Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

What do you need a blood splatter brush for? A game, an album cover, a poster? Whatever dark use you’re planning on, the dried blood splatters on photoshoptutorials may be just right. If you need some fresher blood, try Shad0w-GFX’s brush or circle–of–fire’s brush on deviantart.com. Be sure to check acceptable uses of any blood splatter brushes; some may be for personal use only, while others allow all uses, including commercial.

If you’ve been toying with the idea of creating iPhone apps and you’d like to get started with designing graphical user interface (GUI), or you’d like to get an overview of what kind of design elements it takes to design an iPhone app, check out MobileLove’s collection of iPhone design templates. The collection of iPhone stencils for wireframes, speech bubbles and high resolution vector elements makes it easy to get started and are a great inspiration to come up with your own designs.

If you have a large repetitive task at hand, or you find yourself doing the same type of editing over and over again, Photoshop Actions can be an amazing time saver. You can string together a series of tasks, like tool actions, menu commands and other editing features and record and save them as an action (Like Automator scripts on a Mac).

Photoshop comes with some actions already installed, or you can create your own actions to change the size of an image, apply filters and effects and then save your files in a specific format. Or click over to Visual Blast Magazine for a great collection of customized Photoshop Actions from around the web, like puzzle action, crystal ball, 3d cube and skin softening actions, postage stamp and vintage and curled edge actions.

If you’re looking for a free graphics manipulation software to download, try Gimp. It’s an excellent retouching program lets you fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt and eliminate lens’ barrel distortion and vignetting; it offers a clone and healing tool for retouching photos as well as a perspective clone tool and a orthogonal clone tool. But it can also be used as a simple paint program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP also offers various input devices out of the box, like pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP’s format capabilities with a plug-in.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Features are:

* Painting
o Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
o Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
o Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
o Supports custom brushes and patterns
* System
o Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
o Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
* Advanced Manipulation
o Full alpha channel support
o Layers and channels
o Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
o Editable text layers
o Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
o Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
o Foreground extraction tool
o Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
o Transformable paths, transformable selections.
o Quickmask to paint a selection.
* Extensible
o A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
o Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
o Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
o Over 100 plug-ins already available
* Animation
o Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
o MNG support
o Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
* File Handling
o File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
o Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
o SVG path import/export

Photoshop is a huge program and can be overwhelming at time. But learning little tips and tricks here and there will turn you into a Photoshop pro sooner or later! You can add to your repertoire of Photoshop tricks through the thousands of tutorials offered on Tutorialized. Learn photo effects from user submitted tutorials like the mad horror clown , or a fish eye effect. The site also offers links to tutorials on brushes, buttons, animations and more. Unfortunately the design of the site is pretty annoying, because each submitted tutorial is served through a frame, so prepare to scroll a lot…

Find beautifully done realistic paper and cover textures at DesiznTech. These textures are scanned from real papers, then edited in Photoshop for color balance and effect. You get old paper texture, notebook cover texture, grunge paper texture and even textures with an old gummy price sticker on it. The torn spiral bound papers, wrinkled and three hole punched ones are also very realistic and fun to work with.

For all textures click here.

GIMP is a great program and if you want to make it even greater, you can download some free GIMP brushes at Noupe. Some of these brushes are simply stunning and once you install them, you will be tempted to use them in every single design you make. (Photoshop Brushes are now Fully Compatible with Gimp 2.4 and up.)

Nobody denies that Adobe Photoshop is a great program but it’s pretty expensive. There are other graphics editing programs and one of them, the open source GIMP is sometimes called “Photoshop killer” because it is a real alternative to Photoshop.

24 high resolution Photoshop brushes free for personal and commercial use at webdesignerdepot.com.

Choose from lots of free Photoshop brushes and patterns at Brusheezy.com. Search by category and Photoshop version.