RoyalTutorial.com » Tutorials http://royaltutorial.com A Kingdom of Tutorials & Amazing Design Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:51:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 How to Deal with Crazy Clients Suggestions http://royaltutorial.com/how-to-deal-with-crazy-clients-suggestions/ http://royaltutorial.com/how-to-deal-with-crazy-clients-suggestions/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:51:24 +0000 Royal Tutorial http://royaltutorial.com/?p=986 You may ignore it but deep down your heart, you know that the design is extremely ordinary, if not awful to look at. Now do not blame you squarely for that. As we are into the same field, we all know how hard it is to give perfect shape to a design when the client is interrupting all the time or making all sorts of suggestions, which are somewhat not possible unless you leave your human existence. Yes, it drives us crazy and you might feel the urge to yell at someone nearby in utter frustration when you look at the final outcome, which could be just like this –

But this is not the case always. There are some glaring or glowing examples of great web designs where client’s suggestions did work. See things this way. Since we are all human beings, we cannot be right (as a designer) or wrong (clients of course) always.

Learn From Experience

If you are a seasoned designer, you might possess the divine knowledge of judging the fate of a project at the very early stage. If you spot any signs of a project to be victim of bad decision, you should take a firm stance at the very onset. When you start feeling that your client is making you compromise on the colors, font or other things that could spell doom for your design project, you need to make it clear to your client that he is wrong though not directly. You need to make him see the other side of things by letting him know that his decision is going to get the whole project down. However, if the client is adamant and threatens to stop the project, you should maintain silence unless you do not care much about losing the client. And if you choose the first path to salvation and keep praying to God.

Draw A Line

You need to draw a line between insanity and argument. If you feel that the suggestions or the arguments of the client hold some water, you need to take criticism into grace and try your level best to make whatever amendment possible. However, if you feel that suggestions are no better than insanity, you should never go down to the stupid suggestions of clients. However, I am not asking you to confront him headlong rather try to be reasonable with him by showing him a preview of the future. Tell him straight that you have been working on the same thing for the past few years and you know what is write and wrong to stop the nagging client from intervening in the project all the time.

Sometimes, clients themselves do not have any clear idea of what they want but they still feel, as they are clients, they should intervene whenever possible. If this is the case, you need to make him clear that you have got enough projects in your hands and therefore, you do not have enough time in your hands to entertain all his fancy ideas. Let him find another service provider if he refuses to budge. It is better to concentrate on other projects rather than getting yourself busy with some unproductive and fruitless tasks.

Do not Ignore Him Completely

Sometimes, it good to make somebody appear that you are all ears. It is like making him believe that you are taking care of all his suggestions but when you are paying little attention to. However, try this small trick – try to accommodate one or two of his weird suggestions into the design, it will make him feel good and at the same time, you would not have to make much compromise on the quality front.

Author Bio
Michael Evans is a passionate writer and he has been writing for Site2You, which is the best small business website builder. He has written different article on web design, online marketing and SEO. He is equally enthusiastic about latest gadgets.

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]]> http://royaltutorial.com/how-to-deal-with-crazy-clients-suggestions/feed/ 1 Nail Art Tutorials http://royaltutorial.com/nail-art-tutorials/ http://royaltutorial.com/nail-art-tutorials/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:27:32 +0000 Royal Tutorial http://royaltutorial.com/?p=940 Imagine if you could do your own nails like they do in the nail salons? Not only would it save you a lot of money, but you would be so proud of yourself and could get super creative. That’s exactly what users on YouTube are doing, and they are sharing their art and perfection with the world. Take a look at these great nail tutorial videos.

Nail Art Tutorial – Easter Egg Bunny Animal Design

Nail Art Tutorial – Morality Monkeys or Monkey See Monkey Do Design

Nail Art Tutorial – Twilight Kitty Cat Cute Midnight Animal Pet Design

Nail Art Tutorial – That’s Not Grape? Flowers Design Cute

Nail Art Tutorial – Finger Army Shaytards Family Portrait Character Cartoon Design

Nail Art Tutorial – Spring Flowers Pretty Design

Nail Art Tutorial – Sleeping Bear-UT (Beauty) Animal Design

Nail Art Tutorial – Bunny, Chick and Eggs Design

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]]> http://royaltutorial.com/nail-art-tutorials/feed/ 5 Create a Flickr Widget for your blog. http://royaltutorial.com/create-a-flickr-widget-for-your-blog/ http://royaltutorial.com/create-a-flickr-widget-for-your-blog/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 15:52:19 +0000 BenSpark http://royaltutorial.com/?p=932 Flickr is one of the most popular photo hosting sites around. You can post your photos, add notes to them, put them in collections and sets. You can interact socially with other photographers with comments and groups and discussions. You can post photos to your blog and send them to be bookmarked on Delicious. But that is not all you can do.

You can create widgets to display your photos on your blog in interesting ways. Flickr calls this a badge. You can create an HTML badge or a Javascript badge and add them to your blog. I created a couple of different sized badges that I provide to other bloggers so they can share my Photo-A-Day photos on their blog. IT is a really easy thing to do. First you have to find it. Scroll to the bottom of your Flickr page and locate the link to Tools.

From there you are going to go to the page where you can download the Flickr uploader and other tools for posting photos to Flickr, but what about expanding Flickr. For that you need to locate the link to Hey! Where is the badge?.

At this point you are presented with a choice. Will you create an HTML badge or a Javascript badge. Let’s opt for the HTML badge, more compatible with many of the free services that won’t allow javascript. Pick your poison (HTML or javascript) and then we can pick the flavor (content).

You can now choose to display your photos, a group’s photos or everyone’s photos. If you are looking to just display photos from your own set then you can choose that set. I decided that I wanted to display all of my photos that were tagged with “photo-a-day”

Once you’ve chosen the content for your badge you are presented with options to choose how that badge is going to look, will it be vertical or horizontal, will you use square images, thumbnails or mid-size images. How many images would you like to display (1,3,5 or 10). Do you want the most recent or a random selection of images? And, do you want your buddy icon (avatar) on the badge. You can also junk everything and style the badge by yourself, but that would be in another tutorial)

Once you have made your selections you can then choose the colors for the badge. You can change the background, border, links and text. You can also remove the background and border. This is a great way to match your new Flickr badge to your current blog theme. Once this is complete you can get the code so that you can post it to your site.

On the code page all you can do is copy the code. You cannot edit the code on this page because it will always revert to the code that Flickr supplies. So copy the code and then post it to your blog, there you can make any edits that you wish. Here is one of the options that people can post to their own blogs of my final badge.

I tweaked the code a bit myself and can probably do much more with CSS however for the basic user going through the steps should take care of most people’s needs.

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]]> http://royaltutorial.com/create-a-flickr-widget-for-your-blog/feed/ 0 Create a Chalkboard Effect http://royaltutorial.com/create-a-chalkboard-effect/ http://royaltutorial.com/create-a-chalkboard-effect/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 16:15:30 +0000 BenSpark http://royaltutorial.com/?p=918 I love watching the podcast Adobe Photoshop Elements Killer Tips with Corey Barker. I’ve learned some great things from the tutorials. I watched a tutorial recently on how to make the effect of a chalkboard work in Adobe Elements. This is actually pretty simple to do.

First fill your page with a dark green color, similar to the chalkboard.

Next grab the Text tool and write on up some words. Make the color something like an off white or a light yellow, the color of chalk.

At this point you can do a couple of things. You could simply simplify the text layer or you could create a selection from the text and continue from there. I suggest that you make a selection from the text because you will have a little more control with what we will do next.

Next select your paintbrush and choose the dry brushes set. Choose the last brush in the set. This is the Pastel Medium Tip.

With this brush selected you want to go and change the more options area for it. What we want to do is change the spacing on the brush to 40%.

At this point you are going to color on the new layer within the section that was made from the text. Make sure that you turn off the layer of the actual text.

Now you can see that the writing looks a little more like Chalk. You can use that same brush to draw on the chalkboard.

And then suppose that you don’t really like how it came out, you can erase what you made but to make the chalkboard more authentic you can erase like a chalkboard eraser. Go to the Smudge tool and pick another Dry Brush, this time pick the first one the Pastel on Charcoal Paper one. Set your strength around 50% too.

You can use the smudge tool to make the board look like it was erased with an actual eraser, it will get that haze that can only be cleaned with some water, and even then it never gets quite that clean.

Have fun with this one and if you want find an image of a real chalkboard and cut out the board part to add your creation into.

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]]> http://royaltutorial.com/create-a-chalkboard-effect/feed/ 5 Get your Work in a Museum http://royaltutorial.com/get-your-work-in-a-museum/ http://royaltutorial.com/get-your-work-in-a-museum/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:00:38 +0000 BenSpark http://royaltutorial.com/?p=907 Imagine your photos hanging in famous museums all over the world. Can you picture your fantastic photos hanging for all the world to see. What one would you choose to frame and hang? I picked one of my prettier photos and decided to frame it and hang it using Museumr through the fun photo enhancing site Dumpr. So here is one of my photos using one of the framing options.

BenSpark's Photo-A-Day in a Museum

To make your photos into works of art is very easy. You simply go to Dumpr.net and choose Museumr. There you pick your photo or upload a photo and then choose museum you want to hang your photo in.

Once you choose Museumr then you have to decide where to get your photo. You can upload one from your computer, grab one from Flickr or even from any web url you can find. So you can do some very cool stuff with other people’s photos and send them to those people. Be creative and have fun.

Once you have selected your photo and museum then you get your finished product.


At this point you can choose to upload the photo to Flickr, save it to your computer or e-mail it to someone. Here is one of my final products.

BenSpark's Photos in Museums

What will you make?

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]]> http://royaltutorial.com/get-your-work-in-a-museum/feed/ 0 Layer Mask Workaround in PhotoShop Elements http://royaltutorial.com/layer-mask-workaround-in-photoshop-elements/ http://royaltutorial.com/layer-mask-workaround-in-photoshop-elements/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:00:43 +0000 BenSpark http://royaltutorial.com/?p=902 Blending layers in the full blown PhotoShop program is easy. So, when I lost my full size version of the program and had to jump to the consumer grade version known as PhotoShop Elements I lost some functionality, or so I thought.

1. Start with an image.

The idea that I had for my first image for my photo-a-day project year six was to put my eyes on Optimus Prime and also include the image of the 25th anniversary G1 DVD set as the Matrix of Leadership.

2. Scale down your additional images.

I took a photo of myself and then scaled the image down and lined my eyes up with Optimus’ eyes. To do this I set the opacity on the image of me down so that I could see my eyes over Optimus’ eyes.

3. Scale down any additional images.

I also wanted the box image of the DVD set to serve as the Matrix of Leadership on Optimus.

4. Create a blank layer.

Clipping MaskYou will move the layers like the eyes and the matrix above the background layer of Optimus Prime. Then I moved my mouse to the layers toolbar and specifically to the spot between the blank layer and the face layer. I hold down my alt key and then the clipping mask icon (see image at the left) comes up, I click my mouse and the eyes layer indents and you no longer see that layer. Make sure that you now click on the blank layer and you can start painting on that layer, this allows the image of the eyes to show through to the image of Optimus Prime. You can also stack multiple layers above that blank “painting” layer and that is how I created hte overall final image.

5. Painting on the Clipping Layer

By painting this layer I can easily add paint to reveal more of the underlying layers like the Face and the Matrix. I use the eraser option to put back more of the layer of Optimus. This gives you great control over what to reveal in your images. Also it doesn’t matter what color you use to paint on the clipping layer. So if you are blending multiple layers it is actually easier to organize by using different colors to correspond with the multiple layers.

6. See your final image

Here is my final image before I added some extra enhancements not related to the clipping mask.


7. Add some additional enhancements (if you want)

I didn’t think the image above was dynamic enough so I added a few lens flares and some difference clouds to give it a little more depth and interest. So, below is my final image.

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]]> http://royaltutorial.com/layer-mask-workaround-in-photoshop-elements/feed/ 4 Cropping is not Scary http://royaltutorial.com/cropping-is-not-scary/ http://royaltutorial.com/cropping-is-not-scary/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 15:00:09 +0000 BenSpark http://royaltutorial.com/?p=893 Cropping an image can change so much about what you want to convey. Cropping is as much about what you take away as whatyou leave behind in a photo. Cropping images in PhotoShop Elements is not a difficult process. But you need to know a few tips on how to make your crop a great one. Take for example this image below.


This is one of my Transformers, Hot Shot. I like the image but maybe I wanted to crop in tighter and make an image where you only see one arm but that leads you up to the head and the helicopter.

That is okay but I really want to give a sense that this guy is a badass so I want to focus on this head and shoulders, the body is positioned to for action and it looks like he is ready to attack in the cropped shot below.

So as you can see I can do a lot just by taking away part of the original image and shifting the focus to other areas, it changes the whole tone of the image. I actually like the image above this one better, it gives a much better sense that this character is powerful.

So, how do you crop? What is cropping and what do I need to do to crop my image? First you need to make a setting change to the Image Size routine.

The reason that you need to go here is that you need to make a setting change that will allow you to crop and retain the detail and beauty of your image. You want to make sure a few things are checked off on the screen.

Checking off Scale Styles and Constrain proportions makes sure that you crop still looks good and your image does not get distorted in the cropping process.

More importantly than that is making sure that you check off the Resample image feature and choose Bicubic. I’m going to let Wikipedia explain more on that, it is math related and well I just know it works and that is good enough for me. Using that feature has never steered me wrong. When you check off Resample image then the Pixel Dimensions box becomes available for you to use, this is good because when you are making graphics for your blog you’re going to care about pixels not inches.

Once you have made those setting changes then you can go back to the work area, click on the crop tool and crop your image. Like this:


You may want to have some more control over your crop so you are going to want to make some changes to the tool settings depending upon what yo want to crop and how you want it to look. So this is these are the options that come up when you click on the crop tool.

With this tool you have control over Aspect Ratio, Height and Width as well as resolution. You can also quickly change the values in the height and width boxes by clicking the arrows in between those boxes.

There are some pre-defined choices under the aspect ratio box, using this you can make images that fit very specific sizes or you can just do your own thing and set the no restriction on the crop and just crop with your eye.

If you choose one of the pre-defined options then as you drag the crop tool across your photo the box you create will be the size of the final crop. I had been cropping my images to 8×10 but changed to 5×7 because I can get a wider crop, or at least is seems that way.

I use a custom crop each week for the post image for every Royal Tutorial article I write. That custom is 200 pixels X 200 pixels. I can easily set that as a custom crop with the crop tool. Like this.

So that is it, cropping make easy and less scary. Experiment and tell me more about how your images look after being cropped.

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]]> http://royaltutorial.com/cropping-is-not-scary/feed/ 1 How to Create a Photo Sketch Fast. http://royaltutorial.com/how-to-create-a-photo-sketch-fast/ http://royaltutorial.com/how-to-create-a-photo-sketch-fast/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:00:22 +0000 BenSpark http://royaltutorial.com/?p=865 My work laptop is crap. For some reason it will not open my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and sometimes I have to make do with what tools are available online. Luckily there are some very, very cool ones and one of those is Dumpr. I’m going to talk only about one of the Dumpr functions in this post and revisit the site in subsequent posts. I think you will enjoy the cool functionality of this site.

The first thing you need to do is head to Dumpr.net. On the main page click on Photo-to-Sketch.

This will take you to the next area where you can select your photo. Here you can upload a photo, pull in a photo from a url or link directly to your Flickr account. I link directly to my Flickr account because I can also upload my new creation right away. So here I click on a photo from my photostream. The only issue is that you can only select from the past 40 or 50 recent photos.

After I select my photo I click continue and instantly my photo is rendered into a very cool looking sketch. I’ve noticed that sketches of people work much better than other items. Each one I made up of my daughter Eva worked fantastic. When I tried her teddy bear it didn’t work very well at all.

Once the photo has been rendered into a sketch Dumpr.net gives you a ton of options with which to share your cool creation. There are social bookmarks, the ability to send it as a card, or just e-mail it as an attachment or even upload directly to your Flickr account (required that you authorize Dumpr.net as an entity able to upload to your account.). I choose to upload to Flickr and the photo appears right in my photo stream.


Try making a few of these and please leave me links to your creations in the post comments. What will you create?

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