MacHouse - A World of Video Tutorials

Last Christmas, my wife and I went to a concert put on by a local church. It was quite existing till a certain moment, when the lead singer suddenly stopped singing. Then something unexpected happened. Suddenly, there was an announcement. A male voice said “Tom Bluewater from MacHouse, please come to the backstage immediately.” “Huh, me!?,” I said to myself. So I went to the backstage. Then a man who introduced himself as the concert manager said that they needed to lower the curtain immediately. I said “Hold on, how do you know about me and MacHouse?” The concert manager said “I searched the world wide web with keywords ‘Mac Photoshop tutorial’ and found you.” But how did he know that I was here? I asked him, but he just kept talking as if I had not existed. Oh, boy… As usual, I pulled MacBook out of my backpack and launched Adobe Photoshop CS3. In a matter of 6 minutes or so, I managed to lower the stage curtain.

The following tutorial shows easy steps to design a stage curtain in 6 minutes or so, using Adobe Photoshop CS3. Note that the screenshots shown below are not in a good quality because they were extracted from a tutorial video whose color depth is 8 bits. Meanwhile, the photo used in this tutorial comes from Webshots.

1. Using Rectangular Marquee Tool and Quick Mask, make a selection of the area where you want to lay a curtain.
2. While the selection is active, fill it with sheer black. Then cast Noise > Add Noise.
3. Lock transparency on the Layer Palette.
4. Apply to the layer Blur > Gaussian Blur.
5. Pick a lighter gray color and draw vertical lines.
6. Pick a darker gray color and draw vertical lines adjacent to the existing ones.
7. Pick a half-tone gray color and draw vertical zig-zag lines between light and dark vertical lines.
8. Apply to the selection Blur > Gaussian Blur.
9. Apply to the selection Adjustments > Hue/Saturation to colorize it.
10. Add a layer style and enable Drop Shadow.

The following is a screenshot of the final result.

Video tutorial with no audio commentary

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Photoshop CS3 is a product of Adobe Systems Incorporated.