Here are my thoughts about designing icons in Adobe Photoshop: - many respected icon designers consider Illustrator better tool to design icons - http://blog.turbomilk.com/ . I do not own or know Illustrator, but I'm pretty good at Photoshop, and I found that it can be tweaked to create icons fast and easy too. - the best way to design icons (even in small sizes) is vectors. In Photoshop, they are...

All digital images can benefit from some sharpening. Translating the continuous tones of the real world into a mosaic of square pixels will inevitably introduce some softness into an image. With digital captures, this is more noticeable with RAW files because cameras typically apply some amount of in-camera sharpening to JPEG captures but not to RAW captures.

Thats the button that looks like a magnifying glass. Click on that and zoom in to a comfortable level by left clicking. The more you zoom in the longer time it will take but the better the cutout will be. Once you are zoomed in use the pen tool to go around the whole image where you wanted cut and left click around the edges. Once you come to the end that's where you will connect the points by...

The Healing Brush is similar to the Clone Stamp Tool in that it is used to sample from an image to correct or enhance other areas of the image. It samples the colour, luminosity and texture of the source area separately and blends it with the destination area. This means you can get excellent results without having to do things manually.

little like the Magnetic Lasso tool the Magic Wand does much of the hard work for you. It works by selecting pixels based on settings defined by you. Select the Magic Wand tool by pressing W. In this example we are going to remove the background of a picture. This is a common task in Photoshop and one that is simple with the Magic Wand tool.

Curved rectanges are simple - there is tool in photoshop that will create the shape for you. You can access this tool by pressing U. This selects the Custom Shape Tool. To create a curved rectangle you need the Rounded Rectangle Tool, which is the second one down.

First lets start with the image. Think about what you want to portray. Find an image that matches the aspirations of your brand. Choose one that is quick to recognize and will work on the smaller screen resolutions of the web. There are numerous image banks on the web and you do not need to pay the earth for excellent imagery.

For this to work it needs to be on a transparent background. If you look in the layers panel you will see it is a Background layer at the moment. So double click the layer and click ok. This turns it into a normal layer with a transparent background. Then we want to enlarge the canvas so the second image can fit. Go to Image > Canvas Size and double the height. Then open the second image and...

Using custom patterns is a great way to fill large areas. Open up a new document of 12 x 12 and select the pencil tool. Draw a pattern that will repeat. Here's the one that I've drawn.

I want to have shapes or anything for that matter have a stroke but a transparent fill. In Illustrator this would be easy but it requires a little more effort in Photoshop. We want the shapes to overlap with a transparent center but for them also to have a stroke.

SMS (also known as text-messaging) has grown into a very popular method of communication. It has been around in Europe and Asia since the early nineties and its use is steadily increasing in the US as well. SMS stands for "Short Message Service" and uses mobile phones to transmit (surprise, surprise) short messages to and from mobile phones and whilst many of us might not know this, it...

E-mail newsletters are a very popular method of maintaining an open channel of communication with your site visitors. They have the great benefit of keeping a site's current user base up-to-date on the latest news and offerings from the organization. Moreover, they have the potential for turning site visitors into site customers or donators. For newsletters to be successful logistically, they...

This tutorial will show You how to generate google sitemaps based on Your site MySQL structure. I hope this tutorial will save up some time. First we have to make our map skeleton with some needed stuff (for example database connection)

When a search engine visits the dynamic url like product.php?id=5 it does not give much importance to that URL as search engine sees “?” sign treat it as a url which keeps on changing. so we’re converting the dynamic URL like the product.php?id=5 to static url format like product-5.html. We’ll rewrite the url in such a way that in browser’s address bar it will display as a product-5.html but it...

This tutorial focuses on a thumbnail generation script I wrote for the Accidental President site. Rather than generating a smaller representation of the image, it cuts out a section of the photograph to create an obscure snapshot of the photo itself. The thumbnail's size is variable also, so the script be used across different sites to create different sized thumbnails where needed.