Category: Resources

Free font: Dead Letter Office

One of my favorite sites to visit is One Digital Life. It’s not really a “design” site, but it’s just fun to read and every once in a while he posts a real gem. About a week ago, I came across such a gem in a post titled Dead Letter Office Font. While the font is quite a unique font and not for everyday use, I actually was looking for something like it just when I came across the post.

Free textures for use in Photoshop

TextureKing has over 250 freely downloadable textures for use with Photoshop, and appears to be adding more all the time. Many sites offer free textures, but I usually find that they’re incredibly lame and practically worthless. TextureKing, on the other hand, has some very good artwork that is quite useful in everyday professional projects.

Easily apply scanlines to your images in Photoshop

One of the most popular techniques lately seems to be adding a pseudo-TV look to images, also called “Scanlines.” Here’s a down and dirty simple way to add some “tech/gritty” look to your image. The technique is used in a lot of movie posters and hi-tech imagery. Read on for a step-by-step tutorial on how to create scanlines quickly and easily. First, choose your image. High contrast images work best, but virtually any image will do. Here we have a fairly boring product photo. But we need to add “a little something” to spice it up for a Web site splash page. The first thing to do is make sure you’re working at 300 dpi. This technique will work with 72 dpi, but the effect won’t be the same. You can size it down later.

  1. Create a new layer
  2. Press “D” to reset your colors to black and white
  3. Hit Command + Delete (Backspace on some keyboards) to fill the new layer with white
  4. Go under Filter>Sketch>Halftone Pattern and choose 1 for size, 50 for contrast and Line for pattern type
  5. Your image should look something like this:

Now you could stop there, but the image may be “distorted” enough that your client isn’t happy. In this case, we want to see the keys on the phone more, and the image itself to be a little more dirty and have a little more contrast. To do that:

  1. Create a selection around the areas you want to adjust (in this case it was the keys and the screen
  2. Feather the edges around 5 to 10% (you can use whatever amount you like)
  3. Paste this selection on top of the scanline layer
  4. Set the layer style to Overlay and adjust the opacity to around 80% (you can adjust this amount to your liking)

Now we need to focus on the highlight area again. To do this:

  1. Make a copy of the layer we just worked on (the selection of the buttons)
  2. Command + Click on the layer to select it
  3. Go to Select>Modify>Contract and enter about 10-20% (again, you can use any amount, but we’re trying to reduce that selection by about 20%)
  4. Invert your selection and hit delete to get rid of the area outside the selection
  5. Set the layer style to Normal and the opacity to around 90%

We could stop here. But It’s still not “dirty” enough. Lets add some “distortion” to the scanlines. This portion is completely optional. If you want a “clean” look to your image, skip this step.

  1. Create a new layer on top of all the other layers
  2. Fill the layer with white by hitting Command + Delete again (your colors should still be the default black & white)
  3. Go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise and use 40% for the amount and set the check boxes for Gaussian and Monochromatic and hit OK
  4. Now make your layer style Multiply and the opacity around 20% (adjust to your liking)

Now you can just add text or other elements as you see fit. I chose to set the type layer to overlay and place the layer just above the original image layer. You could also adjust the colors to add some mood or action by using the Hue/Saturation (Command + U) dialog with the Colorize box checked. Now is the time to reduce the resolution for Web use. The reason you do that last is that if you start out with 72 dpi, the scanlines we created in the first steps will be too large.

Color shifting and replacement in Photoshop

The Color Replacement Tool is often overlooked by many designers… mostly because it’s a relatively new tool, and partly because it’s somewhat hidden where you wouldn’t expect to find it. It’s not a terribly difficult tool to master, and using it once will show you how often you *could* use it. In Adobe Photoshop CS it is bundled with the Healing Brush tool (another tool many people tend to “forget to use”). In Photoshop CS2, Adobe decided that it needed to be moved next door to the Brush Tool (see image at right). No matter where you happen to find this little bugger, you’re going to love what it can do for you. Lets say you want to change the color of the shirt in a photo to better match your layout. Many folks would spend a lot of time making a mask or clipping path, create a new layer and paint a color over top of the shirt, then adjust the layer transparency settings. Still others would just use Selective Color under the Edit>Adjustments menu and hope that it didn’t alter the image too much. These and other methods work fine, of course, but take much more effort than is necessary. To use the Color Replacement tool, choose a color to make the shirt. Then click on the Color Replacement tool icon in the tool bar. Then you’ll need to make some quick adjustments in the Options Bar. First, click the Brush size icon and adjust your brush settings. You’ll want to use a larger brush with a soft edge. Be careful not to make the brush too large though, you want to keep some control. Second, make sure you select Contiguous from the Limits pop-up menu and you set the Mode to either Color or Hue. These are the three main adjustments that need to be made. You can also adjust the Tolerance, but try working with the tool a little first. Now comes the fun part. You should now see the round outline of your brush with a little crosshair, just start painting over the area you want to color shift, being careful not to let the crosshair touch any color you DON’T want to shift (if it touches any other color, it will shift that color as well). Now that you see how easy it is to use and how well it works, play with the color modes, tolerance settings, etc… I think you’ll find it to be quite a useful tool not only for changing colors completely, but simply color correcting them as well.

Color management for digital artists

Color calibration is the biggest headache in the business, I personally don’t even calibrate my monitor anymore because I’ve found that the standard settings produce excellent results with the printers I use. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find the results that best suit you and the commercial printers you use. Peachpit Press has a brief but informative article on calibrating your monitor.

Creating your own distortion envelopes in Adobe Illustrator

Envelopes are what Adobe Illustrator calls the shapes you use to distort objects. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go to the Effects>Warp menu when you have an object selected. You can create your own Envelopes and use them on virtually any object in Illustrator other than graphs or guides. Here’s how: Select one or more objects on your page. Now go to the Object>Envelope Distort menu and select a method for distortion from the menu. Once applied, you can continue to the edit the original object, and you can edit, expand or delete the Envelope at any time you desire. The only thing you can’t do is edit an Envelope shape and the object in the Envelope at the same time.

Sending large files via email

web_yousendit If you’ve ever had to send a large file via e-mail to a printer or publication at the last minute, only to realize that either your ISP, or the ISP of the person receiving the e-mail cannot send files as large as yours, you know how frustrating it can be. You could get your own domain name and post it on your site, but that seems like overkill. You could use FTP, but your run the risk of having to spend an hour on the phone explaining to some underpaid secretary how to use FTP on her 7 year old PC – not to mention you still need a site to upload it to. Enter YouSendIt. YouSendIt is a “remailer” service, and it’s totally free. You go to their site, upload your file to THEIR server and type a custom message. YouSendIt then sends the person you want the file to go to a simple text message with a link to the actual file that they can download via the Web. Since pretty much everyone on the planet is capable of clicking a link, it couldn’t be simpler. The file remains available for download for a short time, so the end user isn’t forced to download it immediately, though you don’t want them to wait too long, because the files are deleted after a set amount of time.