Tutorials
In today’s Photoshop tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a vintage photo effect, based on Daguerreotypes from the 1800s. Being the most common photography method in the 19th century, this photo style is often associated with old portraits and scenes of the wild west. Daguerreotypes were exposed onto polished metal plates which were easily tarnished and scratched. This has become one of the main aesthetics of these antique images, so we’ll be using some texture images to mimic the appearance. And to achieve the most realism, we’ll be using the real thing! I recently found some public domain scans of authentic Daguerreotype photographs, which I processed into design resources by Photoshopping out the subject to leave just the texture of the tarnished metal plate.
In today’s Photoshop video tutorial we’re going to create a clever text portrait effect where a passage of text bends and warps to form the contours of the subject’s face. This effect is particularly powerful when used to present famous speeches by depicting the orator with their own words. It could also be used to produce artwork of musicians and their song lyrics, writers and stories, poets and their poems, or any other popular figure who is remembered for their words. The process uses just a small selection of Photoshop’s tools, with the Displace filter and a clipping mask being the key ingredients to making the effect.
In today’s Adobe Photoshop video tutorial we’re going to have some fun creating a map of our own fantasy world, just like the fictional story settings of Neverland, Middle-Earth or Westoros. We’ll use Photoshop’s built in tools to establish the landmass and sea, then construct hills, mountains and deserts with some simple filter combinations, before finishing off the artwork with a vintage paper texture and place names to simulate an old world map.
One of my Spoon Graphics readers recently sent me an email with a great tutorial suggestion based on one of the promo graphics of the free font named Manrope. The cited artwork featured a collection of letters as long three dimensional shapes of varying heights, densely packed together in the scene. Clearly some kind of 3D modelling software was used to produce the original concept, but I experimented with Photoshop’s built-in 3D tools to see if a similar effect could be made. Follow along with today’s tutorial to learn how to use Photoshop’s 3D capabilities to create the effect yourself.
In today’s Adobe Illustrator tutorial we’ll be creating a shaded type effect, which applies little shadows to cursive lettering where the strokes loop and overlap, to give the impression that the characters interweave. The artwork we’ll be producing in this tutorial features the word ‘Love’ in a bold, flowing script font with the addition of those shaded elements, further enhanced with grain filters and dusty textures to distress the artwork and finish it off with a low-fi appearance.
I received an email from a Spoon Graphics reader last week who wanted some advice for creating a striped type effect in Illustrator, citing a retro 70s style logo as an example. I was sure I’d created a similar effect in a recent tutorial, but it turned out to be the title art I produced for my Washed & Worn textures that I was thinking of. In today’s Adode Illustrator tutorial I’ll take you through my process of creating such artwork to produce a similar 70s inspired type style, then follow it up with an alternative process that has the advantage of preserving the live text.
