The effects this site taught, and which ones aged
Of the 6 Photoshop effects this site taught between 2006 and 2018, 3 now date a picture on sight, 2 the software has absorbed into a slider, and 1 is still exactly how you do it. That is the whole verdict, and the rest of this page earns it effect by effect. An Adobe Photoshop tutorial from the period is not wrong about the buttons, which is why so many of them still rank: the menus it names are mostly still there, the layer stack still builds the same way, and following it will produce the result it promises. The question a 2006 tutorial cannot answer is whether you want that result, and that is the one this archive is in a position to answer, because it wrote them.
The 6 effects, judged
| Effect | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome text | DATES THE PICTURE | The hard bevel, the fixed 120 degree light and the drop shadow are a period signature. |
| The sketch effect | CURRENT | Nothing replaced the colour dodge stack, and it still produces the cleanest result. |
| Reflections | DATES THE PICTURE | The mirrored fade under a floating object is the Web 2.0 reflex, not a real surface. |
| The vintage look | ONE CLICK NOW | Curve, grain, vignette and split tone are one panel and one preset. |
| The polarizing filter | ONE CLICK NOW | The sky part is a slider. The reflection part was never possible in software. |
| The soft border | DATES THE PICTURE | A feathered white edge reads as a 2004 portrait studio and nothing else. |
Chrome text, and the 3 things that give it away
Chrome text is the most linked tutorial this domain ever published, and it dates a picture faster than anything else on the list. The recipe was a heavy grotesque, a gradient running white to mid grey to a warm highlight, Bevel & Emboss in the Layer Style dialog set to a hard chisel, the Chrome filter that now lives inside Filter > Filter Gallery, and a drop shadow on a flat coloured background. All of it still works. What gives it away is 3 specifics rather than the idea: the global light left at its default 120 degrees, so every bevelled element in the image is lit from the same impossible upper left; a pure white highlight at full opacity where real chrome shows a sharp horizon line between a light sky and a dark ground; and a drop shadow cast onto a background that is not a surface. If you want the look deliberately, and there is a live revival that does, keep it and go further rather than halfway, because a half committed chrome effect reads as an accident.
The sketch effect, still exactly right
The sketch effect is the 1 technique here that has not been improved on, and the stack is 5 steps. Duplicate the photograph. Desaturate it with Shift+Ctrl+U, or Shift+Cmd+U on a Mac. Duplicate that layer and invert it with Ctrl+I. Set the inverted layer to Color Dodge, at which point the image goes almost pure white and looks broken. Run Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and raise the radius until the pencil lines appear, usually somewhere between 2 px and 12 px depending on the size of the file. Add a Levels adjustment clipped on top to control how dense the lines are.
What goes wrong is always step 4: the white screen convinces people the technique failed, and they undo before the blur that makes it work. The second failure is scale. The blur radius that gives a delicate drawing on a 1,200 px file gives mud on a 6,000 px one, because the radius is in pixels and the drawing is not. The filter gallery contains sketch presets that skip all of this, and they are worse, because they bake in a line weight you cannot then change.
The vintage look and the polarizing filter, now 2 panels away
The vintage look and the polarizing filter are the 2 effects the software absorbed, and both now live in Filter > Camera Raw Filter. The 2006 vintage recipe was a curve with a lifted black point, a warming photo filter, monochromatic noise for grain, and a vignette painted as a radial gradient on a separate layer. Every one of those is a control in the one panel now, they can be saved as a preset, and the preset can be applied to 200 files at once. You still need the long way for exactly 1 case: when the ageing must apply to part of the frame only, such as a background aged while the subject stays clean, because that needs a mask and a separate layer.
The polarizing filter needs a harder judgement, because it was never a fair name. What the tutorial actually did was deepen a blue sky and raise contrast, usually with a Hue/Saturation adjustment restricted to the Blues range, or a duplicate layer set to Multiply and masked to the sky. The Camera Raw panel does that in one move with its per colour luminance and saturation controls. What no software does, then or now, is the other half of what a real polariser does at the lens: remove the reflection from glass or water. A polariser rejects light at one angle before it reaches the sensor, so the reflection is never recorded. In an edit, the reflection and the thing behind it arrived as a single value in every pixel, and there is nothing to separate. A tutorial that promises otherwise is selling a masked repaint, which is a different job.
Reflections and soft borders, the 2 reflexes to drop
Reflections and soft borders are period reflexes rather than techniques, and dropping them improves most images immediately. The reflection was built by duplicating the object layer, running Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical, adding a layer mask, dragging a black to white gradient down it and lowering opacity to around 40%. It still works and it is still correct when the object genuinely stands on a reflective floor, because then the surface has texture and the reflection compresses with perspective. It dates the picture when it is applied to an object standing on nothing, which is how it was used on every product shot and every logo of the period. The soft border is simpler to judge: a rectangular selection inset from the edge, Select > Modify > Feather at 30 px or 40 px, inverted and filled with white. There is no context in which that reads as anything but a 2004 portrait studio. Related, and worse: Filter > Render > Lens Flare is the single fastest way to put a date on an image, because it renders the optics of a lens that is not in the picture.
Lighting effects, and the Illustrator half of the question
Photoshop lighting effects still render from Filter > Render > Lighting Effects, which places spotlights and can drive a bump from a texture channel, and it is worth keeping for that bump rather than for the light. The editable way to add light is a new layer set to Screen or Soft Light, painted with a large soft brush in a warm tone and then masked, because every value stays adjustable and nothing is baked into the photograph. In Illustrator, text effects are built in the Appearance panel rather than by rasterising: stack multiple fills and strokes on one type object, add Effect > Warp or a drop shadow to a specific one, and save the result as a graphic style so it applies to the next headline. When Illustrator effects are not working, the cause is nearly always 1 of 2 things: Effect > Document Raster Effects Settings left at 72 ppi, so glows and shadows print coarse while looking fine on screen, or the effect applied to the wrong row in the Appearance panel, usually the group instead of the object.
Which of these to follow if you are starting now
A beginner should learn 4 things before any effect: layers, masks, selections and adjustment layers. Every technique above is a rearrangement of those, which is why a person who has them can read a 2006 tutorial and update it themselves, and a person who does not will follow 30 steps and be unable to change the result. Note 2 practical limits of this site. Every page here is written in English, so a tutorial in Tamil or Bangla is not something we can point you to honestly. And there is no PDF to download: these pages are written for someone with the program open on the other monitor, not for printing. If your reason for landing here was a cut out rather than an effect, Removing a background in Photoshop is the operation you want, and Photoshop on a phone covers what any of this looks like on a touchscreen. The web this site was written for explains why so much of the archive assumed a 1,024 px layout, and Photoshop, operation by operation lists the operations one by one.