Whew! It took most of the weekend, and now my very first 60lessons.com lesson is ready:

Photoshop I Lesson 1a – Rearranging and Saving Workspaces

I designed 60lessons.com to be a resource for teachers. The lessons are meant to be 45 minutes long each, and grouped into units of 10 lessons each.

But anyone can follow them! Please check it out.

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Hello all!

I am going full-steam at my new business site, bluelobsterart.com. Here are my latest tutorials:

The Photoshop CS4 Workspace

The RGB Color Wheel

3-Column Web Page Using CSS Layers in Dreamweaver CS4

The Dreamweaver CS4 Workspace

Frame an Image inside a Shape or Text using Photoshop

The CMYK Color Wheel

Turn a Beetle into a Brush in Photoshop

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It’s official. I filed my business paperwork with the County yesterday. I’ve been working like crazy to get the new site up and running.

My Portfolio is not yet complete but I hope to finish it this week.

My Resume is up too.

I’ve been gearing up to provide a whole bunch of original tutorials on Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and other design programs. To support these future tutorials, I’ve been creating primers on the basics. Here’s what I have so far:

The Photoshop Interface

The Photoshop Color Picker

The Illustrator Interface

The Illustrator Color Picker

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I’ve been adapting enough Photoshop tutorials lately for my graphic design class that I decided I can do these on my own in about the same amount of time. You are free to use these tutorials in your own classrooms. They are very detailed and can be completed by even a beginning student who knows a little about the toolbox, the options bar, and the layers palette.

Clipping Masks

Using a custom shape:

Using text:

If you like, follow up the tutorial with this independent project.

Using a custom shape:

Using text:

UPDATE 2/11/09: Student Work

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I’m generally working from a textbook to teach Photoshop, but sometimes the one I’m using is just too simplistic. In order to show a taste of the true artistic power of Photoshop, I put together the following design project for my students.

Let’s take your knowledge of color adjustments and blend modes one step further. Create three very different versions of a composite image.

1. Find two interesting and colorful images online which you can overlap in your composite. Save them into your folder. Open them in Photoshop.

One image will be my Flower layer and the other will be my Swirl layer.

2. Add one image onto the other in some way. Give a suitable name to each layer. Save the composite file as Color Experiment.psd. This will be your starting point for each of three versions.
3. Save the file again as Color Experiment 1.psd.
   1. Apply an artistic filter to one of the layers (Filter > Artistic). You can try other filters instead. Filter > Distort has some cool ones.
   2. Apply a color adjustment to the other layer (Image > Adjustments). Try Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, or Variations.
   3. Select your top-most layer. In the layers palette, change the blend mode from Normal to something else. Try out a bunch until you find a neat combination.
   4. Save your file.
4. Re-open Color Experiment.psd and save it as Color Experiment 2.psd. Repeat steps a – d above but with all different settings. You can change the order of the layers if you like. Save your file.
5. Re-open Color Experiment.psd and save it as Color Experiment 3.psd. Repeat steps a – d above but with all different settings. You can change the order of the layers if you like. Save your file.

My results are below:

The Flower layer on the bottom has the Plastic Wrap filter applied to it. The Swirl layer on top has had a hue increase and a Difference blend mode applied.

The Swirl layer on the bottom has the Cutout filter applied to it. The Flower layer on top has had a hue increase and a Lighten blend mode applied.

The Swirl layer on the bottom has been colorized to a monotone purple. The Flower layer on top has the Ocean Ripple filter and a Linear Light blend mode applied.

UPDATE 12/13/08: Student Work

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