http://www.removethelabels.com/2010/06/06/how-to-fix-sony-psp-6-20-games-on-custom-firmware/ http://www.removethelabels.com/2010/06/06/how-to-fix-sony-psp-6-20-games-on-custom-firmware/#comments Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:23:19 +0000 William http://www.removethelabels.com/?p=27678

Despite making many attempts to secure and lockdown the Sony PSP platform, Sony has been outpaced by the homebrew scene consistently. Copy protection, stronger DRM, applications that wouldn’t run on anything but the absolute newest firmware, Sony has tried it all, and has been beaten to the punch.

The newest games out use a new decryption method that Sony thought would stop piracy. The guys over at OCModshop prove Sony wrong.

These new games utilize a new decryption method, and cannot be patched using Eboot Exchange 2.8. Some of the new games that cannot be patched by EE are:

• Iron Man 2
• Prince of Persia – Forgotten Sands
• Metal Gear Solid – Peace Walker
• FullMetal Alchemist
• What Have I Done To Deserve This, My Lord?
• Hexyz Force

Of course there are methods to manually patch your games (UMDGen 4.0, etc), but these are rather complicated, especially when compared to the ease of Eboot Exchange. Another method to patch recent games is with the use of ISO Tool 1.51. Not only will it patch 6.20 games to work on the recent custom firmwares, but it does it right on the PSP – no PC required!

The instructions are simple enough to follow. Take that Sony!

[ Links: OCModshop ]

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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

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• 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…

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…

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…

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…

• 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…

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

Tunnel
Kevinhooa walks backwards while circling a road flare inside the Oxford tunnel.

AntiVJ
AntiVJ is funky and creative. The team creates visual experiments, installations and live light visuals. Videos are included.

So far away

Lightmark
Light architecture by Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke from Hamburg, Germany.

Eric Staller
Light drawings and light sculptures created by Eric Staller.

Spirallight
By Robin Carpenter.

Laser
Created by Fesan from Norway.

Light in the Hall

Fluorescent Tunnel

Light Painting Humanoids
Light painting examples by Christopher Hibbert.

Dean Chamberlain

Abstract

My New Camera!

Toby Keller

Olho – Light Paint com celular e sony!

Fun with light and robots

Feb light graffiti

Lichtfaktor
A German design crew which specializes in light graffiti and light drawing.

Light River
A light painting by Crystal Chroma.

Michael Bosanko
“We Come In Peace”.

Experiments with Light

Santa’s Reindeer – Light Sculpture

Abstract light painting

Breakwater

Neon Coriolis

Bow

Gyrating Quasar
Photos created by throwing an old camera around various light sources. A camera toss in front of some lovely blue lights.

UVA and the Light Fantastic
Some excellent examples of light installations presented by the Creative Review blog.

Working Late

Fireworks
No light art without fireworks, of course… Sky painting at its best.

Last Click

Sprint flashlight
Sprint commercial with flashlight animation.

Resources

• Cameratoss- Everything!
  Photos created by throwing an old camera around various light sources.
• DIY Photography: Painting with Light
  A step-by-step tutorial.
• 25 Amazing Light Graffiti Pictures
• Light Writing Flickr Group
• Lights-n-Shadows Flickr Pool
• Moving Light Flickr Pool
• Light Fantastic Flickr Pool
• Light Junkies Flickr Pool
• Light Drawing Flickr Pool
• Light Painted Flickr Group
• Light Stream Pool
• 10 Amazing Light Graffiti Artists and Photographers
• The Gallery of Light Flickr Pool

Link to the original article…

• (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers
• More (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers
• Space Wallpapers and Nebula Wallpapers

50 Remarkable Nature Desktop Wallpapers

Hamad Darwish’s Wallpapers
A photo collection of the images taken during Microsoft’s Windows Vista photo-shoot. Two of which are currently shipped in the Vista installation disk, while the rest did not make the cut into Vista’s Wallpaper Collection.

the magic tree -wallpaper pack by =mpk

A Rorschach Morning

Desktopography 2008

distraction – WP Pack Collab by =mpk

Aker by *Kobhen

June 15:crying grass. by *Cute-Sleepwalker
Only 1024×768px.

Another 17 Fantastic Free Wallpaper Images @ Crestock.com Blog

Tower Bridge. by ~phyzer

Fresh Water by ~norbi

Autumn by ~sican

Green Snake by ~elliquote

Jeffrey Klassen photos

Darkness To Light

The Blue Jay

Moody Waters

Boone Hall Plantation

Hilltop Mountain Skys

Sea Sharks

Snowy Peaks

Sunset at the Bay

Crashing Wave Wallpaper

Sun ray in the woods

Golden Tree

Spot of Light

Flowers Wide Screen

Green leaf

Planet Football by ~meatcar

The Running Horse

Waterfall

Hummingbird

Another Day On The Terrace by Shane66.

Yaquina Head Lighthouse "The Yaquina Head Light also known as Cape Foulweather Lighthouse, is a lighthouse on the Oregon Coast of the United States. Built in 1873, it was automated in 1966 and is currently an active aid to navigation".

Cloudy Day II "From a small boat harbour in Denmark".

Garp Wallpaper by trenchmaker 1600×1200 px.

Wafting 1600×1200, 1680×1050 and 1280×1024 px.

Its All Tears.

THE RIGHT WAY by designed shilk 1680×1050 px .

Eis.

lonely soul by werol 1024×768 px.

Silence of The Storm by angelreich 1200×798 px.

Day subsiding designed by memod.

Golden Sea by tonyelieh.

Pacific City.

Sources and Resources

• Breathtaking Photo Sets Guaranteed to Inspire Flickr Set
• 49 Amazing Wallpapers
• 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpapers
• 218 HD Resolution Desktop Wallpapers for Nerds
• 20 Selected Desktop Wallpapers

Link to the original article…

Textures and patterns are used more often than one may think. The reason why we don’t see them is because they usually remain in the background, supporting the overall design, replacing a standard background color and creating a more inviting atmosphere. But they almost never stand out. Used primarily for background images, they need to fit to the overall design making the content easier to perceive. In fact, wood textures seem to have become so popular that designers suggest that wood is the new glossy style and wood is the new white.

Well, we don’t think that wood is a new revolutionary trend — after all, it was used and explored for years. However, since wood isn’t used everywhere — in correct and wrong contexts — experimenting with it makes perfectly sense. Still, there are a number of options beyond wood: e.g. fabric patterns, tiles, ground, stone, walls, bricks, stiches, cardboard, ceramics, decay, rust, old tapes, illustrations, plastic and glass.

In this post we present a showcase of sites using textures and patterns— we want to focus designer’s attention on design options available beyond wood. Reason: we strongly believe that vibrant, realistic background images are becoming a new trend. If it sounds familiar to you, you are absolutely right: we’ve seen the same trend 8-10 years ago. The sources for the background images are usually either photos (e.g. you can download free textures in the Smashing Texture Library) or illustrations created with Photoshop, Illustration etc.

You may want to take a look at the related articles:

• Where can I find textures and background images?

Tiles, Patterns

How do I create a tile or a pattern?

Actually, that’s easier than one might think. For instance, you can use BgPatterns, a free “tiled background designer” which is basically a pattern library where you can find, create, rate and share patterns. You can select one of 68 images (scrolls, stars, flowers, hearts, signs, trees etc.) as well as pick a color of your tile and the pattern will be generated automatically.

You can also apply some effects (dirty, rugged etc.) and rotate the pattern as you wish. The service has a nifty preview option which enables you to generate your background tiles on the fly, download them or store them.

Here is a compact overview of tiles which have been used on some sites presented below:

Showcase of tiles and patterns in modern web design

The Paisley Farmhouse uses nicely packaged retro wallpaper tiles as the background image.

Renegade Latino uses dark tiles for the background image. The content should probably be larger.

t!agOliveira uses a hardly recognizable, dark pattern as the background image. The image supports the content and fits to the overall site layout.

Uniquexports uses patterns and tiles for the background image for an online-shop. The pattern resembles a usual (not desktop) wallpaper. The design looks unusual yet attractive and definitely distinctive.

Noblanco with a background patterns on the left side of the page. The layout is right-aligned for some reason.

General Robots uses stars tiles on both the left and the right side of the centered layout. It is also an online-shop.

Booreiland: any friends of blue, pink and yellow out there?

Warfield.net with a classic wallpaper patterns…

…and so does Designbyfront: the same theme, a different color.

Falko Seidel with some tiles which one can find in old sweaters or on indoor walls.

Latviešu Dziesmu svētki with traditional wallpaper tiles.

Evernote has a corporate design with quite strange background patterns.

Anthony Clark uses a fading background pattern in the header of his portfolio.

Rob Morris with a classic pattern used as the background image.

Eden Organix is a wellness store with a classic wallpaper pattern.

MiniIcon keeps it to minimal; tiny content area is surrounded by background tiles.

Paul Burd uses the same concept.

Images and Textures

Ground

Outdoor Italia uses crumbly pieces of the ground as the background image. Other illustrations on the site fit to the background. The ants on the right hand side of the layout are pretty cool.

Stone and walls

Soyrosa uses vibrant stone stripes as the background image.

Pikaboo.be with hard, strong and dark stone and an unusual vertical scrolling.

Elliot Jay Stocks uses stones as well and has even a tutorial which explains how to Create a textured background image

Nolgraphic makes it differently: a photo of a wall is used.

Corner Stone Americus is a church web-site with a grunge look.

Bricks

uturn with bricks used as the background image. Here the background fits to the theme of the site which aims to “work togther to uplift street people”.

Hubltd.com with bricks painted in a white color.

Illustrations

Tennessee Education uses a vibrant background image with lines from primary school writing books.

Springtime in Tennessee is a section on the same site and uses the same approach.

Dara’s Garden with beautiful flowers which make the background more lively and lovely.

Dean Oakley’s design isn’t long but wide. Users need to scroll horizontally. The background image (illustration) always remains the same.

DivVoted fills the whole page with a vibrant background image.

Stiches and Fabric

the brainwashfactory with stiches and fabric. Notice the sewed header at the top of the site.

Design Sponge is dedicated to home and product design which explains why its background image is a fabric.

Scouting for Girls doesn’t only offer a “sewed” background image; it has a beautiful ladybug at the bottom as well.

Paper and Cardboard

Raufaser with an old paper pattern used as the background image.

A-Falange.net uses old-looking paper…

RedBull with a huge ragged cardboard. Flash in use.

The Brown Corporation uses a similar idea. The site name (Shitbox) is probably not the best title from the marketing perspective.

Ceramics

The Letter with a ceramics theme.

Decay, Dirt and Grunge

BrightCreative: ornaments and patterns in use.

Decay of Intent: the title of the site defines the layout of Alessandro Cammarota’s portfolio. Apparently, the background image stands for decay, the main theme of the site.

Old movie-tape

0hara uses an old movie-tape for the background.

Rust

Riders network: riders drive on the roads which is why this riders’ club uses rusty road as the background image.

Life Style Sports has a rusty background image with asymmetric points spread across the background image.

Wood

ChamaDigital with a “wood”-theme. Clean and beautiful design.

Kyle Haskins uses subtle “woody” background image which doesn’t stand out yet manages to support the content effectively. The design itself is clean and attractive.

Robert Strickland uses wood as the background image; the colors in the design are chosen accordingly.

Slabovia.tv combine a unique retro-design with grid-based approach and with wood. The result is impressive.

Highresolutiontextures with, well, high-resolution textures and the wood used as a background image.

Built by Buffalo with a high-quality wood background.

Oahu Hawaii real estate attempts to combine grunge with retro and wood. The result is definitely unusual, but in some sense quite appealing.

Rafael van der Vaart: the site uses wood as the background image. Beware: on the site music automatically starts to play.

Does.ch uses wood, stiches, old paper and grunge together. Well, that’s an unusual combination.

WebRevolutionary with the black-white wood.

soulBlog uses a wood theme for a 4-column-based design layout. The color of links and headings fits to the theme.

Skitnice uses wood not as the background image for the layout, but only as the background for the main content area.

Paul Wallas with a light falling on the wood.

Perfect Order is a Japanese online store with a wooden background.

Bfrancesi.com with a dark sprayed “woody” background image.

Anthonyfairweather is a producer and designer and he seems to love black wood.

Brianwebb.org: surprise, surprise! This design combines two popular background themes, wood in the header and tiles in the footer.

Sources and Resources

• Tiled background designers is a pattern library where you can find, create and share patterns.
• Inspired by Nature: 27 websites with Wood
• 30 Great Free Paper Backgrounds and Textures
• WordPress Theme "ModernOak" – Screenshot
• Textures Download at Smashing Magazine
• WordPress Theme "Woody"
• The Ultimate Wood Texture Tutorial
• Create a Textured Background Image
• Stunning Designs Using that Piece of Wood

Link to the original article…

Enter this tutorial about how to replace memory heat spreaders by Tweaktown.

- This will void your warranty!
- Do not attempt this mod unless you can afford to replace the RAM if you happen to break it!
- TweakTown and its associates are not responsible for any damage or harm caused in any way!

It even goes into how to freeze your RAM… you know I have to link that type of action. Wish me luck… perhaps my RAM heatsink replacement operation will go without a hitch.