Each month we will select three different free tutorials from the Planet Photoshop collection. Your mission: watch the tutorials and create an original piece of work, inspired by one or more of the selected tutorials, and submit it to Planet Photoshop. Winners will receive a special prize from NAPP and will have their work displayed in our "Learn it. Do it. Win it." Gallery. Each month, we will issue new challenges, designate a new batch of tutorials and offer new prizes so be sure to check in often. It’s great to learn when you win stuff too, right?
Watch these tutorials and create an original piece of work, inspired by one or more of the selected tutorials, and submit it to Planet Photoshop by Wednesday, June 24, 2009.
Thought we would start this contest series off with a bang and give away an exclusive prize package which includes:


Prizes will vary per contest so keep checking back.
Planet Photoshop is the Web's premier source for free Adobe Photoshop tutorials and brought to you by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). This is where we offer a small taste of what NAPP has to offer. Our mission: to educate and inspire other creatives through Photoshop. If you like what you see, please join us!
I used a combination of layer masks, smart blur, color range and gradients that I learned from Corey Barker’s tutorial, Photo to Drawing, to create my own original piece. I experimented with a few layers of color and gradients as well as with the aid of the pen tool, to create the design shapes in the picture.
The tutorial on alpha channels made my day when I watched it and I decided to re-take that learned skill and apply it to my own creative twist. In this image I took the fiery inspiration from the glowing gel fire thingy. I used the alpha channel extraction technique to get all these smoke
When thinking of how to best combine the techniques of drawing to photo, smoke mask, and design swirls, I thought it would be interesting to have an image of a fighter that was blasting his way out
Corey shows you how to create a 3D animation form 2D elements using Photoshop CS4 Extended. Click here to download a .MOV file with the final version of this animation.
This effect was discovered by a ‘happy accident’ and uses the 3D features inside of Photoshop CS4 Extended.
Further experiments into what you can do with texture images in Photoshop.
Create and animate a 3D wireframe using Photoshop CS4 Extended.
Sometimes our best creations happen by pure experimentation and accident. Sitting in front of a Photoshop file, you are 40 History States in, and then it happens…magic! You really want to be able to get back to that moment. To do so, make sure that you turn on the History Log checkbox in the General Preferences (Photoshop>Preferences>General [PC: Edit>Preferences>General]). You can save the information as metadata, as a separate text file, or both!