15 October 2008

The Photoshop Compass

1818.


Another day past, another PSTUT down. This time, we created a rather spiffy looking compass, perfect for use as an icon in an application or just looking at and going oooh, preetty!:


The Photoshop Compass


That is really nifty, no? The real takeaway from this illustration is the ways one can make a 3D look from two-d shapes, gradients, and shading.


Note the shiny spots along the side of the compass. The first thing that was done was creating an ellipse and filling it with gray. Then, I copied this and moved that up. Using guides, I created a rectangle between the two ellpses, and filled that with a gradient. After putting in (and Gaussian-blurring out) more white for reflections, without actually creating a 3D shape, I had a 3D look.


Technically I implemented skills used in the other tutes ... including command-clicking layers to load them as selections, and rocked the blending modes. Shadows and layer effects are used liberally to give depth and reality, and the selections are moved this way and that based on the other layers to keep things in the right sizes.


All the instructions needed to produce this ... inlcuding a PNG of the compass dial ... are available at the tutorial site.


In our endless search for interesting tutes to keep our PS skills sharp, we've concluded that PSTUTS is a worthwhile stop.


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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

thank u r information

it very useful

Dale said...

Cool compass!

You've seen this photoshop contest, yes?

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/10/photoshop-conte.html

Samuel John Klein said...

@Matthew:

U welcome!

@Dale:

No, I haven't. But I was aware of Photohshop Phriday over at SomethingAwful.com, and of course the legendary field of battle at Fark.com.

Thank you for telling me about this.

Of course you have divined my purpose in running these tutes; eventual world domination. I will either have to kill you or offer you a position in my Evil Organization of Evil Geniuses (to be contrasted with my cow-orker's Evil Genius Organization, with which I will compete until we merge the two so I can retire a happy miser).

I will probably offer you a position. We, after all, will have in-office mani-pedis, spa days, retro video-games and Roth IRAs, whereas my competitor will only offer a Parcourse and a 401(k).

And we'll have macadamia nut-white chocolate chip cookies. Also a full dental and vision.