You must have in your life, been forced to use a variety of stock images or clip arts in your designs, but never wanted your buyer to know about it.
This is exactly what I’ll teach you in today’s discussion. The Free images available on the internet, are all too bogus to be used, and the ones that are good enough are always too expensive. Think again…. You didn’t get into the designing business to listen to excuses like these. Why not make your buyer believe that the image is actually yours. You may be violating a thousand image copyrights by doing so, but doing it effectively will never get you into trouble.
http://www.desktoptreat.com/wp-content/wallpapers/halo-3-game-wallpaper.jpg
Lets just have a look at this Wallpaper Here. Now the guys who must have captured the image, have tried to incooporate a brand name over the image, even though the image’s copyright may never have been in their possession. Let’s give it a better look.
And this is the version, when I’m done with it.
http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb243/Xenonz/halo-3-game-wallpaper.png
I used the extract tool in Photoshop to extract the guy, and adding round about 15 effects to give it a little more depth. You have just made a pretty good wallpaper on your name in just 15 minutes.
Effects added
1. Burn tool on the armour to strengthen effects.
2. Background made black and Dark Grey so that white used stands out more.
3. Winter Breeze and Ice Crack brushes used to create the effect at the back.
4. The white glow is because of the effect applied to an elipse. Gausian Blur at 30 px Radius is applied and Opacity decreased to light levels.
5. Aero Font is used to write HALO3.
No suspicions can ever be made on where the image was rendered from. You can experiment with more effects and more styles. In web designing, I usually take part of some different images and combine them together to get my intended look. The image becomes fresh and reusable at my name. That doesn’t mean, I don’t design my own stuff 
. I know how to do that, but its time consuming, and making use of so many different images to create one, is also an art on its own.
The same can be applied to cliparts. Most cliparts can be merged together as a single object to get a new one.
Hope this post proves useful to newbies.
) and they prefer posting website links to check. That may be the easy way out, as obviously if your Employer can check your site, why can’t he check that? But I must say that is not the right way of presenting your portfolio. Portfolios should be made keeping in mind accessibility, ease and distinction.
