About this site
What this site is, and what it is not
This site is an independent reference on how images and interfaces are made, and it is the successor to the multi author tutorial site that ran on this domain from 2006 to 2018. That earlier site published technique for Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, PaintShop Pro, CSS, PHP and WordPress, submitted by contributors, over 12 years. The subject has not changed. The form has: it is now written as a single reference rather than a submissions queue.
It is not Adobe, not Corel, and not any other software company. It has no partnership, affiliation or sponsorship with any of them, it does not write as though it made the software, and it does not present vendor interface screenshots as its own material. When a page says what a button does, that is a description of somebody else's product, written by a reader of it. Anybody claiming otherwise on your behalf is wrong, and the distinction matters most on the pages where a vendor's own documentation is the better source, in which case this site says so and says what the documentation does not cover.
The one advantage: a 20 year memory
The advantage this site has over the rest of the results is a 20 year memory, and everything else follows from it. Step by step instructions for image work are not scarce. There are thousands of pages that will tell you to duplicate a layer, set a blend mode and reduce opacity, and most of them are correct, and most of them are useless, because they do not tell you the thing you actually need: whether that is still how it is done.
Having watched the same techniques since 2006, this site can say which one still works, which one the software now performs in a single click, and which one dates a picture the moment anybody looks at it. That judgement is the product. A page here that only lists steps has failed by its own standard, because a thousand pages already list steps and none of them will tell you that you are about to spend 20 minutes reproducing something a button does now, or that the finished result will read as a 2006 web graphic to everyone who sees it.
The judgement runs in both directions. It stops you doing obsolete work, and it stops you throwing away technique that is still the right answer. Feathering is a good example of the second case: it is old, it is unglamorous, and it is still exactly how a smooth transition is made.
The 4 verdicts, and what each one means
Each of the 4 verdicts appears at the top of a technique page, before the instructions, so that you can leave immediately if the answer is not worth your time.
| Verdict | What it means | What the page then contains |
|---|---|---|
| CURRENT | This is still how you do it. | The procedure, and where it goes wrong. |
| ONE CLICK NOW | The software absorbed it. | The button, plus the cases where the long way still wins. |
| DATES THE PICTURE | It works, and anyone can tell. | What gives it away, and what to do instead. |
| DISCONTINUED | The tool is gone. | History and what replaced it. Never instructions. |
Worked through 4 real cases, that reads as follows.
- Feathering a selection edge is CURRENT. The control has not moved, the setting is still a radius in pixels, and the modern alternative, painting on a layer mask with a soft brush or running
Gaussian Bluron the mask itself, is the same idea done non destructively. What goes wrong is scale: a 200 pixel feather on a 400 pixel wide image consumes the subject, and a feather applied before you scale the layer softens further as the layer grows. - Removing a background is ONE CLICK NOW. Adobe's own Photoshop documentation describes a Remove Background command in the Contextual Task Bar that detects the subject and creates a layer mask, and a Select Subject command that makes the selection in one click including hair and other fine edges. Photoshop Elements carries the same Contextual Task Bar. The value of that page is therefore entirely in the cases where the automatic selection loses.
- A hard bevel with a 45 degree drop shadow, a glassy highlight and a gradient bar behind it DATES THE PICTURE. It still renders perfectly. It also reads as a 2006 web badge to every viewer, which is a result nobody asked for. The effects this site taught are catalogued for exactly this reason, each one carrying the verdict it earns now rather than the one it earned when it was published.
- Adobe Fireworks is DISCONTINUED. Adobe announced the end of feature development in May 2013, citing overlap with Photoshop and Illustrator, and shipped no direct replacement. So Fireworks gets history on this site and never a how to, because a 2026 tutorial for it would be the precise failure this site exists to prevent.
How a verdict gets made, and what happens when it cannot be
A verdict gets made from a checked source with a date on the check, and where no such source exists the verdict is withheld and the page says the state is not established. An unjudged technique is honest. A wrong verdict is the one failure this site cannot carry, because it sends somebody to do by hand what the program has done automatically for years, or to learn a program that no longer exists.
PaintShop Pro is the worked example of the process catching an error before publication. An early draft of this site's own planning notes filed PaintShop Pro alongside Fireworks as a dead tool, and would have built it as history. Checking the fact overturned it. Corel purchased Jasc Software and the distribution rights in October 2004, which is why so many people still search for a company that stopped existing over 20 years ago, and PaintShop Pro is still sold, with PaintShop Pro 2023, version 25.0, published in December 2022 and a free trial offered from Corel's own site. It is alive, it gets technique, and the page about the Jasc handover exists because 1 fact was checked instead of assumed.
The same rule governs every present tense claim: what is free, what is current, and who owns what are verified before a page is written, and technique itself, which does not change with a release, is not decorated with citations it does not need.
The free software question, answered in full
The subject here is paid software, so a good share of readers arrive wanting a free copy, and this site answers that question completely rather than pretending it was not asked. There are real, lawful, capable free options, and they are named on their own page in full:
- Install GIMP, which is free, cross platform and actively released, with 3.0.6 during 2025 and 3.0.8 on 24 January 2026.
- Install Krita for painting and illustration work, currently at 5.3.2.1, released on 1 June 2026.
- Open Photopea in a browser when you need to read or edit a PSD file without installing anything.
- Install Paint.NET on Windows for quick, ordinary edits.
- Download the Photoshop mobile app, whose base version has been free since the iPhone release in February 2025, with an Android version later that year. Selections, layers, masks and compositing are in the free tier; the full feature set needs a subscription.
- Use the vendors' own trials, including Corel's free trial of PaintShop Pro, when you need the paid application itself for a fixed job.
The working rule, stated once: this site does not name, link or describe cracks, serials, keygens, patches, mirrors, torrents or "full version" downloads, and does not explain how to bypass a trial or an activation. That is not a lecture and it is not squeamishness about the question. It is that the honest answer above is better than the unlawful one, and a site that hedges on either half of that is no use to anybody.
What is gone from the old site
Gone from the old site is everything that made it a community, and none of it is coming back. There are no author accounts, no member profiles, no comment threads, no forum and no submit a tutorial form. Anything on this domain that appears to offer those is a relic of the archive, not a working feature, and no submission sent to an old address reaches anybody.
What remains is the subject and the record. Pages that existed between 2006 and 2018 are answered at their original addresses, rewritten to current standards and marked with a verdict, and the full list of what exists now is on the site map page here, Every page on this site. The site speaks as a site. It publishes no bylines, invents no editorial team, and asks you to judge it on whether the verdict at the top of each page turns out to be right.