Installing brushes is extremely easy to do, but keeping them all organized is another thing. In short were just gonna show you how to load up or install the brush you have. We’ll talk about organizing your stuff later. So on to installing our Photoshop Brushes.

Note: We’re gonna start, assuming we have downloaded or bought our desired photoshop brushes on our favorite photoshop online store where you can download your mix of professional and artistic photoshop brushes.

Now that we have our brushes, we need to move the .ABR files into the Presets>Brushes folder of
the directory where you installed your Adobe Photoshop in but it’s usually in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Brushes.

Note: Just in case you have downloaded a huge mix of photoshop brushes on a zip file, you must first extract them with your preferred zip software. If you don’t have one you can download the Free Trial – WinZip 12 Standard
or get theFREE 7ZIP utility.

Now you have installed your photoshop brushes succesfully! You can now run your Adobe Photoshop and it will automatically load up your brushes. Pretty easy.

But what if you were in the middle of working on the project, and you always find it troublesome to move the brush files on the brushes folder and restarting your Adobe Photoshop just to load a silly brush?

This is a frequent case, where it’s not convenient to close and open again your photoshop application. Don’t know how? We can always use the Load Preset Button to open a specific brush preset anywhere on your hard drive.

So to do this:

First, select the brush tool from the tool bar. And this will activate the various brush tools.

On the Brush options select the drop down menu

From there select the Load Preset button (the arrow and circle) and then select “Load Brushes…”

Then target the location where your brush files .ABR have been downloaded. And then choose whether you append or replace the currently loaded brushes.

Pretty much basic.

So for more tips and advice on photoshop, just please stay tuned on our photoshopbag.com blog cause from time to time we will be giving awesome tips and techniques, even effects to further improve your skills on Adobe Photoshop.

Today were going to make this glowing Christmas Tree Greeting Card

So lets get this thing started..

1. First set your background to whatever color you like.. i choose red on mine..#a72218.

2. Then set the Gradient Tool(G) to White to Transparent and set the Gradient setting to Radial then apply the White Gradient on top of the Red Layer Background.. I did this mine like this to add highlights on later..

and on the White Gradient Layer Blending options, change the settings to Overlay..

3. So now we start on making the Christmas Tree. Make a triangular shape on our canvass by using the Shape Tool(U), choose the Polygon Shape setting… and set the sides to three(3) to make the triangle

Also we wouldn’t want the bright shining star on top of our tree missing; So again using the Shape Tool(U) choose the Custom Shape icon and choose the black star shape.

Note: If by any chance that the star shape is not on the shape selection, you can easily load it up clicking on the load icon on shapes and the select SHAPE.

and place it on top of the triangle shape

4. So now we have a tree shape. Next we will now draw a wave like line using our Pen Tool(P), Just draw the line
just like so.

5. Now the fun and easiest part.. we will now use our Brush(B) to make the star effect on our tree. First we select our star shaped brush tip on the Brush Preset (F5) and then set the these following settings on the brush tip.

Note: If ever you can’t see the star brush tip for this effect, you can easily load it up by clicking on the side icon and choose the Assorted Brush to load up the star brush tip that we will need for our effect.

So we have our brush settings done, but before applying the brush on our canvass; we must hide the triangle shape we made earlier by clicking the hide layer on the Layers Panel and so we have this.

Then we create a new layer File>Layer>New>Layer and name it whatever you like for example brush star, I just named my New Layer Stroke. So choose again our Pen tool(P) to apply our effect, on the new layer, Right Click and choose stroke path.

And so we now have this new brush effect

6. Now that we have our starry Christmas Tree, we will now apply more effects to our tree to make it more stunning. First select your layer in which you have applied the star brush and then apply this Outer Glow Settings.

With the same process, we now select the star on top of the tree and apply this new settings.

After applying those settings, we now have this:

7. Now that we have our tree I just placed a rectangular box using our shape tool (U) to act as a card to hold our grettings. Tilted it a little using the Free Transform command Ctrl+T:

And then apply this setting on the rectangular shape.

note: on this settings, you can play around as much as you want to achive your desired outcome

8. Then give it your message.. using your Text Tool.. (T) and type your most touching message for your love ones..

Here’s our final product..

You can download the PSD File of the Glowing Christmas Tree Greeting Card Photoshop Tutorial here so you can study it further.

To learn more photoshop effects visit our photoshop tutorial page. You can watch our own free photo shop video tutorials that consists the most basic way of using your photoshop. Or avail our special offers of essential tutorial packages and download our mixed bag of photoshop video tutorials.

So what were doing today is the reflection technique photoshop tutorial.

This technique is usually applied side by side with the shining or glossy effect for web 2.0 designs, to enhance and make our graphic more realistic and stand out.

Lets now start learning how to make a nice reflection on our graphics.

1) First lets create a new blank white canvass for our tutorial. We can use any size of canvass for this one, but i have used the default web canvass (640×480). File>New>Preset>Web.

2) Now on our blank white canvass, were gonna type our text. You can write whatever you like, but we have used the “TUTORIAL” for this one and were gonna give it a color of #0B7AAE. By the way any color would do on the text, its just my favorite color is blue

3) Next on the layers panel, we select the text layer we previously made and then duplicate it. We go to Layer>Duplicate Layer. And after that we flip that layer vertically just go to Edit>Transform>Flip Vertical, and then nudge it just below the original text layer. Just like so:

4) After we have flipped and nudged our duplicated layer, we add a layer mask on the text we previously flipped vertically. Like so:

5) Now to make the effect, we will now use and set the gradient tool. So on the tool bar select the Gradient Tool(G). And make sure select the gradient settings to foreground to transparent, and the foreground color is black. and the gradient orientation to a linear one.

Now that were done on setting up our gradient, we now apply the gradient, on the flipped text layer with a layer mask. With our gradient tool, try to drag the cursor on an upward direction just like that:

Here’s what we got after we apply the gradient on the masked layer:

6)To finish off the effect, we just adjust the layer opacity of the text layer with the gradient mask, to make a more realistic reflection effect on our text.

After the opacity adjustment, this is what we got

For more cool tutorials, please keep in tune with our blog, or visit our photoshop tutorials page for more cool and premium online photoshop video tutorials.

Also, if you have any photoshop tutorial requests, please do tell us and we’ll see what we can do. Later

So how do you identify a web 2.0 design? There are few design considerations that are the most common
that we see on a web 2.0 design:

1)Simplicity

Web 2.0 design should be simple ,noise free, uncluttered, with little contents, more graphics and large fonts. Look at the screenshot below it will help you to imagine what is simplicity in design:

2)Centralized Contents

The contents of the page should be in the center of the page like the following samples, as you can see the contents are in the center of the page and the left and right space are filled with gradient background.

3)Backgrounds

The backgrounds in web 2.0 have several forms, either to be gradient colors or diagonal line pattern.

4)Reflections

One of the web 2.0 standards is to make some reflection on your images.

5)Round Corners

The new style in corners is to make the corners rounded, in contents boxes or in buttons.

6)Large Fonts

Use large and clear fonts in your web 2.0 design.

7)Bright Colors

Web 2.0 design usually have bright, strong, eye catching, and most of the time unnatural colors. Just like the example color gradients below.

And we think it’s about time to make that request, actually its the first time since we started this blog, that we used the suggestion of a reader. So for this tutorial we will be doing a shining text effect. In this tutorial we will be learning how photoshop brush can be used in variety of ways.

So lets gets this photoshop tutorial on the roll. We will be making this simple shining text effect:

Step 1: So starting off with the tutorial we will first setup our canvass, any size will do but i did mine 640X480 pixels. Now lets give it a background color#FFD456.

Step 2: Now we have our canvass set, we now make the text were gonna place the effect, so with our text Type Tool(T) we write anything on the canvass. So go on ahead and type anything you want on the canvass. I typed “SPARKLE & SHINE” on mine.

Note: In choosing the font for your effect, try to use a much wider or bold type font to fit this effect, but in any case you have chosen a slim typed of font it will do just fine.

We now apply this settings for our text to be more prettier. Just copy the settings below or adjust it to your liking:

Step 3: Now we move to the step where we setup our brush tip for the shining effect. But before that we must create a new transparent layer on our PSD file. So we go to File>Layer>New Layer (Ctrl+Shft+N) and we name this layer “Shine”.

Onto our brush tip setting, click on our Brush Tip template we choose “Crosshatch” 1 or 4.

Note:By the way “Crosshatch” brush tip is one of the default brush tip for photoshop. If ever you don’t see the brush tip crosshatch, just click on the Load Brush button and select Assorted Brush and the click OK.

Step 4:Now we apply the Crosshatch brush to complete our Shining Effect on our text. Before we apply it though, we must make sure that we are using the White color for your brush. Moving on, select the “Shine” layer we just previously created and then apply the brush effect on selected parts of the text to make it look like its shining. Just like so:

Note: You can adjust the brush tip size to make variation with the shine size to make it more realistic. You can adjust the size by pressing the ([) to make it smaller and (]) to make it bigger. Or you can simply click on the brush tip and drag the Master Diameter to adjust the brush tip size.

Here’s the final artwork we have made:

There’s really many things you can do with photoshop brush from making the actual artwork, or even using it to enhance your design or logo. To learn more on how to use photoshop brush you can visit our photoshop tutorial page and watch our online videos. Also you can try and download our huge collection of artistic photoshop brushes, for more effects to choose from. Get it right our photoshop brush page and start making awesome effects.