Photoshop Tutorial - Chaos Background

In this tutorial, you can learn how to create a 'Chaos' digital background in Adobe Photoshop for your graphic design projects. (Or... if you want to skip all the steps and just get this cool background for a minimal fee, go to our website up240.com, register and download).


1. Get a digital 'Chaos' download from our website. Make sure you get the eps version for easier color changes and detail manipulation in Adobe Illustrator. Copy the graphic and paste into a newly created Photoshop file.


2. Paste it into a Photoshop file as a 'smart object'.


3. Create a new Layer behind the graphic and color it a solid background. In this case we selected a generic brown and will tweak all the colors at the end.



4. Duplicate the Layer with the 'chaos' graphic and scale it up. The new enlarged layer should be placed behind the original graphic.



5. Now, lighten the opacity Layer. Go up to Filters menu and apply Gaussian filter to soften the edges.


6. Duplicate your newly created blurred layer and scale it up to cover most of the background.


7. In the Layers box, select 'Hard Mix' option which creates a different color and effect. You can apply it to either the 1st blurred layer or 2nd.


8. Next, using a Brush tool set to 25% opacity and low hardness level (for soft edges), create 'glowing dots'. This adds a lot of depth to the image.


9. Now, repeat the Brush dots but with even less opacity and much larger diameter. Place the new larger dots over the smaller ones you created in step 7.



10. Tweak the color to your liking. Do this on your background Layer. Use the 'Edit' - 'Adjustments' - 'Hue/Saturation' commands.


11. You can get a lot of different variations from this image you just created by simply turning some Layers on/off, changing background color or cropping. Our 'chaos' graphics are extremely detailed. See some samples below.

DRM - selling stock images online

A friendly stranger contacted me last week, informing me that my site is in need of 'disabling mouse right-click' ability for my visitors and customers. I consider myself a cautious business owner of a digital download stock illustration web site and so even though i know i took the basic necessary steps to secure my art work, i thought i'd look into this a bit further.

Majority of my efforts in securing my site and my digital stock patterns went into preventing illegal downloads of my high resolution files. I guess i never lost any sleep over the tiny thumbnail previews shown on my up240.com site which, as the friendly stranger stated, are available for anyone to download.

My first thought was to immediately look into disabling the right-click function for all my customers. However, after doing some research, i found out that if someone is determined, even if everyone is prevented from doing the 'save as' function via mouse right-click, they can enable it right back with minimal maneuvering through their computer preferences.
Also, disabling this function creates a slew of other problems like inability to scroll and annoying reminder windows popping up every few seconds. I think in the end this would make the customers annoyed and not wanting to ever come back.

It would seem that the best way for any online store to manage security of its digital products previews, is watermarking all stock illustrations, photos, templates and clipart. Details of each can be blown up and cropped to small sections so that customers can have a good look at what they are buying. Our artwork at up240.com has the most value at high resolution and as vector eps formats. The small thumbnails, i suppose could be used as digital wallpaper for web projects, but really, with such low resolution i don't think anyone could do much more than that.