Author: James Qu

Not sure whether you’ve heard of desktopography.net? If not, head over them and take a look – In my opinion, they have some of the most creative, high-end photo manipluation works you will ever see on the net. Although their collection is reletively small, the quality is absolutely top-class. Ipersonally visit them everyday and every time I can discover something new, especially when I need motivation and inspirational.

In this post, I will show you 20 awesome photo manipulative wallpapar from desktopography.net, hopefully you will enjoy them as much as I did and find them inspirational.

In this tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to design this very eye-catching, Laser Particle abstract effect in Photoshop. This is a beginner level tutorial and steps are really simple, have a try!

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!

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.

A while ago I bumped into the website of Clark Little and saw a set of his stunning Ocean Wave Photographs. I was really amazed by those photos and thought I would start a series here on PSD Vault – focusing on the collection of beautiful and dramatic nature-themed photos. Although this series is not directly link to Photoshop but I do hope you will find insipartion and design ideas from them. After all, nature is something we all treasure.

In the first volume of this series, I put together a collection of 25 spectacular ocean Photographs. Hope you enjoy them and find them inspirational :)

Welcome to the 17th volume of “Creativity Fine-Tuning: Best of PSD Vault Flickr Group”, which is a showcase I run regularly here on psdvault.com featuring some fantastic, highly-creative design works in the PSD Vault Flickr Group.

Hope you enjoy those works as much as I did and find them inspirational! Meanwhile, if you have some cool designs and would like to share them here, you can simply join the PSD Vault Flickr group.

In terms of Icon design, people may think of Illustrator (or any other vector-oriented software) much more often that Photoshop. However, what happen if you just want to make some icons and the only tool you have is Photoshop?

Here I collected 11 Ultra Delicious Icon Design Tutorials Done in Photoshop to show you how you can create great icons with the drawing facilities available in Photoshop. If you haven’t already seen them, take a look! You might be surprised to see how Photoshop can do :)

In this post, I will showcase you 22 (Perhaps) the Most Unbelievable Human Photo Manipulation Artworks to boost your inspiration. Those works are mixed with surreal, or even bizarre concepts, and the techniques used in those artworks are simply top-class – that’s why I call them unbelievable.

I personally think you will lots of creativity in those works and hopefully they can give you tons of inspiration for your next design.

Please remember, if you like those works, click on them and drop a comment or two to support those great artist, they deserve it :)

Textures are something every Photoshopper loves – great texture mean great design outcome. Plus you can combine different image adjustment tool to those textures to create unique, eye-catching effect.

In this post, I will share my collection 80+ of High Quality Free Variety Texture (Packs) for Your Next Design. Those are excellent textures I collected in the past and I personally think they’re absolutely great. The texture packs range from abstract, natural, metal to grunge. Hope you enjoy them :)

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.

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!

I love space artworks – mainly because there is alway certain degree of mystery in them. After all, that’s a place far beyond our reach and most of us will never get to experience the real space.

Photoshop, on the other hand, give us the freedom to put our imagination into some sort of “reality”. By using Photoshop, we’re able to transform our thoughts about how space would look into digital artworks. And also we can combine different types of space element into our design and create surreal, fantasy effect with them.

In this post, I put in 100+ Brilliant Space Photoshop Brushes to Beautify Your Design + 6 Amazing Space Artworks to Inspire You as a designer. Hopefully you will find them useful and give you some inspiration towards your design.

Here goes the list, enjoy!

Welcome to the 17th volume of “Creativity Fine-Tuning: Best of PSD Vault Flickr Group”, which is a showcase I run regularly here on psdvault.com featuring some fantastic, highly-creative design works in the PSD Vault Flickr Group.

Hope you enjoy those works as much as I did and find them inspirational! Meanwhile, if you have some cool designs and would like to share them here, you can simply join the PSD Vault Flickr group.

In this post, I will show 25 Beautiful, Absolutely Magical Traditional Art Fantasy Drawings as a source of your inspiration. Some of them are done in watercolor and some of them are pencil drawing. Nonetheless they look amazing! Hope you enjoy them!

In this tutorial, I will show the steps I took to create this Grungy Style Artwork, Mixing with Great Lighting and Shattered Effect in Photoshop. This is an intermediate level tutorial and some steps can be tricky, but why not just have a try :)

We’re are almost into the year of 2010! In this post, I will showcase my collection of 25 Absolutely Beautiful Artworks Featuring Year 2010, hopefully they will inspire you and give a boost to your new year spirit!

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this really great looking, space-themed “Unleash Your Creativity” Artwork in Photoshop. Have a try!

The point I would like to address in this tutorial is how we can achieve great lighting effect by simply mixing custom brushset and various Photoshop filters, plus we will be exploring different layer blending effects and the use of Pen Tool to create abstract lines. I will also show you how to quickly render realistic star field effect in Photoshop.

In this post, I will share with you 25 really cool, high-res abstract style Photoshop brush sets I have in my bookmarks for your next design project. Hope you like them and find them useful :)

Personally I love those abstract style brushset because I found them quite useful when you want to add a bit of finishing touches to spice up the image. Mixing them with colors and filters, you can produce very nice effects for your image.

Here goes the list, enjoy!