Aside from designing graphics, one of the many uses of Photoshop is for photo retouching. You can take a poorly taken photo, enhance it in Photoshop and make it look a hundred folds better. A great way to learn how to retouch photos is through online tutorials. If you are a beginner, step-by-step walkthrough tutorials are great, but sometimes, it’s also easier to follow a good screencast. A great site that provides photo retouching tutorial screencasts is RetouchCreative.

Retouch Creative provides you with streaming training videos on professional photography retouching in Photoshop. With their videos, you will be able to learn the professional post production techniques that are used by many pros in high-end productions.

In each video, advanced retouching processes are explained in detail while completing the editing on a photograph from start to finish. Our videos will give you the creative edge to stay ahead of your competition and to further your artistic visions.

Here’s a glimpse of what you will be getting from the video tutorials:

Today we have teamed up with the guys at RetouchCreative and are giving away two (2) training videos of your choice to five (5) lucky winners! This would be a great prize especially for those who have beginner skills in Photoshop.

Here’s how to join:
1. Leave a comment on this post saying what you would want to win. Make sure you leave your name and a valid Email Address.
2. Subscribe to our RSS feed to keep you up to date with the winners and future contests.

Winners will be chosen at random. Contest ends on March 10, 2010.

Good luck everyone!

I’ve been a happy user of DesignBump, a site where you can share, save, vote on, and discover the best design related links from around the web. So when they launched their very own design blog, I decided to contribute for them. For my very first contribution, I’ve created for them the Worn-Out Soda Cans Social Media Icon Pack. The icon pack once again features icons of our favorite social media sites in 200×200, transparent PNG formats.

The Worn-Out Soda Cans Social Media Icon Pack is free to use for both your personal and commercial projects. Link backs are very much appreciated!

Let us now head over to DesignBump to download the Worn-Out Soda Can Social Media Icon Pack.

Valentine’s Day is once again here! To celebrate the season of hearts, Dawghouse Design Studio has teamed up with the very talented guys over at IconShock and came up with the Saint Valentine’s Day Icon Set, a set of icons that you will surely enjoy! These icons are available in sizes 256 x 256 and 512 x 512. The icons are available in transparent PNG formats and are free to use for your personal and commercial projects but may not be sold or redistributed.

If you guys are looking high-quality icon sets just like these, check out IconShock!

Now what you waiting for? Download this awesome icon set now and know how we guys truly love you! Happy Valentine’s Day!

As you all would have probably noticed by now, two of my favorite design styles are grunge and vintage. Making use of these design styles, I’ve contributed another awesome icon set to Tutorial9 – the Vintage Postage Stamps Social Media Icon Pack. The set comes with 23 icons of your favorite social media sites, all in 200 x 200px and in transparent PNG formats. These icons would surely be a perfect fit for your vintage or grunge themed web designs!

Let us now head over to Tutorial9 to download the Vintage Postage Stamps Social Media Icon Pack.

For my very first contribution to Design Instruct, I’ve written for them this tutorial on How to Make a Worn Vintage Beach Ad in Photoshop. In this Photoshop tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a worn out, low-saturation-colored vintage beach ad in Photoshop. We’ll use some beginner to intermediate level techniques such as the usage of brushes, editing colors, using filters, masking and a whole lot more!

Let us now head over to Design Instruct to check out the tutorial!

This icon pack is free to use for both your personal and commercial projects but may not be sold or redistributed in any way.

Let us now head over to Tutorial9 to download this awesome icon pack!

In the end of this tutorial, you may want to save the final output in transparent PNG or ICO formats to use them on your websites or applications.

Final Product:

Materials Needed:
Coffee Stains Brush Set by Photoshopranger
Lost and Taken’s Stained Paper Texture (Texture #3)
Dafont’s Cloister Black Font

1. Create a new layer in Photoshop with dimension 250×250.

2. With the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M), draw a rectangular selection and fill it with the color #7f785e using the Gradient Tool (G).

3. On the topmost part of our rectangle, use the Polygon Lasso Tool (L), draw an irregular selection. This will add a jagged look on the top area of our newspaper.
After drawing the selection, hit on the Delete key.

4. Using the Blending Options tool, add a Drop Shadow to the rectangle with these settings.

5. Create a new empty layer. Select both this empty layer and our rectangle layer. Right click and hit on Merge Layers. This will flatten our layer along with its Blending Options settings. Using the Burn Tool (O) set to an ordinary rounded brush, slight burn some of the edges of our rectangle.

6. Open up the 3rd Paper Texture we downloaded from Lost and Taken in Photoshop. Resize the texture small and place it over our rectangle. With the texture layer active, CTRL/CMD + Click our rectangle. This will create a selection on our texture with the same size as our rectangle. Click on the Mask icon.

7. Create a new layer. Again, CTRL/CMD + Click our rectangle to create a rectangular selection on our new layer. Using the Gradient Tool (G), add a gradient on our new layer. Make sure the gradient goes from color #6c5d3c to transparent. This will add a bit more depth to our newspaper.

8. Load the Coffee Stain brushes we just downloaded into Photoshop. Using the Brush Tool (B), randomly select any brush from the set and add some little stains on our newspaper. Make sure our Foreground color is set to a dark brown color like #332a15 and Background color set to #62460a.

9. Using the Type Tool (T), set the font to Cloister Black and color to #000000. Add the title of the newspaper. Set this layer’s Blending Mode to Overlay.

10. Now, we will be adding the divisions on our newspaper. Using the Pencil Tool (B), set its size to 1px. Draw a horizontal line under our title. Don’t forget to hold down the Shift key while doing this to make sure we make a straight line. For the bottom horizontal line, set the Pencil Tool’s size to 2px. Set this layer’s Blending Mode to Overlay.

11. You may also want to add vertical line divisions.

12. Now, for the final touches, let us add photos and text to our newspaper to make it look more realistic!

You may also want to duplicate the newspaper icon and rotate the bottom one to make it look like there are two newspapers.

One of the many resources that designers need are photos. Photos play an important role in contributing to the entire aesthetics of a design. They help convey a message without the need for words. Say, in a website or in a magazine, if an article is accompanied by a photo that is interesting enough, it traps the reader and encourages him to read on. And as designers, nothing is better than getting free photos and textures to add to our design resources!

So to anyone who is looking for free high-resolution photos and textures, we would like to introduce you to one of our Sponsors - Photovaco. Photovaco is a site that provides free stock photos and free textures. This site offers us thousands of photos in several categories such as landscapes, nature, animals, food, people and a whole lot more!

These resources from Photovaco are free to use for both your personal and commercial projects but must not be sold or redistributed in any way. Whether you would like to use their photos for your websites, videos, TV productions, forums, blogs, school projects and print media including newspapers, magazine, books and CD covers, feel free to do so. Plus, there is absolutely no need to register. This site spares us the hassle of having to sign up for an account so once you have selected the photos of your choice, you can just download them straight to your computer! Isn’t that great?

So what are you all waiting for? Let’s go check Photovaco out!

As you all know, last January 08, Dawghouse Design Studio along with the very cool guys at UPrinting, held a contest of 250 Business Cards for Giveaway. Now, it is about time we are announcing who this very lucky winner is!

But before we announce the winners, Dawghouse Design Studio would first like to say a HUGE THANK YOU to all who participated in the contest and to UPrinting for making this possible!

And the winner is… (drumroll please) :)

Laura – @BigeyesWorld

You will contacted by UPrinting shortly.

I hope you enjoyed the contest guys! Stayed tuned for more great contests, tuts and freebies from Dawghouse Design Studio soon!

We have another great icon set to give away! But this time, we are steering away from our usual grunge or worn-out icon styles. Today, we’ve teamed up with Speckyboy Design Magazine and we are giving away a simple or minimalist style icon set we are calling the Go Green! Web Icon Set. In this set, you will find 108 different icons you can use for your websites, blogs or applications.

The set comes with eCommerce icons, social media, computer accessories, multimedia and a hell of a lot more! These icons are available in 64 x 64 px and in transparent PNG formats for which you can easily change the hues to match your needs.

Now let’s head over to Speckyboy Design Magazine to download the icon set!