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10 Websites To Make You A Photoshop Ninja - Part II
I told You All About 5 Websites In Previous Post. Photoshop Tutorials combines tutorials for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Photography. It covers a whole range of things, and always tells you how advanced the particular tutorial is. Some are incredibly complicated, and some are great ways to do really basic things in Photoshop. Though it doesn’t have the largest database I found, it probably wins my award for easiest-to-follow tutorials. Users also rate and comment on tutorials, so you can see what people liked and hated on the site. Luxa calls itself a “social learning site for Photoshop artists.” It’s a combination of tutorials, videos, and design articles. Users suggest video and tutorial topics, and Luxa helps them learn Photoshop. To really appreciate Luxa’s community, you’ll want to become a member, which is a bit of a pain but creates a lot of benefits. There’s also a voting system (though not an oft-used one yet) that helps bring the best to the top. In addition to all the tutorials too, Luxa also has a large collection of Photoshop brushes that will let you achieve before-impossible awesomeness. Photoshop Contest is one part site for Photoshop ninjas, one part site for becoming one. There are contests for people doing cool things with Photoshop, but also a big repository of tutorials and videos. Since the makers of the tutorials are usually on the site because they know Photoshop inside and out, they often have cool tips for how to take shortcuts and “cheat” an image. Most of the tutorials are pretty basic, though at least for me, there’s nothing basic about any of Photoshop. PSHero gets onto the list for being the most practical of the bunch, and sharing the most tutorials that the average user would actually want. If you’re looking to do things like design a website, create logos, or make your photos grungier, you’re set with PSHero. There’s not a lot of higher-level stuff to be found, but I found that PSHero was perfect for someone like me, who’s more likely to be creating a logo than an anime airplane eating a lion on top of a mountain. The tutorials are easy to follow, and definitely geared toward the inexperienced Photoshopper. Another aggregator (I think the name might have taken from AllTop), PSDTop is a great place to find all kinds of cool Photoshop Tutorials. Though it’s not the only site to have categories, its breakdown of the tutorials into various types (Drawing, Digital Art, etc.) is a great way to become ninja-like at a particular skill in Photoshop. Since it’s an aggregator, it too will have the occasional dud tutorial, but most are good. From introductions to Photoshop to doing things that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world, these ten sites will help you earn your black belt in the wide world of Photoshopping. But obviously many more Photoshopping tutorial websites exist out there so tell us your recommendations in the comments below.
Next 5 Websites Are Here
Now Previous Continued...Photoshop Tutorials
Luxa
Photoshop Contest
PSHero
PSDTop
10 Websites To Make You A Photoshop Ninja - Part I
Photoshop is hard. There’s all kinds of menus, commands, and keyboard shortcuts that you’ve got to figure out. Once you learn how it works, it’s an unbelievably useful and powerful tool, but the learning curve is enormous.
Using the Web though, you can learn how to do just about anything in Photoshop, and either become great at it or just get really good at faking it. Either way, you’re doing cool stuff.
Here are ten sites to learn Photoshop online and get you Photoshopping like a champion:
You Suck at Photoshop
You Suck at Photoshop is the place to start, just to defeat you a little bit and make you realize how badly you need to learn Photoshop. In all seriousness, though, Donnie Hoyle’s video tutorial series is both hilarious and informative. They’re helpful for learning how to do simple things, where to find particular tools, and how to mess with the pictures of people you love.
Tutorial9
Tutorial9 has a ton of different tutorials, including a lot of them for Photoshop. Every tutorial has step-by-step instructions, complete with pictures of the tools you need and the buttons you should click on (really helpful- what in the world does the “capture” tool look like?).
Then, for everything you need to do, there’s a quick video showing you what it looks like. There’s no narration, but that’s okay- the step-by-step instructions do everything you need. Tutorial9 helps you do all kinds of things with Photoshop- my favorite was creating burnt parchment. You know, without burning anything. Definitely agreat site to learn photoshop online.
PSDTUTS
With PSDTUTS, you’ll see lots and lots of pictures. Tutorials are made up almost entirely of pictures that give you the slightest detail instructions on how to do various things in Photoshop.
One of the best things about PSDTUTS are the comments on the tutorials, which help to iron out the possible issues with the tutorials as presented. The tutorials are long, because they’re so broken down, but if they can teach me to make a Web banner out of a motorcycle, they’re doing something right.
Good-Tutorials
There’s nothing terribly unique about Good-Tutorials, except that it’s more of a general guide to using Photoshop than a guide to achieving a particular effect in Photoshop.
Though Good-Tutorials does have those tutorials, it’s also got things like “Create a Photoshop Action for Screenshots” to help save you time and effort in Photoshop. Simple tutorials and powerful Photoshopping both come from Good-Tutorials.
Photoshop Lady
The Photoshop Lady pulls together some of the best Photoshop tutorials from around the Web, and lets you read and watch them easily. If you create an account, you can save tutorials for later, and you can also see the “Most Viewed” and “Highest Rated” tutorials to see what other people are learning how to do. Since it’s not centralized, some tutorials are better than others, but most of it is good stuff.
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22 Most Useful Free Applications for your PC - System Utilities
Previous Continued... Keeping my system healthy and working its best is a never ending challenge. These are some of the tools that I use to help. CCleaner - Keep your PC squeaky clean with this System Optimization tool. It deletes just about every kind of unnecessary crap from your computer. Temporary files, Cookies and other junk from every browser, Programs running at Startup, Uninstalls software and fixes all kinds of problems in your Registry. Click about five buttons and wait about a minute and your machine is a new person. Alternatives: NCleaner – better in some ways, but worse interface. AdAware and Spybot for spyware removal. Filezilla - My favorite FTP client. Quick, simple, and easy. FTP from your browser with FireFTP. Not secure enough, try WinSCP for secure FTP. Use Putty for Telnet and SSH access. Rocket Dock - Do you have Mac Envy? This launching doc is nearly a dead clone of Apple’s dock. You can launch Applications, Folders, Files, and other processes so quickly and easily, you’ll never click the Start button again. Alternatives: Object Dock 7Zip - This WinZip alternative will open just about any archive file format known to man. It’s faster and lighter on resources than any archive tool I’ve used. Alternatives: There are a bunch, here is a list of free winzip alternatives. TightVNC - Remotely view and control other computers from your desktop. Install the server software on one (remote) computer and then control it with the viewer software from your main computer. Great for helping diagnose computer problems on your family and friend’s computers. Alternatives: UltraVNC and RealVNC have comparable feature sets and decent followings. See this tutorial for Using VNC to remotely control another computer. uTorrent - The best way to download huge files is with BitTorrent technology. My (current) favorite BitTorrent client is uTorrent. Nothing spectacular, just a solid tool that fills an important role. Alternatives: Azureus is a java based bit torrent client with similar features. SyncBack Freeware - Very powerful backup program with numerous configuration options including: Backup and Restore of files, Synchronization of files, Zip Compression of backed up files to save space, Back up to FTP servers, Filters for choosing what to back up or ignore. Alternatives: Mozy Backup (web base $5/per month) AVG Antivirus - Don’t destroy your computer with that garbage that Norton and McAfee are peddling. Those two applications will screw up you computer worse than any virus. AVG Antivirus (free version) protects your computer from viruses, spyware, and heebie-jeebies of all types without bogging down your computer. Alternatives: Antivir and Avast also offer very good free antivirus options.System Utilities
22 Most Useful Free Applications for your PC - Multimedia
Previous Continued... Here is one of the fields where you can spend your whole paycheck on commercial software. Pick up anything from Adobe, Corel, Pinnacle, etc and you’ll see what I mean. Fear not, there are plenty of ways to view, manage, create, and distribute your media without spending a dime. Paint.net - If you need to do minor edits to your photos and images that don’t warrant the King’s ransom that Photoshop commands, you should give Paint.net a try. You can do edits that range from simple to complex without spending a dime. Yes, I know there’s a huge Gimp following, but I just like this better. Alternatives: The Gimp do yourself a favor get the Gimpshop version. Picasa - Manage your photos like a champ. If you have more than 10 photos on your computer, you MUST get Picasa. Organize, search, display, and share your photos in a way that will make you really appreciate your camera. Windows Live Photo Gallery (Reasonable clone of Picasa integrates with Windows Live services well). iTunes - Yeah I know, there are a bunch of alternatives but, I still just like iTunes. It does just about everything I need very well and the few things it doesn’t do, I just use one of the other options. Alternatives: (Media Monkey, Songbird, Winamp, Miro TV) DVD Shrink - If you want to make "backup copies" of any of your "legally purchased" DVDs, this is the simplest application out there. Pop in the disk, click "Backup" and go. Then, use DVD Decrypter to burn it to a blank disk. Once you do the simple setup, you can do a two click back up of any DVD. (I hope Netflix doesn’t read this blog.) Multimedia
VLC - This is a streamed down media player that will play any audio or video format ever created flawlessly. This is a lot like Foxit for your videos. It opens lightning fast and begins playing your files. Light, fast, simple!
22 Most Useful Free Applications for your PC - Productivity
Previous continued... Getting things done on your computer can often cost you a pretty penny. While I’m still an advocate of forking over the money for Microsoft Office, there a lot of other areas that you can save money. Windows Live Writer - I write every one of my blog posts using Live Writer. If you have a blog you really should try this. It handles multiple sites and has tons of extensions to customize it. Alternatives: Raven is a desktop blogging software that is a lighter alternative to WLW. Not light enough? Try the Scribefire extension for Firefox. Notepad++ - Sure, Windows comes with a text editor built in, but not like Notepad++. You can use the tabbed interface to work on multiple documents at once. There is syntax highlighting for editing code. If I need to do minor edits to code I can open a file, make the changes, and have it closed before Dreamweaver would even begin launching. This is another application with plethora of extensions that allow you to modify it to your heart’s content. Foxit PDF Reader - Love PDFs, but hate the bloat of Adobe Acrobat? I thought so. Foxit will open your PDF files so fast, you’ll wonder why anyone would ever use Acrobat. Get hours of your life back. CutePDF Writer - If you need to create PDF files from your documents and don’t want to shell out for Acrobat Pro, then get CutePDF Writer. This installs on your system as a Printer. Then, you can turn any printable information from any application on your computer into a perfect PDF. Put it all together to be a PDF champion.Productivity
22 Most Useful Free Applications for your PC - Internet
Previous continued... This is the home of the freebies. There are so many free internet browsers and applications that I could go on all day. Actually, the follow-up article will focus on the best web-based applications. Firefox - The Granddaddy of all free software. If there were one piece of software that I would just not give up, it’s Firefox. Alternatives: Flock (Firefox variant aimed at media and social networking), Opera (decent alternative, but no extensions), Google Chrome (lean and clean new-kid-on-the-block), Apple Safari (only for testing web development). Google Earth - Put every inch of the Earth at the tip of your finger. I’m not sure how much anybody "needs" this software, but you know you want it. Stalk your friends, enemies, and ex, then check out the Eifel Tower and Pyramids. Internet
22 Most Useful Free Applications for your PC - Communication
Use your Computer, Not your Wallet
The recession is hitting everyone hard and money is tight. That doesn’t mean that can’t get the most out of your computer. There are so many great free applications that can help you do just about anything. I’m going to take a look at 22 applications that I use all the time with wonderful results.
I’m going to identify the free applications that I use in the following categories:
- Communication
- Internet
- Productivity
- Multimedia
- System Utilities
I have my personal favorites that I’m going to talk about, but those are not your only options. I’ll also list any other viable alternatives that I’m aware of for each category.
Communication
I’m a big fan of Microsoft Outlook, but I have been using Thunderbird on my computer for a while now. It’s not quite as good, but it’s constantly closing the gap. Here are some of my favorite ways to keep in touch for free.
Thunderbird - This is Mozilla’s open source answer to Microsoft Outlook. You can do Email, Contacts, and Calendaring very similarly to Outlook (minus some of the polish). It’s built using the same open, extensible platform as Firefox, so there is a steadily growing collection of extensions to augment it’s functionality. Turbocharge Thunderbird with these plug-ins. Alternatives: Gmail.
Digsby - Simply the best Instant Messenger tool available. You can connect to all of your IM networks (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Google, ICQ, Jabber, and Facebook ) to let you chat with any of your contacts. That alone makes it valuable, but wait, there’s more: Get real-time updates on your social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn). You can also get updates on your inbox for just about any email account (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, plus any IMAP and POP3 accounts). Alternatives: If you’re looking for something almost as good, try Pidgin IM or Trillian with a bunch of plug-ins. Meebo (Web Based).
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