Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

How to Create a Morphing Effect in Photoshop

As I informed you before, I wrote another Photoshop Manual for MakeUseOf.comAdvanced Features and Fun Photo Effects. This time I will post a small part of it here on TrueKolor. I will show you the basics of animation in Photoshop CS5 and you will create a morphing effect. As we proceed, you will use such tools as Liquify, Forward Warp, Bloat, Color Replacement, etc. Plus, you will learn the basics of creating an animation and saving it for the web.

What’s morphing? Basically, morphing is transforming from one thing to another. And yes, we’ll make some face transform into something weird, an alien-looking thing. Here’s what you will create Read more »


Photoshop CS5 Guide: Advanced Features and Fun Photo Effects

As I promised before, I’ve finished writing another Photoshop Guide titled “An Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop, Part 4: Advanced Features and Fun Photo Effects” for MakeUseOf.com and now it is available for free download. No matter whether you are a beginner or an advanced Photoshop user, this guide will teach you some cool things for sure.

What will you learn in this guide?

This time, I’ll show you how to make use of some amazing features that came with CS5, such as Content-Aware and Puppet Warp and some handy tools that we had before the CS5 Read more »


An Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop pt III: Pro Tips (Free Download)

I’ve finished writing the Third part of Photoshop Guides for MakeUseOf.com and am really proud to announce it! It’s totally free and cool!
In this Pro Tips part I covered more than 30 most important Photoshop tips and tricks, which will be useful for both beginners and professionals (please believe, some of them you didn’t even know about). Moreover, I’ve included some detailed tutorials like Creating a YouTube Partner banner with links, How to create a favicon in Photoshop, Silhouette tutorial; Read more »


Learn How To Create an Animated Scrapbook for Google + Page

Ever since Google launched their Google + Pages I was plotting and scheming on writing a tutorial about creating a nice animated scrapbook for the page. By the way, the scrapbook is the header of your profile page where you can display 5 images from your Photos.

It is similar to Facebook’s scrapbook. But Google’s one supports animated images as well! You may have seen nicely animated scrapbooks on various profile pages. Ever wondered how they do it? Read more »


Free PDF Guides to Help You Start With Photoshop

I am currently working over another PDF guide on Photoshop, that’s why I thought it would be cool to give you the first two parts of the series. These guides are best for beginners – once you go through them you will not be scared when you open Photoshop for the first time.

The first two parts of  “An Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop”  series of guides explain how to use some basic tools (from How to create a new document to How to add a fake tattoo to your photo and help you to get prepared for more advanced operations. The Part II was written by me and was downloaded more than 20800 times from MakeUseOf.com. Numbers don’t lie, Read more »


Learn How To Create a Custom Action in Photoshop (Basics)

How To Create A Custom Action in PhotoshopPhotoshop is an enormous universe of useful tools, many of which we don’t really care about or never use. Sometimes because we just don’t know their functions, usefulness and efficiency, sometimes it’s just because there are so many tools in Photoshop, you can’t be aware of all of them.

Actions are must-use. You can find them in Window->Actions (Alt+F9). Especially when you have some bulk work to do, like editing multiple images which need the same effect, or size, etc.. By taking advantage of Actions you can save time and let Photoshop do the job. Of course, you will need to do everything necessary with the first image, recording your steps as an Action and then you will be able to apply everything by just clicking Play button.

Recently, our friends at MakeUseOf asked me to create preview images for their PDF Guides. There are more than 50 high-quality PDF’s they have there and they needed web-ready JPEG covers of their guides, with a dog-ear effect on all of them. Simple task, but time-consuming. So I decided to create an Action. Read more »


4 More Important Photoshop Shortcuts You Should Know

Important Photoshop ShortcutsDon’t waste your precious time going through all those standard menu paths to perform a small task! You have the magic shortcuts here, thoughtfully provided by Adobe engineers.

There are just too many shortcuts in Photoshop to talk about, but many of them are not so important than the others. Here on TrueKolor we don’t want to waste your and our time and we show you only the best stuff. That’s why in these Photoshop Tricks series we show only the most important and really useful shortcuts and tricks.

If you check all our posts on Photoshop Tips & Tricks and Shortcuts, you will get a good almost complete list of the most important time-savers: Read more »


Learn How To Create a Silhouette from a Photo in Few Minutes

How To Create a Silhouette In PhotoshopWhat is a silhouette? It’s an outline of any figure filled with a solid color, most commonly a dark shade. Like when you look at something against sunset.

Silhouettes are very useful when it comes to graphics, they almost always fit the background, since they don’t have many details to interfere with the whole picture.

In this quick tutorial, you will learn how easily you can create a silhouette from almost any picture in Photoshop.

Keep in mind that the most important step in this Photoshop tutorial is to make a nice selection- the more precise it is, the better quality your final silhouette will be.

Once done with the silhouette, you can turn it into a custom Brush or Shape. How to create one I will show in next tutorial.

Let’s start. Read more »


6 Important Photoshop Tools for Basic Photo Retouching

Important Photoshop tools for Photo RetouchingWhether you are a professional photographer or just taking pictures as a hobby, you still need to tweak around with the photo to make it look better. And you don’t need a lab, as it was before digital photography, all you need now is a computer and photo retouching tools.

Photoshop, as always, is a must have. And if you are using Photoshop only for quick photo retouching you don’t need to master all and everything about the program. You will need the most essential tools. Some of them I will show you today.

These tools are the basics and I will only show the basic usage for you to get familiar with the stuff. All you will need for more advanced methods is practice.

So let’s say you have taken some nice pictures and want to make some changes, corrections and so on and on. Upload it to your machine and open with Photoshop. Read more »


Two Small Yet Useful Photoshop CS5 Tips

Photoshop TipsAs a Photoshop freak, I spend many hours everyday doing something, experimenting, working and just having fun with the software. And it’s been like that for many years. But I am still not a guru, it is impossible to know everything about Photoshop. And sometimes I come up with little sweet things that make me wonder how come I didn’t know about them before?

Sometimes a project gets piled up with many layers, way too many layers. After a while it becomes harder and harder to find the layer you need [I always forget to name them] and usually I don’t really delete an unsuccessful layer, just make it invisible and forget about it. Familiar?

Today I’ve found two little functions in Photoshop to get rid of unwanted layers.  You need to know them if you don’t! Read more »