Author: James Qu

James is a seasoned Photoshop expert with over 25 years of experience based in Australia. As the driving force behind PSD Vault, he authors the majority of its in-depth tutorials and insightful articles.

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this black and white, dreamy style sureal artwork in Photoshop. Have a try!

If you have been following my tutorials for a while, you will notice that I very rarely publish anything that is black and white – I love colours, but I think sometimes black and white style can produce effect that colour can’t – for example, a sense of dark and gloom.

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In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this surreal “Departing” Jump Scene with Cloud Warping in Photoshop. This is an intermediate tutorial so some steps can be tricky, but why not have a try! Along the way, you will learn how to bring out extra details from your photo via a few simple tweaks, plus how to warp the cloud generated by Photoshop filter so to best suit your image. Here is a preview of the final result I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge) PSDĀ Vault VIP Membership You can download the PSD…

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Recently I bumped into a great graphic desginer Tadeo Alexander Martinez Anguiano on Flickr and I personally think he has an amazing set of design works and great talent. I sought to have an interview with him, which he kindly agreed :)

In this post, I will share with you Tadeo’s answers to my interview questions, along with some of his fantastic works. Hopefully you will enjoy them and find them useful.

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In this tutorial, I will show the processes I took to create this cool-looking, ancient cracked sword in Photoshop. Personally I think the steps aren’t hard to follow and the end result looks good, Have a go :)

The technique I would like to emphasise in this tutorial is how you can use the cloud filter to add contrast to object, and the important of using the correct blending mode for layers to maximise the effect.

You will also see by choosing a great quality texture, you can easily add extra effect to your design with mimimum effort.

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When you first started with Photoshop, you might be overwhelmed by the amount of features and functionalities built for various graphic design tasks and basically don’t know where to begin. So what can we do to overcome this initial difficulty? Just like learning every other thing in life, we start with the easiest part.

In this post, I will provide 5 Simple, Yet Useful Photoshop “How-to”s for Absolute Beginners. Take a look and hopefully you will see after all, Photoshop is not that hard to start with!

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In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this really cool, Mystical Golden Sphere in Photoshop. The steps are in fact pretty simple and the outcome looks great in my opinion, have a try :)

We will be using some drawing techniques, plus customer brushsets and filter effects along the way, plus I will show you a clever use of Photoshop brush to create special effect around the sphere.

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In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this really cool-looking, Splashing Ocean Text Effect with Lightning Background in Photoshop. Have a try :)

Along the way, we will be using lots of textures, image adjustments, blending options and various filters. The purpose is to show you how you can use multiple texture images and combine them to create dramatic effect.

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Previously I published a post named “5 Useful Little Photoshop Tricks to Add Extra Elegance For Your Design” and it turns out to be quite a popular tutorial here. (Had about 35,000 hits so far). So I guess you guys (especially Photoshop beginners) would probably like another similar post. So here we go :)

In this post, I will show you yet another 5 Interesting Little Photoshop Tricks to Add Extra Elegance to Your Design. These techniques are just little things that I found useful in Photoshop, and I think they’re quite beneficial to learn if you’re a PS beginner. So go ahead and have a try!

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