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Creating effective advertisements is one of the biggest jobs for a graphic designer.  The advertising industry is one of the largest employers of graphic designers, but creating advertisements requires a mastery of many different skills.  From photomanipulation, digital painting, 3D, and vector graphics, graphic designers need to have strong skillsets in order to be able to work on a given project.

In this graphic design tutorial, we’ll cover the essential advertising workflow.  By following along with thisPhotoshop ad tutorial, you’ll see how to take just a simple stock image and build a pixel perfect artwork around it, while also communicating valuable information about the brand to viewers.

Step 1

First, we need to isolate the photo of Mercedes and put it on a white background.  This will give us the base of our advertisement and a focal point to build around.  The pen tool or magic wand will work best for this extraction.

Then we start to make the shadows with soft round brush.  You can just paint below the extracted car layer on a new layer, based upon where you will place your light source.

Step 2

Invert the background layer using ctrl+i and make a new layer, with soft round brush paint some blue areas behind the car.  Alternately you can create your own fill layer with a different color.

After that, we use a smoke brush and add a little mist on the left.

Step 3

To make it more realistic, I decided to add a clouds texture (http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=24208522) on the background.

With the layer mask on, we erase the areas on the bottom right corner.

Next, I took a green grass texture and desaturated it using hue/saturation (ctrl+u) or ctrl+shift+u.

Step 4

I think it is a little bit too dark, so we use the adjustment layer – curves and brighten it up.

On new layer, make the left corner a little dark, the light is not going there so strong, that is why we make it darker.  You can paint it with a dark brush and set to Overlay or Soft Light.

I want to make it all in one colour pallete, so we need to use a hue/saturation, colorized check.

Step 5

On the top of the layers we start to adding the trees (http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-1204409-bonsai-tree.php?st=996a73c).

As you see, every tree is blended, so use the curves to make it darker or brighter, and hue/saturation to make it desaturated or more colorful. Don’t forget about the shadows, paint it with a soft round brush just like we did for the car shadows.

Once you’ve added some stock photos, now you can paint the rest with a small brush, use the same colours like the tree and start to paint your wooden root.

Step 6

Now, it is time to make the base. We have a dark and relatively ugly looking grass texture. So we need to search a stock photo, on www.sxc.hu and start to blend the green grass.

Use the layer mask, and erase some areas to fit the texture more.

I found some stock photos of the stones and put it on the bottom of the project, also add one more wooden root on the left.

The same stones I put on the left background, that give as an effect, like the car is staying on rocks.

Step 7

We add the rocks on the background from a mountain texture. As you see they don’t fit to the image in terms of color.  To fix this, we use the hue/saturation adjustment layer.

I also paint some mist with soft round brush.

The final touch is the flying birds. This is always a good thing, because birds show you the scale of the illustration… the same is with the people on the images.  The human eye understands certain sizes for things, such as people, or birds, so they help establish a scale for the eye.

Step 8

Now it its almost done, but the adjustment layers will bring it on the next level. First a little more contrast with brightness/contrast and new color pallete with a channel mixer.

Final Image

This tutorial was originally posted on: creativefan.com, I found it really good, and I hope to post my attempts at this kind of artwork soon.

I have been trying for a few days to create a better signature on my Mac Mail programme, and it was bugging the life out of me not being able to get it quite how I wanted it.

I had finally found a tutorial after searching Google for a whole morning, but for a while that didn’t work either! Arrggghhh! But with a couple tweaks I managed to get it to work, now I have a great looking email signature, with a logo that is hosted on my server and some great looking links to Facebook and Twitter with out the need to write out the whole URL – Happy Days!!

Ok, so what do you need to do this for yourself?

• Mac Mail
• Dreamweaver – (or some other HTML programme)
• Safari
• A place to store your logos and a html file online, either a webserver or a document hosting provider such as Dropbox.

Now lets crack on with what you have to do:

1. Upload the logos you want on your signature to your server or image hosting provider, and make sure you have the complete URL for the image (ie http://mydomain.com/email-signature/my-logo.jpg) to hand.
2. In Dreamweaver (or alternative programme) create your email signature. Make sure any images used are linked to the image on your server and not locally on your computer. (<img src=”http://yourdomain.com/email-signatures/images/your-logo.jpg” width=”200″ height=”71″ alt=”Your Logo”>)
3. Save copy of your signature as an .html document and upload to your server or public dropbox folder, and visit that .html page on Safari ie type in Safari’s address bar: http://yourdomain.com/email-signatures/signature.html
4. Now you need to save the page as a .webarchive file, do this by going to File > Save as, then make sure Web Archive is selected by Format and click save
5. In Mail create a new signature by going to Mail > Preferences > Signature – then click on the + symbol to create a new signature
6. Don’t worry about filling anything in, you can now quit out of Mail
7. In finder navigate to: macintosh HD > users > Icon of the House > Library > Mail > Signatures
8. Now find the  .webarchive file that was created “Today” and copy the filename (not the actual file, just the name of the file, you can do this by click the name with to slow clicks, selected all the name, ctrl click and “copy”)
9. Now find the .webarchive file you saved from Safari in step 4 and rename it to the file name you just copied, then drag the file into the Signatures folder. A window will pop up stating “An item named “xxxxxx.webarchive” already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it with the one you’re moving?,  click replace
10. Open up your mail application, click “New” you should now see an option to add you signature

I done every thing above but I can’t see my signature!! What do I do?

If you have done all the steps correctly you should be able to check whether it has worked by opening mail, then navigate to Mail > Preferences > Signatures.

If this has worked, and you see the new signature in the All Signature tab, but you can not selected it when you create a new email, it is probably because you haven’t create the signature for use for that specific email address. Within the signature Preferences you can drag signatures into specific email accounts that are set up in your Mac Mail. Drag the signature from the “All Signatures” tab into the correct account, which symbol should by a greyish black globe with a white @ symbol.

 

I hope this has worked for you! If you have any problems then please do leave a comment.

The original tutorial I followed was from businesscasualblog.com

Here is another great Photoshop tutorial I found, this time we are going to be looking how to create atmospheric black and white photographs with an artistic hint of colour.

I found this amazing tutorial on theclothes.blogspot.co.uk thanks to the author Katrina.