Author: James Qu

My name is James and I have been using Photoshop since version 5.0 (long time ago!). PSD Vault is my spare time hobby and I write majority of the Photoshop tutorials and articles here. I hope you enjoy my blog, and feel free to leave a comment or contact me if you have any questions.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to design a Modern Glossy Navigation Bar in Photoshop. This is a beginner tutorial with a just few simple steps, aiming to help beginner web designer for making their first-ever web page.

Skills involved in this tutorials are selection tools, layer blending options, and some simple gradiant filling techniques. Have a go!

Read More

In this tutorial, I am going to show you the steps I took to create this awesome starry text effect in Photoshop. The inspiration of this text effect comes from the EA game “Dead Space”.

Together we will practice some brush techniques, layer blending options, selection techniques and applying filter effects.

Read More

Welcome to Part III of the “Seeking Inspiration” series on PSD Vault! In this part, we focus on looking at some fantastic Abstract Designs.

In my opinion, abstract design is a wonderful way of expressing your creativity and maximise it to the extreme. They are meaningless, yet can be so meaningful if you could somehow inject your own thoughts and imagination into them.

Read More

In this tutorial, I will show you the processses involved in transforming an average photo into a mysterious dark portal to the underworld scene, inspired by the famous Playstation hack-and-slash game Devil May Cry.

The techniques used in this tutorial include layer blending styles, various image adjustment tools, filters and some basic selection techniques. The steps are very simple and straight-forward. Give it a go!

Read More

In this tutorial, I will show you a very simple way to achieve this cool crystal text effect in Photoshop. I accidentally discover this method when I was playing with the layer blending options and I decide to share this with you guys..

This is a short and simple tutorial and you should have no trouble doing it :). Have a try!

Read More

Welcome to the second part of “Seeking Inspiration” on PSD Vault. This time we take a look at those design works containing a reletively dark theme. Although the dark colour/theme can be a little depressive sometimes, they can always offer a mysterious and gloomy atmosphere.

I Hope you enjoy this post and let me know what you think of them :)

Read More

In this tutorial, I will show how easy it is to adjust lightness for your photos by using the LAB Mode in Photoshop. You can apply this tutorial to any photo you like.

We will also explore the use of layer blending options, hue/saturation tool and various filters in Photoshop.

Read More

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate the processes I used to create this Crispy-Crust text effect with flower texture in Photoshop, inspired by Pizzahut’s thin’n crispy pizza base!

From this tutorial, together we can explore the power of blending style options, brush tools, image adjustment tools such as curve and hue tools, and some selection techniques in Photoshop.

Read More

Welcome to the first volume of the “Seeking Inspiration” series! This series is aimed to provide inspirational contents in terms of graphic and web design, and to give you a boost for your creativity. This series will be divided into parts and each part will focus on a specific topic from the graphic/web design field.

Read More

In this tutorial, I will show you the procedures I took to create an Ocean-feeling text effect in Photoshop, which is inspired by one of the ocean photos my aunt showed me from Mykonos, Greece.

We will be exploring some layer blending options, various tools and filters. I will also show you the way I use to add extra lighting contrast to the image.

Read More

This tutorial shows the path I took to create this Diablo III Inspired Grunge Text Effect.

I was looking for some design inspirations on the net and I bumped into the Diablo III website. I was intrigued by the design of the title text and I thought: what happen if I add something extra to it? What will the end result like if I apply a cracked texture on top of the text?

The story begins…

Read More