Minute but many developments took place when I was NOT blogging in college.

I improved a lot with Photoshop and picked up great techniques in Corel draw. Thanks to my college magazine design buddies Advaith and Mayank. One day after writing an exam I was in a very jolly mood. I couldn’t resist opening Photoshop. I started working from scratch and with my golden iPod nano in front of me. I came out with the following illustration of the iPod Nano

I stopped playing the most loved hostel multiplayer – counterstrike. It was sucking away huge amounts of my time.

I touched the 400 floor in the icytower, could survive till the 422^nd floor. This made my worldwide icytower rank to A. I was the first among my icytower playing crazy friends to achieve this. The following screenshot shows the A rank and the floor 422. To go to the next rank you are supposed to go to 500^th floor. 500 I think is possible. But the 2^nd goal (highlighted) to reach the 400^th floor without combos a little too much.

Started playing Farmville and Mafia-wars just to learn some tricks so I could post it for new players.

Well, when I was away I didn’t stop gathering information to blog about. So I could immediately start writing when I get back. Some of great such new things are waiting to get written and posted. Watch out

Sitting jobless couple of days back I discovered a good technique. Came up with this after hours of manipulation.

Adobe Photoshop was the only tool used in the making of the wallpaper. It is a nice big size (1900X1200) so you can crop according to your screen size. Request for custom screen size wallpaper, without the watermark in the comments OR a PSD.

Till now I wasn’t quite well acquainted with CorelDRAW. It was recently when I had to start learning Corel pertaining to my work needs. Photoshop and Corel are masterpiece softwares for 2D graphic designing. Photoshop used to be god for me till I stumbled on to Corel. Then I realized when it comes to vector based designing, nothing can beat Corel. Corel is perfect for vector graphics. Photoshop is wonderful to work on if you are working with bitmap.

Bitmap vs vector

Vector : Is a type of graphic where lines are defined by mathematical descriptions. So, no matter what the zoom is, the line would never get pixellated. Details are not lost.

Bitmap : Bitmap is made up of number of dots called pixels. So, if a bimap graphic is zoomed, unlike the mathematical curves in vector, each pixel gets zoomed and the image looses clarity.

Thus, working with Vector is obviously rewarding when you have to enlarge the graphic to unusually high resolution. You would finally have a zoomed image without any loss of quality. Vectors also have a small size if stored in vector supported format like Corel’s ‘.CDR’.

Its not just lines. Texture or gradient fills can also be vectors. Unlike bitmap textures and gradients they don’t loose the color detail at the transition. No matter what the zoom is.

When I learnt to use Photoshop, I did it in a trial and error way. It took me a little more time to master but learning this way helped me to remember through mistakes. The best way to learn online is, looking at step by step tutorials and following them. This helps well to get well acquainted with the workspace, shortcuts and predefined techniques. I started with the Corel documentation at first. Now I’ve started to follow some random online Corel tutorials.

Photoshop:

• www.tutorialized.com
• www.psdtuts.com
• www.psdhero.com

Corel:

• www.sketchpad.net
• www.grafx-design.com

Sumopaint (MSpaint on drugs) is a wonderful online PhotoEditing/paint application. It uses Flash player 10 to display on the browser window. Unlike Adobe Photoshop it is free to use and needs no installation (is an online app). It can do almost everything Photoshop can do. Functions ranging from filters, levels, temperature, tone adjustments, transform, layers and selections are supported. The symmetry tool with the gravity feature tuned on makes great modern art.

The gravity and symmetry tool turned on makes great art.

[Sumopaint]

Lets see if there is a bigger and badder stumbleupon fan out there come on can you beat this?? Here is my fan-art:

Hand-made stumbleupon logo in photoshop- By me