I’ve done this one before on a couple of my fellow geeks. It’s super easy to do and will have even the most savvy individual scratching their head.

Step 1: First thing you need to do is take a screen shot of the victims desktop. Since I’m a designer I use the, “Print Screen”, option and then just paste into Photoshop. Make sure to get the bottom taskbar in the shot. The idea is to emulate the person’s desktop exactly.

Step 2: Once you have your screen shot cropped and saved set it as the desktop. To do this right click on the desktop and click on Properties. This will pull up the Display Properties panel.

Step 3: Right click on the desktop again and select, “Arrange Icons By”. Make sure to uncheck, “Show Desktop Icons”. This will hide their icons. See where I’m going with this?

Step 4: Right click on the taskbar and make sure to uncheck,”Lock the Taskbar”. Once you do this drag the task bar to the top of the screen.

Step 5: Right click on the bottom taskbar and go to properties. Click on, “Auto-hide the taskbar”.

The task bar will then disappear leaving the screen shot you took of the desktop with the icons in it’s place. The victim wont be able to open any files on the desktop or run any programs from the taskbar. Like I said I’ve done this to a couple buddies and watched them restart after restart start to pull out their hair. It’s a good obnoxious one that is harmless to the PC. Happy Pranking.

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Photoshop blending options give your images and text some extra impact. Drop shadows, gradients, outlines, bevels and more will give your graphics that professional look you are striving for. Below I’ll be explaining the, “Blending Options”, Pallet in Photoshop.

First off to get to the, “Blending Options”, pallet right click on the layer you wish to apply effects to. You’ll get a list of options. Blending options is the second in that list.

Drop Shadow

Yep you guessed it…the drop shadow option adds a shadow to your image or text. This effect makes your images jump off the page and give them the illusion of depth. I use this effect all the time in conjunction with, “stroke”, when making images for my site.

Inner Shadow

Again this effect lives up to it’s name inner shadow also helps give your text a realer 3dimensional quality.

Outer Glow

Outer glow has many different applications. By adjusting the spread and opacity you can create a nice haloed effect that works well for putting behind cut out images giving them more impact. If you keep the size of the glow small you can make your text or images larger and more pronounced.

Inner Glow

Normally you wouldn’t use all these effects together as your project would get far too busy, but for the sake of this tutorial you will at least get the idea of what each option can do. I like to use the inner glow sparingly mostly on text to give my graphics more impact.

Bevel And Emboss

This effect is by far way to over-used by Photoshop newbies. The, “Bevel and Emboss”, option gives your graphics a sense of roundedness. Used sparingly this effect can be quite elegant, but like I said before is the downfall of many new designers. Play with the opacity and light angle to get the effect that is right for you.

Color Overlay

The color overlay is an option I use the least, but can be handy on occasion especially when working with shapes. Color overlay will replace your shape with what ever color you choose while maintaining other blending effects.

Gradient Overlay

This is a neat looking effect. It applies well to text, but will work with images as well. Gradients can be altered by toggling through the colors and slider at the bottom.

Pattern Overlay

This is one I personally don’t use that often, but can produce some interesting effects. Photoshop has some prefabbed patterns you can use or if you feel so inclined you can import your own through the pattern manager arrow on the side of the pattern box.

Stroke

I use this one all the time. With the, “Stroke”, option you can put a defined line around any image or text. This is the other option I use when building graphics for my site. It provides a defined edge around your content.

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So you have a folder with 100 images in it that need to be resized and have a watermark added. Doing this one at a time would take you all day, but with the use of Actions in Photoshop this repetitive task is as simple as editing one image with just a few extra steps.

Let’s Get Started.

1. Open your actions pallet. If you don’t see it in your window tabs go to Window > Actions

2. Click the, “Create New Actions”, tab. (It’s the one at the bottom that looks like a post it note.) Name your action something that makes sense to you. If you’re resizing images call it something like resize.

3. Once you’ve created your action and named it hit the round record button at the bottom. You’ll know it’s recording your action when it turns red.

4. Apply what ever effects you wish to your images. You will see them recorded in the Actions pallet as you finish with your selections.

5. When you’ve finished adding effects, resizing, adding text, etc to your project hit the stop button at the bottom of the Actions pallet.

How To Batch Process Your Images

6. Go to File > Automate > Batch

7. When the box below will pops up select your action from the drop down list at the top.

8. Choose the folder you wish to batch from the source option.

9. Select the folder where you want these new images to go. Hit ok and go get some coffee. Depending on the size and difficulty of your action these images should be batched in no time.

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If you’ve never used blending effects in Photoshop you really need to hop on board. Blending effects can be particularly handy when creating the same effect over and over. This is especially beneficial when making graphics for a website that holds a set standard. Save a psd with layer effects applied to it and you can re-create the same look and feel time and time again without re-inventing the wheel.

Today we’ll be adding effects to textual graphics.

1. First off create a new text layer with a font of your choosing. I’m using my standard site font, “Dirty Ego“.

2. Blending Options Palette: Open the blending options palette. To do this right click on the layer you wish to apply effects to and select, “Blending Options”. This will open the palette up. Here you will have a number of effects to play with.

3. Drop Shadow: Select drop shadow from the blending options palette. You can keep the default settings where they are, but I find I like just a touch less of a drop shadow on my graphics. So I have the distance and size turned down from 5’s to 3’s.

4. Stroke: Select stroke from the same palette Here you will have the option to choose your outline color as well as thickness. By default it’s set to 3 pts red, but simply click on the color box to select a new color and reduce the line size in the same palette.

5. Inner Glow: Again in the blending options palette make your effect selections. Choose Inner Glow. By default the color is set to #ffffbe, but once again you can choose what ever color you wish to choose from the color palette. Select, “Blend Mode”, at the top to get a more controlled inner glow effect. Choose Normal instead of Screen.

Before

After

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