Hot foil stamping is a special finish that gives printed material such as business cards or packaging a feeling of quality and luxury. Common foils include silver, gold and the more psychedelic holographic foils that reflect a full spectrum of colours. These extravagant foils are applied at the print stage by industrial machines, but designers are starting to simulate the appearance in their digital artwork to add artificial foil effects to designs that are viewed on screens. I’ve been busy creating a free set of textures that you can use to produce holographic foil effects in your own designs. Use them with Clipping Masks to give your text and other design elements a vivid, shimmering, iridescent appearance.
Access All Areas members have a useful set of textures to download this week, courtesy of Heather Noll Design. This Grunge Halftone pack includes 14 high resolution 4000x6000px Bitmap files that can be used individually, or blended for different effects. There’s a variety of surface textures to choose from, including stains, heavy dirt and ornate patterns.
Discover a world class library of fonts that have topped every best-sellers list out there, including clean sans-serifs, gorgeous serifs, creative brush scripts and stunning display fonts. The Professional, Dynamic Font Library is the latest fonts bundle from Design Cuts, featuring a 99% discount that reduces the regular price of $2342 to just $29 for a limited time. It provides a great opportunity to upgrade your font library with some quality typefaces while saving thousands of dollars from the usual retail price!
If like me, you went through a dinosaur phase during your childhood, one of the first genres of art you probably developed an appreciation for is Paleoart—the depiction prehistoric life. I loved browsing though my collection of Dinosaurs! magazine, admiring the pages of colourful hand-illustrated artist’s impressions of oversized lizards. The tools available to paleo-artists have since evolved to include digital illustration and 3D modeling, which now allow both hobbyists and professionals to produce intense dinosaur themed art. Today’s inspiration showcase features 60 fearsome examples of modern Paleoart, including ultra-realistic 3D renders and digitally painted concept art. It’s interesting to compare the difference in art style pre-and-post Jurassic Park (1993), which is now being built upon with a new wave of artwork that depict dinosaurs with the more recent discoveries of feathers and bright markings.
In today’s Photoshop tutorial we’re going to take a look at replicating the unique appearance of false-color infrared photography. Authentic infrared photos are captured using infrared film, or digitally using an infrared lens, but the overall style and aesthetic can also be simulated with some tweaks to a normal photograph in Adobe Photoshop. In false-color infrared photos the reds, blues and greens are reversed, so scenes with foliage and trees appear as a vibrant pink rather than green, which often looks like the photograph was taken on another planet! The result is a surreal image that transforms a typical landscape shot into a vibrant and unique photo.
Color splash is a classic photo effect that goes by many names; selective colour, spot colour, colour isolation, partial colour, colour accent and many more! It’s made by converting a photograph to black and white, but leaving a specific colour intact, which produces a striking effect that highlights specific areas of the image. Typically the effect focuses on bright reds, yellows or blues, which is the colour of the main subject within the photo. In today’s tutorial I show you how to create the effect in Photoshop by picking out the hue using the Color Range selection method, then we’ll complement it with a couple of additional enhancements.
