July 2011
This Week’s Featured Authors
Congratulations to this week’s featured marketplace authors.
ActiveDen Featured Author: bluegestaltX
Our current featured author here on ActiveDen is bluegestaltX who joined in February 2009, has a portfolio of 14 items for sale and has racked up 1919 sales!
View bluegestaltX’s Portfolio
40 Effective Ways To Become a Successful ActiveDen Author
This article was originally written by Scott Wills for the ActiveDen blog in November 2009, though many of his points are applicable for authors of other marketplaces.
Phototuts+ and Lomography.com Partner Up for a Contest!
Photo by maximum_b
I’m excited to let you know that Lomography.com and Phototuts+ will be joining forces once a month to bring you the best in film photography tips, tricks and tutorials. To celebrate, we’re launching the first collaborative contest open to all Phototuts+ and Lomography.com readers!
Create Creepy, Branch Based Typography
Create Creepy, Branch Based Typography
Learn how to create some creepy typography created out of winter branches:
Resources Used In This Tutorial
Final Image
As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:
This Week’s Featured Authors
Congratulations to this week’s featured marketplace authors.
ActiveDen Featured Author: codempire
Our current featured author here on ActiveDen is codempire who joined in July 2010, has a portfolio of 4 items for sale and has racked up 141 sales!
View codempire’s Portfolio
Welcome David Appleyard as the New Tuts+ Manager
Hey everyone! It’s Skellie here, and I look after the educational side of Envato, like the Tuts+ blogs, Tuts+ Premium membership, Rockable Press and FreelanceSwitch. Today I’m proud to announce a big change in my team: David Appleyard is the new Tuts+ Manager! He’ll be responsible for making sure each of the Tuts+ sites are awesome, and has already been hard at work whipping everything into shape.
Here’s what he had to say when asked how he feels about the new role, and his plans for the coming months:
Since starting out as the Mac.AppStorm editor two years ago, I’ve had a wonderful time working for Envato. I was honoured to be asked to take on the role of Tuts+ Manager, and the first few weeks working with our super-talented team of editors and writers has been a pleasure.
Master a Professional Photo Retouching Workflow
Master a Professional Photo Retouching Workflow
For this retouching tutorial Tom has asked me to provide an overview of a full retouching process. Most tutorials and indeed most tutorial sites will give you snippets of information, teaching a lot of bad habits and a few good ones, and it’s often difficult for the beginner or serious amateur to know when they’re following good advice.
Author Interview: Zeplix
Making money on the Tuts+ Marketplace, being too advanced to learn Photoshop at university, “the Cintiq is just the King of Tablets”, and clicking “Refresh” on his Earnings page like a madman. This week we meet Philip Zeplin-Frederiksen (Zeplix) from the Tuts+ Marketplace and GraphicRiver.
If you’re an Envato marketplace author and would like to be interviewed for the blog, head over to this form. We’d love to hear from you.
Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from, what do you do for a living?
Create a Unique Burning Text Effect
As Halloween approaches we bring you a hell-like burning text effect! Enjoy the tutorial!
Final Image
As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:
Step 1
So let’s start with a new document of 3300 px width and 2336 px height at 300 resolutions. I created large document because I wanted to print it on A4 size.
Step 2
Press U and select rectangle tool and create a rectangle of document size and apply gradient overlay with colors 890000 & ffb400. Now select transform tool and increase rectangle size from document size to 4515 px width and 3196px height.
A Quick Tip to Increasing Photoshop Efficiency
This is just a short screen cast on how you can change around settings in Photoshop, in order to make Photoshop faster. The video is less than few a few minutes and takes less than a few seconds to implement this quick tip.
This Week’s Featured Authors
Congratulations to this week’s featured marketplace authors.
ActiveDen Featured Author: codempire
Our current featured author here on ActiveDen is codempire who joined in July 2010, has a portfolio of 4 items for sale and has racked up 139 sales!
View codempire’s Portfolio
Wavy Gravy—Extreme Slow Mo in Apple Motion
Wavy Gravy – Who Needs Twixtor? 2000 FPS+ With Apple Motion
Using a Canon 7D at 59.94 frames/second then timed in Apple Motion using Optical flow. No rotoscoping or masking. The slowest footage was slowed down to about 2% or 3% speed.
Thanks to Matt Wiebe for grinding it out that day. He can do flippier tricks, but I needed straight airs to avoid the wavy gravy.
I have nothing against Twixtor, just can’t afford it. Thank you to CrumplePop for the Motion Tutorial.
Enjoy!
My Infiniti Design Competition Final Entry
Some of you may remember a few weeks back when I posted that I would be entering the Infiniti Digital Art Competition. Well the deadline time has arrived and I’ve completed my entry!
A Recap of the Competition Brief:
For those of you who didn’t see the original post, the basics of the Infiniti brief are as follows:
The contest theme is ‘inspired performance’. The heroes of the design must be Infiniti’s cars. The brief is really quite broad, which was great because it gave me quite a lot of creative freedom.
Straight off the mark ‘inspired performance’ evoked images of professional dancers. As well as following the theme closely, dancers seemed to be a perfect visual evocation of the Infiniti brand. Dancers are after all, powerful, fast, strong, and have grace and poise. All of these qualities are shared by the Infiniti brand.
Anyway, enough chit chat! Here’s a look at my final composition:
Freebie Friday: Free Marketplace Files for July
Have you checked out the marketplaces’ free files for July? Download them while you can!
CodeCanyon: Context Menu Class
ContextMenu.js is a very easy to use utility that lets you add custom right click menus to any HTML element on your website!
Features:
This Week’s Featured Authors
Congratulations to this week’s featured marketplace authors.
ActiveDen Featured Author: Desilum
Our current featured author here on ActiveDen is Desilum who joined in January 2010, has a portfolio of 7 items for sale and has racked up 90 sales!
View Desilum’s Portfolio
31 Powerful and Usable Web Applications to Improve Your Workflow
31 Powerful and Usable Web Applications to Improve Your Workflow
Nowadays, a lot of great and usable applications are sold by their creators. This way, authors, get monetary support for their work, however, not every author decides to sell, some of the creator companies simply share it with the community for free. All of the web apps below are either totally free, have free plans or have at least one month of free trial so you could try them.
Carbon Made
Operate your own portfolio with a variety of handy tools in this stylish and cosy online app.
Create a Dark and Mysterious Fantasy Portrait
Create a Dark and Mysterious Fantasy Portrait
In this tutorial we will combine several stock images, adjust color, use retouching techiniques as well as make and control custom brushes to create a dark and mysterious blue portrait.
Resources Used In This Tutorial
Final Image
As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:
Design a Sleek Google+ Icon (Plus Free Google+ Icon Set Download)
Design a Sleek Google+ Icon (Plus Free Google+ Icon Set Download)
Final Image
Here is a preview of the image that we are going to be creating:
Find Us on Google+
You can now connect with FanExtra/PSDFAN at Google+. If you’re not lucky enough to have an invite yet hopefully Google will be releasing the next batch soon .
Connect with FanExtra at Google+
Step 1
We’re going to be creating our icon at 128X128 (although you can use this tutorial to create an icon of any size).
Start by creating a new document (128X128px). Then lay out some guides:
Vertical Guides:
0px, 32px, 64px, 96px, 128px