If you want to learn how to composite photos together to produce a realistic scene in Photoshop, matte paintings are a great place to start. Matte paintings often involve the combination of several photos to produce an environment that could not or does not exist in real life. This means that in order to produce a photo realistic scene, you’ll need to know how to cleanly extract specific pieces of photography and how to place those elements to produce the exact look you are going for.
In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial by Bobby Myers, we will show you how to combine photo manipulation and digital painting techniques to create a desert oasis in Photoshop. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members and includes both written and video content. If you are looking to take your matte painting and photo manipulation skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!

We are excited to announce a fantastic new workshop led by Instructor Martin Perhiniak: Photoshop and Lightroom for Photographers
Are you an aspiring photographer with the desire to take your skills to the next level? Learn everything you need to know about Adobe’s two most important applications for photographers: Photoshop and Lightroom.
Develop a professional workflow, learn invaluable editing techniques, and master all the tools of your craft in our newest Workshop.
Early Bird tickets are now available for only $49, but places are strictly limited so act fast to make sure you don’t miss out!

This tutorial is the first part of a new short series called ” The Comprehensive Guide to Color in Photoshop.” In this tutorial, we will discuss how to set up your Swatches panel, how to work with the Preset Manager, how to choose and save new Swatches and how to export them from Photoshop. Let’s get started!

Envato (the people behind Psdtuts+) have recently launched a new service, currently in beta, called Microlancer. It’s a place where people can sell their creative services, or get creative work done.
The difference between Microlancer and other freelance job sites is that every Microlancer service is sold at a fixed price chosen by the service provider, which must fall within a reasonable range for the value of the service. In other words, no $5 jobs! Services are also generally smaller jobs that take less than a day to complete. The end goal is that selling or buying design services on Microlancer feels a little like selling or buying items in an online store: fast, easy, and affordable.

Children have quite an imagination. When you were young, you probably dreamed of having a cute cuddly best friend. Boy or girl, there is a good chance that you had a stuffed animal at some point in your life. What if those stuffed animals were real, however? In this article, we will take a look at the work of Cindy de Sousa. Cindy’s illustrations are filled with bright-eyed, cuddly creatures that most children would love to call their best friend.

Steampunk is popular style of artwork. Artists create modern objects from materials found during an earlier time. In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial by Benjamin Mounsey, we will show you how to create a steampunk illustration of farm equipment assembled from an earlier post-apocalyptic period of war. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members and includes both written and video content. If you are looking to take your digital illustration skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!

This Month’s Challenge and Review
This month we asked for your help in choosing the theme and you picked, Recreate A Famous Movie Poster. For this challenge, use Photoshop combined with any additional application or technique of your choice to produce your artwork. Remember, the deadline for this challenge is Tuesday, July 2, 2013 at 11:59 PM EST.
Artist James White will also be joining the Google Hangout Review for this month’s challenge. Welcome him with us and stay tuned after the challenge for the official Google Hangout link to enjoy the design review live!

Making selections is an essential skill for any Photoshop user. In this tutorial, we are going to show you 10 ways to modify a selection in Photoshop. By watching this video, you will be able to understand the connection between all the selection features Photoshop offers including; Feather, Contract, Expand, Border, Smooth, Refine Edge, Quick Mask, Color Range, Transform Selection and many more. Let’s get started!

The Crop Tool is used to resize the canvas and active image area. To use the crop tool, simply drag out a square that encompasses the area which you want to become the new canvas size.

Note that cropping an image will not delete layer data. All layer data is preserved when an image is cropped to be smaller in size. Some layer data may just not be visible since it might become outside of the active image area.

Now that you see how the tools are all organized, let’s take a look at some of the most vital tools Photoshop has to offer. This is really just a cursory glance of the toolbox, as we’d be crazy to go into detail for EVERY SINGLE tool Photoshop has to offer in a single lesson, but you ought to now have an understanding what some of the tools are capable of. We’ll go over how to use many of these tools in later lessons.

LAYERS
Layers let you organize your work into distinct levels that can be edited and viewed as individual units. Every Photoshop CS4 document contains at least one layer. Creating multiple layers lets you easily control how your artwork is printed, displayed, and edited. You will use the Layers palette (Fig. 6) often while creating a document, so it is crucial to understand what it does and how to use it.

COLOR, SWATCHES, STYLE

The Color palette (Fig. 1) displays the current foreground and background colors and RGB values for these colors. You can use the sliders to change the foreground and background colors in different
color modes. You can also choose a color from the spectrum of colors displayed in the color ramp at the bottom of the palette.

Mastering selections is undoubtedly one of the most essential and powerful aspects of Photoshop. Below are some extremely useful (and not very well-known) selection techniques: once you learn them, you will wonder how you ever got by without them!

Read more: http://www.webdesign.org/photoshop/photoshop-basics/selection-tools.6164.html#ixzz2UZvrxv8y

If you used other Adobe products, such as Illustrator or InDesign, you should be familiar with the toolbox in Adobe Photoshop CS4 as it shares some of the tools from these applications. If you are a novice user of Adobe products, you should keep in mind that you might not need to use all of the tools. In this tutorial, only the basic tools will be discussed in depth.