Friday's Favorite Five

Hey everyone! I'd like to introduce a new periodical feature here on Chopshopped, Friday's Favorites Five! Every Friday, I'll share my five favorite Photoshop resource finds from around the web with you. And now, for this week's highlight Photoshop tutorials!

• Super Cool Watercolor Effect in Photoshop


• Create a Wood Background in Photoshop


• Create a Unique Colorful Site Layout


• 60 High Quality Photoshop PSD Files


• Selecting and Extracting Hair in Photoshop

Make Photoshop Faster

By tweaking several settings, you can really improve the speed and performance of the Adobe Photoshop environment.

• Preferences > Performance > Cache Levels


• Preferences > File Handling > Image Previews

Dan Rubin has published these tweaks on MakePhotoshopFaster.com, make sure to bookmark it!

Free Icon Set Friday - Web Injection

In an effort to bring you, the readers, a steady stream of updated content, we've decided to publish a weekly column that will feature a royalty free, downloadable icon set for your use in any application or design!

For our first Free Icon Set Friday, we present to you an icon set by Midtone Design, the Web Injection icon set.



Download link provided by Tutorial9.

Smoothe Chrome Styling Effect

We'll start off with a shape with which we are going to apply our chrome texture. For our lesson today, I'll choose to make a chromed out version Photoshop's Flubber shape. (You could use anything, even on text.) Let's go ahead and fill that with a nice grey, #c0c0c0. I went ahead and gave it a nice little drop shadow as well.



Now, we add ze Stroke to the Chrome Flubber. Leave it with the default with of 3px, but change the Fill Type to Gradient, and choose a nice white to grey to white radial gradient. Or, you can copy my settings, ya lazy bastard.



Next, we add a Gradient Overlay with the same gradient we used for the stroke, except keep it linear. You shouldn't need the reference, but here are the settings for the overlay.



Now comes the tricky part. Choose the Bevel and Emboss blending option, and check Contour below it as well. Go back to the Bevel and Emboss settings, and set the Highlight and Shadow Modes to Screen, 25% Opacity, and #FFFFFF. Make your Gloss Contour lines similar to what I have on my bevel, and go to town with the depth and size sliders to find your desired chrome effect.

Polished Wood Background Texture

In today's tutorial I will show you how to create an authentic "Polished Wood" background / texture in Adobe Photoshop. This technique is perfect when you're doing wood paneling for cabinetry and furniture, as well as walls for houses.

Make a new image, I chose 600x200, but use whatever you please. Set your foreground color to #bb9966 and your background color to #885533. Fill the layer with your foreground color.



Select Filter » Render » Fibers and set the variance to 16.0 and the strength to 42.0. Render the fibers.



Now to add a varnished look to the wood texture. Style your layer with a Gradient Overlay, using the following options: Soft Light Blend Mode, 45% Opacity, Default Black to White Gradient (Reversed), Reflected Style.

Windows Vista Wallpaper Photoshop Tutorials

So, you want to create some wallpapers that match the Windows Vista theme?

Well, check out these great tutorials that will send you in quite the right direction.

Windows Vista Microsoft Flag Wallpaper Tutorial adobetutorialz.com


Windows Vista Glossy Orbs Wallpaper Tutorial adobetutorialz.com


Windows Vista Aurora Wallpaper Tutorial tutorial9.net


If you want the full effect, try combining any of the three tutorials!

Creating a Web 2.0 Site Button

I'd recommend to use your result on Sivatar.com to promote your website!

Create a new image. (Width: 70px, Height: 70px)

Select your Rounded Rectangle Tool, and set the radius to 3 pixels, and the color to #ee920e. Create a Rounded Rectangle that is 1px away from the edge of the image on all sides.



Now, duplicate this layer and set the layer's blending options to screen. Reposition the screened duplicate so it only overlaps in the bottom right. (Remember, it's always good to hold shift while doing these sorts of things to maintain straight paths.) Rasterize both of these layers.



The next step is to remove a small portion of the bottom right corner, so the button will appear to be dogeared. Use your Polygonal Lasso Tool to create a right triangle selection, line it up with the button properly, then delete the selection from both layers.



Select your dogear layer, and apply a gradient overlay. (blend mode: multiply, #ee920e -> #FFFFFF, 120 degrees) Merge the two existing layers.



Pull out your Elliptical Marquee Tool and create a selection over your whole image that will be satisfying to yourself as a "lighting" layer. Create a new layer and fill your selection with a gradient that fades from white to transparent. Delete all areas of this "lighting" layer that do not overlap with the base image.



Last step, throw some text on there! I chose Tahoma, 11 pt (no anti aliasing), bold. Give it a drop shadow (2px distance, 1px size) and a stroke (#d48310) of 1 pixel.

Ta - da!



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