It seems no matter where you look on the internet today you will see ads everywhere telling you how you can make money from the internet. Now I do not deny that you can make money on the internet. I mean I do it every day, I have adsense ads on some of my sites as well as paid advertisers. But make a nickel per click or less is hardly what I would call making money on the internet.

True I have built and managed many online stores and they have all made money as well. But they have had to sell products. It takes money to buy the products to sell, money to store the products etc. I have also been paid for teaching people how to do things. But this was always a one shot deal. That is until I decided to make some informational products and sell them on the internet.

This is not a new idea of mine, and in a sense I have already been doing this. I mean I have many photoshop tutorials on this site that have adsense ads plastered all over them. But I have always want to make and sell training videos. So I decided to get more involved in this. Along the way I came across Kevin Rileys Program How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now. The price was right and I thought hey this would be a good way to cut my teeth on marketing an information product. Besides, having a product in three days. How could that not appeal to you?

I got the paid my money and promptly got distracted onto something else. Almost forgetting about it, and then I thought you know it is time to get off my butt and give this a try. That is exactly what I did. Kevin Rileys instructions were clear and very logically laid out. He takes from finding the idea of what to write about, actually writing the guide, to putting it online and making sales as well as promoting it. In less then three days I had my guide “Pictures Sell!” written and on the internet.

The one thing I didn’t really do from Mr. Rileys guide was promote my new product. In fact all I did was add the link to my signature on a few of the forums I visit regularly. Well the morning after I had my guide posted I was checking my e-mail as I always do and I was surprised to see not one, but a couple of sales for “Pictures Sell!”. I always love the excitement of selling something or getting money from an ad click. But this time instead of a puny few cents I had made close to $10.00. I know, big wow right? But it didn’t stop there through out the day I kept getting e-mails that another copy of my guide had sold. I mean come on, I haven’t even started promoting it yet. Now I really look forward to checking my e-mail because just about every time I do I find I have made another sale.

Kevin Riley is a stand up sort of guy. In fact he has even given me a little additional help over Skype. Not only is he very helpful he is a lot of fun to talk to. Although I always feel I am infringing on his valuable time, he never makes me feel that way. When Kevin asked me to write a testimonial for How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now I jumped at the chance. It was then I realized that I was not really sure how to write a testimonial. But it was easy because “How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now” is truly a great product.

The only possible flaw it could have is telling you how to take and edit the pictures. But don’t worry about that “Pictures Sell!” will teach you how to do that with FREE image editing software.

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 There are numerous tutorials out there showing you how to make a virtual tattoo using Photo Shop. Many of these use overlay in the blending modes to achieve this. The only problem with most of the tutorials out there is that the virtual tattoo looks sort of, well overlaid and not actually following the contour of the body it is place on.

 I have however seen one tutorial where the virtual tattoo seem to follow the contours of the body but alas it was in black and white only. Not that black and white tattoos and pictures don’t look good but they don’t suit all purposes.

 In this tutorial I will show you a method using the displace filter to make a virtual tattoo look as though it follows the contours of the body. So let’s get started….

• The first thing you need to do is locate an image of a person that you want to place the tattoo on. I went to www.sxc.hu to find one. Make sure you choose one with lots of exposed skin so you have more areas to place the virtual tattoo.
• The next thing you need is the image of the virtual tattoo. Since I am a little lazy sometimes I just looked through my hard drive and found this image of a Fighting Hell Fish (if your a Simpson’s Fan you probably just got a good laugh.).

• Now open the picture of the person you want to place the virtual tattoo on in Photo Shop. Duplicate the layer, you can do this by dragging the layer to the New Layer Icon . Now click on the eye next to the original layer to turn off its visibility. I always try and do this so if I do a major screw up I still have the original image in tact.
• Make sure you are working on your duplicate layer by clicking on it. Now might be a good time to change its name to person or woman, or something descriptive. This is a good practice to get into so when you are working with numerous layers you know whats what. Now in the Layers Pallet select the channels tab.
• Now click on each channel until you find the one that gives you the most contrast. This means that the bright areas are their brightest and the dark areas are there darkest. In my case it was the Reds channel.
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• Right Click or Ctrl Click on the channel that gives you the best contrast, then select Duplicate Channel. When the Duplicate Channel dialog box appears make sure under Destination, Document is set to New. You can then name it. I went with Tattoo map for a name. This document will become the displacement map for the tattoo.

• On you new image which should have open automatically click the Layers tab to go back to the layers. Now press Crtl+L to bring up the levels dialog. Here we will tweak the contrast a little bit. To do this you’ll move the far left and far right arrows under the Input Levels graph. The far left will control the darkness and the far right will make it lighter. Don’t over do it, on some images you may not have to do it at all. Want you want to be able to see is the curves of the body getting gradually darker as they move away from you.



• As you can see I really didn’t change it too much. But you can see that the image gets darker as it rolls of the shoulder. This should make for a good displacement map. Now be sure to Save this image. I called mine tattomap.psd . You can close it if you wish as we will no longer be working on it.
• Go back to the image of the person you want to place the tattoo on. Now go back to Channels and select RGB to turn the colors back on. Then click back on layers and select your duplicated layer.
• If you haven’t already open the image of the tattoo you want to place. Now using the Move tool drag your tattoo image onto the the picture of the person you want to virtual tattoo (I had removed the background from my tattoo image – and if you haven’t you need to do this). Using the Move Tool place the tattoo where you want. You may have to resize and rotate it so it fits. For my image I am placing it on her shoulder.


• If you adjusted the size or rated the tattoo you now need to press Enter to accept the changes. Now tattoos seldom have clearly defined edges (most likely because the ink spreads a little on the skin). So go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and blur it any where from .5 to 2 pixels. Depending on the image you have chosen for your tattoo, in my case I blurred it about 1.5 pixels.
• Now we are going to use the Displace filter. Go to Filters > Distort > Displace. Make sure your settings are the same as mine below.





• Press Okay and when it asks you for the displacement map file choose the one you created from the channels. Mine was the tattoomap.psd file. Then in the layer blending mode change it to Multiply in the Layers Pallet. Then adjust the opacity to around 75%. This should result in a really realistic looking tattoo.

 The Displace filter is a really powerful feature and you can use it to many more things. I hope this tutorial has shown you a better way to use photo shop to make a virtual tattoo. Happy Virtual Tattooing.

For more tutorials from this site Click Here

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 Now I know there are several tutorials out there that show you how to make an image looked cracked and peeling away. But I have never seen one that demonstrates how to reveal another image beneath the cracks and peels. Hopefully that is what this tutorial will teach you to do just that.

• Well the first thing we have to do is find the images we want to use. This is the normally the most important and difficult step. You’ll need the image you want to crack and peel (I picked a
  portrait of a woman), you’ll need an image for the texture you want to use for the cracks (I picked the dried and cracked mud picture), then you need the image you want to reveal underneath the peels (for this I picked a circuit board). I got all my images from http://www.sxc.hu. If you click on the thumbnails of them below it will take you to the full size images I used.
   


• First off lets open the image with the circuit board (in photo shop of course). What we are going to do here is blend the circuit board into the holes in the rust. So open up the image of the rust and use the Move Tool to drag a copy of the rust over the circuit board. Position it over the circuit board where you will have the most flakes. You can also resize it to just cover the circuit board. I want to achieve an effect of a large peel so I didn’t resize it. In the image below I have reduced the opacity of the rust layer so you can see how I positioned it over the circuit board. You DO NOT have to do this.

 



 
• Now what we want to do is let the Circuit board show through beneath the areas where the rust has peeled away. We will do this by using a layer mask as it is easy to fix mistakes as we make them. Click the Layer Mask Button at the bottom of your Layers palette.

 



 
• Now select a soft brush that will fit in the rust hole hole and begin to paint black to reveal the circuit board beneath as in the above image. You may have to adjust the size of the brush as you go. I like to use the [ and ] keys to change the size as I go. Try to get close to the edge, if you go over switch to white to remove any part of the circuit board that extends outside of the rust hole. Pay attention to not reveal the circuit board on the inside of the flakes that are hanging there. I first take a small soft brush and go along the edges, once I have all the edges done I select a harder larger brush to fill in the center. Clicking on the Brush Drop Down allows you to change the hardness or softness of your brush.

 




 
• Take your time doing this masking, the more attention to detail you give it the better the end result. Above is my masking almost complete. Once your masking is done go to Layer > Merge Flatten Image. Its a good idea to save this image at this point so we can use it later.

 



 
• Now if you haven’t already opened the portrait picture and the cracked earth picture in photo shop, do so now. Again using the Move drag the cracked earth image over the portrait image. I then used the handles to transform it to fit completely over the woman’s skin. Go to your Layers Palette and select Multiply in the blending mode and adjust the opacity to about 50%.

 




 


 
• Now if you look at the above image you’ll see the color just doesn’t seem right and some of those cracks don’t look realistic. First lets start by correcting the color hit Ctrl +L to bring up the levels adjuster. Now how you set your levels will depend greatly on the images you are using. Dragging the far left slider will darken the image, using the far right slider will lighten it. In my case I needed to lighten it a fair bit.

 



 
 
 


 
 
• Now we have to fix some of those cracks. I don’t want to have cracks through the eyes, or the lips. So once again I use a layer mask by selecting the layer mask icon . I paint the eyes with a soft black brush to remove the cracks. If I screw up I just go over that area with white. Now because a real face is 3D and a picture is 2D we have to turn our attention to the areas of the face where the height would change in 3D. For example the neck, and nose. We can’t really have a crack continue from the neck onto the chin. So zoom in to these areas and mask off the continuing cracks so they look as below.

 
 



 

 

 
 

 
 


 
 
• Alright now we have achieved a cracking effect on the face. It is now time to use the rust peel image we created. Using the Move Tool drag your peel image on the portrait. Now I changed the Opacity of this layer so I could better resize and position it. I want the main peels to be on her fore head and top of the face so by resizing and moving the peel image around I can achieve this.

 
 



 
 
• Once you have placed the circuit/rust layer and resized it to want you want hit the Enter key to accept the transformation. Now turn your Opacity up to around 90%, and select multiply from the blending level. Just as with the cracks you now have to hit Ctrl +L

 
 



 
 
• Now if you look at the above image you’ll notice a few things glaring at you. Firstly some of our peels don’t seem to blend very well. Secondly we got a bit of the blue stripe from our rust image showing. So to fix this we once again as we did with the crack image use a layer mask. Select the Layer Mask button. Using a large soft brush and having your foreground color set to black, (TipI you press the D and then X keys it will change your foreground color to black) paint out the areas you don’t want and blend the edges.

 
 



 
 
• Now you can use levels here to blend the colors and make the image appear more realistic. But in something like this I like to use color over lays. I find if can give a really nice effect. So create a new layer by clicking on the New Layer Button . Now double click on your foreground color to bring up the color picker. If you want to use the same colors I did type b79631 by the number sign in the color picker. Select the Fill Tool and click on the image. Change your Blending Mode in your Layers Pallet to color.

 
 




 
 
• Next add another new layer, and fill this layer with the same color. This time however set your Blending Mode to Overlay and adjust the Opacity until you achieve a sort of film look.

 
 

  Now you should have been able to get your image to look something like the image above. Feel free to experiment using different colors to achieve a different look. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have some time look at some of the other tutorials on this site by clicking here.

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  Let’s face it, most of us use photo shop because it is fun. The other day at work a colleague and I were discussing how one would manipulate a picture of an apple to make it square. So thought “What the heck I’ll do a tutorial on it.”. So lets’ get started.

  Well first you are going to need a picture of a piece of fruit, or an object you want to change the shape of. In order to find the picture of an apple that I am going to use, I used googles
image search. You are looking for an apple with white back ground, or some other back ground that is going to be easy to remove. Once you have found your desired image and removed the back ground you can continue on with the tutorial.

• So open up the your image that you have removed the back ground from in photoshop. Keeping this image open, go to File > New and create a new image. Make it larger than your source picture to give you some extra room and select white background for background contents.


 

• Use the select tool to drag your image (in this case an apple) to your new image and place it somewhere in the center.
• Photoshop will automatically create a new layer when you drag your apple to the new image. Now we are going to draw some guide lines in order to make our apple square. Create a new layer.
• Choose a color that’s not going to interfere with your image. I like to use red, but use what ever you are comfortable with. Make sure on the top menu you have the Fill Pixels icon selected   and draw a 3D box around your apple. Don’t get too worried if it is not perfect, we are only going to use it for a guide.

• Now turn off the background layer by clicking on the eye icon. Select the layer with your apple on it. I went ahead and renamed this layer apple.
• From the filter menu choose liquify. When the liquify filter screen appears you may have to zoom in on your apple to make it easier to work with.

• Now on the Liquify screen you’ll want to change the following options.
  1. Make sure Show Backdrop is selected.
  2. Change the Use tab to the layer where your 3D box is.
  3. Change the Opacity to about 50%.
  

• Now using the warp tool we can begin to shape the apple. If you click on the image below, you can see a short clip on how I used the warp tool to both push the apple out to the box and into the box.

• Don’t worry if you make a mistake. If you want to undo something you have done use the Reconstruct Tool and it will do just that – reconstruct your image.
• You may encounter places where you just can’t seem to make it warp and still look good. In this case you can use the Bloat Tool . This will (you guessed it) bloat the image. Another useful tip is to use as big of a brush as will work, this tends to give you better edges.
• Once you are satisfied with your shaping of the apple. Select Ok and the filter will render its results. You could stop here but we can make it look a little better by adding some highlights along the square edges.
• Use the Eyedropper and select an area where the color is a good representative of the color of the entire apple.
• Double click the new color picked and the color picker will come up. Now choose a color to the left of the one selected so it will have more white in it. Select the paint brush, and choose a small, soft brush with an opacity close to 60%. make a New layer. Take this brush and paint lines where the edges of the apple should be.




• Now using the eraser, remove some of the harshness of the lines and make them look more natural.



• Now I like to turn the background layer back on. You do this by clicking on the box where the eye ball should be. Then I select the layer I put my highlights on and adjust the opacity until they blend into the light.





• At this point you can call it done, depending on if you are going to use this square apple in another image. At this point I add a bit of shadow. To see how click here.

 This techniques are not just limited to fruit, and vegetables. You can apply them on just about anything, pets people. let your imagination free and see what you can come up with.

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 Has this ever happened to you? Your surfing the web looking at photos to get ideas and learn better composition. When suddenly a picture captures your eye. Wait a second you took that picture! But that’s not your name on it. Some one is trying to pass off your work as there own.

 Or here’s a more realistic scenario. some one hires you to do some photo shop work for them and wants to see the finished project. So you dutifully post the pictures to your web site to show your client that yes indeed you are doing what they want. Then you never here back from them. They have taken your posted pictures from the web and printed them off leaving you out in the cold.

  In this tutorial I will show you one way of placing a water mark right in the picture so that it will print out with the picture. Meta copyrights are great but they don’t help a hill of beans when some one prints off your work, or uses it in print media. Now a good photoshop user can in all honestly remove this watermark but it will take a bit of effort. In a later tutorial I will show you another way to put a watermark on a photo that is much more difficult and time consuming to remove.

So lets get started!

1. Fire up photoshop if you haven’t already and open the photo you want to place your watermark on.
2. Choose the Custom Shape tool from the tool box. (It is the icon that looks like a little blog right underneath a black arrow)
3. After selection the custom shape tool, go up to the options bar and select the copyright symbol.

4. Create a new blank layer bu clicking on the Create New layer button at the bottom of the layers pallet.
5. Now hit the letter “D” on your keyboard to turn your fore ground color to black and drag the copyright symbol over your photo.(use your judgement as to the size you want to go. Also keep in mind that we’ll be adding some text next to it. Below is a picture with the copyright symbol at a size I felt was good.
6. Next select the text tool, select your font and type your text. I always type the year and my name or my web sites name. When you enter the text photoshop will automatically create it on a new layer. After you have entered your text and moved it to a position that you like.



7. Now go under the filter menu and select Stylize then choose Emboss. Use the filter with the default settings of Angle 135′, Height 3 pixels, and Amount 100%. If you increase the height you’ll get a more pronounced look. When photoshop tells you that the layer must be rasterized select Okay. (Note that after you rasterize the layer you will not be able to edit the text)

8. Now select the layer with your copyright symbol and do the same as above. Once it has been embossed select your text layer and on the PC hit Ctrl + E, or Apple + E on the mac. This merges the two layers to form one.
9. Now we are going to smooth out the edges a bit to give it a little more refinement. On the layers pallet turn on the Lock Transparent Pixels. (the first icon on the left at the top in the Lock section) Then got to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and add a 2 to 3 pixel blur.

10. Make sure your copyright layer is selected and choose Hard Light from the blend menu. This will make your text and symbol transparent.
11. Now go under the File menu and Choose File Info. This will bring up the screen below.


12. Here is where you’ll enter the embedded information. Change the Copyright Status pop up menu to Copyrighted. enter your copyright notice information in the appropriate field. I usually just enter the year and my name. You can also add your web site address in the “Copyright Info URL:” box. Hit okay and all this information is recorded.
13. Now if you like this method of adding a watermark I would suggest you make this whole thing into an action so you can do it with the touch of a button. Once you have it as an action you can even apply this to a whole folder of pictures by using batch automate. We will do this in the next copyright tutorial where I’ll show you how to create the copyright that I prefer.

 Below is the finished project. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

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