Topic awaiting preservation: review my Tutorials (Page 1 of 1)

i spent the last few days writing tutorials and i wanted to know what you all thought of them: http://www.animedge.net/tutorials/index.php

w007

i liked the lightning tutorial its simple and gives the right effect ,but the crack one is less like a crack... and the web designing is cool exept the face thing at the upper right corner.
mainly it's cool, good work guys
the "bad mental image studio thing" is kinda uncool..

yea i know the cracked tutorial looks more like a mold one i shoudl put something about adjusting the levels more to make it more crisp and the Bad Mental Image thing is beouse this is post merger, kinda a long story about all that and the head is the logo theres aslo a explenation about why the site is setted up the way it is and so on but i guess theres not a real point to go on about it :P

w007

Firstly, use a spell checker, and proof read for grammatical errors. Secondly, for the love of god, stop centring all of your text! Actually, all of the typography on that site is kinda shot to shit. If you're going to publish something, learn about typography and fix it. Margins, screen fonts, justification etc...

As for the tutorial content, I'm not overly thrilled. Simple do this, then click that, then apply this filer type tutorials are for the most part rather pointless. They don't teach the user anything except how to follow some simple and rather straight forward instructions.

Instead, it would be a lot more beneficial to talk about how and why these steps help to illustrate the object/effect rather than just what button to click and when to click it. Talk about what makes metal look like metal, talk about why wood has a visible grain. Light, shadow, reflection (etc etc?), and how these fundamentals can be illustrated with PS. That's what people really need to learn.

It's good to see you putting in the effort and that you want to help people learn, but I fear these kind of tutorials don't really teach people, they just make them filter junkies.

I do have a bad habit of not using spellcheck on any of my stuff, its a habit i should work on to fix i know that,
All the people i have asked on aim and on other Mboards you are the only one to complain that i dont explain why it does what it does, you are right thats what people need to learn is why it does that, but no one will read it, the point behind it is to be easy straight forward instructions on how to do that certain effect and hope that they can figure out why it does that(those who care that much).
I guess this wouldnt be the best site to post such a basic tutorial becouse everyone here probly knows all this but thats also the point to get info from people who are better then me, i know a lot of people who want to read and learn how to do this but doesnt want to listen to long rambling on why it does that, i have tryed to do some research into how i should do my tutorials and thats what i have learned from it. Infact if there are ways to do this with out the add noise or blur or diffrence clouds or whatever filter i used it would be kool if someone pointed me into that non-filter direction.

w007

Heh. This is how I started off Photoshop. Filters. But the thing is though, clouds is REALLY obvious.

For lightning? I suppose you could draw a straight line and use the wave filter and gaussian blur... :: works one something while posting.:: [Made it by doing a white line, wave, duplicate, wave, duplicate, wave, flatten, duplicate, blur on bottom layer, use blur and saturation)

And before you start telling me that the wave filter is a filter, its not. There are a few filters (such as noise, blur, liquify, distort, etc) which you could not do by hand. Now things like "clouds" are a bit too obvious. (Cough cough I'm a clouds abuser cough cough::

Try teaching them about the dodge/burn tool, like in... oh who's was it... Someone's sig about the double dragon...
http://ruku.port5.com/lightning.jpg

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"The Mystery of Life"
Vol. 841, Ch. 26
"All life begins with Nu and ends with Nu. This is the truth! This is my beleif! ...at least for now." - Chrono Trigger
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I do like that lightning effect ( which is well-documented throughout the web ), but there is this even more realistic lightning that you hand-draw that is just amazing. Check out this tutorial:

http://www.digitalabuse.net/lightningtutorial.html

Yes, watch your spelling and grammar, those are two of the most important aspects of web design. You don't need to go into great detail in your tutorials, but I suggest giving some thoughtful suggestion to the reader as to what does what and why it does that. It always aids in facilitating the learning process