Photoshop Gurus?

I've had the CS4 Design Premium installed on my computer since it was released. I use it for work, mostly in Illustrator though, as I do a lot more print and label type work than actual graphics. I do use Photoshop once in a while though.

I've recently tried to get back into Photoshop, for graphic design as a hobby. I've played with it before, done tutorials from Lynda.com, made some simple pieces of art, so I have a good grasp of the program.

Are there any here that use Photoshop regularly? Not just for photo editing and touching up, but for full-on graphics art and development? I'm interested in seeing what others have come up with, perhaps some websites that they frequent, maybe another message board that has a friendly community and would be good to get feedback on.

Some websites I've found that are really helpful for Photoshop tutorials:
www.lynda.com
www.hongkiat.com
www.advancedphotoshop.co.uk I recently found this magazine for $10 US at Costco, it's a pretty awesome mag. Too bad they don't sell it at my local Costco.
www.deke.com Deke is a true Photoshop guru

What do you guys use? I want to hear from you.

And if I get what I'm working on right now looking half-way decent, I'll post it here.

Can't say I use Photoshop for creation of graphics from scratch. I find Illustrator is my goto for creating new graphics, (well aside from tablet drawing, that's better done in Photoshop, but I digest.) Mostly what I use Photoshop for is color correction and image manipulation. I learned that the hard way though, by sitting correcting raw scans, and being supervised (re: scolded) by the in house photo guru. When I started that job they handed me a copy of Photoshop WOW (this is the newest one, I think the one I got was for Photoshop 5, maybe) which I skimmed and promptly lost. In retrospect, there is a lot of really neat tricks in there, but you can't use it to just sit down and learn. You have to have something in mind and use it as reference for how best to do it. At least that's my experience. Maybe the new one is better.
If you're looking for inpsiration, you might take a look at Red Bubble. It's full of really good artists and there's lots of stuff to get some ideas from.
I will say this though. Learn to use Alpha Channels. Possibly one of the most powerful tools available in Photoshop. Forget all the filters and flashy crap, alpha channels is what's up

Thanks for the info Rob. Yeah, I don't know how much graphics I will do from complete scratch. I'm thinking of taking a stock photo and using that as a base, or multiple.

I found a cool picture of a break dancer that I am playing with:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kromanf...

Taking some inspiration from this tutorial:
http://psdlearning.com/2009/04/dance...

And adding my own ideas obviously. It's like fun practice and helping me work on my photoshop skills.

And yeah, Alpha channels are great. There are some helpful tips I've found here from Deke Mclelland:
http://www.deke.com/content/photosho...

I've known about masks and alpha channels for a while now, but I'm really learning how to use them now. It's easy to forget and draw/edit/erase right on a layer, but I'm getting into the habit of masking.

Good man. The fun really starts when you figure out you can combine your masks with adjustment layers and then play with blending modes/opacity. And after that you can try grouping things and applying masks to the group. You can make some really subtle adjustments that completely change the tone of the image. Plus, if you ever want to go back to the original image just hide the adjustment layers and channels.

Yeah I've advanced to having done that. This is what I did yesterday with that image... very work in progress though. Laugh if you like:

IMAGE(http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/785/378806354f118788a5do.th.jpg)

I'm an illustrator and designer and I use Photoshop everyday. For tutorials, I love PSD Tuts and Abduzeedo. More often than not, however, the rigidness of tutorials in general feels a bit like a turn off for me. Usually, I'll just read through a tutorial and try and pick up the really useful techniques and try and play with them at some point down the road. I'll rarely run through a tutorial step by step to produce an effect, however.

Mostly the way I've picked up Photoshop skills is through friends who drop some massively useful technique on me that I then end up using in every project I do.

I'm wouldn't really call myself a Photoshop whiz, or anything, but I feel comfortable enough to think of a potential look and play around until I get what I want. I've got most of my work up in my Flickr stream, if you want to check it out.

7inch, I'm the same way. I won't usually follow a tutorial step-by-step, unless I really want to use every piece of it. Usually I just want to see how they did a certain effect as well.

Thanks for the links, I already have PSD Tuts bookmarked, that's a great website. Abduzeedo is new though, so thanks for that one.

And I'll check out your Flickr stream.

I've found PS Hero to be useful for my photobooks which were done entirely in CS2. Also his Links section has some additional good tutorial sites and inspiration.

IMAGE(http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/9936/vallartabuildingshdr.jpg)

So I shot an HDR 3-exposure shot today. The sun had already gone down just a minute before, I was too late for the picture I really wanted. Of course, it looked rather plain as well, so I've sharpened and high-passed using different filters, along with some vibrance and brightness/contrast corrections.

I overdid the sharpness, but I wanted to give it a halo look, I think it kind of looks cool. There is some extra noise I tried to get rid of, but can't always remove it all.

/casts resurrection on thread

Anyone interested in some fun photo manipulations using Photoshop, Gimp, etc? This has been my hobby for the last few months. Here's a vampire lady I just finished:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/finishedvamplady.jpg)

And here it is with the stock source pic:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/vampireladybefore-after.jpg)

Fine, let's try some Nick Cage then...

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/cage-rockin.jpg)

And Tom Cruise, trapped in a flower ...

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/cruise_flower.jpg)

Cool stuff. I assume that's Nick Cage's face on someone else's body. And you can barely tell that is Tom Cruise, but that's okay... he's trapped in a flower anyways.

Jeff-66 wrote:

/casts resurrection on thread

Anyone interested in some fun photo manipulations using Photoshop, Gimp, etc? This has been my hobby for the last few months. Here's a vampire lady I just finished:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/finishedvamplady.jpg)

And here it is with the stock source pic:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/vampireladybefore-after.jpg)

WTF, that looks f*cking cool man! How long does something like that take?

Jeff-66 wrote:

/casts resurrection on thread

Anyone interested in some fun photo manipulations using Photoshop, Gimp, etc? This has been my hobby for the last few months. Here's a vampire lady I just finished:

Wow, mad props on the nostril details, and the whole thing actually, good detail.

muttonchop wrote:

You suck at Photoshop

Holy crap, I almost pissed myself laughing so hard on just the first two.

ibdoomed wrote:

Wow, mad props on the nostril details, and the whole thing actually, good detail.

Mex wrote:

WTF, that looks f*cking cool man! How long does something like that take?

Thanks a lot!

The vampire took me about 90 minutes. Btw, any skill I might have, I attribute to the great Deke McClelland, a true photoshop master, and instructor at Lynda.com. I've put probably 50 to 75 hours into studying his courses there.

Jeff-66 wrote:

The vampire took me about 90 minutes. Btw, any skill I might have, I attribute to the great Deke McClelland, a true photoshop master, and instructor at Lynda.com. I've put probably 50 to 75 hours into studying his courses there.

Agree 100%, he's a great teacher, and has a lot of fun doing it. If anyone wants to learn Photoshop, I would highly suggest watching some of his videos

Probably not on par with what people here use it for.
I use it it with some other software to take CAD drawings and make them look hand rendered.
I've worked for Architects who want their design drawings to look like hand sketched ink lines with pantone marker colouring.

I use one software to jitter the CAD lines in a way that makes it look hand drawn, then use simple layer masks to create areas of colour.
An overlay to make the solid colour look like built up marker lines.
This all gives a good non destructive editing method which makes colour changes easy.

IMAGE(http://www.echelonarch.com/images/testsmall.jpg)
There's copyright on this design, which isn't mine. If you need copyright info, please contact me.

This one is mine.
IMAGE(http://www.echelonarch.com/images/demosmall.jpg)
The photoshop filters are far too obvious, but this was more about testing the modelling/drafting software.

I like how it has that "cell shaded" quality to it! Looks really cool.

Also: Vampire Lady = Awesome!

Aries wrote:

I like how it has that "cell shaded" quality to it! Looks really cool.

Also: Vampire Lady = Awesome!

Thanks, Aries. And I agree, Ghostship's house looks really cool. I really love the second one.

I also enjoy making fake movie posters:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/Falloutposter-1.jpg)

Nice Jeff! I love fake movie posters, you hit that one spot on (except for Cruise....)

Citizen86 wrote:

Nice Jeff! I love fake movie posters, you hit that one spot on (except for Cruise....)

I knew the 'except for Cruise' was coming, but what can I say... as person, he's a kook, but as an actor, I like him. He was awesome in Tropic Thunder!

It's true, he's a good actor, I can't deny it. You win jeff-66, you always do

Here's a couple of others I did a while back. Not that great, but they were fun to make.

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/amnesia-poster.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/pf_movieposter.jpg)

Speaking of Photoshop, I just got this in the mail from WeGraphics ( I love that website ).

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

Looks pretty cool. Since I use Photoshop most days at work, I might just jump in on this. It would be my first Kickstarter

That Wegraphics site is really cool, C86. I might have to sub there.

Here I put angel wings on Mia Wallace:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/miatheangel.jpg)

Then tried an animal mashup, a wolf pup and an owl:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/wolf-owlmashup.jpg)

This next one is not my work. I found it when searching for animal hybrids, and thought it was awesome:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/hippomelon.jpg)

I do it a bit, but its more for cleaning up renders and placing them on the actual site: link 8 mb dropbox link, sorry. I dont want these just sitting on flickr for the time being until we finish building this thing.

Three of my latest:

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/sheepmonkeymix.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/icecreamtruckinAfrica.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g81/ziffel66/PS%20Projects/applegirl.jpg)

As a good exercise, take a photo and remove the people. Leave the clothes, but remove the people. It's one of the third or fourth assignments we cover in our image manipulation classes and is a good use of tools to rebuild portions of scenes.

It's also a great way to prep for Visual Effects compositing work.

When I have some time, I'll throw one together and post it.

You're going crazy with the photo manipulations! They're looking better and better

The apple looks great, very reminiscent of those Annoying Orange youtube videos. If I could give one suggestion to complete the affect, it's with the bow. The shadows fit in nicely, except that it is overtop the apple where it should follow the apple back. I would also bend the bow a bit at the top so it looks like it is sitting back on the apple, instead of straight up and down.