This has been an ongoing headache of mine – colour calibration – colour profiles – and how to avoid that annoying colour shift when you save your image for the web…

I was working on a design for Lawrence Griffiths (LookingForAWebsite) who is setting up a website for a primary school. As the school is set in trees – the design brief was to convey this feel, meaning lots of green tones and shades. All was going fine until I wanted to upload the mockups as optimised jpgs for preview and feedback. With my file setup as RGB, 8 Channel and the ‘convert to sRGB’ set in the ‘save for web’ window – I thought I was doing everything I needed to simply optimise my mockup.
But how wrong I was… again, I hit the odd colour shift problem – my carefully chosen green tones taking on a completely different shade as soon as I went into the ‘save for web’ window… :'( → continue reading…

Even though Photoshop does come with a good selection of default brushes – it is a lot of fun to create your own brushes and brush sets, as well as giving you more creative freedom. If you have never created your own brushes and think this might be complicated – don’t worry… It’s very easy – you might need a little time to experiment until you get the results you are after but the actual brush creation is quite simple.

You can understand a custom brush essentially as a black and white image which you can then use to ‘stamp’ your image with. Note that our custom brushes would not be used as the airbrush, for example, with which you would imitate the real tool and use via click and drag. A custom brush however would be applied by a single click – though clicking and dragging can at times produce some interesting results as well.

You can create a new brush from anything you have drawn or painted yourself – or you can use an image edited to suit. Once you start creating a lot of specific brushes you can then also save your own brush presets for easier use.
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One very effective look for images, regardless of whether you are preparing your graphic for print or for the web is changing the used colours to limited palette such as in using mono- or duotone images. Just to remind you – here is quick break down of the technique: → continue reading…