By Popular Demand
The Dreaded iPod Effect...
What a great gift idea! iPod your friends and relatives...
We've all seen those Apple iPod commercials on TV, with silhouetted people dancing around acting like a spaz. Well, since mentioning the "iPod Effect" a month ago, several hundred people have requested the the iPod Effect technique. Since it's such an easy photoshop effect, we're not going to replicate it -- too many Photoshop sites already replicate each other's techniques... I'll just send you to some of these...
Attack of the iPod People - macMerc has probably the best tutorial online, which
results in this graphic. Quoting: "iPod People, iCharacters, silhouettes--whatever you call them, they are those cool people who dance around in the iPod TV commercials and show up in the posters and billboards you might have seen around town."
Here's the tutorial.
Unfortunately the brain-child who designed the MacMerc site omitted the "about" page and/or any other information on who may have created the tutorial, so we can't credit them. Oh well.
photoshopLAB.com - One of the better ones comes from the photoshopLAB.com site, Make Your Own iPod style Photo Photoshop Tutorial by Tommy Maloney
Sitepoint - Another fun one comes from the sitepoint.com blogs section. This was one of the first out there, incidentally, so it has some really flaky coding on the page. It's by Corrie Haffly, and touches on how to trace and "cut out" an object in Photoshop and create a black silhouette, a la iPod ads. You can read it here
Pixelfull has one called iPod Silhouette, by Nick K. explains the Silhouette technique, but then gets the actual iPod ad look backwards.
The Photoshop Support site really disappointed us on this one... usually they have pretty good tutorials with only mild site stalking and spam. But in this one by Jennifer Apple, we get only enough of a brief tutorial to make sure all the ads get registered as a view. But it's fun, so read it here.
"Dr Photoshop" shares his ideas on creating iPod People but may not display right in some browsers. The graphics were broken but hopefully they'll be fixed by the time you read this.
It's a Photoshop Jungle out there
Be careful... there are 43,000 others out there (like this one) that all claim to be "the" tutorial for the technique, but somehow come up short and manage just to grab you for their ad revenue. If you wanted to learn how NOT to get the effect or create a tutorial, just visit the "Tutorial Tomb" -- it won't be difficult to see how the site got its name.
Make a buck
If you learn how to do it really well, maybe you can make some bucks the way iPod My Photo dot com has managed, capitalizing on the fad.
Oh Pleeeze, Photoshop Me
There are a number of ways you can get your favorite Photoshop resource mentioned in Photoshop Madness... visit our tutorial submission page (anonymous or not!) or just slip me a note at my contact page.
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Hope you enjoyed this month's Photoshop Madness
Thanks for reading...
Editor / Publisher, DT&G Magazine
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