slodive - Design Resources & Inspiration

Who doesn’t love some awesome photo manipulations and Sebastian Niedlich takes these to a whole new level. Ultra cool and kinda creepy these creations really spark the imagination into overdrive.

The quality of Photoshop tutorials seems to increase year after year and 2009 was no exception. After going through quite a few ourselves, below are a handful that really caught our attention but may have been missed by a lot of the round ups posted throughout the year. Here’s a second chance to catch up on our top overlooked tutorials of 09. Hope you guys and gals enjoy and here’s to a great 2010.

According to Wikipedia, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting— “good” or “bad” bokeh, respectively.Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

Bokeh is often most visible around small background highlights, such as specular reflections and light sources, which is why it often associated with such areas. However, bokeh is not limited to highlights, as blur occurs in all out-of-focus regions of the image.

Tiago Hoisel is a young and talented artist from Brazil. It may be hard to imagine but all of the images below were made with just a simple sketch and Photoshop. They really look like they came from a Pixar movie but nothing more than PS is being used. Tiago really has mastered shadows/lighting in every way imaginable. I think it’s time to get back to the drawing board.