This is an extremely simple tutorial that will give a pretty interesting touch to your photos and designs. What we are going to do is to give more depth to photos, in an almost 3D-ish way.

1 – First of all, we’ll get our image. I chose the following one from a Paris Hilton ad (click on images to enlarge):

2 – Now create a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N). Fill it with black. Adjust opacity to 45/50%.

3 – Using the lasso tool, loosely outline the figure trying to be quite away from the borders. (click below image to enlarge):

4 – Now go to Select > Feather and choose a value as you see fit. In this case, I chose 30px.

5 – With this new feathered selection, simply delete it and you’ll have a new image with great depth. Use a very soft brush to delete certain parts (I used it for the burger, small portions of hair and one of her bracelets)

6 – Done. If you want to go further, simply enhance the image. I used a very little airbrush and a level adjustment layer on top of everything and voilà! here’s the end result:

Alternatives

You may think this is all cool and dandy with dark backgrounds, but what with cleared backgrounds? The short easy answer is “cut the figure and apply it over a dark background”. But check another option you can do:

I took this beautiful hippie girl in a forest picture

and converted it into this:

How did I achieve this? I just did exactly the following I said before, only that this time the feathered layer has its blending mode set to overlay and opacity in 36%.

Experiment, try different settings and the may the force be with you!

Unless you live under a rock in another planet with no intelligent life, you must be aware by now that Mobile Content is the “next big thing”. There’s a lot to say about this conception, personally I find it very difficult to understand. While computer and TV screens are going bigger and bigger and then even bigger, mobile content is going a million steps back. Then again, many people, especially younger people mesmerized by “coolness” likes this way of content delivery, and there’s money to be made off. So… time for some Mobile issues.

First of all, if your site is well done, you won’t need many changes. When I say well done, I mean proper XHTML with both HTML and CSS validating. If you went with a cheap designer that provided some half made product… well, now you have to pay again for a whole new content delivery tour. If your designer used tables… well, whole new tour. If your designer can’t make proper CSS (even if validating), well… whole new tour. Take it as a learning, pay twice for the ‘cheapo’ (hopefully cheap) and continue reading.

Design for Mobile is a whole new different thing. it’s easy and simple but it has to be made TO THE “A”. Content organization and logical flow is key, and so is CSS. As you may imagine, there are not much options with mobile design since its screen doesn’t allow it. However, you can be as complex as you want. And…. fail. Mobile design is about simplicity, in essence it’s like 94/95′s design, only that without the tables.

Once you have a logical structure (you can draw it on paper or make a graph flow for visual help), you can apply the CSS. Personally, I’d use 3 or 4 style sheets and offer them as options. Since my html has to be PERFECT and I’ll use DIVs, I can change everything in a snap via CSS, hence your mobile customers will be able to choose whatever they like.

An idea for organization would be something like this:

the size of this screen is the one you should aim for since it’s the most common: 240×320. However, you can serve different style sheets and detect screen sizes or be smart and use liquid layouts. The choice is yours.

As you may see, this very basic design uses logical semantyc XHTML. It’s simple and to the point, yet it uses some content display that allows you to maximize content delivery using as little space as possible

Another thing to note: Don’t rely on fonts! NEVER! Most mobile devices won’t include any of the fonts you usually will rely on, like Times, Verdana and such. The user has to install them.

For devices using Windows Mobile, it’s a great idea to offer the fonts you want to display in your site so the user can download them.

Obviously, you can use something as Facelift, Flir, AnyFont, whatever, but it’s always a nice idea to deliver the regular fonts for your site as well.

So now we need to display content.

In adult business, you’ll want to display photos and videos rather than text. How to do it AND DO IT WELL is a very tricky question. Personally, I’d use any kind of tool based on JQuery or Prototype to build AJAX apps, but you can do it with php or simply with HTML. The better you do that, the better you’ll do with your mobile site. As a tip, think about this: most people doesn’t have an Iphone, yet everybody loves it. So… why not serve your site emulating Iphone? It’s relatively easy for someone that knows what is he/she doing, and your members will love the slick modern design

Finally, something so basic that it’s borderline ridiculous yet many people doesn’t do: add a bookmark link.

Of course there’s a lot more to mobile content delivery, but for now, I hope this helps to any one willing to enter this competitive market

One of the things I saw many people fails at in Photoshop is to create convincing cigarette smoke. It’s just a matter of observation, so it’s really simple when you think about it. Most people thinks about smoke like fluffy clouds. That’s OK… for fluffy clouds. They’re made of steam, while smoke is a very different thing, and cigarette smoke has its particularities. I won’t enter on the physics behind it, but let’s say that cigarette smoke is made of threads of smoke rather than clouds of smoke. And it’s white, almost 100% white.

So without further ado, let’s enter the tutorial

Creating cigarette smoke Photoshop tutorial

First, let’s open a photo with someone smoking. For this example, I took a pic of Lindsay Lohan which also needs some work, so I’ll create the smoke, manipulate it to look as letters and work on enhancing the picture, all in the same tutorial. You can’t complaint, huh?

This is my picture, feel free to choose any other you like

Now that we have the pic to work with, let’s start by the very basic:
1- Open the document
2- Press Ctrl+J to duplicate the background so you have a backup just in case
3- Name the new layer as you like

Creating the smoke
1- Press D to set your foreground and background colors to black and white
2- Create a new layer. Name it smoke
3- From the cigarette, draw an inverted triangle with the lasso tool
4- Go to Filter > Render > Clouds
5- Press Ctrl+F until you get around 70% of white and 30% of black

by now you should have something like this:

6- with the lasso area still selected, make sure you have black set as foreground color and go to Select > Color Range. Make sure you have these values: Select: Sample Colors / Fuzziness: 200 and the Selection ratio checked. Press OK and it will select a little area of your smoke. Delete it (press Del) and you’re done with this step.

7- Press Ctrl+D to deselect everything

8- Now duplicate the layer using Ctrl+J

9- Go to Filters > Distort > Wave and use the following on any one of the layers (click on the image if you don’t see the values):

10 – Select the other layer and change values slightly. From top to bottom I’ve used 5 – 10 – 137 – 15 – 20

11 – You’ll probably need to arrange the layers, maybe flip them horizontally, do it as you see it fits

12 – now set the blending options to Hard Light 100% for the lower layer and Linear Dodge 45% for the upper smoke layer (or play with the blending options as you like). If you need it, adjust curves on any of the layers to make it look as you want.

13 – That’s it! This is what I ended with so far (click to enlarge):

let’s add some pizzaz! This photo needs some retouch, so we’ll do a very fast but nice retouch in a few steps

Fast Photo Retouch

1 – Press Ctrl+A to select everything, then Ctrl+Shift+C to copy all layers combined. Then Ctrl+V to paste it (as you may notice, I use mostly keyword macros, it makes your work really fast, so be sure to learn them!)

2 – Now go to Filters > Blur > Surface Blur . Use the following values: Radius 7 / Threshold: 23 (it may be different for larger or smaller images so those are just guideline values)

3 – Set that layer to Hard Light and 60% (or adjust as desired, those are the values I used)

4 – Duplicate the layer using Ctrl+J

5 – Set the blending options to Screen 45% (or adjust as desired, those are the values I used)

6 – If you need it, create an adjustment layer on top of all layers. You can do so by going to the layers window and you can find it at the bottom. Click on that semi-circle you see with the red arrow and you’ll see a menu. Select Curves and adjust as needed

7 – Done!

Playing with this Photoshop Tutorial

Now I’m sure you can think on many ideas and usages for what you learned in this tutorial. I did something like the following by using a curvy font letter by letter, rasterized it and from there did the same steps I told you previously. It may look like a lot of work but if you learned the key macros, it’s a 3-4 minutes work, check it out!

Hope you liked it, please comment and make as many questions as you want. If you link to this tutorial, give me a shout