background in Photoshop. To achieve this we will play with some filters.

Enjoy!

1. Open a new document with these settings:

2. Select the Brush tool, with a round Brush and a diameter around 17px

3. Now draw some random lines on the background layer like this:

4. We will now apply our first filter. Go to the Filter -> Blur -> Radial Blur

5. The Radial Blur options window will now pop up. Use these settings:

6. Apply a second filter like this: Go to Filter -> Stylize -> Find Edges

7. You should get something like this:

8. Now go to Image -> Adjustments -> Invert

9. Repeat step 4, then step 6, then step 4 and finally step 8 again and you should get something like this:

10. now go to Image -> Adjustments -> Color Balance and play around with the rgb bars untill you see something you like. Then press OK.

11. To finish it off go to Filter -> Distort -> Twirl and use these settings:

12. Click OK and you're all done!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, now go ahead and play with different settings and document sizes.

1. Create a new file, 500 pixels wide and 200 pixels high.

2. Create a new layer by pressing Shift + Ctrl + N

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3. With this new layer selected, select the Gradient Tool

4. Click on the gradient to edit it.

5. Use the following colors for the gradient: #396395 and #00bacc and click OKÂ (you can choose different colors if you want)

6. While holding Shift, drag the cursor from top to down and you will get a nice gradient background.

7. Now we will add some text. Use font Arial 63 pt bold color #ffffff

8. Right-click the text layer, select blending options and select Bevel and Emboss. Use these settings:

9. With the text layer selected, hold down Alt, press up once and press right once. Do this 4-5 times to get this result

10. Right-click the top layer, select blending options and deselect Bevel and Emboss. This will flatten the top layer. Select Stroke and use these settings with color #c5c6c6

11. All done! Now get creative by using different colors, fonts,..

Have fun!

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We created a free Wordpress theme for you to download and use on your Wordpress blog.

Download it here

Please vote for us or download our theme on the following websites:

http://www.bestwpthemez.com/

http://www.wordpressthemebase.com

http://www.wpskins.org/

Thanks and enjoy this free Wordpress Theme

I thought it was time to share my experience with Windows Home server with the world, so I'm going to dedicate this blog post to it.

What is Windows Home server ?

Before I go deeper into my personal experience with WHS let's take a minute to review what all the buzz is about.

Windows Home server generally provides a simpler, smarter and safer way for families to share, organize and protect their precious photos, videos, music, documents and much more. To know if you would benefit of using WHS for your home you need to ask yourself some questions:

• Do you have 2 or more PC's in your home wich are in a network?
• Do you have a broadband internet connection?
• Do you oftenly spend time backing up those PC's?
• Do you lack access to your files on your computers when you are not at home?

Same as most people these days, you probably answered yes to all of those questions. This means that Windows Home Server would be a great product for you.
You probably have a ton of data and are beginning to have touble keeping track of all of it.

The 4 core features of Windows Home Server:

1. Share – With WHS you are able to to access your files from inside and outside of your home. You will be able to connect to your home computers and your server from virtually anywhere and share your files with family and friends through a very user friendly web interface. Also connecting to various devices such as windows mobile devices, smartphones and XBOX 360 is no problem.
2. Protect – This is probably Home Server's main function. WHS will do a fully automated backup of your home computers every day. The backups are image based so if a hard drive fails on a home PC you can replace the drive and do a full restore of that machine. An other function is shared foler duplication and snapshots to enable users to restore a file a previous version easily.
3. Store – Home server becomes the digital hub for all the data you have stored on your PC's. You can stream music, videos and photos to all PC's that are given access. It also works great with a Windows Media Center PC.
4. Expand – With home server you don't have to worry about drive letters and it allows you to expand storage quickly and easily. If you have some old USH or ATA hord drives laying around just plug them in and WHS will add them to the total drive pool. Big points on usability here!

Some technical stuff

There is a lot of stuff going in the background to make all these great features work. Windows Home Server is based on the trustworthy Windows Server 2003 SP2 with additional services running to give you that home server magic. So what are they and how do they work ?

Automated Backup

This is a new service that takes care of all the daily backups on each PC in the house. If you have a problem on a home PC it allows you to either restore an individual file or an entire PC. So how does this work ?

After setting up your Home server you will need to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software on your home computers. This software will take care of communicating with WHS to arrange the backup process. You can choose what to backup and when. Normally this will be every night.

1. When a computer is backed up, a snapshot or Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) is taken of each volume configured for backup. You can choose wich drives are included in each backup.
2. The Windows Home Server Connector Software running on your home PC then determines which clusters ( standard 4KB in size) on the volume that have changed since the last backup.
3. A hash is then calculated for each changed cluster and is then sent to the Home Server.
4. The server then performs a lookup in the central backup database to determine if this cluster is already being stored.
5. If the cluster does "not" exist in the backup database, the server then asks the client to send the entire cluster. Otherwise the location of the cluster in this snapshot is recorded and we then move on to the next cluster..and it goes on and on..
6. This is repeated until all changed clusters on the PC have been evaluated.

What's really nice about the backup feature is that Home Server uses Single Instance Storage, meaning it will only store a single copy of a given file.

We all know that files get duplicated around on the various home PC's in the house and of course we don't want to backup all these file smultiple times. WHS takes care of this by only backing up each file only once.

Drive Extender

Drive Extender is a fantastic service that handles all the magic behind getting rid of the dreaded drive letters when you are adding additional storage to the Home Server.

This means you can use drives of different sizes both external and internal while the Drive Extender service will just add them to the total drive pool. Also if you remove a drive from the Home Server or one of them fails, WHS will move the data to another drive.

This "redundancy" happens at the shared folder level and you can turn this on or off for individual shares.
With Shared folder duplication what happens is this. Say for example you save a new photo to "Photo" share on your Windows Home Server.

At this point the Drive extender system filter creates a reparse point for the new file and determines onto which disk to store the new file. Within a couple of minutes the drive extender service will create a duplicate copy of the file and update the reparse point with the second location.

Remote Access

This is the coolest feature of Windows Home server. With Home Server you are able to access all your computers both inside and out of your home.

Using the web interface you can log in to acces your shared folders on your Home server, Remote Access the Home Server console and even get a Remote Desktop connection to all the PC's in your home network just like you were sitting in front of your own PC when you are actually far away from home.

Of course to get all of this working prperly requires some configuring. I'll get back at this in the "My Experience" section.

My Experience with Windows Home Server

So now that you are properly introduced to the main functions of WHS and are starting to get an idea what it is exactly, I'll share my experience with it.

My Home server:

I assembled some old computer parts I had lying around and bought some harddisks and come up with this system:

• 3GHz Pentium 4 with silent cooler
• MSI Motherboard
• 1 GB DDR
• 2 x 500 GB Sata
• DVD RW

I've put this hardware in an old tower case with a silent power supply.

Here are Microsoft’s stated minimum requirements for WHS:

• 1GHz Pentium 3 or higher
• 512MB of RAM
• 70GB of storage space
• 100 Mbps Ethernet card

WHS comes in three discs. They are:

• Windows Home Server Installation DVD – use this DVD to install Windows Home Server on a computer
• Windows Home Server Connector Software CD – use this CD to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software
• Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore CD – use this CD to restore a home computer from a backup located on a Windows Home Server

After installing with the Home Server Installation DVD i was ready to start configuring it.

There is a great tutorial on installing WHS on your server here : http://www.krunker.com/2007/06/26/part-1-installing-windows-home-server-rc/

Part 2 of this tutorial shows you how to setup your software : http://www.krunker.com/2007/07/22/part-2-windows-home-server-connector/

It's all pretty straight forward, but I encountered one major problem. I could not get the remote access to work.

WHS uses port 80 and SSL port 443 for serving the Windows Home Server web interface.
But my ISP Telenet blocks all ports under 1024.. so I had to change them to something higher.

There is a fantastic tutorial on how to do this here: http://www.myhomeserver.com/?page_id=23

After following this tutorial, my web server was up and running and I could remote access EVERYTHING at EVERY TIME from ANYWHERE and my computers were safely backed up daily so you could say I was already

very happy with it.

I have to round up this post for today, but it will be continued with topics like add-ins and other functions.

Resources

Windows Home Server Site
Stay at Home Servers
Windows Home Server Blog
MS Windows Home
Server.com – Great blog and Add-in site
We Got
Served UK Home Server site. Lots of add-ins here

1. Open the image you want to retouch and also open a random image of a sunset.

2. Now select the image you want to retouch and in the Photoshop menu go to Image > Adjustments > Match Color

3. The Match Color dialog box will appear.

4. In the source option box select the sunset image. If you have the preview option selected you will see that your original image has now taken over the color attributes from the sunset image.

5. Now the effect has a little bit too much effect. So now you can adjust the Fade slider until you see something you like.

6. There you go! Check out the before and after retouch inmage below. You can use this retouch function in many occasions so get creative with it.

Stay tuned for more tutorials.

Now it’s your time to find out the secret to make the wrinkles look very dramatic using Photoshop.

1. Open a photo

Begin by opening a portrait of someone with wrinkles.

I dragged a pic of stockphoto to use as an example.

To open an image, choose File > Open, browse for the image and click Ok

This effect will also work on photos of younger people with smoother skin as well but this photo effect works best on wrinkles.

2. Click on the New Adjustment Layer button in the layers palette

3. Choose Black & White.

4. The Black and White tool will appear. Click OK with the default settings.

5. Blend the layer. In the Layers palette, click on the drop down menu and select Overlay.

6. Now your image should look a bit more dramatic already.

7. Duplicate the background layer by selecting it and pressing Ctrl + J. This new layer will be called Background copy.

8. Now apply the Plastic Wrap filter. Choose Filter > Artistic > Plastic Wrap.

9. In the Plastic Wrap options window, use these settings:

10. From the drop down menu in the Layers palette, select Multiply.

11. Now click on the Add Layer Mask button in the Layers palette.

12. Now your background copy will have a layer mask like this:

14. Right click in the image and the brush settings will appear. Use a large brush and set the Hardness to 0%.

15. Erase everything around the face so that the grunge effect is only on the face of the person.

16. All done! Before and after view here:

2. Select the rectangular marquee tool, set it to fixed size: width 15px, height 30px and click the left size of the project. You should get this:

3. Fill the selection with the color #D15600 by setting it as your foreground color and pressing alt+backspace.

4. Now do the same for the right side width this color: #f4bc19

5. Deselect by pressing ctrl+d and go to Edit –> Define Pattern.. and give it the name you want.

6. Open a new document: width 500px, height 500px

7. Select the Paint Bucket Tool and make sure it’s set to Pattern and select your pattern.

8. Fill the background with the pattern by clicking it once with the Paint Bucket Tool.

9. Select the Gradient Tool and set it to Foreground to transparent.

10. Draw the gradient from top to bottom, beginning at 30 % from the top.

11. Go to Filter –> Distort –> Polar Coordinates.. and click OK.

12. All done! You got a nice “sun ray” background. Now go ahead and experiment with the colors and document size. Have fun!

Stay tuned for more tutorials!

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If you do some research on some common topics you will see a pattern in the use of certain colors for certain subjects or impressions. For example, blue is a color assiciated with trust and reliability. No wonder you will often find blue tints on websites of lawyers, webhosting companies, etc.
The use of lost of white space is even more logical when you see it on medical websites because it has a very sterile feel to it. In contrast, black is used on websites that want their product or subject to have a very prestigous look.

So before selecting the base colors for your website design, think about what look and feel is commonly associated with your subject. Of course you can brek the pattern and suddenly use a color that doen’st seem related to the rest of the colors in your design to highlight a part on your site that needs special attention. No doubt when you have a design with very light shades of grey for example and you put in a section with a bright yellow color, people will automatically be attracted to this section instantly.

Web based color palettes can be very helpfull in the whole color selection process, so google it and perhaps you will be surprised what a difference it can make.