looking for a leisurely diversion or do they want to get in and out fast?
• What kind of personalities do they have?
• How much support will they need, and what form should it take?

Obviously there are likely to be several audiences for any given product. Plenty of computer users have the knowledge, experience, and personality types to easily do whatever they choose to do on their computers. If you’re designing a niche product — a website for Linux users, for example — perhaps you can get away with directing yourself towards only one, narrow audience. In most cases, though, a product has to work equally for all its potential users if it’s to accomplish its goal.

3. Consider what your audience intends to do with it.

As we saw in the case of Amazon.com, there are a lot of ways that users use a product besides those that directly fulfill the product’s main goal. In fact, every user comes to a product with his or her own intention — and they are rarely the goals that designers have in mind. For example, nobody in the history of humankind has ever wanted to record what was on channel Three between 9 pm and 10pm on Thursday the 27th — yet for years that was how VCR designers insisted we program our VCRs. No surprise, then, that few people programmed their VCRs.

Instead, what people want to do is record House tomorrow night. Likewise, your dad doesn’t want to configure his POP3 and SMTP settings. He doesn’t even want to send and receive email. He wants to send pictures of the baby to Aunt Jill in Iowa. Engineers and designers have long suffered from a tendency to substitute concrete specifications and processes for fuzzy user behaviors — but users don’t do that.

Engineers and designers have long suffered from a tendency to substitute concrete specifications and processes for fuzzy user behaviors — but users don’t do that.

Adequate knowledge of who your audience is requires some sense of what their intentions are and how they are going to think about your product. That’s what Tivo did when they replaced the complicated process of recording a show on a VCR with a process that better reflected their users’ intentions — just select a show you want to record and hit "Record".

4. Is it clear how to use it?

The best design, as often said, "speaks for itself". It is immediately clear — at least to its target audience(s) — what a product does and how to use it. Clarity is key to functional design. Probably one of the best-designed objects in the world is the ball. With minimal instruction even infants can use it!

In contrast, look at the website above. That’s the home page for Chipotle, the Mexican fast food restaurant known for its use of free-range, organic, and locally-grown ingredients. Not that you’d know that from the homepage. What you know is a) they have a logo, and b) there’s something you should know about jalapeño peppers. If there were no food scare involving jalapeños, you’d see only the logo. What do you do? We can assume the site has a goal — probably to get you to buy some tasty Mexican food — but how do you, the visitor, fulfill your own goal of finding what you want to know about Chipotle?

This is a classic example of what Vincent Flanders calls "mystery meat navigation" (presumably free-range, organically-grown mystery meat), a website navigation system so clever, so stylish, that visitors have no idea what the site does or how to do it. Make your product difficult enough to understand and it won’t get used at all — which means it doesn’t achieve its goal, which in turn means it doesn’t function.

5. How does your user know it’s working?

Remember in the Bad Old Days of the Web, when you’d make a purchase online and the "Submit" button would say underneath something like:

Please press the "Submit" button only once. Pressing more than once will duplicate your purchase.

We’ve come a ways since then, but it’s surprising how many times you still come across a website feedback form that doesn’t tell you when your message has been sent, or a search form that doesn’t tell you that it’s working on your request.

This problem is by no means limited to the online world. How often do you double-check to see that your alarm clock is set to go off, and at the right time, before you can relax and go to sleep? Or maybe you’ve run into this problem: you hit "Program" on your CD player (assuming you still have one) and key in the tracks you want to hear, but aren’t sure whether to hit "Program" again or just hit "Play" — and if you hit the wrong one, whether your program will be lost and you’ll have to re-do it.

These are all examples of inadequate feedback — it’s not clear whether you’ve completed the task you inteded to do or if there are more steps still required. While technically a product is functioning even if you don’t know it’s working, it’s not functioning well from the user’s standpoint — and products that don’t function well tend not to create very loyal users.

6. Is it engaging to your users?

One of the great products of recent years, at least in terms of engagement, is the Blackberry. Blackberry owners can’t stop fiddling with their devices — they check their email, flick the trackball around, check email again, send a text, scroll around the home screen, and then do it all over again. And again.

It’s no accident it’s earned the nickname "Crackberry."

Usability testing and paper prototyping are common methods to understand the way your target group will interact with you web-site and find out if it is engaging to your users. Image source.

Good design draws users in, whether through visual appeal, feel, ease of use, or sheer amazement. Anyone who has ever picked up a well-made hand tool and felt the desire to build something has experienced this — the tool just feels right.

This is, in part, the aesthetic value of the design — we are naturally drawn to things we find pretty. But aesthetics are hardly the limit of what makes something engaging. There are plenty of websites out there that are downright hideous — but they work. Those long form sales pages that litter the Web hawking "get rich quick" programs and miracle cures (like this landing page which won the SEOmoz landing page contest last year) are as ugly as human ingenuity can make them — but they consistently succeed in leading visitors (at least the kind of users that the pages are designed for) to the inevitable sale.

7. How does it handle mistakes?

How often have you visited a web page, realized it didn’t have the information you were looking for, clicked the "Back" button, and ended up on the same page again?

You made a mistake, to be sure — you clicked the wrong link — but that happens. It was the designer, though, who decided to make your mistake difficult to undo. Good design takes into account the possibility that users make mistakes.

Unless your only desired user is a member of that very small demographic of people who don’t ever make mistakes, your design should accommodate and even anticipate mistakes as much as possible. Web designers have come up with all sorts of ways to accommodate visitors’ mistakes, from persistent menus and "breadcrumbs" to 404 pages ("Page Not Found" pages) that link to the pages the websurfer was likely to have been looking for.

Designers who don’t make room for — and offer solutions to — users’ mistakes create non-functioning products.

Conclusion

Design is necessarily a relationship between users with problems to solve and designers with solutions to offer. Too often, though, users are left out of the designer’s considerations. Whoever designed the Chipotle site, for instance, had no conception of how any part of their target audience would approach the site. They had a clever idea — "it’s minimalism, man!" — and ran with it, to the detriment of potential diners, and possibly to the detriment of Chipotle.

Unless your specialty is creating concepts that have no possibility of being made into actual products, the ultimate goal is to design things that will be used. Think about how and why your product will be used, and by whom, as a central part of the design process to assure that your designs not only can be used, but will.

Related articles

You may want to take a look at related articles:

• 10 Principles of Effective Web Design
• 5 More Priniciples of Effective Web Design

About the author

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and anthropologist with a long-standing interest in design. You can contact him or find links to his work around the Web at his site at dustinwax.com.

Link to the original article…

If you have been following Smashing Magazine for a while you know that we love to release high-quality freebies. Over the last years we’ve featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free. You can find many of them in our section Freebies.

Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.

Today we are glad to release a fervens — a free professional Wordpress-theme. The theme has 3 columns of fixed width, comes in 3 flavours and is supposed to be a starting point for your projects. The theme was designed by Elena Gafita especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Main features of the theme

• 3 columns of fixed width
• widget-ready — two sidebars (both sidebars are supporting widgets, but I recommend to use the smaler one.
• the theme is using 3 plugins; 2 of them are integrated into functions.php, so there is no need to install them. These plugins are Gravatar, Recent Comments and FlickrRSS. You can use the last one to present your Flickr images in a Flickr Photostream (see the demo).

Motivation behind the design

We have provided Elena with the freedom to explore her creativity and asked her to create a fresh Wordpress-theme which could be used and extended for a variety of different projects. Here is how Elena explains what prompted her to design the theme the way it is released now.

“Fervens is the name for the new theme I made for my friends from Smashing Magazine. But what is Fervens and what does it mean? As you might know, I give Latin names to all my themes simply because I believe they are more practical, more brandable and they just feel right to me.

Fervens is supposed to stand for freshness. Summer is my favorite time of year as it always amazes us with a rainbow of sensation and colors, making this time of year the best of all. The green of the plants and trees, the blue of the water… It’s just amazing and beautiful. And this was the reason why one of the sidebars was chosen to be designed with different variations of green.

The sidebar of the theme was chosen to be designed with different variations of green.

With this new theme I have tried to get something out of that “summer freshness” and deliver it to the Web in a form of a Wordpress-theme which is easy to use and to extend. Because I couldn’t agree with Vitaly regarding the column positions we decided to make 3 versions of it:

• Fervens A (Sidebar 1, Central Column, Sidebar 2),
• Fervens B (Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, Central Column) and
• Fervens C (Central Column, Sidebar 2, Sidebar 1).

I hope you enjoy this theme as much as I enjoyed making it. Thanks Vitaly for the opportunity!

The Fervens Theme is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This means that you may use it for your personal and commercial projects and you may also make any changes — just don’t remove the credits from footer. ;-)”

Elena has also designed a small button for Smashing Magazine and all Smashing readers out there. Thank you, Elena. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.

Download the themes for free!

You can use the theme for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both designer’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission — please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish, but if you are planning to release your modification, please ask for a permission first.

• Demo
• Download PSD (.zip-package, 0.3 Mb)
• Download the theme (.zip-package, 0.1 Mb)
• Support and Feedback

• Demo
• Download PSD (.zip-package, 0.3 Mb)
• Download the theme (.zip-package, 0.1 Mb)
• Support and Feedback

• Demo
• Download PSD (.zip-package, 0.3 Mb)
• Download the theme (.zip-package, 0.1 Mb)
• Support and Feedback

Last but not least…

We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.

If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a Wordpress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).

You can also subscribe to our RSS-feed , we are going to release more free Wordpress-themes in the future.

Link to the original article…

By Ashley Ringrose and Smashing Editorial Team

Album cover art is often considered to be one of the “extincted” fields in modern graphics design. In times when digital copies are cheaper and quicker to get, album covers have somehow lost their importance as less and less customers actually buy CDs and LPs in the stores. That’s a pity because album covers can be extremely expressive and convey the message of the album in a number of creative ways. This post attempts to prove exactly that.

Music and art go hand in hand. And the best way to get a potential buyers’ attention is with an eye catching album cover. We all know you can’t just judge a book by it’s cover but it doesn’t hurt to give a CD a spin based off a sexy piece of art.

Below we present 35 excellent examples of beautiful, creative and impressive album covers that will certainly inspire you to head down to the local record shop and start browsing through records and labels. We have tried to address various cover designs and present both CD covers and LP covers from 60s to 2000s, however some excellent album covers are definitely missing. Please let us know about them in the comments to the post!

This post was updated. Thank you for the comments!

Album Covers

The Mars Volta “Frances the Mute”

Danger Doom - The Mouse and the Mask

Michael Jackson: Dangerous by Mark Ryden

Devil’s Gun - Raising The Beast

Smashing Pumpkins: Zeitgeist by Shepard Fairey

Keane: Under The Iron Sea by Sanna Annukka

Kisschasy: United Paper People by Debaser

Editors: The End Has a Start by Idris Khan

Electric Light Orchestra - Out of the Blue

Ground Components: An Eye for a Brow, A Tooth for a Pick by Jonathan Zawada

Arcade Fire: Funeral

Kool & the Gang - Still Cool

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon 1973

Gallows: In The Belly of a Shark by Dan Mumford

Muse - Origin of Symmetry (thanks, Paul)

Linkin Park - Reanimation

Lemon Jelly: Lost Horizons by Airside

Tool: 10,000 Days

Circa Survive: On Letting Go

The Last Goodnight - Poison Kiss

Pink Floyd - The Division Bell

Thom Yorke: The Eraser by Stanley Donwood

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (thanks, yaara)

Architecture in Helsinki: Places Like This by Will Sweeney

The Chemical Brothers: Push the Button by Tappin Gofton

Rolling Stones - Forty Licks

Rafale: Rock It, Don’t Stop It by Akroe

Dream Theater - Scenes from the memory (thanks, OverZero.it)

Guns N’ Roses - Appetite for Destruction

Relayer: Yes

Coldplay - Viva La Vida

New Order - Power, Corruption and Lies
Designed by one of today’s most influential designers Peter Saville (thanks, Shaun)

Soulwax - Nite Versions

Pixies - Doolittle

Deerhunter - Cryptograms

Hot Chip - The Warning

Muse - Absolution

The Police - Ghost In The Machine

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti

DJ Shadow - Endtroducing…

Wow - Moby Grape

Genji Siraisi: Censorsh!t by Razauno

Radiohead - Hail to the Thief

VHS Orbeta - Bring On The Comets

Van Halen - 1984

Fort-Minor - The Rising Tied Front

The Roots - Game Theory

Led Zeppelin - Mothership

Nick Drake - Pink Moon

The Cribs - Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever

Elton John - Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy

XTC - Drums and Wires

Queens Of The Stone Age: Era Vulgaris by Morning Breath Inc

Beck: The Information by Big Active and you
“The album was issued with a blank sleeve and booklet and one of four different sheets of stickers for fans to make their own album art. Beck explained to Wired magazine he wanted no two copies of the CD cover to be the same: “The artwork is going to be customizable. The idea is to provide something that calls for interactivity.” However, because the unique album art concept was seen as a gimmick to bolster retail sales, The Information was deemed ineligible to enter the UK Albums Chart.”

Merzbow - Frog: Remixed and Revisited

Last Click

The World’s First Album Cover
Alex Steinwess, a then 23 years old designer, convinced Columbia’s suits to create the first true album cover. Until then, 78s were sold in generic sleeves. Please notice that there is the word “smash” on the cover.

About the author

Ashley Ringrose is better known as Mr Truffle and editor of Sleevage a music design blog. He occasionally plays with Mr Potatoheads and dresses up in costumes. He is also a founding member of Soap Creative an Australian based digital agency.

Related posts

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• 29 Brilliant Music Videos
• Excellent Book Covers and Paperbacks
• Beautiful Brochures and Booklets

Link to the original article…

by Dirk Metzmacher

Beauty retouching is probably one of the most popular application areas in which Adobe Photoshop is used extensively. There are two simple reasons for that. First, Photoshop offers a variety of advanced tools to smooth out skin and hair, optimize body proportions and emphasize some beautiful details. And second, if you have some experience with Photoshop it is easy to learn the basics and quickly produce very impressive and beautiful results.

Of course, beauty-retouching is a quite deceptive art. The masters of Photoshop create illusions which are hard to tell apart — unless you have both a genuine photo and the final result in Photoshop and can directly compare them. In fact, every day we consume perfectly retouched stars and models online and offline which just look different in the real life.

Still, it is not the reason to avoid learning advanced Photoshop techniques for beauty-retouching and study examples of how it is done in practice. The list below presents both image-tutorials as well as video-tutorials. Most examples have a before-vs.-after-comparison and you can follow the modifications with Photoshop step-by-step.

You may want to take a look at the further Photoshop tutorials selections we’ve presented earlier:

• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects

Skin

• Beautiful Skin
  Not everyone has beautiful skin but you can make it better - at least in your photographs.

  

• Smooth skin
  How to make a skin like the ones you see in magazines like Playboy.

  

• Beauty Retouching
  Beauty retouching is one of the most demanding parts of photo manipulation. The main trick for your results to be astonishing is patience.

  

• Remove Freckles
  Reduce slight freckles naturally without using the Healing Brush. In this Photoshop tutorial, you’ll learn how to subtract freckles using a layer.

  

• Perfect Skin
  How you can get rid of all the acne and pimples and blemishes and scars on your face.

  

• Skin looking smooth
  During the course of this Photoshop Lunacore shows you how to make skin look smooth.

  

• Makeup makeover
  How to remove hair in front of someone’s face, retouch skin and apply makeup using Photoshop.

  

• Dark skin - bright skin
  This tutorial shows you how to make a dark skin bright(er).

  

• A chapter of Beauty Retouching
  A free sample chapter of “Skin”, a Photoshop Retouching Book by Lee Varis about Beauty Retouching.

  

Hair

• Changing Hair Color
  How to change hair color.

  

• Shining hair
  Creating shining hair like shown in shampoo ads.

  

• Removing Hair Roots
  A fairly straight-forward method for removing hair roots that takes mere seconds to accomplish.

  

• Color hair locks
  Changing hair color in just few minutes.

  

Body (breasts, bum, figure, etc.)

• Trimming weight
  Trimming weight off with the Liquify tool.

  

• Digital Nip Tuck
  Photoshop is probably the cheapest alternative to plastic surgery possible.

  

• Digital Nose Job
  Simple and easy photo editing technique to give someone a digital nose job.

  

• Spare Tires
  In this tutorial we will see how to remove love handles (or the extra fat around the waist).

  

• Smaller Nose
  This tutorial will walk you through the steps for reducing the size of a nose in a photograph using Photoshop.

  

• Bigger Bustline
  Learn to make a bustline look huge and comically big.

  

Eyes, mouth and teeth

• Enhancing Iris Color
  It is said that the eyes are windows into the soul. This tutorial details a simple yet powerful technique for altering eye color using basic Photoshop tools.

  

• Red Eye Tool
  This photoshop tutorial will show you how to use Photoshop CS2’s Red Eye tool in a non-destructive way.

  

• Whitening Teeth & Eyes
  Some methods to make natural elements white or whiter.

  

• Make eyelashes thicker
  Learn how to make eyelashes thicker.

  

• Apply Eye Make-up
  This photoshop tutorial will show you how you can add eyeshadow, eyeliner and mascara to any model easily.

  

• Eyebrow Piercing
  This tutorial shows you how to add an eyebrow piercing to a photo.

  

• Photoshop dentist
  Everybody can be a good dentist - with Photoshop.

  

• Whitening Teeth
  Another way to make whiter teeth with Adjustment Layer.

  

Galleries

• Celebrities Before and After
  Shows some photos of celebrities before and after beauty retouching.

  

• Greg Apodaca
  Rolling the mouse over most of the images of this digital portfolio will display the original scan before it was retouched.

  

• Touch of Glamour
  Photo Retouching and Enhancement for Pageant, Model and Glamour Photography - Rollover effect also here.

  

• Amy Dresser
  Portfolio of a full-time retoucher and illustrator.

  

• Retouche
  Norm Nason is a senior graphic designer and fine artist.

  

• The art of retouching
  Glenn Feron was born, then found art and was born again.

  

• Digitalpablo
  Portfolio of Pablo J. Castillo.

  

• Digital Retouche
  A German professional retoucher.

  

• Artist 2 Design
  Experience retouching thousands of actors headshots over the years has taught Shawn the art of what to retouch and what not to.

  

• Digital Retouching Services
  From very basic blemish clean ups to full out magazine quality beauty skin retouching.

  

• Retouchme
  Creative high-end beauty, fashion and product retouching.

  

• Retouche Demo
  Nice flash demonstration how to retouche a photo.

  

Video-Tutorials

• A Perfect Lie In Photoshop
  Cameron Rad turn a beautiful woman into a perfect one. “I went through about 40 different makeover techniques, until i found what i thought was the best balance for this photo.” A good “flawless” skin method.

  

• Hilary Duff
  Hilary Duff makeover.

  

• Breast Enlarge
  This tutorial shows you how to enlarge a breast.

  

• Smart Filters
  Using smart filters to soften the skin of your subject gives you the ability to retouch your image while maintaining flexibility.

  

• Basic Beauty
  Learn the absolute basics of beauty retouching in Photoshop.

  

• Beauty Saloon
  Skin retouching with Photoshop.

  

• Model Beauty
  Speed revision of a model beauty.

  

• Natural to Synthetic
  Extremly makeover of a photo of Amy Lee from Evanescence.

  

• Gossip Girl
  Leighton Meester super glam.

  

• Body makeover
  Makeover to illustrate what photoshop can do.

  

• Magic
  The fast way to loosing weight.

  

• Pretty
  A little time and effort can do a lot.

  

• Extreme
  A really nice Photoshop Makeover.

  

• Pretty face
  Another Makeover.

  

• Evolution
  An evolution of a model.

  

• proof
  Proof that you can in fact create top beauty images with a point and shoot camera.

  

• model job
  Great digital makeup in photoshop.

  

• The Perfect Lie
  High-speed Photoshop transformation.

  

Complete Workflow

• Pure perfection
  Spin raw beauty into pure perfection. Very detailed tutorial.

  

• Beautify a Face
  This extensive Photoshop tutorial will show you how to beautify a face.

  

• Ultimate Makeup
  A series of steps to improve skin tones, modify shadow and light patterns to increase the impact, and enhance the eyes and hair to create a striking portrait.

  

Artistic Retouch

• Phoenix Hair Effect
  With some simple brushing techniques, and a bit of color tweaking, you can spice up your photos with this flaming hair tutorial.

  

More beauty

• Longer Nails
  You would like a woman’s nails to be longer? Here we go…

  

• Eliminate Cellulite
  In this tutorial you can learn how to eliminate a person’s cellulite.

  

• Nail manipulation
  Manipulating nails by increasing length and changing shade.

  

• Airbrush retouching
  See what`s possible with Photoshop`s airbrush tool.

  

• Retouching for Beginners
  This tutorial shows a couple of simple techniques you can use to enhance your portraits.

  

• Photoshop Beauty
  Some ways to improve your photos with the help of using Photoshop.

  

• Tone Down Highlights
  Sometimes the only thing that keeps a good portrait from being a great portrait is a little too much shine on the skin.

  

• Looking good
  Great Techniques for Photoshop Beauty Retouching.

  

• New look
  Whatever a model looks like, we can give her a totaly new, beautiful look.

  

• Glamour Style
  Suzette Troche-Stapp is one of the most sought-after photographer/digital artists today.

  

Dirk Metzmacher is a professional Photoshop trainer, book author and designed with over 10 years of experience. He is also a creative mind behind Photoshop Weblog, a German blog about techniques, tutorials and resources related to Adobe Photoshop.

Link to the original article…

Although light is considered to be rather a practical than an artistic tool, it has some properties which designers can effectively explore in their works. Indeed, light can also be considered as a medium for more powerful and more vivid artistic expression. In fact, many artists and crews make use of it creating quite impressive works of art.

In this episode of our Monday Inspiration series we present 50 beautiful examples of light art — paintings, sculptures, drawings and graffitts which were created using light. At the bottom of this post you will find references to related Flickr pools which contain thousands of further examples of what can be achieved out of creative experiments with light.

Light Paintings and Light Sculptures

Sitooterie II
The structure is a cube punctured by over 5000 long thin windows that project from all its surfaces and lift it off the ground. As the long thin windows all point at the exact centre of the cube, it only takes a single light source, located at this central point, to send light through every tube, causing the windows to glow orange. A small number of them also project into the cube to form seating. Designed by Heatherwick studio.

I am on Fire
Light painting by Benegizer.

sm_light paint
Created by Andrew Thomas.

Finding Light

feb light graffiti 011

Light Circles

Perfect Cicle

Human Bulb