I am aware that this has near nothing to do with ColdStone, but I decided to post it anyway. A good number of people have photoshop from what I know. Anyway, for anyone who wants this, here it is.

Lightning effect (Thank you, Down and Dirty Tricks!)

Make a new doc.
For now make it more than 3 in. wide and 3 in. high
Draw a gradient.
For this purpose draw a linear gradient from the bottom left corner to the top right corner. A black to white gradient works best
Apply Difference Clouds
Go to Filter>Render>Difference Clouds.
You should see a black outline of the lightning bolt. The good thing about this filter is that it is pretty much random. Undo and re-apply as many times as you see fit.
Adjust Levels
Go to Image>Adjust>Levels.
Pull the slider on the far right gradually left until you can see the bolt clearly. (In my experience, you should probably leave it not entirely cleaned up)
Finishing Up
If you want you can apply Find Edges, (Filter>Stylise>Find Edges) or Glowing Edges.(Filter>Stylise>Glowing Edges)

Please add more.

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When asked what his favorite bible verse was, Bill Clinton calmly responded. "John 16:3"
"These things they have said because they know not the father nor me." -John 16:3

Excellent idea -- I myself have no tricks, but hopefully others will add.

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Here's a quick photoshop tip:

If your image's dimensions in pixels are powers of 2 (16, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc), the "Render->Clouds" and "Render->Difference Clouds" plugins will generate tileable imagery.

No, I'm not suggesting you use these as your images, but these effects can be combined with others to create patterns.

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People who claim the sky is falling obviously aren't aware the earth is falling, too.
--
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" --Benjamin Franklin.

Here's an easy one: brushed metal for futuristic interfaces. Off the top of my head so forgive me if I miss a step:

1. Create an RGB file, any size will do but go larger than your final image.

2. Fill it with 50% gray

3. Filter-->Noise-->Add Noise... about 35%, gaussian, monochromatic.

4. Motion blur 10-20 pixels 180 degrees, or whatever angle you desire the "brushed" direction to be

5. Crop to clip blurry edges. Add Filter-->Render-->Lighting Effects as necessary to punch it up. A touch of unsharp mask might help if you want more definition.

All the parameters above can be adjusted for effect. Since it's gray, you can also use this as a bump map for a 3-D program to give your metallic textures some visual interest.

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marc siry
century city, usa

heh, lightsabres are pretty awesome too, and they're easy to make. (I'm not sure how applicable this is to coldstone, but it'd be a neat effect to try, and it makes for cool animations)

first , draw over the part of your image you want to turn into a lightsabre either using the line tool in a new layer with white (or the polygonal lasoo, if the area is bigger than a straight line, ie: the object is in motion then you would fill the area with white). Then , after you're done with that, you add soem layer effects (an outer glow to be exact, you can play with the spread and range to get the desired amount of glow). There ya go, almost instant lightsabre!

(I just woke up, so I'm sure I could give a more detailed description than this.)

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Hail to the king, baby.

(This message has been edited by Bean * (edited 11-18-2001).)

Here's a fairly simple procedure for making a nice tileable grass texture:

Create new document, make it square with dimentions that are a power of two (I usually do 256x256, but yours can be smaller or larger). Set the background to Transparent.

Choose a forground and background color (e.g. two shades of green) and run a Render/Clouds filter. Select All and run a Brush Stroke/Spatter filter. I usually then fade the spatter a little and maybe run a Blur filter.

Now you have a bunch of random colors, but it doesn't look like much yet. To add some realistic texture to the grass, you need to find a digital photo of some natural surface such as tree bark, dirt, asphalt, or whatver. Any image pulled off of the internet will work -- there are many sites full of archives of these types of images. This will effectively become your bumpmap.

Once you've chosen an image, open it in PhotoShop and re-size it so the dimensions match your grass document. It doesn't matter if the re-sized image become distorted or pixelated. Next you need to remove all the color from this image, either by selecting all and chosing Desaturate, or by changing the image mode to Grayscale. Once the color is out, copy this image to a new layer in your grass document.

From here on, you'll be working only with you grass document, which now should have two layers. Make sure the grayscale image layer is on top of the color layer and choose either Overlay or Multiply, whichever gives the best look. You can make a lot of adjustments to the overall appearance by adjusting contrast of the Grayscale image and by adjusting its opacity.

Once you have a look you're happy with, merge the two layers. The only thing left to do is to make the grass tileable. This is easily done by selecting all and choosing the Other/Offset filter. Make the Offset values half of the total image size (i.e. 64x64 if your image is 128x128). You should see a horizontal and vertical seam intersecting the middle of your image. Use the rubber stamp tool with a soft, feathered brush to smooth out these seams. Change the Offset back to zero.

Viola. You have a tileable grass texture. Similar techinques can be used to create water, rock, snow, and sand textures. The key is choosing the right colors and an appropriate image for you grayscale bumpmap. (I should mention that I think I'm technically misusing the term bumpmap here, but I don't know what else to call the thing ;-))

Other filters that work well for these sorts of textures include: Sponge, Oceanic Waves, and Craquelure.

Enjoy.

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--
Mauglir

(This message has been edited by Mauglir (edited 11-19-2001).)