This is a fairly long tutorial. But, there’s a reason for that. I’d seen several other tutorials out there on Embroidered text, and they just weren’t as detailed or realistic as I would have liked to see them. So, I created this one. With it, you should be able to create some fairly realistic “embroidery” in Photoshop.

A healthy knowledge of web design can help greatly when you are deciding on which web site design you are going to go with for your site; a good web design firm can help make you one if you don’t know enough about web page design to make your own.

While this tutorial should be followable by beginners, to get the full effects from it (knowing how to “play around” with the different settings that I suggest in the end to get your desired effect, for instance), you should know some of the basics of Photoshop. Like, what multiply does versus screen, etc. Even if you’re a beginner, however, you should be able to follow my more precise instructions and get a good result.If you have ANY questions, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments. I will answer them. With this tutorial being as long and in depth as it is, I want to be sure it’s understood! Enjoy.

(The brush set that I use to create the lines can be found here: http://www.obsidiandawn.com/brushes/sets/micro-patterns-brushes.php )

  View the Tutorial Now! 

This was a request from a donator! I’ve still got a couple more of those that I’m working on, and hope to get one or two more of them out in the next week or so, before my sinus surgery.

There are cheap spectacles available online for those who wish to save money, and for those buying eye glasses on a looser budget they may also want to consider designer glasses as an alternative.

This brush set is made up of tons of different kinds of bottles, including those with a cork, spout, or stopper in them, decanters, a milk bottle, apothecary bottles, perfume bottles (some with and some without an atomizer), medicine bottles & droppers, vases, a cruet, etc.

There are 32 brushes total - some clear bottles, some cut glass bottles, and some colored glass bottles.

Enjoy!

 

Go Now to the Downloads Page

**** (BTW - I changed the name of my RSS feed so it wasn’t so damn long. I switched it on Feedburner, too, so it may automatically redirect any of you that had already subscribed to it - but it hasn’t done it for me yet… so you may need to re-subscribe to the RSS feed, those few of you that already did. Sorry for the inconvenience!) ****

I’ve had a few people ask me lately “Do you have any of your brush sets available in larger sizes?” Unfortunately, the answer to that is pretty much “No.” When I make these, I make the original size somewhere around 500 X 500 pixels in most cases, because most people don’t need them to be much larger than that. If I made them much bigger, the file sizes would start to get really huge.

I do have a few higher resolution sets, where the brush sizes are more like 1000 X 1000 pixels. But, once I finish a set, I don’t keep any original images that I used to make that set, so the sizes are pretty much what they are.

Keep in mind, though, that these ARE Photoshop brushes. I mean, just because the original size is 400 X 400 pixels doesn’t mean that’s the largest it can be used. You can make the brush size a decent amount larger right there in Photoshop, without getting much blurring.

So, what if you can’t? Is there a way to make a particular brush larger and still keep it very crisp and sharp? Yes! In fact, this doesn’t apply to just brushes. It applies to any “shape” that you want, really, provided that it’s not something terribly complex. It won’t work very well for your basic photograph, for example. But, it’s great for a design like I use below.

Please keep in mind that this tutorial is written with Photoshop CS2 specifically in mind. It makes use of “Smart Sharpen,” which isn’t available in any previous version of Photoshop. I don’t THINK it’s available in any versions of Photoshop Elements, but I may be wrong. (And if I am, please correct me in the comments so that I can fix this!) You can try the tutorial using any of them, but the quality of the ending image just won’t be the same. None of the other sharpen tools really come close to what Smart Sharpen is able to do.

You can follow along with the tutorial using the same image that I used. Download the image here.

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This tutorial is great for brush sets with images in them. Like, the Flames & Fire brush set, for example. Flames aren’t all orange. They have some oranges, yellows, and reds in them at varying stages of “hotness.” You could use this tutorial to add those colors!

This technique is the single most important skill that I developped that helps me to make brushes look more “real” - almost like images that you can control the colors of. Whenever people ask me how I’ve managed to make the brushes look so great and full of different colors in the preview images, THIS is the technique that I used.

Feedback on the tutorial is very welcome!

View the Tutorial Now!

 

It’s almost that time again! I absolutely love Christmas. All holidays, really… I love an entire season devoted to “jollyness” and giving and family. I haven’t started my shopping yet, but I can usually get that all done pretty quickly. Need to get some pretty soon, though, so that I can mail them out to get there in time! Tomorrow will be our first “Christmas Shopping” day. That’s half the fun for me, really, picking out presents. Seems like everyone veers more and more toward gift certificates each year, and while they’re a really good idea for a gift (heck, I love em), I really like to get something more personal at Christmas if I can. So we’ll see what I can find.

Keep your
Christmas decor in mind when planning the festivities.

Finally finished up the Holiday Brushes set! It has both Christmas and Hanukkah elements in it. Click on the image/text below to go to the downloads/info page on my site!

  On a sidenote, regarding that whole LASIK vs ICL decision that I had to make… I’ve decided to go with ICL. After a WHOLE LOT of research, it seems like a better option for me. ICL is basically a lens that goes inside your eye, just on top of your cornea. LASIK, as most know, is a laser surgery that actually alters/cuts away your cornea to make it shaped correctly in order for your vision to be “corrected”. Now, for me, “corrected” had a decent chance of not being 20/20. Because I am -8 and -8.75 in my eyes, I wouldn’t necessarily have enough of my cornea left to go in for a second “enhancement” LASIK operation, if the first one didn’t get me all the way to 20/20. If I was even -7 instead of -8, I would have had much better chances with LASIK.

Originally, I was thinking that it made more sense to actually “fix” my eye with LASIK then to put in a lens that was “temporary”, since the ICL lens has to come out when you get cataracts. But here’s the thing: if I get cataracts, I will very likely have surgery to remove them anyway. Regardless of whether I had LASIK or ICL. This way, they can take out the ICL lens, fix the cataracts, and then put in the new lens that’s a part of the cataract surgery. So, LASIK and ICL should theoretically last the same amount of time for me.

Also, I’m really coming to like the thought that this is both reversible AND isn’t cutting away at part of my eye (the cornea).

If some “miracle” procedure comes out 5 years from now, and I decide I want to get it, I could get the ICL lens taken out and have the “miracle” procedure done, no problem. If I had LASIK, there’s a chance that I wouldn’t be eligible for this “miracle” procedure simply because my eyes had been “messed with” and part of my cornea was gone.

The risks for both procedures are very similar. LASIK had some that ICL didn’t, and vice versa. For those of you interested in learning more about ICL and what I’ll be having done, check out this website:http://www.visianinfo.com/index.html

There’s videos there that show exactly how the procedure is done, as well as testimonials from some people. The ONLY downside for me about ICL is that it’s a relatively new procedure, and it costs more than LASIK does. But, if I’m going to get this done, I’m not going to choose the cheaper procedure when it’s not as good for me. I mean, these are my EYES. ICL was only approved by the FDA 1 year ago, although it’s been done in various parts of the globe for about 15 years. I will be the very first procedure done at this particular clinic in Dothan, AL… but the doctor doing it has done the surgery before elsewhere. The procedure is also VERY similar to cataract surgery, and my doctor apparently does about 20 of those a day!

It took me several months to switch from being gung-ho about LASIK to realizing that ICL is the better alternative for me. I did a lot of research, but what finally made up my mind was having several people tell me that I would be much more likely to have better vision afterwards with ICL. Even if I was seeing 20/40 with LASIK, and I could read those numbers on the chart, that doesn’t mean that it’s a “crisp” 20/40. With ICL, I can reasonably expect to see 20/20, and I can reasonably expect it to be a crisp 20/20. There were other little things that influenced it, too, but that was the bottom line. I mean, after all, why else am I getting this surgery if not so that I don’t have to wear glasses anymore and to have perfect vision without them?

I’ll be having the surgery done sometime in January, if all goes right. They want to find a second candidate and do two of the ICL operations around the same time period, so that’s all I’m waiting on… other than the fact that I wanted to wait until after the holidays to have it done.