How to make really awesome graphics
by Greater Evil

Hey dudes!! If you're like me you got your hands on Adobe Photoshop and were wondering, "what the hell do I do with this?" Well I'm here to show you that, with a little patience, Photoshop can be an important part of any artist's toolset.

One thing I've learned over the years -- my fundamental design principle if you will -- is that everything looks way cooler in outer-space. Now, all of our graphics won't be space-related, but we can apply that principle to all of our images, namely the following attributes:

• in space everything is in 3D
• in space there are crazy lighting effects

We can make crazy lighting effects using shadows and "lens flares". In case you don't know about lens flares, they are a natural phenomenon that happens around big lights like stars. Sometimes you can see them on Earth if you take a picture of the sun, but from all the movies I've seen, there are tons more in space, probably from all the stars.

So how do you use these ideas? Here's a typical example. Suppose you have a webpage, but it's pretty boring because you have mostly information and not enough flashy graphics (not even midi files or javascript!) Well you can start to fix all that up pretty easily with a few simple procedures. Let's say your webpage has a banner like this:

My Web Page

Now, we need to add shadows. There are two types, first the "Drop Shadow" and also the "Cast Shadow". Here's how to do both:

To make a drop shadow, copy the image to a new transparent layer. Then fill the selection black, and perform "Gaussian Blur" filter. Then offset the layer by a few pixels to make the shadow complete.

To make a cast shadow, copy the image to a new transparent layer and fill the selection black. Now use the transformation tool to make the shadow.

Finally, to make this look totally awesome, we need to throw in some killer lens flares. To make a lens flare, use the "Render Lens Flare" plugin:

Here's the final image. This is off the hook!!

Now I'm going to show you how to take a lame ass photo that you took from your digital camera and make it into something really killer. First, let's make it look 3d. We can do that with this wicked filter called "emboss":

Original image:

Embossed image:

Now add lighting effects as before:

Kick ass!

That does it -- with these few simple effects you can make graphics like a pro! Next month, we'll cover importing clip art into your favorite drawing program!