I never thought to use a Photoshop Filter like Spatter like this until someone showed it to me. Sure you can use Dither on Gradient Fill layers, but what happens when you layer multiple gradients on each other, and you get really bad banding? Seriously, guys.

Let’s be honest; Photoshop is absolutely terrible at saving transparent PNGs for web use. Your choices are between an 8-bit with 1-bit transparency (better than a GIF in terms of file size, but no better in terms of transparency options) or a huge 32-bit PNG with alpha transparency. There’s no middle ground. You can run the resulting files through various PNG reduction utilities (PNGOUT, Pngcrush, or my personal favourite PngThing) but when the savings are a few hundred bytes off an 80KB file, the returns are slim.

After creating a few icons with the excellent iPhone 4 icon PSD template from Cocoia, we started noticing the dreaded “black corner pixels” effect on iOS and iTunes, which you see all over the place these days.

There are plenty of ways to create a Watercolor Effect in Photoshop. Some are very cheesy and you can easily tell that a simple filter has been used. In this tutorial, we will be using Layer Masking.

Watercolor photo effect in Photoshop.

The underlying secret to beautiful user interface design is realism: making 2D objects on your screen appear to sit in 3D space with volume, surface properties and undulations that might appear in real life. These faux 3D objects have highlights and shadows just like objects on your desk might have, and they have textures that emulate real objects from glass to sandpaper and everything in between. Designing beautiful user interfaces has more to do with the why than the how.

Among all the art schools, one of the most bad-asses is definitely the Constructivism. Spread worldwide by Soviet propaganda, it features lots of straight lines, few colors, and it feels really powerful.

How to create a halftone image out of two overlayed halftone patterns.

Photoshop photography actions to consider.

These can be found in just Photoshop; I can’t imagine what I’d find elsewhere in the suite.

The most common out of all these seems to be second one, Brightness Adjustment.
They’re all ugly. The only near-acceptable one is the Layer Style slider.
None of these looks like the standard OS X slider.

Cool little typographic effect in case I ever need to steampunk some text out, yo.

Adjust brush sizes, use keyboard shortcuts and more a lot quicker than I am doing now.

inset letterpress type treatment

Add 3D text into a photo

Little alien character with good background color

embosses swirling lines colorful

photoshop type tutorials and explanations

glowing lights in Photoshop.

The ultimate collection of free Photoshop patterns.

glowing outlines of men walking across a street