Here you have a bokeh effect texture pack that you can use for free for your personal or commercial projects. You can use these textures for your website backgrounds, twitter backgrounds, wallpapers and so on. You may not however resell or redistribute the contents of this download in part or whole,  without my permission. The zip file contains 15 textures sized at 2000×1300 px, and you can see below previews to each texture included. These textures are made from scratch in Photoshop and I also plan to publish a tutorial to show you how I made them. Interested? :)

Prewiew:

Download:

Rollip.com has developed a new site that gives any digital photo a new look and feel by offering 40 filters ranging from 70’s vintage to more modern ones. Extra effort has been put into giving users a selection of high-quality filters and while Rollip is free for smaller images, they do offer additional high-quality processing. Rollip features a clean light interface where you can choose your effect and apply it to your image for free. You don’t need any software for this and you can change your image look and feel in seconds.

Below you can see some of the effects that you can find at Rollip.com:

and this is what I did with Rollip:

Rollip offered to 15 of our readers Pro accounts with 30 credits each (worth $5.98 per account).

How can you get your Free Pro Rollip account?

• Follow me on twitter and fan me on facebook (optional)
• Go to this page, sign up with your email and get your Free Pro Rollip Account.

The free Pro accounts are distributed on a first-come first-served basis so hurry up and grab yours.

One of my latest work is a website layout for TobosariCrestini.ro (Christian Drummers). They needed a new layout for their website and you can see below what I came out with. The guys with the coding are currently working to convert the theme to drupal so the new website I think will be online at the beginning of 2010. You can see below the HOME page and the layout for a full post (threaded comments, about the author section, share on social media module etc.). Click on the images to see all the details. Feedback much appreciated! :)

One of my latest works is a design for the romanian band The Marker. They became really popular in Romania after winning the Global Battle of the Bands and got an award at Cerbul de Aur. My work consist basically in creating the background and some photo retouching. I made more versions, but I’m gonna show you just this one as a teaser for the new The Marker website, which will be online soon.

I made these posters for a play that will take place here in Cluj-Napoca. The play is directed by Sorin Misiriantu. He wanted something feminine and sensual and I came up with these. Which one do you like most?

I am amazed by James White’s art and I created a wallpaper inspired by his works. You can see a preview below, and HERE you can download a zip archive that includes various resolutions . Sharing and retweets are much appreciated. The following resolutions are included:

• 1920×1200
• 1680×1050
• 1600×1200
• 1440×1900
• 320×480 (iPhone)

Hope you’ll enjoy it! :)

click for larger preview:

If you enjoyed this post, please share it using the toolbar at the bottom of the page and follow me on twitter @colourofair and facebook for design news and free resources.

I want to showcase below the best T-Shirt designs i’ve seen on various tee design sites. Not all of the tees below are available for sale, some of them are just submissions to contests over various T-Shirt printing sites and some of them are out of stock. Check them out and tell us which ones are your favourites by leaving a comment. You will also find at the end of this post some links to T-shirt design resources. Enjoy!

I. Splatter, watercolor & vector tee design.

1. colorblind

2. Tawdry Hepburn

3. Booyah!

4. Tears Fall Upon

5. Bold is Beautiful

6. Agent Skully

7. Iron Fist – Life at Sea

8. Quicksilver

9. Music in my Head

10. When Panda’s Attack

11. My City Song

12. Gather Ye Rosebuds

13. Mountain Attack

14. Beauty Before Death

15. Coexistence

16. Long journey

17. Kill Monotony

18. The Dark Side of the Mystery

19. SOS strawberry flavour

20. .:FIERCE IDEOLOGY:.

21. Ekadanta

22. Goddess of Abduction

23. unity through art

24. Know Looking Back

25. The not so Saintly Sebastian

…and two of my t-shirt designs (not printed) submitted to designbyhumans. Maybe they don’t match with the blog post title but i’m gonna show them to you anyway :)

26. Mutatio Mentis

27. Seagull

II. Type Tee Design

28. Keep Reading

29. . . .and then I woke up.

30. 26 + 74 = One Hundred

31. lowercase

32. Math problem

33. Sans Serif (Black)

34. Ampersand Pattern

35. Huge Type Looks Sweet (White)

III. T-Shirt design resources & articles:

• Free vectors via GoMedia
• Free vectors via Designious
• How to Create Photorealistic T-shirt Mockups
• Huge Collection of T-Shirt Design Mockup Templates
• 600+ Photoshop Brushes: strokes, stains, splatters, spray, watercolor

If you enjoyed this post, please share it using the toolbar at the bottom of the page and follow me on twitter @colourofair and facebook for design news and free resources.

As the title says, in this tutorial i’m going to show you how to make a dramatic urban scene using an ordinary photo taken with a compact camera. (I used a similar tehnique when i made the wallpaper April in Transylvania for Smashing Magazine, you might want to check it out). You’re going to learn how to replace the sky, how to increase the dramatic feel by boosting the contrast and how to add a vignette effect.

You can see below what we are going to achieve:

and this is the original image that we are going to use:

Time: 45 minutes * Level: Beginner / Intermediate

What you need:

• Original Image (right-click, save link as)
• Sky Image
• Texture (optional)

Well let’s get started!

1. Download the original image and open it in Adobe Photoshop. As you can see the sky is pretty boring and we are going to replace it with one more cloudy to give the image a dramatic feel. To do that we need first to cut the sky out, so duplicate the background layer. Now you’ll have 2 layers with the same image: Background and Background copy. Now delete the first layer and change the other layer’s name from Background copy to Original. Now press P to choose the pen tool and make sure your that your paths option is selected (see below).

2. Now we are going to start to make a path along the building edges to separate them from the sky. Zoom in to be more precise and ignore the wires, we don’t need them (we won’t see them anyway in the final image). This is going to take some time but remember, patience is a virtue :)

3. Now after your path is done close it into a shape like the one below and then with your path selected, right-click, and choose make selection, and then press Backspace to remove the sky.

4. Now we need the image with the sky. Download it, open it in photoshop, copy and paste it into our project. (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, go to our project and press Ctrl+V). Now we have a new layer that we are going to name “clouds”. Drag it below the “Original” layer. Make it bigger if you need to, so it would be visible just the sky and not the green field. (press M, then right click free transform, drag one of the corners holding shift to re dimension it proportionally, then hit enter).  Press V to select the Move tool and then drag the cloud layer and position it so the best part of the sky would be visible. You should have something like this:

5. Now you have 2 layers, the first shoud be “clouds” and on top of it the layer “original” with the street and buildings. Now we need to make them match visually, so desaturate both layers (image, adjustments, desaturate or press Shift+Ctrl+U). Now we’re going to change the contrast and the brightness (image -> adjustments -> brightness/contrast) to both layers so choose these values for the layer with the buildings:

and the following values for the clouds layer:

6. Now after we increased the contrast so much some edge imperfections could me more visible. If you zoom in and your cutout is not perfect, we’re going to do a little trick that I bet you didn’t know about:). As you can see below my cutout is not perfect either, there is a thin white line at the edges that doesn’t look good, so we can automatically cut the building edges with 1 px (or 2 if needed).

Right click on the layer with the buildings and click select pixels.

Now go to Select -> Modify -> Contract and contract by 1 pixels and hit OK:

Now we need to inverse the selection so hit Shift+Ctrl+I to do that. Now we have selected just the 1 pixel thin edge that we want to get rid off. So hit backspace do delete it. If you still have unwanted white edges you can repeat the operation.

7. In this step we are going to add a vignette effect to the image so make an eliptical selection choosing the eliptical marquee tool and with the maximum feather which is 250 px:

Make a selection like the one below and then invert it (Shift+Ctrl+I)

Create a new layer and go to Edit -> Fill choose Black and hit OK. Name this new layer “vignette”.  If you feel that the vignette effect is too strong you can reduce the opacity of the layer.

8. Now we are going to colorize the image a little bit so make a new layer and set its blending mode to color, and name the layer “color”. Go to your foreground color and set it to #4a3900 and hit OK. Press G to select the Paint Bucket Tool and then make a click on the surface of the image to fill it with the foreground color. Reduce the opacity of the color layer to 67% (or other value if you want the color stronger, or more desaturated) Your layers should look like this:

and your image like this:

If you’re not satisfied with this color you can go to image -> adjustments -> hue and saturation and change the hue values and make it blueish, purpleish or whatever color you want.

9. Now if you want you can texturize the image a little bit by placing this texture, on our image. Open the texture in photoshop and copy it in our project, pressing Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (the same as you did with the cloud image). Right-click -> Free Transform -> Right-click again and choose rotate 90 degrees CCW so the darker side would be up. Change the blending mode to multiply. Drag the corners and transform the texture until the edges of our project, or you can make it even bigger and move it so you can choose the zone of the texture that you like more. Now go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness and Contrast and increase the brightness and the contrast of the image until you’re satisfied with the effect. I used these values:

This should be your final result:

10. We’re done with the image now and you can use it for a wallpaper for instance. Just place it on a 1920 × 1200 new document to have a widescreen wallpaper like this one:

That’s it, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. You can download the Hi Res PSD clicking the link below:

If you enjoyed this post, please share it using the toolbar at the bottom of the page and follow me on twitter @colourofair and facebook for design news and free resources.

I got interviewed few days ago by tony from LOOKS.GD (a great design blog with news and resources for designers). I had a great time sharing how I got into design and things that inspire me, so if you want to know more about myself than you can read on the about page, please read the interview. Thanks again Tony for giving me this great oportunity!

I’ve set up a facebook page for davidg.ro, so if you’re int0 facebook and you want to be updated with the best design news, resources and tutorials that will help you develop your work, just follow me becoming a fan. You can also Become a Fan and check the latest updates from my facebook page, here, using the bottom bar clicking on Fan Page. If you prefer twitter you can follow me @colourofair.