Godwin_a's List: Creative background design

This site can is a great source of assets by allowing users to upload their own content and share it with the world. When you use the search engine you can type specific file formats like psd, abr, ai, webcode. Many artists on this site are constantly publishing new content and if you watch their profile you can get updated version of files and things to use to create all types of digital art.

This site features all sorts of brilliant textures to help you build a nice creative background. Using these textures you will have the ability to create 3d depth and tiled layers. These textures are royalty free assets to use in as many projects as you like as long as you don’t modify and redistribute without written consent.

This site is an excellent source of ABR adobe brush files. They have no terms or conditions to these files so you are free to use them commercially and for personal projects. On this site you can find adobe brushes that can be called a form of clip art that you use inside the brush tool in Photoshop. With these brushes you can create a 3d perspective scene rich with lights and trees and all sorts of creative imagery.

This tutorial will walk you through creating a depth feel for your background. It goes into detail on warping objects into 3d perspectives and create a nice gradient feel to start shaping your scene. Written by Steve Anderson for photoshopessentials.com where you can find plenty more free tutorials .

This article was written by Lee Munroe to show off how creative backgrounds make twitter come alive. It is a great tool to get inspired to use creatively designed backgrounds to display a style in the internet community. Articles like this can help boost your creative thinking when you are designing your own background.

This forum is based around the use of Photoshop and development ideas. It was started by the magazine Advanced Photoshop to create an online community for their readers to participate in the ideas that make Photoshop great. This forum is also a great place to self-advertise by submitting yourself in the Readers Gallery. There is 10,951 posts with a total of 3285 members.

On this site you have the ability to participate with the Photoshop Guru’s. A community forum dedicated to all the areas of Photoshop and the creative ways people use it to get work done. It also allows users to submit their work ad show it off to the community. Need an answer then sign up for Photoshop Guru’s. The last post was done today 09:28 PM and has very current posts on it all day long. It has 29,911 users and 3,2721 active users with a total of 13,989 threads.

Welcome to a site written by users and professional that care enough to write detailed tutorials for you to learn from and explore the asset files. This site is important to me because it is in the form of a blog with new articles daily that include video and digital assets to use. Three articles in the Photoshop Tuts category that are very helpful are “Create a Surreal Matte Painting in Photoshop – Psd Premium Tutorial”, “How to Turn a Texture into a Seamlessly Tiled Background”, “Quickly Build an Abstract Background of Colored Bars”.

Adobe Photoshop is the main program if you are designing and creating any type of digital production assets. Photoshop is used in video, print, and web developments. You can purchase Photoshop for about 199.99 or you can buy the student version from journeyed.com which sells packages of software to students for considerably less. For now give the trial a shot and see if it meets your expectations. Photoshop is for windows and mac format but they do have mobile apps and tablet apps with minimal features.

I used Google to find the sites that are new to me but I had a good idea what keywords to use in my search. I was looking for the best sites for the categories I have on this page and I used mainly the keyword “PHOTOSHOP” as the leading keyword so that the site contained information about how to use Photoshop and assets you can use in Photoshop.  I accompanied my leading keyword with the name of the sections of I have on my page  to find the best results to share with you.

Speck Boy released this article talking about the best Photoshop related websites that can help you be more social and use your software like a professional. It’s a nice long article with about 84 links to some of the sites I listed above. It is always good to read articles like this because someone spent the time searching online about these sites and sharing them just like what we are doing here on Diigo.

Toolfarm.com supplies some of the best tutorials to learn from in the adobe world. This link is to an amazing video tutorial that teaches you how to make creative abstract backgrounds in After Effects a motion program that can also be used for still frame effect. This package cost $40 us dollars and is well worth it if you are a just starting out with After Effects.