PP first informed me on this new product by Adobe. Adobe Photoshop express is a web version of Photoshop, where you can crop, rotate, tweak and do other adjustments on the web. No installation was needed! They even give you a 2GB of free space to host your images. Isn’t that wonderful? Please not that in order to use this website, you’ll need to have Flash 9 plugin for your web browser.

I’m now taking a “test drive” at their site. Its a user friendly website, easy to navigate and its not overly crowded with information. This site looks like a simplified version of Adobe Lightroom. Upon signing up, you’ll now be able to upload your photos. Clicking on “My Photos”, you’ll be able to edit your photos, organize them in albums and etc. At “My Gallery”, you be able to view and share your album publicly. Clicking on “Browse”, you’ll be able to search through the public albums by other users.

What I like most about this site is the ability to edit your photos online. There’s no hassle of installing application and you’ll be able to access your photos at almost anywhere, just as long as there is internet connection. It also has some of the features that PP and I use often. We like to rate our photos so that its easier for us to access and edit them later on. They also allow you to set different categories for your photos and its unlimited. Unlike Flickr, free users are only limited to a number of categories.

Click here to sign up now.

After “The 300″ movie, we are crazy about the effect. We tried to search the photo tutorial for how to create this effect but no luck However, we finally made it by ourselves. Now, we would like share with you step by step how to create “the 300″ effect in Photoshop.

Original Photo:

Step 1: Add Channel Mixer as layer and set the channel Red, Green & Blue to the value below:
Channel Red:
Red = 80%
Green = 0%
Blue = 0%
Constant = -2%

Channel Green:
Red = 76%
Green = 0%
Blue = 0%
Constant = 0%

Channel Blue:
Red = 65%
Green = 4%
Blue = 8%
Constant = 0%

Step 2: Set the layer mode = Color / Opacity = 70%

Step 3: Duplicate background to a new layer and rename it to “Soft”.

Step 4: Apply Gaussian Blur filter to “Soft” layer. Radius = 2.0 pixels.

Step 5: Set the layer mode = Overlay / Opacity = 85%

Below photo is after applied “The 300″ Effect:

Some of the Photoshop Action websites are selling this action around USD15. Now we have provided the action for you to download for FREE!!!

Another Sample:

Recently I am trying out black and white effect and next level or advanced level of B&W will be duotone or tritone.

I have learned some technique how to do duotone and today i would like to share with our pixelraves’ reader how to archive it step by step in Photoshop CS3.

Here is the start photo with color.

Step 1: Go to Image -> Adjustments -> Channel Mixer

Step 2: In Channel Mixer, convert the photo to grayscale mode by select the preset to “Black & White with Orange Filter“, make sure the Output Channel is Gray. Adjust the source channels value for Red, Green and Blue to your like. and click OK.

Now you get a basic Black & White photo.

Step 3: Even you got Black and White photo, but you need to convert to Grayscale mode before you can select the Duotone mode. If you can see the Duotone mode enabled, the reason is you are not in Grayscale mode.

Step 4: After you have converted to Grayscale and Duotone, you will get Duotone Options dialog box. Usually the Ink 1 will be Black, Ink 2 you can whatever color you want. In this tutorial, I have selected light blue from PANTONE 306 C. Hold on, you are not done yet. You can further enhance your duotone effect by changing the value of the curve. Once you have satisfied the adjustment, click OK.

Here is the final Black & White photo with Duotone effect.