1 The Plus Project

As you may know we have some pretty big plans for these Tuts+ sites. While today they are humble little tutorial blogs, we’ve thought for some time that it would be cool to build an entire platform for education. We’re going to call that platform Plus. You’ll know Plus content as our premium content, but no longer.
Our premium content is now ‘Premium’ (go figure!) and Plus is the brand for the educational platform we’re building, which, just like Psdtuts+, will be completely free for the most part.

With Tuts+ well established now, we’ve finally begun work on the project! We’ve acquired the domain Plus.org which will be the home of the new platform (yay for our first four letter domain!) We’ve also brought over our resident code genius Ryan Allen (who built our ActiveDen platform all by himself back in 2006) to team up with Tuts+ developer extraordinaire Fred Wu and kick ass front-end guru Derek Herman. And Skellie and I have been busy spec’ing out the plans for the new site, and it’s pretty, damn cool if I do say so myself!

Right now the Tuts+ sites are fairly passive, but we’d like to get the whole community involved in writing, teaching, answering questions and generally learning. The new Plus.org platform promises to incorporate all that plus some nifty ideas we’ve taken from gaming to come together into a social education platform.

It’s going to take a long time and we’re going to roll it all out in pieces over the next 2 years. We’re super excited about it all, and I hope I’ll have more updates in the coming months!

2 Creative Sessions and Mobiletuts+

While Plus.org will take a long time, we do have some new goodies coming much sooner including Creative Sessions which is being built now, and also Mobiletuts+ which will be all about mobile development!

3 Server Update

About a week and a half ago we had some major problems with our servers. I’m happy to say that we’ve now completely resolved these issues by moving hosts and reengineering our hosting setup completely from scratch. The new setup is much quicker and has a much greater capacity for growth, so fingers crossed, that will be the last server outage for a long time to come!

4 The Redesign

The new theme has a few neat features you may want to check out including:

• Basix!
  While Tuts+ has always been known for intermediate to advanced level content, we’ve been thinking it’d be good to separate out tutorials and articles better suited to people just getting started. So we’ve created the Basix tag for quick browsing. You’ll find it in the top menu, and expect to see more Basix content soon as we beef up our library of novice-friendly content.
• Easy access to Videos, Tips and Premium Posts
  We’ve also started tagging videos, tips and Premium membership posts so that along with Basix content you can quickly find what you’re after. We’re generally going to be working to clean up our category/tagging across the network in the coming months to get it more standardized.
• Tutorial Details on Posts
  We’re also going to start standardizing all tutorials to have a "Tutorial Details" section at the top with difficulty and other pertinent details. Eventually we’ll get all the archives updated … but with over 2000 tutorials, that will take a while!
• Bigger, more readable content area
  We’ve expanded the site to be optimized for bigger 1280px wide screens, with a bit of JavaScript to resize for smaller resolutions. This has given us the space to clean up the content area to be a bit bigger and more readable generally.
• Latest Creattica content for inspiration
  We’ve also started porting over the latest Creattica content into our sidebars. There’s actually a redesign of Creattica coming in the next few weeks and we’ll be expanding the gallery to cover even more types of inspiration. The new sidebar widget will give even more exposure to those talented creatives on Creattica!
• General UI Improvements
  Most of the improvements on the new design are small, subtle improvements such as a reduction in the number of clicks needed to browse categories, a clearer search field, faster loading pages and generally cleaner, more optimized code.

One change that we have also made is to remove the community link feed. Over the years this was a great way to get exposure to community links, but unfortunately was also home to a lot of spam. So with this iteration we’ve left it behind.

Also at the moment sites with Flickr groups don’t have it showing, but don’t worry that’ll be back. There’s just a problem with our Flickr plugin at the moment!!

There are still some more tweaks to do to the new design and a lot of post formatting to do to get our archives matching up with the new theme. But for all intents and purposes the new theme is now alive and well! Enjoy!

It seems to all be resolved now, but I just wanted to make a quick apology for the inconvenience and interruptions. We’re going to be re-examining our hosting setup to make sure we avoid this situation in the future and to generally try to pull up the quality of service across the board.

In the meantime there may be some further minor interruptions as we shore up the setup. Thank you for your patience!

To avoid this situation, be sure to always credit your work with any influences, then we can determine accurately whether the proposed tutorial concept meets our site requirements prior to publication – learn more about creating content for Psdtuts+. Also, in general, avoid mimicking other artists work, especially closely mimicking one artists specific work. We’ll all be influenced to some degree, but the goal here is original artwork, and not recreating someone else’s art.

This Premium Tutorial is Filled with Creative Tips

Mythical creatures have been part of legend and folklore since the dawn of time. These imaginary creatures are often hybrids, or a combination of two or more animals such as a centaur (human and horse) or a minotaur (human and bull). In this tutorial we’ll take inspiration from these fantastical creatures and transform a portrait into a terrifying horned beast. You’ll discover how to blend animal and human anatomy, then add convincing skin textures to really pull off the effect.

A preview of the final image is below.

Professional and Detailed Instructions Inside

Plus members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! Below are some sample images from this tutorial.

PSD Plus Membership

As you know, we run a premium membership system here called ‘Plus’ that costs $9 a month (or $22 for 3 months!) which gives members access to the Source files for tutorials as well as periodic extra tutorials, like this one! You’ll also get access to Net Plus and Vector Plus, too. If you’re a Plus member, you can log in and download the tutorial. If you’re not a member, you can of course join today!

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the Psdtuts+ RSS Feed to stay up to date with the latest Photoshop tutorials and articles.

This Plus Tutorial is Filled with Creative Tips

This tutorial is a collaboration between myself, Alex Beltechi, and college pal, Andrei Bacter. I’ve requested his help to bring you a bit of what we don’t do a lot on Psdtuts – Matte Painting. This technique combines photo scenery and tablet drawn details. As such, the tutorial is divided in two parts. The first one covers how to draw the actual character, which Andrei covers entirely. After that, we’ll jump straight into Part 2, where I teach you how to combine the sketch and photo with a pen tablet.

Tutorial Details

• Program: Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Difficulty: Advanced
• Estimated Completion Time: 5 hours

A preview of the final image is below.

Professional and Detailed Instructions Inside

Plus members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! Below are some sample images from this tutorial.

PSD Plus Membership

As you know, we run a premium membership system here called ‘Plus’ that costs $9 a month (or $22 for 3 months!) which gives members access to the Source files for tutorials as well as periodic extra tutorials, like this one! You’ll also get access to Net Plus and Vector Plus, too. If you’re a Plus member, you can log in and download the tutorial. If you’re not a member, you can of course join today!

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the Psdtuts+ RSS Feed to stay up to date with the latest Photoshop tutorials and articles.

The awards present a wonderful opportunity for graphic designers to have their work seen by luminaries in the industry like David Carson, Chuck Anderson, James Verdesoto (designer of the Pulp Fiction movie poster), Nik Ainley and Laura Smith. These people and more will be judging entries.

The awards exist to discover and celebrate outstanding talents in the design world and to reward creativity with a meaningful honour. Entry fees – used to fund prizes – are low and a portion of the profits will be donated to Cancer Research UK. Every entrant will feature in the new Designers Directory, have the chance to feature in the yearly book that will be published to showcase the best designs, and have access to the website notice board where designers can promote their business, special offers, job vacancies and more.

The Annual Design Awards will not just be celebrating the finalists and winners of each category but will also be dishing out awards to outstanding contributions. The judges will select entries that they feel are truly groundbreaking and those participants will be honoured with an ‘Excellence in Design Accolade’ amongst other ’special’ awards.

All finalists will feature in numerous promotions and media coverage and will gain global respect within the industry as well as receiving promotional tools from the organisers, with all winners receiving the glamourous trophy and additional promotions around the world.

What’s more, the organisers are giving all Envato Members a special discount to enter the awards. Tuts+ readers will get a 30 per cent discount on entry (enter here) using this promotional code: 22ENVATO30.

You can keep up with all the latest from the Annual Design Awards team on Twitter: @ADAwards.

New Exclusive High Resolution Photoshop Brushes

This new Photoshop Brushes Pack are created by Stuart Rochford of Qbrushes and is available for Psd Plus members today. This is a set of 30 Brushes, which are all high resolution at around 2500 pixels by 2500 pixels. Members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! A preview of the brushes are below.

See the Brushes in Action Below

Members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now!

Psd Plus Membership

As you know, we run a premium membership system here called Psdtuts+ Plus that costs $9 a month (or $22 for 3 months!) which gives members access to the PSD files for tutorials as well as periodic extra tutorials, like this one! If you’re a member you can log in and download the tutorial. If you’re not a member, you can of course join today!

Subscribe to the Psdtuts+ RSS Feed for the best Photoshop tuts and articles on the web.

This Plus Tutorial is Filled with Creative Tips

Incorporating hand-drawn artwork with Photoshop is a trend that’s been around for a while. It’s a style that instantly gives your work an edgy feel – and it translates well for both print or web-based projects.

I’ve supplied all the hand-drawn artwork to complete this tutorial, but you’ll learn more and inject some personal flair by creating your own sketches and doodles. As you’ll discover, we’ll be tracing the main image of the model, so you don’t necessarily need to be a talented artist to achieve a great end result. I’ll walk you through all the details of putting this together.

Tutorial Details

• Program: Adobe Photoshop CS3 or later
• Program: Adobe Illustrator CS2 or later
• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated Completion Time: 4 hours

A preview of the final image is below.

Professional and Detailed Instructions Inside

Plus members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! Below are some sample images from this tutorial.

PSD Plus Membership

As you know, we run a premium membership system here called ‘Plus’ that costs $9 a month (or $22 for 3 months!) which gives members access to the Source files for tutorials as well as periodic extra tutorials, like this one! You’ll also get access to Net Plus and Vector Plus, too. If you’re a Plus member, you can log in and download the tutorial. If you’re not a member, you can of course join today!

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the Psdtuts+ RSS Feed to stay up to date with the latest Photoshop tutorials and articles.

This Plus Tutorial is Filled with Creative Tips

This tutorial will guide you through the process of taking multiple existing 3D renders and compositing them into a detailed digital illustration using Photoshop. The subject is a figure in a futuristic nano-suit. We will be covering lighting, layer modes, masking and warping.

Tutorial Details

• Program : Photoshop CS3
• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated Completion Time: Around 3 hours

A preview of the final image is below.

Professional and Detailed Instructions Inside

Plus members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! Below are some sample images from this tutorial.

PSD Plus Membership

As you know, we run a premium membership system here called ‘Plus’ that costs $9 a month (or $22 for 3 months!) which gives members access to the Source files for tutorials as well as periodic extra tutorials, like this one! You’ll also get access to Net Plus and Vector Plus, too. If you’re a Plus member, you can log in and download the tutorial. If you’re not a member, you can of course join today!

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the Psdtuts+ RSS Feed to stay up to date with the latest Photoshop tutorials and articles.

This Plus Tutorial is Filled with Creative Tips

In this tutorial we will go over how to create 3D text in Cinema 4D, render it out in regular and wireframe mode, then import it into Photoshop to add the final touches, which include all sorts of lighting effects.

Tutorial Details

• Program: Cinema 4D and Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated Completion Time: 3 hours

A preview of the final image is below.

Professional and Detailed Instructions Inside

Plus members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! Below are some sample images from this tutorial.

PSD Plus Membership

As you know, we run a premium membership system here called ‘Plus’ that costs $9 a month (or $22 for 3 months!) which gives members access to the Source files for tutorials as well as periodic extra tutorials, like this one! You’ll also get access to Net Plus and Vector Plus, too. If you’re a Plus member, you can log in and download the tutorial. If you’re not a member, you can of course join today!

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the Psdtuts+ RSS Feed to stay up to date with the latest Photoshop tutorials and articles.