Today, we are going to look at two of Photoshop’s primary masking techniques – layer masks and clipping masks. We’ll be comparing the two by looking at how they work on a practical level, the basic similarities, and the much more significant differences.

Not too long ago I stumbled across the US Air Force site, and was immediately struck by it’s style and slick patterns. The inner pages of the site focus on large background images with a cool mesh overlay. I decided to play around in Photoshop to see if I could replicate the effect. It turns out to be rather easy, so I wanted to share this quick tutorial with you.

There are a lot of cool and effective ways to call attention to portions of a design. When writing 6 Ways To Take Your Webdesign From Good To Great I used a simple blur technique that proved to be quite popular. I’ve seen the effect a lot of places before, so in no way can I take credit for it

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this Surreal, Ancient Fantasy Scene in Photoshop. We will take several real world objects and seamlessly blend them together to form this artwork. We will also use a number of Photoshop brushes to spice up the effect.

Blogging as we all know is much more than writing an article. In most posts, you need to take screen captures, edit, copy, paste, format, etc.. Basically, there is much more to it than meets the eye. Any decent article will take at least an hour to write and may take several.

I came up with the idea for creating a skyline made of text after some creative thinking and seeing this amazing stock photo. After a brief look around the web, I still can’t find a manipulation quite like it. In this tutorial, we will be creating the text ‘MIB’, in the night skyline of a Seattle cityscape.

Many techniques and/or “accidents” as I like to call them, were used in creating the design for my “Skull Board”. It was designed as pure fun, but was then printed and applied to a skateboard for entrance in to a local art show a couple months ago.

3D text effects are a growing and awesome design trend. They can add angles, lighting and interest that many 2D text effects can’t bring. Here is an awesome Showcase of 3D Typography that was put together a little while back by Angie Bowen. I’ve also been seen and been inspired by tutorials like 3D Text on Fire and this Fresh Text Effect.

JQuery offers a very practical and easy way to build plugins, as well as a very good documentation on this subject. However, it could be useful to see how a plugin is written step-by-step.

You read the advice on virtually every design blog populating the cyberspace landscape, and if you haven’t, you don’t read enough design blogs. Kidding, but seriously, people say it all the time, ‘If you want to be taken seriously as a designer, you cannot use the Bevel or Drop Shadow tools in Photoshop’.

This tutorial will show you how to add descriptive icons to your links using a CSS pseudo selector element. This small progressive enhancement greatly improves a site’s usability.

The definitions used here are from the Photoshop help files, with a few bits of added explanation where I saw fit to add them. The Blend Modes specified in the options bar control how pixels in two separate layers interact with and effect each other. It’s helpful to think in terms of the following colors when visualizing a blending mode’s effect: