For the Elite. Photoshop Resources

What's Up DP,

My question is simple. I teach a class and on top of the resources I hold Golden, I wanted to give my students what other people in the graphics world find sacred, so...

What are at least 3 external photoshop resources you could not live without. This could be anything from favorite action scripts, tutorials sites, or ANYTHING. Please include if it is a tutorial site, actions pack or external plugin source, etc.

-Lee

 

www.deviantart.com (for my photoshop brushes)
that site i just awesome

and for textures and C4D's, but never use em

that's the only one really

[I dont use tutorials]

 

Awesome, I never knew Deviant had brushes. Thanks for that, where are they at. Deviant is in maintenance right now so i cant explore a whole lot

 

yeah
its awesome.

ya welcome

its working fine for me..

 

I think you cannot go past http://www.ozoneasylum.com/ which has a major section of the forum devoted to Photoshop. Great advice and great links and great resources. Been going there since Photoshop v.5

 

Great Resource its awesome for all the artist who want to get the credibility for the work done.

 

talk-mania.com has lot of good photoshop for web layout

 

check out this page http://www.brusheezy.com/brushes

 

Things I can't live without:

Inkscape
opensource vector program, it is professional quality, and it also has different strengths than illustrator so it's worth having no matter what other software you may or may not have

GIMP
opensource raster graphics program. again, it doesn't replace photoshop, but I find for simple image editing or for opening weird formats it tends to be quicker and better than photoshop in many cases. For the price it comes why wouldn't you have it?

POSIX operating system
Okay, so it's not as confusing as it sounds, what I mean by this is Linux, Unix or Mac. Unix was designed back in the 1960's as a professional operating system made for hard tasks and it's only been refined for 40 years since then. Mac or Linux both piggyback on it's advances and make excellent stable, simple and fast working environments. If NASA relies on Linux for it's missions, I'm sure it's powerful enough for you (and since it's free why not at least dual-boot eh?)

I recommend you get Kubuntu if you're looking at linux, it's free, and hey, from shipit.kubuntu.com they'll send you a printed and pressed CD in the mail absolutely no cost to you! it doesn't get any more free than that I'm afraid.

Oxygen
No, not the element, I mean the user interface initiative! a group of professional designers got together and decided to make the best icon set ever. They made a professional colour palette to work from, and created the icons according to a guideline so they are all unified and top quality. The best part about this is it's open-source so you're free to use it, and they supply the VECTORS as well, because on linux you can use svg vector images as icons!

the oxygen colour palette, one of two palettes I use for my work.


Now getting oxygen is a little trickier, there's not download link from the site, and they work on it collaboratively using an SVN repository.

You can figure out how to install svn on your computer, but I'll save you the hard part, once you have installed SVN, you just need to cut and paste this on the command line to get oxygen

Imageshack/Flickr
While working on stuff I often upload revisions for critiquing purposes and so I know I've got a copy of them. I don't edit these files again, this is simply for screen viewing and review/input purposes.

PNG
an image format? No, better than that, this is the king of editing image formats. It's lossless, like a bitmap. No quality loss. You can sit there and save it over and over and over and over and it won't degrade one bit. It's also compressed in size, making it not as big as a bitmap image but the same quality. It has 255 levels of alpha transparency, GIF has 2 (opaque or fully transparent).

I use PNG for all raster images I deal with for editing. I won't use anything else. If something like a photo comes at me as JPG, the first time I save it it becomes and PNG as to prevent further quality loss.

SVG
Scalable vector graphics, a standard written by the same guy who made PNG graphics. He works for the W3C, the people who make and maintain web standards like HTML and CSS and javascript which I'm sure we've all heard of.

What makes this vector format better than the others is this: it's an open standard and anybody has a shot at implementing it into their software. It has a wide and growing adoption rate. It will show up in the gecko rendering engine, so there's your firefox, mozilla, netscape, camino web browsers, it renders excellently in Opera, and it also renders in webkit (safari). the only browser I'm not suer of it Internet Explorer, but it's a toy browser so I wouldn't be surprised if they never bother implementing it.

Conclusion
I have a mac. I have the adobe creative suite 3 design premium. I love them, but that doesn't mean I couldn't do an equal job without them. Honestly, everything you need to do professional design work is available in the open-source world, it will cost you nothing. Linux, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus - you've got a complete toolset at no cost. Now that I have my mac, I still run linux, now that I have adobe I still run the free open source programs.

The way I see it is like this: they have different strengths and weaknesses, so I use which ever one's stronger and my work is better for it. And hey, at no extra cost, giving yourself that boost doesn't set you back any $, why not?

I'll just post something I did last night as a mockup for a website. I'm not showing off my work, I just think it's very relevant to this thread. I used Inkscape to modify the vector icons before saving them as PNG (inkscape can handle a lot of features like alpha gradients that illustrator cant) and popping it into illustrator. I also designed the gradient in the background in inkscape because it's gradient tool is easier.

Then, once I had the oxygen icons in illustrator and the box, I did the typesetting in illustrator where it's stronger, and finished off the work.



So there, you can see how using the tools I've found, the colour palette, inkscape and oxygen icons, my design has (without much effort on my part) gotten way better, and since it's all free, I'm excited to offer it to you guys and I wanna see what you come up with using these tools too!

 

Good stuff so far, my students are eating it up.

Hey Amits, what was yours, were you just saying everything was good or was "Good Resources" really something. I'm not sure what you meant.

 

If you have the money to eat up, gomedia offers some great vector packs - some of the most well known in the industry.

Their blog also has some really useful tutorials for implementing vectors into works.

 

Yeah the Go Media packs are great. I guess you could use them in them as custom shapes in PS. Speaking of Go Media, I just saw that the have a pack 9 out now. Keep the stuff coming, this is good stuff. Any more Actions, Plugins, Textures for PS?

 

Well, Deviantart has many good user submitted resources, such as brushes and stuff. Also you could go there just to get inspiration, cause there are alot of talented artists there

My favourite tutorial site is pixel2life, great tutorials and easy to navigate. Not only photoshop tutorials though, there are tutorials on all kinds of things =)

 

Hi graphics337,
I get some inspiration from worth1000.com.
They've got a large tutorials page and a forum for specific advice.

Can I recommend some books too?

Adobe Photoshop Restoration and Retouching, by Katrin Eismann, and Photoshop Masking Compositing, also by Katrin Eismann. I've just finished reading them both and they've really helped my Photoshop skills. The books don't come with a CD, but you can download the example images from their respective websites.

 

Visit visual-blast.com , they have links to lot of free PS actions

 

phong.com are also good, and also pslover.com

 

There's no end to the stuff you can do with PS and other resources...c4ds have always been used well with PS and if any of your students already have prior knowledge with illustrator, its always helpful to import and export graphics between the two. And of course, illustrator is required to effectively resize and edit those gomedia packs.

 

Some are new to the course of study but I have a few students that are good with illustrator. What is c4ds? I googled it and found a Cinema 4D, but idk if that's what you mean.

You guys have any recommendation about 3rd party stuff? I have alien skin and love that product line, but there are so many different things that I can't keep up.

 

I think

http://www.tutorialized.com

Is one of the best websites .

 

I have to say I agree with you now. Tutorialized.com is bank if you are looking for how to's. I thought I had enough tutorial sites but if there are more out there, keep them coming. I do need a few more sites to get actions, STYLES (most important) shapes and other presets, and I have one student into web design who is wondering if there is a pre-made pack of color styles that blend well.

You guys are amazing. Keep the good stuff coming.