/ blog | image gallery | resize images online or on your PC maintaining quality

I`m sure you`ve seen this effect before and wondered how it is done. It`s often seen in magazines but this technique of focusing is pretty common in all media formats.

So, how can you do it?

First, let`s find a good picture to use. I will use the following Royalty Free picture:

For this effect to be perfect, I like to have a really clear image. As you can see, this image is a little bit blurry and has a lot of noise in it. So, first, let`s open the image in Reshade – Image Enlarger. With this program I will try to eliminate the noise and sharpen the image (reduce the blur). I use Reshade instead of Photoshop because this program does the job better, and, most important, much easier and quicker. Without using Reshade, the end result will be similar, but will have some blur, noise and artefacts, that I think will ruin the image.

So, after I tried several settings, I ended up using these:

The difference is subtle, but quite visible for the trained eye.

Now, open the modified image in Photoshop. Go to the path panel, and create a new Path. Select the Pen tool and start drawing an outside line for the object you want to focus in the end. Feel free to zoom as much as you want to make all the process easier. It`s not necessarily to make the selection perfect, actually, you can make a rough selection:

Make sure you close the path (end by clicking at the start anchor point). Now, right click on the path in the Path toolbox and click on Make Selection.
Select a Feather Radius of around 20px.

Go to Filter -> Blur -> Radial Blur. Use this settings:

The end result should look something like this:

Some of you might have noticed that after the 1 month expiration period was over, your online credits were still there, ready to use, and all the advantages of a premium user were not taken away. We had a grace period in place for your credits until now.

As of today, any credits purchased have a two month expiration  (yes, it’s been extended with one whole month). For those of you that purchased a very large amount of credits, and might not have been aware of the expiration notice, we’ve decided to extend your expiration period with one month for every 10 credits purchased (only works retroactively). For those that had purchased 100 credits, they will expire in 10 months from now on.

Have a nice weekend!

In this tutorial I will show you how to improve the look of a portrait image in a few quick steps. First, we need a picture. A big picture so we can make sure the details are not altered. For this tutorial I will use this picture:

To quickly edit this image, I will not use Photoshop. Instead I will use Reshade Image Enlarger that will to the job as good as Photoshop if not even better. So, here are the settings that I’ve used:

And here is the image:

At first, the difference might not look that big, but zoom in and you will see what a big difference there is:

Now let’s add some cool curly lines over the image to give it a classy effect. So, I’ve created two images, using letters from the Rothenburg Decorative font (I’ve cropped some parts from the letters R and S). Here are the images:

Import the images in the project, put them in the corners and select the blend mode to Soft Light (both of them). The final image should look like this: