Kiran Upadhyay

Textures are indispensable if you do any kind of design compositions. Not only do they provide an environment or background that you can use in your designs, a skilled designer can use them to set the overall feel and mood of the composition as well. If you have a decent camera, you can mostly create the textures you want using a photo of the desired object and some Photoshop magic. Here are some sites you can look up to find free Photoshop textures in case you are feeling lazy or don’t have the appropriate resources to create your own textures. The sites are in no particular order. Amazing Textures Amazing Textures list various free Photoshop textures nicely sorted into different categories. You can find textures representing wood, bricks, glass, metal, fabric and many more. You can browse the site as it is, however if you want to download higher resolution images you would have to register with the site. The registration is free. DeviantArt DeviantArt is renowned for this kind o

Of course, the easiest way to get rid yourself of almost all performance issues is to have the money to buy a new, faster computer. But it’s much easier said than done, especially when you are not so financially independant. So, let’s say you have an average PC/Mac and whenever you start Photoshop, it takes some time to load (enough to use the bathroom, make coffee, send an email to your loved one, etc. ) or maybe it slows down when processing high resolution images or rendering a filter. I’ll give you some tips on how to make Photoshop faster just by tweaking some options in Preferences. Note: I am using Photoshop CS4 and the screenshots are from that version, but don’t worry if you have an older version of the software – they all have those options, only the text and positioning may vary. Look around and you will find them. To bring up the Preferences dialog box go to Edit-> Preferences or click Ctrl-K: Tip 1: Adjust the Performance settings Choose Performance: As you can

It’s a common problem among computer users: after a few months, our computers become weighed down by programs and all sorts of other junk, and inevitably become sluggish. For the less tech-savvy users, this may induce thoughts like “Why is my computer so terrible?” or “I guess I could always upgrade this… what-cha-ma-callit RAM thing”. Regular maintenance is usually required to keep a computer optimized and running at its best. Here are four programs that will make your computer faster, and four trade-offs to help make the best use out of the amount of RAM that’s installed on your computer. MSConfig For those who despair endlessly that their computer lags too much at start up yet don’t know how to go about fixing that, taking a look through MSConfig would be the place to start. Msconfig can by accessed by hitting Windows-R, which brings up the “Run” dialog, and typing in “msconfig”. Under the “Start Up” tab, there is a list of programs and executables that are launched when the compu

Windows 7 will be released today. We have already given plenty of love to Windows 7. If you are still using Windows XP and want to switch directly to Windows 7, you might get disheartened knowing that there is no direct path to upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7.  However, with a bit of planning and with appropriate tools, you can move from XP to Windows 7 with minimal of fuss. If that is what you are looking for, this is the guide for you. Let’s set the ball rolling straight away. Step 1: The checks First off, you would want to make sure your existing hardware can support Windows 7. Windows XP has been out for a long time and your hardware might not support the newer and comparatively more demanding versions of Windows like Windows 7. These are the official system requirements: 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit) 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit) 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of available disk space (64-bit) DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher dri

Sometimes I wish that dates were the things that only grew on palms. But alas, it stares back at us from calendars too. Apart from the walls, we have them everywhere…online, offline, iPhones et.al. And with all that comes the task of managing them. It seems such a chore at first, but the payoffs if we can keep at it with discipline, is a more organized life. Which are your two favorite calendar apps? I hope its Microsoft Outlook on the desktop and Google Calendar on the web; because this is what the post is all about. Both are full blown calendar utilities and adopting any one decidedly makes our life a whole lot easier. But what if you decide to use both, like I do? One reason is that both have their own features and also I like to store my my plans in two places (offline and online) for all time access. As I said before, maintaining one is a chore…two could be a headache. Thankfully no, because there are some ways we can sync Outlook with Google Calendar. The Little But Handy Out

You should all remember clip art, those drawings you used to play with whenever you had to type a document, or make a presentation. Officially it refers to ‘pre-made images used to illustrate any medium’. These days they’re being used in a multitude of projects, usually to beautify a document’s looks. These clip art graphics are always composed of illustrations, sometimes with a little text, but never photography. If you look at office suites like Microsoft Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel), you’ll see that it comes with a fair bulk of graphics. Most often, you won’t have to look further than that. Nevertheless, sometimes you do. Whether your collection does not suffice, or you never had any clip art in your office suite to begin with, referring to the world wide web for free clipart downloads is a logical step. Regretfully, a lot of people try to make money out of – often mediocre – clip art. Today we’ll show you a bunch of sites that don’t, places where you can find great clip ar

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document