Wow I can't believe it's the 10th of November already. Pretty soon it's going to be Christmas! Anyhow, it's a week late, but here is the best of the Web from October: tutorials, downloads, and articles!
Tutorial Wrap
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Creating a Leopard 'X' in Photoshop
With the release of the new OSX, this simple tutorial from TutorialDog takes you through mimicking the 'X' look. Incidentally if you use GIMP, our very own Zee has a tutorial about making the aurora in the background in GIMP.
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Designing a Watercolor Effect Menu
Nick from WebDesigner Wall has put together a pretty neat two-part tutorial about how to create a CSS menu in his watercolor style. This first part takes you through the Photoshop behind the effect.
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(Over the Top) Photo Retouching
I do enjoy photo retouching tutorials, even if they often result in a not particularly realistic end product. This one from EyesOn manages to go over the top but still look nice!
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Toning with Duotones, Tritones, and Quadtones
PhotoshopSupport has a pretty good explanation of multi-tone images in Photoshop.
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Computer Virus Effect
It's amazing how the limited number of filters that Photoshop has can be put together in so many countless ways. In this tutorial you'll make use of a few tutorials you've doubtless used many times before but to make a really unique look. Very cool!
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Creating Shadows for Complex Objects
This technique is super useful when compositing objects into backgrounds. It's simple and easy to follow.
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Creating a Lens Flare with the Wordpress logo
Proving once and for all that Lens Flares despite being often equated with newbie-ism, can still be super cool!
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Wrinkled Photos
A very clever way of scrunching up your photos that actually looks pretty realistic!
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Apocalypse
I've been watching a lot of the TV show "Heroes" lately. If you haven't seen it, go get it right now! This tutorial hasn't really got much to do with Heroes, except that the look reminds me of post-nuclear New York :-)
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The "Beautiful Lady Effect"
This tutorial has an exceedingly silly name, but the result is actually pretty damn nice, so ignore the name and go read the tutorial!
(FREE!) Download Picks
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FONT: District Thin
I love super clean, thin fonts, and District is pretty damn nice. The only problem is once you have the thin you will be tempted to go and buy the rest... I suppose that's why they give it away!
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TEXTURES: Mayang - 3400 Free Textures!
Mayang is a site that sells DVDs of textures. What's interesting is that they nonetheless have the entire library for free download. That's 3400 textures readily available, that is a *lot* of texturing!
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BRUSH: Paint Brush Strokes
20 brushes that look like paint brushes, made for Photoshop CS2 from the fabulous Brusheezy.
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VECTORS: Vector Swirls/Swooshes/Wings
Bittbox regularly gives away free vectors, including these super swirly-swooshey-wing things ... great description huh?
Article Wrap
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Xtrabold
Ok, this isn't really an article, more of an inspiration piece, but you have to go see this guy's work. He's only 18! When I was 18 I didn't even know what Photoshop was!
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Photoshop Smart Objects, smart but not always that smart
Veerle's written up a little wrap up about Smart Objects that includes all the good that we love and a little of the not-so-good, which I actually didn't know!
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The apostrophe: Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t swing both ways
If you haven't been to iLoveTypography yet, head on over, there were more articles than I could shake a fist at to choose from. And the site seems to be growing in leaps and bounds. Every time I visit, the subscriber count has jumped another thousand!
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Blends, Gradients, Steps ...
COLOURlovers has one of their signature color explorations, this one on gradients. And since as you all know I love a good graduation of color, I really enjoyed this one.
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The Showcase of BIG typography
SmashingMagazine are doing what they do best, rounding up great examples of something. In this case it's big type, and they have found some lovely typographic treatments to look at.
