We all know that bad things happen when designers try to program, and equally bad things happen when programmers try to design – assuming you’re not one of the handful of people who actually can wear both hats with some success.

Icon Search Engines

There are several free icon search engines that can quickly help you find the icons you’re looking for so you can spend more time developing your kickass software and less time trying to find the perfect icon to use in your user interface. These icon search engines allow you to narrow your search results by specific size, which is great if you’re trying to find a set of various icons that look similar and will all fit within your design specs.

The first two in this list are the first places I go to find a specific icon for a user interface.

IconFinder

Search through over 120,000 icons and many icon sets, lets you filter search results dynamically based on the sizes you need, and you can filter by license and background color. They almost always have a png and an ico version available. This search engine is my favorite because it has the most options, and very high quality images.

IconLook

They don’t mention how big their database of files are, but they also let you filter your search results on icon size. They do not allow you to filter by file type, and often do not have multiple formats available.

Iconlet

No mention of how many files they have, and image results tend to be lower quality, but they do have a lot of very small icon images, if that’s what you’re looking for. No ability to filter results on the fly, but the advanced search gives you more options for file type and image size, and they do have a handy search plugin. www.iconlet.com

VeryIcon

Search a database of over 20,000 icons in ico and png format. Their database is smaller than IconFinder, but they seem to have more specialized icons easily discoverable, for example, their World Places set featuring the Eiffel tower, or aquatic set complete with scuba diver icon. These are likely meant for desktop icons, but could be easily adapted. www.veryicon.com

Large Icon Collections

These don’t offer search, or when they do, it’s unimpressive at best, but their variety in specialized collections is worth a mention.

FreeIconsWeb

The search functionality on this site is less than awesome, but their sets are well organized, so if you’re looking for themed icons, this might be worth your time. It’s a bit of a clunky site, but they do have some nice icons. It wouldn’t be my go-to for standard web icons, but good to have as an option. www.freeiconsweb.com

VistaIcons

This is a nice collection of very slick, Vista style icons available in ico and png formats, organized by collection. www.vistaicons.com

I should mention that I’ve opted not to include many of the desktop icon sites – there are dozens, and many of them are great, but they often only offer ico versions of their images, and it can be a pain to convert many images just to use them in a UI.

Converting ICO to PNG

If you happen to find a desktop icon on a site that is only available in .ico format that you’d like to use online, there are online tools available that make it easy to convert from ico to png, and from png to ico (in case you want to use a snazzy png as your desktop icon). I’m sticking with online tools for this to avoid the Mac vs. PC vs. Linux issues

• ConvertIcon.Com – simple flash-based image converted (ico to png, png to ico)
• ConvertICO.Com – same deal, non-flash

DISCLAIMER: I cannot speak for the legitimacy of the licenses in these sites. I haven’t heard anything about them screwing over artists and stealing work they were not allowed to use in their databases or collections, but I obviously do not endorse any site that does that.

Where do you go for icons? Leave your secret sources in the comments.

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I have more IT geek friends than I have designer friends, and some of these geek friends are starting to dabble a little in design. Many are intimidated because they don’t know where to begin, or because the interface is so foreign to them, they don’t even know what tools are available. This post is for them – and anyone else who feels like they’re “not creative enough” to design anything worthwhile in Photoshop.

If you don’t believe me, the lead image in this article was composited entirely in Photoshop – and there’s even a tutorial to show you how it was done. You’re wrong, I’m right. Read on.

Every one of the tutorials in this list are perfect demonstrations of how easy it can be to come up with amazing designs without years of Photoshop know-how. Each one features a stunning end result, and step-by-step directions that show you exactly how to get there yourself. I promise you, you really can do more than you imagine in Photoshop. Yes, even you.

A quick note: I strongly, strongly recommend actually going through these tutorials step-by-step. At the end of the tutorial, your end result may not look exactly like theirs, but I bet you’ll be impressed at what you managed to pull off. Plus, you may find yourself inspired half-way through, and take your design in a totally different direction. You just won’t get nearly as much out of these if you don’t actually spend some time working them.

Website Design

Would you think you were pretty hot shit if you could whip out a design like these? Keep reading – you can, and you don’t have to be a design guru to do it.

1. Design Reviver

2. PSDTuts

3. PSDTuts

4. PSDTuts

5. PSDTuts

6. PSDTuts

1. Premium WordPress Theme Design Part 1 – The Photoshop Mock Up – This is my all-time favorite Photoshop tutorial, especially for creating website designs.  The author takes you through the the process starting with a blank canvas, and ending with a fantastically rich design. He even shows you where to get the stock art he used, so you really can follow the tutorial step-by-step. What’s particularly awesome about this tutorial is that once you’ve created the Photoshop file, the next parts in the series tell you exactly how to slice the images, code the CSS/XTHML, and convert it into a WordPress template! This is the first place I send any code geeks who want to learn how to design websites.

2. Create a Magic Night Themed Web Design from Scratch in Photoshop – Another fantastic step-by-step tutorial with links to download each of the images used. Incredibly detailed and easy to follow, even for novice Photoshoppers. This tutorial demonstrates how subtle color shading, text and light effects can create an ethereal design from a little stock art and elbow-grease.

3. How to Create a Grunge Web Design in Photoshop – Another fabulous artsy-grunge web design tutorial. This one goes into an incredible level of detail, and is an excellent start point for any Photoshop noob. Every nuance is clearly documented and explained to show you

4. How a Simple Layout Can Be Mixed ‘n’ Matched with Patterns, Photos and Backgrounds – If you’re more into straight lines and clean edges, and feel like the first two examples were a little froo-froo for your style, this tutorial is priceless. In nine simple steps, you learn how to transform a blank canvas into a tight, clean web design. An added bonus, they show you results from quite a few variations of color and images, to show you how just a few tiny tweaks can completely change the feel of the design.

5. Design a Cartoon Grunge Web site Layout – While this tutorial won’t show you how to make the actual cartoon that forms the focal point of the design, it shows you how to do just about everything else. This is a great tutorial that walks you through a fun, lighthearted design with a casual flair.

6. Photoshop Paper Texture from Scratch then Create a Grungy Web Design with it! – This tutorial has the same easy walk-through style as the others, plus it shows you how to create the textured paper background from scratch. What you end up with is a business-casual design with just the slightest hint of hip grunge.

Photo Composites & Effects

Think these photo manipulations are way too advanced for you? Think again! There were NO special filters used for these – everything you need is in Photoshop, and these tutorials walk you through it step by step!

1. Design Reviver

2. PSDTuts

3. PSDTuts

4. Abduzeedo

5. 10Steps

6. 10steps

7. 10steps

8. Anothera

9. 10steps

10. PSDtuts

11. DigitalArts

12. 10steps

13. DigitalArts

14. PSDlearning

15. PhotoshopLady

Additional Resources

If you liked these, be sure to hit the links below for more amazing (and amazingly easy) Photoshop tricks:

• 50+ Excellent Body Enhancement Photoshop Tutorials
• PSDTuts
• Photoshop Lady
• PSHero
• PSHero – Text in Stitches
• Painting in Photoshop
• Old Paper Layout

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Retouching dark photos is possible because the camera captures more information than your eyes can see, so even if something looks very dark, there is more information contained there that can be brought out using a series of filters and adjustments. Bear in mind that the end result will be much nicer if the photo can be resized to a smaller version. The tricks we’ll use here can get rid of some of the graininess, but it does so by reducing noise and effectively blurring the image slightly, so if your end result image is smaller than the original, you’ll end up with a nicer finished product. Depending on how dark the image is that you’re starting with, the end result may not be perfect, but it may work for your needs.

For this tutorial, we’ll use a photo taken at a recent concert. MC Frontalot, MC Lars, YTCracker and Devo Spice played at the Mexicali Blues Cafe in Teaneck, New Jersey on the evening of the United States presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama. (OUSTANDING show, by the way – go see them if you can, and bask in their awesomeness. Seriously. More photos of the show that are far better than the photo used in this article are available here.) Being political people, the musicians were kind enough to give us election updates every 10 minutes or so. In this shot, I’m looking over MC Frontalot’s shoulder, checking out the results map on CNN. However, it wasn’t a staged shot, and flash would have ruined it, so the shot came out too dark.

Original image

With a few tweaks, we can make this a usable photo. It was so dark to start with, its never going to be portfolio quality, but for pics that you can’t reshoot and would like to try to save, these techniques may help.

Getting There

The first place I start is either with IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > CURVES or IMAGE > ADJUSTMENT > LEVELS. In this case I started with levels. The three arrows you see on the bottom of the levels palette signify your shadow, midtones and highlights, left to right in that order. Most of the time, you’re going to want to move your midtones the most, and then finesse the levels with your shadow and highlights. This will bring up the light levels in the entire image, and then you can pull some of the shadows down again so it doesn’t look too washed out.

Adjusting with levels

As you can see, its still a little grainy, but there’s only so much we’ll be able to do to save this one. That said, I liked the shot, so I wanted to do what I could. This is a particularly severe example, so our end result isn’t amazing, but at least you can see what’s going on. When you’re starting with a less extreme example, your results will be much better.

After adjustting LEVELS

This looks pretty grainy, even at this smaller size – but the image I was working with was 2896×1936, so it was *really* grainy in the larger version. Here’s an “actual size” detail shot.

Grainy detail

Far from awesome, but its getting there – you can actually see my face now. We’re not going to be able to get too much more lightness in this one without making it even more grainy, so I’m going to stick with this level of exposure and work on smoothing out some of the noise.

The best way to accomplish this is going to be using the noise reduction filter, which basically blurs the pixels slightly and attempts to smooth out harsh variations in pixel colors.

Using FILTERS > NOISE > REDUCE NOISE, we’re able to blur out some of the grain and reduce the colors in the noise, making it less obvious. You’ll have to play with these settings to get it the way you want it – and you may even need to run the filter again to get the level you want – but bear in mind that the more you preserve sharpness and/or detail, the less effective this is going to be. This is where working with a larger image and resizing down is nice – the blurring becomes less obvious on a resized image.

Noise reduction settings

Because this is an extreme example that started off very dark, I ran the noise reduction filter again with the same settings.

Noise reduction filter applied twice

I then cropped the image, getting rid of some of the extra stuff along the sides, resized it and then hit it once more with the levels to bring out a teensy bit more of the shadow, which helps reduce the grain further.

So we went from a practically unusable photo:

Original image

To an image that won’t exactly end up in my photo portfolio, but at least you can see what’s happening:

Final result

Obviously, you’ll need to play with the settings on each of the filters to get the result you want – and hopefully you won’t be starting with an image that is basically pitch black, so your final product will be a little smoother.

If you’re stuck with an image that is particularly grainy, you can also try to get a little creative by using the texture to your advantage. By making the image black and white or sepia-toned, the grainy look can actually help the image, making it appear more aged. To convert an image to black and white or sepia, go to IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > BLACK & WHITE.

Use the Black and White filter to add sepia tones

Some variations:

Black and White

Sepia tint

And don’t forget to play around a little. I found that I liked the end result better when I ran the Black & White filter using the tint setting twice.

Sepia tint applied twice in a row

And that’s all there is to it. Have any tips of your own for saving a photo that’s just too dark? Be sure to share in the comments!

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While its certainly possible to do this on your own in Photoshop, this online conversion does such a nice job, I can’t imagine doing it manually. There’s nothing to download, and the conversion is free, so check it out!

Bakamatsu Koshashin Generator via [Lifehacker]

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Resize2Email:

This handy little app is lightweight and fast. The available options are pretty basic – you can upload an image to the server and crop, resize, and/or rotate the image. This website is so easy, I had recommended it to one of the editors at a newspaper I was working at, and he loved me for it. One nice option is that you can preset the size of the crop box – so if you know you need an image to be 300 pixels wide for a predefined image block, Resize2Email makes that a breeze. Although I have Photoshop (and several other graphic design packages) installed on all of my machines, I still use Resize2Email quite often because its fast and easy, and I can do what I needed to do using their website before Photoshop would even be done loading. (I have a lot of fonts. No, I mean a lot. Really.) Check it out at Resize2Email.Com!

Photoshop Express:

Before you get too excited, this is a pared down version of Photoshop – considerable pared down, but really, in a web app, that’s probably not a bad thing – and it still gives you 90% of the tools that anyone would need for mid-level photo corrections and manipulation. It allows cropping, lighting corrections, hue manipulation, and a ton more. Its definitely more feature-rich than Resize2Email, but it requires a sign-up, and its a flash application, so it can be a little slow on older machines. It also offers the ability to interface with your photos on Facebook, Flickr, and severak other online photo storage communities. Check it out at Photoshop.Com/express!

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