First, we have to chose a photo for our future work. I've picked one from sxc.hu and You can download it from this url http://www.sxc.hu/photo/891765 (You have to register first - it's FREE and realy worth of it). When You open Your photo in Photoshop make first step: Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate (Shift + Ctrl + U). That will be our base image (I'll resize it to 450x600 px for presentation - You may work with larger image if You want or just use this bellow if You don't want to register on sxc.hu).

Now we will add a Adjustment Layer called Levels. Hold Alt Key, and click on Adjustments Layer button on Layers Palette. Select Levels. Make Sure that Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask is sellected. Then just slide dark arrow a little right.

As You can see - image is a little darker now. Now we will draw some fire. Make New Layer, select soft brush of the size You will choise, and using dark orange colour (for example #993300) make a "dot". Next use a smaller size with lighter colour (like #ff9933) make another dot. Again, smaller size, lighter colour (for example #ffcc66), and last time, smaller size, lighter colour (#ffff66) and dot.

Now it's time for a little "magic". Use Smudge Tool (R). Pick small, soft size, and make "fire tongues". Just click somewhere inside our dot, click, hold and drag it up. After first move You will know what I'm meaning. Try untill You will be satisfied. Remember that You may change the Strenght parameter. You will use Alt + Ctrl + Z combination lot of times!

Now lets make this fire more realistic by adding some light on hands. Go to Quick Mask Mode (Q), select big, soft brush, and "draw" there, where You think that the light should appear.

Leave Quick Mask Mode (Q), You will see a sellection. We have to inverse it by Select -> Inverse (Shift + Ctrl + I). Select our Hands Layer, and holding the Alt key add another Adjustment Layer called Color Balance (Use Previous Layer... should be sellected)

Now select our Color Balance Adjustment Layer Mask, and using black soft brush "erase" some lights, and using white - add some lights until You will feel that it looks good.

Next thing will be smal sparks. We have to prepare brush for this operation.

With those settings draw some sparks over our fire (on New Layer). Lower the Opacity of this layer (in my case it is 64%). Use orange colour picked from our fireball (just improvise).

Change again to regular soft brush, use #ffffcc colour (or similar light yellow), select our fireball layer, and make a bright dot inside of it (just for better effect).



My final result:

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Step 1

Let's start from the beginning. Create new document (I used 960x1280px) and fill it with #909090. Now using Blending option apply Gradient Overlay for Layer 1. Reveal effects for this layer, click right mouse button on Gradient Overlay and select Create Layer. Now holding Alt key click between Layer 1 and Layer 1's Gradient Fill (cursor will change to padlock). Move Layer 1 on top, change blending mode for this layer to Overlay, lower Opacity to 75%, use Filter > Noise > Add Noise (Amount about 5,5) and then Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen twice. Change Layer 1's Gradient Fill name to "background gradient", and Layer 1 to "background shrapen", and place them in one group called "background".

Step 2

Now let's find a model which will wear our Water Dress. I found one on sxc.hu, You may see her here. Separate her from image using any method You want (I used Pent Tool (P) for contours, and Filter > Extract (Alt+Ctrl+X) for hairs) and place her on our document (Image bellow Is resized and I don't recommend to use it for further work - it's only example how it should to look). You may name this layer "Lady".

Step 3

Water Dress will look nice on natural body. Because I can't use nude pictures in public tutorial we need a little trick. Click on "Lady" layer holding Ctrl, and using Clone Stamp Tool (S) erase panties (It doesn't have to be photorealistic or perfect looking).

Tip: It's a good practice to create new layer over our "Lady" layer and with Sample All Layers setting checked paint on this new layer. This will save our oryginal image. I made this way, and named this layer "Lady panties mask".

Step 4

Now let's find a material for Water Dress. As You may think - we need a water splash photo. I found one on sxc.hu and You can get it from here. We only need a top part of this image (which by the way looks like a dress). Using Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) cut this part, and using Free Transform (Ctrl+T) place it like on image bellow. You may name layer with this splash as "dress" and place it in "water dress" group.

Tip: It doesn't have to fit perfect, we will match this later.

Step 5

Grab Magic Wand Tool (W), set Tolerance to 5 and delete blue background (select areas and hit Delete). After this there will be some blue dots, which You can erase using Eraser Tool (E).

Tip: If You use different splash image, You may have to use higher/lower Tolerance (depends on image) or even different selection method. Use Ctrl+Z as many times as You have to untill You will be satisfied.

Step 6

Change "dress" layer Blending Mode to Luminosity. Now use Filter > Liquify (Shift+Ctrl+X) to make this splash to look more natural as a dress. You have to use Forward Wrap Tool (W) to do this.

Step 7

Duplicate "dress" layer, set Blending Mode to Overlay and lower Opacity to 40%. Make sure, that You have "dress" layer active, and click on "Lady" layer holding Alt key to make a selection. Now using Burn Tool (O) paint on her legs behind water untill You will get nice effect. After You finish, You may deselect.

Tip: Try to experiment with Burn Tool (O) brush size and Exposure setting. If You are using different splash/lady images You may experiment with Opacity for "dress copy" layer too.

Step 8

It's almost finish. Select Sharpen Tool (R) and using different brush sizes paint on "dress" layer. After few clicks You will understand Why - water will start to look more ... sharpen.

Tip: Try to experiment with Sharpen Tool (R) brush size and Exposure setting. Don't paint over whole dress, just pick some places. Sharpening water drops will be nice idea too.

Final result

I have to say, that figuring how Gisele Bundchen Dons Water Dress was made was verry productive for me. I've learned some new things. When I started I even haven't got an idea how to do this. After 5 hours everything became simple. Ofcourse Gisele dress was made from thousands of great quality water images. Im my case, I had to use free stock photos. If You can get good quality water images You can make better dress than I've done (by the way - I wish You do something better).

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I recently came across this coooool teaser campaign being run by ‘PeppySophia’ watch out her slideshare ppts here : http://www.slideshare.net/peppysophia/slideshows. I think she’s doing a great job, two of her slides even got featured on the Slideshare Homepage. She’s claiming to launch a very unique portal soon & she’s hosting a Bloggers’ Contest for the same : http://peppysophia.wordpress.com/bloggers-contest/ I think there’s some big co. behind this campaign. I have started following her on twitter also http://twitter.com/peppysophia

Will update you if I get to know more about the Unique portal

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We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Magazeen — a free advanced Wordpress-theme in a magazine-llok created by the talented WeFunction Design Agency. This bold magazine 2-col-theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. It was created especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the theme for free!

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

• live demo
• large preview (.jpg, 1.7 Mb)
• download the theme (.zip, 0.3 Mb)
• download the PSD-sources (.zip, 4.5 Mb)
• release post on WeFunction.com

Inspiration behind the design

As usual, here are some insights from the designers themselves:

“We’ve created the Magazeen theme to try and pump as much style and functionality into a WordPress theme to give people something they might not expect from their standard Wordpress theme. There really is very few limits to what WordPress handle, so we’ve built in a lot of custom features and options to give people a little taste of what is possible, and how some small functionality tweaks can make a huge difference to the overall experience of browsing a blog. On top of that we’ve wrapped all that functionality up in a really cool and modern theme, with nice big title fonts, and a stylish colour scheme.

The Magazeen theme is packed full of cool features to really encourage your readers to explore new posts and similar items. The first thing you might notice is the jQuery image showcase at the top, which is fully automated and will display the image from the latest post, and the title above it without you having to do anything other than define the image URL in the custom field we have created which will appear on in your admin post area.

Drop-Down Menu

The other cool and fully automated feature is the related posts drop down effect. It’s a simple idea, if you click the category of the full posts a drop down will appear with some related posts from that category. And if you don’t see a post you like you can always view the full category by clicking view more.

Sidebar

The sidebar area’s have been created to give you a lot of control over the featured posts, and recent posts. Once you’ve installed the theme, you need to go to your Widgets area, and simply activate the “Magazeen Latest Posts”, and “Magazeen Featured Posts” widgets. You can easily control how many posts each feature displays, and using this widget will ensure the area is styled correctly with the post image showing correctly.”

Footer

Thank you, guys. We appreciate your great work, your attention to details and the brilliance of the execution.

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Since I helped open this particular can of worms, I feel responsible for sharing the latest news about an issue in which Adobe Systems' software opens Internet Explorer even when Chrome is set as the default browser.

I had a Twitter tirade in January after the umpteenth time that Lightroom showed me the location of a photo in Internet Explorer when I clicked the Lightroom's GPS photo location icon. Internet Explorer also showed when using Adobe Photoshop's browser-based help and when Lightroom launched my Flickr page after uploading images to the Yahoo Web site. The problems showed on my home machine with 64-bit Vista, but not my work Windows XP laptop.

Tom Hogarty, Lightroom's project manager, was sympathetic and brought the issue up with the company's engineers. They ultimately pointed the finger at Chrome, though, not at themselves. Lo and behold, the Chrome 2.0.164.0 update included this bug fix: "Fixed several problems with making Google Chrome the default browser on Windows Vista," according to Google.

But that fix is for the latest developer-preview version of Chrome--the fast-moving, relatively untested version that's not as reliable as the stable or beta versions Google also offers, which means most folks won't get it until the changes are better tested. Moreover, I installed the new version and still had the default-browser problem. Though I certainly wouldn't rule out some error or omission on my part, I decided to try the another fix suggested Thursday in an Adobe blog post by Jeffrey Tranberry: manually setting the default browser.

I eventually emerged victorious--but it took a lot of fiddling with Vista and a Chrome reinstallation.

Windows Vista offers multiple ways to set defaults. I had the best success with the topmost option.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Vista helpfully offers a "Default Programs" option from the start menu, but then makes it unclear where to perform the action; I tried "Set your default options," "Associate a file type or protocol with a program," and "Set program access and computer defaults."

I had more success with the more straightforward first option, but not without a detour in which Photoshop's help system wouldn't load in any browser at all, instead throwing an error message at me suggesting I reinstall the application.

All my efforts to set the default browser consfused Photoshop to the point where its browser-based help system wouldn't work at all. Reinstalling Chrome fixed the problem.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Instead, I reinstalled the stable version of Chrome and set it as the default during its installation process. That cleared up Photoshop's problems, and Lightroom now shows map links in Chrome as well.

The moral of this story: be careful assigning blame to one company or another for problems involving multiple applications and the operating system. Happily, I sidestepped that pothole in my irate tweet, but I confess that inwardly I thought Adobe the culprit since other programs seemed to have no trouble picking Chrome.

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Adobe Systems released an update to the flagship CS4 version of Photoshop to squelch a number of bugs that could crash or slow down the image-editing software.

The 11.0.1 update (downloads available for Windows and Mac OS X) deals with the following issues, according to Adobe:

• A number of issues that could cause slow performance have been addressed.

• Pen barrel rotation with Wacom tablets now works correctly.

• Photoshop now correctly recognizes 3D textures edited by a plug-in.

• The quality of the results of Auto-Blend Layers (Stack Images) has been improved.

• A problem that could result in a crash when pasting formatted text has been fixed.

• A crash that could result from a corrupt font no longer occurs.

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As a business-to-business marketing platform, Twitter has legs. Some 56% of Twitter users say they use the online social communication site for business-related purposes, according to Rodney Rumford, a social-media guru and CEO at Gravitational Media. This stat, based on a survey of 700 Twitter users, suggests the service's business value, alongside its emerging utility for consumer marketing.

"Twitter is a goldmine," Rumford raved, speaking at the inaugural Gravity Summit on Social Media at UCLA Wednesday. He added that a number of big consumer brands are already on the site, such as Starbucks, which currently boasts about 6 million members.

Rumford also noted that small businesses are using Twitter to advertise, citing the example of a gourmet Korean taco truck business in Los Angeles. Since its launch in November, it has built a following through Twitter. "The driver tweets where the truck will be 20 minutes ahead of time, and literally hundreds of people show up," one conference attendee confirmed.

Marketers can use Twitter actively or passively, Rumford says, either by reaching out with promotional messages or setting up a "listening engine" that lets them track consumer sentiment in public postings on the site. Any active marketing must be handled carefully to avoid alienating consumers with the appearance of dishonesty or inauthentic, impersonal messages. "It's not a campaign," he advises, "it's a conversation."

As with blogs, Rumford conceded that "people are going to be saying bad stuff about your brand, and that's OK." He says negative comments can be an opportunity for customer-service intervention.

Yet companies are still mishandling this kind of functionality, Rumford says. He cited Motrin's slow reaction to widespread criticism on Twitter about an ad featuring pregnant women that was seen as misogynist.

On the upside, Rumford said efforts to drive people to particular online destinations can be tracked and measured by Google Analytics. Google also crawls and indexes all the conversation streams on the site.

Justin Goldsborough, social-media manager for Sprint, said the company uses Twitter to track consumer sentiment and customer service. But Sprint also uses Twitter and a corporate blog to coordinate business-related activities, says Goldsborough, who noted the site's growing penetration in all areas of American business.

"Retail employees are on Twitter," prompting some concern among management, but Goldsborough pointed out that it can connect these workers more closely to both customers and bosses. He cited BestBuy, which has a communal blog and chat site used by thousands of employees.

Online social media can be a highly effective advertising medium, but there are some pitfalls that can seriously damage a brand, the speakers warned conference attendees. All the presenters stressed the importance of honesty and transparency in Web marketing that relies on word-of-mouth.

David Reis, the founder and CEO of DEI, an online word-of-mouth marketing company, recalled the condemnation heaped on Belkin, an electronics manufacturer, for paying users $0.65 per post to write favorable reviews of its products on Amazon.com. "Basically, it's a simple problem: They lied," Reis said, emphasizing that marketers should always be forthright about their identities and mission.

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Thousands of Twitter messages carrying the words “gmail” or “gfail” will teach you that Google’s free web-based e-mail platform is currently down around the world. A Google spokesperson told Pocket Lint that their engineers are working on it but have no clue why the errors are turning up.

Meanwhile, a Google representative posted this on a its help pages:

We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

(POP3 / IMAP seems to be still functioning, and the problem doesn’t appear to affect other Google Apps at this point)

I’m not buying the small subset part, and considering the fact that Pocket Lint says the problem started occuring around 10:20am GMT, 3 hours before even telling everyone what’s going on is an incredibly long timeframe in my opinion.

Update: Gmail is supposed to be coming back now, at least for some. But Google is also dealing with people posting adult content on Groups pages related to Gmail.

Update 2: there’s a status box on the Gmail Help homepage that says the outage started at 1:30 AM PST, which means the problems have been occurring for nearly 2 hours and a half at the time of this update. The message now reads that access has been restored without any indication of time.

Update 3: the problem appears to be solved for most users now, 3 hours after Google indicated that it was aware of the errors.

This comes a couple of weeks after the chaos when a reportedly human error caused Google’s search engine to erroneously flag the entire internet as malware. Curious to see what their response to this outage will be, as this is not the first time this has happened.

Good thing Gmail went offline with Google Gears some time ago.

Update 4: Google’s official statement was just blogged.

If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.

We’re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.

Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We’ll report back as we make progress.

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I’ve collected 15 sites where you can download Photoshop Design Files for free, as you know at sometimes these collection will become marvelous time saver, Mostly for the Photoshop Beginners free psd file helps a lot in learning process.

1.) Photoshop Files

2) Official PSD’s

3.) PS galaxy

4.) Designbum

5.) Free PSD

6.) devinatART

7.) PSD Frebee

8.) Download PSD

9.) Designers Reolution

10.) Lord of Design

11.) Pixey

12.) Psd Protocol

13.) For Designer

14.) Photoshop Candy

15.) TopTut Psd Category

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