You can use these beautiful, free Photoshop brushes with versions CS2 and CS3. For those of you who have an older version of Adobe Photoshop – you can still check them out, because some of the brushes are 999px large. As you might know, larger brushes than that are only supported from Adobe Photoshop CS2.

The Photoshop brushes come as .ABR files, which you have to place in the Presets/Brushes folder on your hard drive. Here is a more detailed installation guide for Photoshop brushes on Beeex.net.

So let’s cut to the chase. This is what you get:

…and you can download these Photoshop brushes right here. Enjoy!

This is a fun tutorial for Photoshop geeks! You take a beautiful – ok, ok, dull – picture of a landscape and by playing around with it a bit, you turn it into a terrifying alien invasion site. Very good Photoshop tutorial over at iMarc!

The tutorial is well written and, believe us, a lot of fun to follow. The author Craig Henry, Creative Director at iMarc, an innovative web design company near Boston, Massachusetts, explains in a very entertaining way how to mess something as innocent as the source image up until you get this terriffic final composition. Link after the jump.

To create this effect, Craig uses pictures of everyday objects – such as a car bumper and a camera lens – and combines them to form a futuristic and printworthy artwork.

You can go to this great tutorial right here.

This free online generator is a great, easy tool for rasterizing images quickly – without using Photoshop or Illustrator. Adobe Photoshop has a similar effect, and more options for sure (not to speak of plugins for rasterizing images), but this cool website does it all in a few easy steps and generates a PDF for you to download in less than a minute!

After uploading a picture or specifying an image URL, you can crop the image, resize it, and choose the rasterization method. Do you prefer small black dots or larger, colored dots? It’s all in your hands!

Remember, this free, web-based tool doesn’t replace any tools you might have, or even Photoshop. Instead, it’s a quick and easy way of rasterizing images without a lot of work. The results, while not the most optimal, are quite good indeed.

This is what your raster image result could look like:

You can jump to the Rasterbator here. Have fun rasterizing!

This is a good tutorial for Photoshop users who know their way around a bit already. You don’t have to be an expert in Photoshop, but you should know some of the basics before you try this tutorial out.

This tutorial takes you from a rather normal image (a picture of an eye; you’ll find all the links to the source files in the tutorial) to implementing more pictures, like a rock wall and a butterfly, to merging them into the final version you see below.

The reason we only recommend this tutorial to somewhat experienced Photoshop users is that while every step is explained quite well, the author uses language like “…lighten the top of your rock with the dodge tool and darken the bottom with the burn tool.”

If you have no idea what he’s talking about, you might want to try some easier tutorials first. If you’re familiar with these tools, and you don’t need them explained, this tutorial is for you!

This is the final image you get after completing this tutorial:

…and here’s the link to this tutorial. Enjoy and beeex happpy!

This is another tutorial about creating patterns in Photoshop. It includes a download of the pattern kit. It is the last part of this series, the other parts are:

The differences between brushes and patterns in Photoshop,
Photoshop Brushes: install and create,
Photoshop Patterns: install, create #1 and #2.

How to create Photoshop Patterns #2

This simple tutorial shows you how easy it is to play around with Photoshop patterns. In our previous post about creating Photoshop patterns, we featured two tutorials on creating stripes and grids in Photoshop. Here, you’ll find out how to vary your settings to get thicker or thinner stripes, and what to pay attention to when you do this.

In case you prefer easy street, you can also download the pattern kit and use it directly with Photoshop!

You can go to this tutorial here! The download link with the .pat file is right below the tutorial.

In this post, we have a great tutorial for you about how to create your own brushes in Photoshop. It is a part of a series, the other parts are:

The differences between brushes and patterns in Photoshop,
Photoshop Brushes: install and create,
Photoshop Patterns: install, create #1 and #2.

How to create your own Photoshop brushes

In this part, we cover the basics of creating your own, custom Photoshop brushes from a pre-existing photograph or image. The tutorial by Bittbox covery not only the basics, but also gets into details about using the right settings and parameters, and also which common mistakes to avoid.

This tutorial is very well written detailed and enough to give you the knowledge you need to make your own brushes. Take a look at all of the possibilities you’ve got with custom brushes!

You can view this tutorial here. You can also find the other parts of this series on Photoshop brushes and patterns at the top of this post. Enjoy!

In this post, we cover the basics about installing patterns in Photoshop. It is a part of a series, the other parts are:

The differences between brushes and patterns in Photoshop,
Photoshop Brushes: install and create,
Photoshop Patterns: install, create #1 and #2.

This is the 4th post in the series. The next two posts will be pusblished over the next 2 days. To stay tuned about new posts, subscribe to our RSS Feed.

How to install patterns in Photoshop

A pattern is a style you can apply to content. It’s usually a small image that can be tiled seamlessly to create a pattern. Once you’ve downloaded a pattern, you will find it on your hard drive in your specified download folder. What’s next?

If your new pattern file is zipped, you have to unzip it first. You then have a .pat file that looks something like this. Now, you have to install it in Photoshop in order to use it on your artwork.

1. Navigate to your Photoshop/Presets/Patterns folder and copy the .pat file to that folder.
2. In Photoshop,
   • double click on the layer you want to apply the pattern to, or
   • activate the ‘Pattern’ checkbox in your Brushes palette (Window/Brushes), if you want to apply the pattern to a brush
3. Click on the dropdown bar in the small pattern preview box, click on the arrow to the upper right, and select ‘Load Pattern’
4. Find the .pat file you just copied to the Patterns folder in step 1, and hit ‘open’.
5. Select ‘Add’ from the popup box to add your new patterns to the existing ones in your palette.

That’s it! Your new pattern is now loaded and ready to use. You may have to scroll down in the pattern list to find your new brushes, as they have been added to the existing ones. The next time you open Photoshop, the new patterns will be in the pattern library already.

Beeex happy!

This post covers the basics and differences about brushes and patterns in Adobe Photoshop. It is a part of a series, the other parts are:

The differences between brushes and patterns in Photoshop,
Photoshop Brushes: install and create,
Photoshop Patterns: install, create #1 and #2.

This is the 3rd post in the series. The next three posts will be pusblished over the next three days. To stay tuned about new posts, subscribe to our RSS Feed.

The difference between brushes and patterns in Photoshop

• As we explained earlier, a brush in Photoshop is like a ‘real’ brush – you can use it to paint stuff (right!). Photoshop offers a lot of options and settings for your brush, like form, spread, edges, and more. The best part is that you can create your own brushes from any image and save them for future use.

• Patterns, on the other hand, are seamless images which you can apply to an artwork using layer styles. Not only that; you can also apply them to a brush! Sounds confusing? Not really, if you consider what a pattern actually is. A pattern is a style you apply to an existing image or brush. It basically consists of a single smaller image which has been designed to be tiled on both its x and y axis.

In essence, a brush is a tool to apply content. A pattern is a style you add to content.

Photoshop offers various pre-installed brushes and patterns. To fully discover and use the beautiful power of Photoshop though, you have to use custom brushes and patterns. There is a nice collection of brushes and patterns on Beeex.net. We add more every day, so be sure to check in often!

So there you have it, the basic difference between brushes and patterns. Quite easy, right? The good thing is that you can use almost every image or photograph to create your own brushes and patterns. The possiblities are truly endless.

We would like to know if this post answered your questions about brushes and patterns. Is anything left unclear? Do you have a question you would like answered? Leave us a note! Comment, and thou shall be heard

This is a wonderful web-based and free tool for every web developer!

The website Typetester lets you compare up to three different typefaces on your screen. You simply choose from a large list of predefined fonts and define the parameters. Almost instantly, you can see the results on your screen – as well as every available font style.

Typetester not only supports every web-safe font, but also default Windows and Apple fonts. In addition to that, you can choose from a long list of specific fonts, including pixel fonts.

Once you’ve finished setting up your preferred font, you can get the CSS source code for that setting, ready for you to copy&paste to your CSS script. But be sure to check it before applying it to your website, as there are still some minor bugs in the code.

Also, if you pick a font which is not compatibe with internet standards, like, for instance, a pixel font (e.g. ‘hooge’, like in the screenshot above), you must be aware of the fact that whoever views your website and does not have that specific typeface installed will see the text on your website in a standard font such as Times New Roman. That’s the crux with web safe fonts

You can jump to Typetester right here.

It’s still January, but you know what, we don’t care! Neither does Bittbox: after a 2-day server downtime due to a senescent hard drive (honestly!), they reward us with three very ’summerish’ vector sunflowers for Adobe Illustrator!

As you may have noticed……Beeex.net featured quite a few things from Bittbox in the past. Now, to be honest, this kit isn’t one of their best ones, but we still decided to feature it. Although it only contains three sunflowers, they are not bad at all, and they can be quite useful indeed.

These sunflowers come as EPS vector files, you can use them with either Illustrator 10 and up or with another vector graphics editor like Inkscape. Alternatively, you can also download the SVG version of the sunflowers.

You can download this .zip file right here. Enjoy!