Sharpen and unsharp mask for bored designers

P.S.: Everybody love these letters!

Hi there, fellow designer. Running is boring and walking is extremely time consuming. What should bored designer suffering time shortage do in such circumstances, you may ask. Of course he or she should sharpen stuff.

Looks like you’ve done great job planning and designing another website layout and it’s final outfit. Your mighty developer friends are working hard cutting your pixel perfect templates in beautiful pngs. And then you find out that your beloved client childishly provided low resolution, bloody small and blurry as hell images for, let’s say, team page. Set of, speaking truthfully, shitty company leaders portraits.

...your beloved client childishly provided low resolution, bloody small and blurry as hell images...

Imagined? Yeah, it’s a pity, that client ruins your design this way. Sure there is no universal cure here and extremely bad images will still be bad and even can transform to a nightmare in spite of all your efforts but you still can try.

Here are your options. You can apply sharpen filter, unsharp mask and a combination of other/high pass filter and blending modes.

• First option seems nice if your target image is free of jpeg artifacts due to sharpening will affect entire image, including areas you’d better don’t show anyone.
• Second option is much better because it’s not so destructive nature -- it increases low scale acutance of predefined in radius value amount of nearby pixels. It won’t add new details, just increase contrast of this neighbors.
• Third option is just a hand crafted variant of unsharp mask, but playing with it’s values you can achieve both sharpen and unsharp mask results.

So, now it’s not exactly that boring to take off for some running, isn’t it? See you soon, dear designer.

...there is always one more option -- hire freelancer or contractor...

By the way, there is always one more option -- hire freelancer or contractor. You might think that creativity is your field and you don’t want to put your hands deep in this nerdy mess. There are always lots of guys who know how to do messy stuff and eager to help.

Photoshop super awesome facts #1: open file from the web

Hi there, fellow runner with wacom tablet ) I mean, hi there, fellow designer! Could you ever imagine, that photoshop could do that? You just copy file's url in your browser, then in your photoshop press CTRL+O (open file dialog) and paste url there, then, when you click open or hit enter, magic works and photoshop opens file you never even saved )

super awesome photoshop super power here: open url from open file dialog

It's super awesome photoshop fact #1.

Ice case study

The final image of ice-based piece of jewelry

Let's create some ice-like stuff and align various pieces on the scene

When finished, you can add color variations and create some sort of desktop wallpaper

To wrap the ice bits in golden cages -- what can be more fun?

Finally, you might want to create old-school gif animation in different color scheme.

Winter application icon template freebie

Hi there, fellow running designer. Christmas is almost here and here are the gift for you ) It's under CC attribution + share alike license, so you can use it in your projects. Winter icon template by damn-love.com. Template for your winter-related app icon (fully customizable vector with objects).

Winter icon template by damn-love.com. Template for your winter-related app icon (fully customizable vector with objects)

To get more out of this included psd file (download the psd template from damn-love.com), you should have experience with smart objects -- double click template or example layer in layer panel to edit it's contents.

Hi there, fellow runner!

It's hard to do things when you have handcuffs on even when you are mighty and scary monster with sharp teeth

Hi there, fellow runner! How the things are going today? Mine are well, but I had no running activities for about two last weeks. It's all about laziness, I know. Lets get ready for new running season on runplusdesign.com -- it's almost here. And of course we'll get back to German language and learn it from start to finish (I hope)!

Coat of arms for those with passions like overeating or smoking and coffee-addicted pals

Coat of arms for those with passions like overeating or smoking and coffee-addicted pals

Coat of arms for those with passions like overeating, smoking and coffee-addicted pals (and as a desktop wallpaper too)

Icon tutorial: cute dslr camera icon and fake camera poster

Lets get some google research and find camera we like to be our source

Then we will create basic shapes and place them all over the scene around our source

Let's start composing our super new icon and place more details on the base shape

Let's add more details and start working with volume and colors

So now we can start placing more elements on our basic shape to look at contrast and materials

add more details now

And finally delete the reference image and start working with your own imagination

Add custom logo and think on various color schemes

align color variations on working scene for our new fake poster

add test note and company's identity

And here you go with final great product poster

Running shoe icon tutorial

Hi there! For today we have some sort of icon tutorial. We'll create running shoe icon and teaser image for it. And animated teaser image too! Fun stuff goes below!

At first you'll need to get general image and composition of the final product, look through tons of pics on google and find good one to be our prototype.

Let's find cool picture of running shoe in the internet

Then let's create new photoshop document to place our copy of the good pic from google

Then you should place vector objects on raster crap from google, I use contrast colors to mace picture stand out from background

Add more details, not too much, while remembering that this is an icon at last.. Feel free to shift pattern, material and color -- it's your own shoe, not new balance any more.

You may then finish all the shapes forming the shoe and delete the background level

Create pattern for the air flow perforation on the sides and top of our running shoe

Add more details and apply textures and basic shadows, think on color theme

Make sure you've added all details you wanted and convert all your layers to a smart object for a backup, duplicate them then

Try different color scheme -- if you please, add final details, if needed and look at it on background. So here you can save png files with or without background and on various backgrounds, but most of us prefer transparent background, I assume. The icon is finished, let's create teaser image, to draw user-s attention to our product.

Add some lighting and speed emotions to scene.

Now you can put some text to the final teaser image and make scene a bit lighter, more real life dirt might be added to the icon too

And finally you might want to add some animation to draw more attention.

Feel free to create your own icon now, i dont think that you need psd or png files, though if I'm wrong leave me a note in comments.