A lot of people don’t realize how easy it is to create your own photoshop brushes. If you find yourself drawing the same elements over and over you can save a lot of time by creating a brush of that particular element.

This tutorial will teach you various techniques that photoshop has to offer, from using keyboard shortcuts to filters. By the end you will have created a cool lighting effect that appears from a dark abyss.

Today we’re going to be creating the dark and grungy poster you see below. You will also find links to the stock images we will be using in this tutorial. This tutorial focuses heavily on blending images together to achieve a desired effect.

It’s impressive how quick and simple it is to create realistic drawings in Photoshop through the use of textures, layers and gradients. This tutorial explores some of these techniques while designing a realistic chalkboard.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to mock up a fresh looking blog theme in Photoshop that is designed to be used within the 960 framework. This tutorial was designed more for web design theory than Photoshop technique. It is for that reason that I don’t go into great depth on each Photoshop step, but spend considerably more time on design theory and application. Photoshop beginners may find it somewhat tricky to follow along. Let’s get started.

Pressed lettering is showing up more and more these days in web design. Like any other trend, you have to be careful not to over use it. Already you can recognize those people that are doing it well and those that are not. Recently, I read a post at Smashing Magazine that highlighted pressed lettering as one of the Web Design Trends for 2009.

The other day I was writing a roundup style post here on MIB that required a bunch of screenshots. I was capturing the shots, bringing them into Photoshop, then tediously editing each individual one. It didn’t take me long to realized I was wasting a lot of time. A commodity which us designers never seem to have enough of. The simple solution was to create a Photoshop action to handle the dirty work of repetitive steps. PS actions are beautifully suited to save time for us lazy (I mean productive) designers. The result was so simple and easy, I wanted to share it here with you.

This tutorial covers the use of filters, brushes, the pen tool, masks, and maybe a couple other techniques; all in order to create a realistic sandwich bag from scratch.

This tutorial will cover a lot of ground (that may or may not be a bad play on words :) ). We will use both Illustrator and Photoshop to create a cool winter background. The focus will be showing you how to create custom patterns in Illustrator and custom brushes from these patterns in Photoshop. I think you’ll find a lot of these techniques very useful.

In web design, it can be tricky to decide how to present your layout to a client. There are some designers who believe you should skip Photoshop and go straight to coding. I disagree. At the very least you should sketch out your ideas with a pencil and pad before ever opening up a text editor. For me, my workflow is: sketch / Photoshop / code.