The term invented by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty who used it to describe a set of successful characteristics that many businesses seemed to share. From these practices grew an architecture of interactive participation in the form of a service, versus a product. Clients, customers and users became encouraged to contribute to a collective intelligence, and thus was conceived the notion of open source. As this progressed, the internet has transformed from a document delivery system into a much healthier web economy that focuses more on customer self-services and rich interface designs. As online experiences be come more enjoyable and interactive for the user, we can notice more and more people turning to the web who may not have been so inclined previously, like for example senior citizens and elementary school children.

From a developers perspective, more content is created using applications which allow for user interactivity, like Drupal, and XML. Additionally popular is the creation of Open Source data through API’s and web services like RSS, and Ajax and conforming to proper Web Standards (DOM Scripting, XHTML, CSS).

In keeping with appropriate standards, I will conclude this post by adding a graphical representation of the many characteristics and concepts that have created what we know as Web 2.0.

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All this is coming from someone (me) who doesn’t even have children, but I’m sure that perhaps some of my words could resonate with someone who is even interested enough to read this post.

Thankx, Angel

Effects of Television and Media on child neurological development. 

Step 1

Start with a new document, I used 800 X 600. Make a new layer and call it “background”, fill it with white.
Again make a new layer, but this time call it: “sphere”

Make a 400px X 400px round selection. Take your gradient tool and make your foreground color white and your background color should be black. Now make a radial gradient and use it like this:

Step 2Now with the “sphere” layer active, press ctrl+U. in this new window you can give the sphere the color you prefer, just make sure that “colorize” is checked. Then make a new layer and call it: “Cut out.”

Now, make a new circle selection, only this time a lot smaller then before. Apply the same radial gradient as you did before, but these times do it like this:

 Step 3

Press Ctrl+U again and repeat the process we did before. Also give it a 1px black stroke, with an opacity of 32%
This is how it should look by now:

 Step 4

Make a new layer underneath the “cut out” layer. and call it: “Big inse.” Grab your pen tool and draw a rounded path from the top to the bottom.

 Step 5

Now take your brush tool and select a 1px white brush. Go back to your pen tool and right click on the path. Click on “stroke path” in the new window, select the “brush” from the dropdown menu and uncheck “stimulate pressure”

With your move tool active, press your down button 1 time. repeat the “stroke path” process, but this time, your foreground color should be black, don’t use the move tool this time. Delete the path and set the “big inset” layer to “soft ligh.”

 Step 6

Repeat the whole process with the 2 “stroke path” things, until you’ve got enough inset lines, just make sure to make each inset line on a new layer.

And here we are finished already. To make it look real, add some shadowing  underneath for a added effect.

Check out the final outcome:

Create a new 600×150 document. Fill the background with an extremely light orange color.

Step 2

Create a base for your rounded rectangle on a new layer. Drag the rounded rectangle tool across the image, and you’ll get something like the image below (use a radius of 25px.)

Step 3

Hold down ctrl and hit the thumbnail icon on the layer in the layers window. Now we’ve created a selection of the shape to work with. Next, take the “Rectangular Marquee” tool, and while holding down alt, drag from the center to the right and let go. (This will remove the bottom half of the selection, giving a selection like the image displays below.)

Step 4

Take the “Gradient” tool, and with a white to transparent gradient, make a glossy effect within the selection.

Step 5

Now on to the middle of the rectangle. Create a new layer. Take the rounded rectangle tool once again, but this time hold down shift while dragging it so you can make a perfect square like in the image below.

Step 6

Apply the gradient overlay to the block you just drew. Right-click on the layer and go into the blending options.

Step 7

Follow the same gloss technique we did in step 3, but do it with the square block layer instead.

Step 8

Go into blending options and add this stroke for the block. It is a medium grey color  (See image).

Step 9

Select a thick font, and create some links for your site. Space them about 3 spaces apart, and make the color of them a bright grey. Be sure this layer is under the gloss layer, that way the text can still obtain gloss.

Step 10

Type in your website’s text in the left side with the light grey color. I made mine from the signiture tutorial I posted a while back. Be sure this layer is under the gloss layer, that way the text can still obtain gloss.

And that’s it!

Pretty Sweet!

Step1
We’ll begin this tutorial, by selecting the “Type Tool.” Select a bold style as the typeface at a size of about 50,and with the colour similar to my image. Type “shiny” set the blending mode to “Color Dodge”

Step 2
Now that you have your text, you can now right click on the text layer and select, “Blending Options”,then choose “Inner Shadow” and use settings at left. Do not click OK yet… still more to do

Step 3
Now click on “Stroke” and use my same settings.

Now click OK. You should now have the following:

Step 4

Now select the “Pen Tool” and draw a wavy effect like mine.

Step 5

Next, set the blending mode of the new shape layer to ‘Screen’, and turn the fill down to 75%, then go to the main menu and select “Layer” then “Create Clipping Mask”

Step6

Hey, we’re almost done! Now duplicate the text layer and move so it is under the first text layer and above the background.
Change its current style by right clicking the layer in the layers pallete and selecting “Clear Layer Style.” Now change the Blending Mode to “Color Dodge” and the color of the text to b2d7ed by double clicking the icon on the layer in the layers palette.

Next, go to the main menu and select “Filter” then “Blur” and lastly “Gaussian Blur” and use 8.8 pixels as the setting for the blur.

Okay, that’s it! Check out the final result!

I’m serving up another Photo-shop trick for you. On the menu today we have a slick, modern-looking glass orb which has become a staple ingredient in the on-line interfaces we see today. It’s important to realize that make a sphere, as simple as it seems requires quite a bit of work. This tutorial is fairly basic, although there are others that get into exact shadowing and depth and angular precision. But, for photo-shop users a a basic to intermediate, this method should work just fine.

Step 1
We will start with a transparent layer. 
Draw a circle using the circular marquee tool by holding the Alt/Option and Shift. This creates a perfect circle, which is drawn from the center out.

Step 2

To fill this circle, we will create a Circular Gradient, going from dark to light blue. Use the settings here, then drag from the middle of the circle out.

Step #3
Create a new layer and change the gradient setting to Linear Gradient, and double click inside the gradient slider. We will have to create a gradient that starts at solid white and gradually fades away, this is called a Foreground to Transparent gradient. Drag the gradient tool from the top to the bottom, with the top white.

Step #4

Now Deslect this layer and press command-T (Mac), or control T (windows) to activate the Free Transform command. This makes it possible to manipulate the contents of this layer. Grab the bottom of the dotted square line and drag it about half way up, brin iin the sides a little bit until your image looks similar to mine. The idea is that we want to be able to see just a tiny bit of darker blue all around the white circle.

Step 5

Add a gassian blur to the white cirle and turn the opacity down a tiny bit. As you can see it really has takek shape, we could stop here, but I’ll take you one step farther.

Step 6

Choose the blue circle layer and in the layer styles, choose Inner Glow. After this, you can merge both layers together and add a dropshadow underneath your blue orb.

So, as you can probably guess, this tutorial can come in very handy. This same technique can be used to create a realistic looking eye or a marble or even a crystal ball. It’s versility comes in handy, but over and above, we can have the most fun with this shape if you ‘tune’ in next week for my next edition of NinkyNoo’s How To’s when I’ll be introducing my favorite, and might I say quite festive, photoshop trick! Bye for now.

I’ve got another tutorial for you, and this time it’s a bit gross, but who know when you might want to use this! Here’s a quick peek at the final result.

Step 1

Begin this tutorial by choosing a photo of a certain individual that you will use as your unlucky guinea pig. Next, you need to click on the two thumbnails (either side) that contain the textured surfaces; we will use these to simulate the realistic looking wounds

Step 2

Let’s start with the texture-bark.jpg and drag it onto the face of your person picture. Name this new layer ‘Wood’, or something similar.

Step 3

Select the wood layer from your layers pallet and create a layer mask, (small button located bottom right). Click once on the mask to activate it. Now choose a soft round brush and make sure that your foreground colour is set to black. This acts as a sort of eraser.
Paint around the outside edge of the face.

Step 4

Change the blending mode of this layer to Soft Light.

Step 5

Now drag texture-beach.jpg onto the face. Go to Image, Adjustment, Hue and Saturation and change the saturation level so that it is almost fully desaturated. Follow the process outlined in steps 3-4. Turn the opacity of the beach layer down to about 40%.

Step 6

To finish it off you can chooses to create some depth within the scarring by adding some highlights and shadows. To do this you can flatten the visible layers (Layers, Merge Visible) and then use the Burn and the Dodge tools to darkken the shadows and lighten the highlights.

Here is another finished images I did using similar techniques.

Here are some example photos to use for this tutorial.

veer2.JPG  

veer3.JPG   5.png

I don’t know what happened to the images that went with this tutorials, please stand by while I fix this error. Sorrry for the  inconveniance.
I hope everyone is enjoying the tutorials so far. Today I will outline the steps necessary to create cool diamond ‘bling’ text. You can use this technique on any type you choose.
Step one

Start by typing out some large text with a boxy or bold type font. In order to make this text editable we have to rasterize it, so right click on the layer palette and choose ‘Rasterize layer’.

Step two
Make a selection around the text, you can do this easily by grabbing the magic wand tool and clicking somewhere on the transparent background, and then going to Select and Invert Selection. Now press “D” to reset to black default color.

Second part is to go to Filter, Render, Clouds (If the render menu is not available make sure you are in RGB mode.)

Step three
Now this is where we create the diamond effect. Go back to Filter, then Distort and Glass. Choose the tiny lens option and scale it down quite small. You can try the settings I’ve chosen here. Then click OK.

Step four

We now we’ve made the diamond look. To really make this ‘pop’, it look good to create a golden border. It’s really reasy.

Step five

Apply a layer style to the layer, (the last little icon on the bottom of the layers pallet) choose stroke.
Follow my settings; Position = Center and Fill type = Gradient, (choose the default copper setting)
Make the size 10

Step six

Click on the Bevel and emboss option
Choose “Stroke Emboss” this will apply the bevel to the stroke we just made.
Crank the Depth up and set the size for the same as the stroke:10
Change the gloss contour until you get something that looks nice and metallic.
Click OK

Step Seven

Here we have our basic effect. We just need to adjust the color to make it look more like gold.
Step eight

Step 8

Apply a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and push the saturation all the way up to 100
Tweak the hue until you get a nice gold color.

Step nine

Last thing we need to do is add some sparkles, but first, in order to work with our text, we have to merge the text layer and adjustment layer. Click on the text layer, press shift and click on the adjustment layer, then go to Layer and Merge Visible.

Now we can load the ‘assorted’ brush set that comes with Photoshop. Choose the X type brush and add your sparkling last touch! That’s it!

Today’s Photoshop tutorial is going to be fun! Have you ever wanted to get a tattoo? (If you don’t already have one). Well now you can learn to create a virtual one! This lesson is short and easy

Step 1
Open up the image you want to place the tattoo on, it works better when the skin surface had some definition, or muscle. Now go to Image, Adjustments and then to Desaturate. Also, you’ll want to create a slight blur to it, so go to Filter, Blur and Gaussian Blur, (o.4). This makes the tattoo look more natural. Save this as a new document, call it Desaturate, and then close it.

Step 2

Now open up that same image in it’s original as well as the image you’ve chosen to use as the tattoo. It’s important to note that the tattoo image must have a transparent background. Drag the tattoo to the area you want it displayed. Resize it on the skin to fit, (command-T on the Mac).

Step 3
There is two steps to this filter, go to Filter, Distort, and Displace. Type in the amount of horizontal and vertical scaling you want. I’m using 10 and 10, but yours may vary a bit. Press Ok, then select the Displacement image we made earlier, then Ok.

Step 4

This is the last step. Find the Tattoo layer blending mode and select Multiply, this will show some of the skin underneath, also it makes it appear more realistic if you turn the opacity down (between 70-80%).

Note: it’s optional to add a bit of little drop shadow. You can do this by double clicking on the tattoo layer to the layer styles and choosing drop shadow.

Now You Mum won’t freak when she see that it’s just a fake!

This is the end result.