I decided to change this to a recommendation for tutorials, since I refuse to try or even review a tut I don’t like. (Don’t have the time.)

Posting a day early. Tomorrow is my son’s B-day - no time to play with Photoshop then.

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Teddy Bear Photoshop Tutorial: Fun and short tutorial. Gives the steps simply with good pictures. I didn’t have to follow it step by step, instead just looked at it to understand the basic concepts to see if I could tinker on my own. From what I learned, I was able to create this little fox character.

Plastic Wrap Effect: I adore this simple and clever little effect. The last step (”Finale”) is the actual plastic wrap effect, with the key being the outer glow being just a pixel or two larger than the stroke.

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Smart Objects: I’ve heard these mentioned a several times. Thought I’d try to learn more about them. The Smart Objects — Photoshop CS2 (Photoshop 9) Video Tutorial shows how to bring an object in from another program (i.e. Illustrator) in a layer so that it will be scalable and fully editable. Neat tutorial, but I’m still a bit fuzzy on smart objects are. So I did some hunting around to see if I could find more explanation and found: Smart Objects, Smart Guides, Layer Enhancements in Photoshop CS2 and Work Smart with Photoshop CS2’s Smart Objects. The two things I thought were the neatest about these are

 

1. if you make a copy of a smart object layer, it remembers the orignal size of the object and
2. you can transform and play with the size of these repeatedly without having to undo.

No little projects to go with these tutorials and explanations, but I hope to cook up a tut using smart objects for a next tutorial of my own…