First off, I’m finally announcing the winners of the Tech/Gears Contest winners from last month. Here are the winners and their prizes. They will be contacted (or have already been contacted) shortly.

Tech/Gears Contest

BannerSnack Contest

For the BannerSnack contest, 3 winners were chosen randomly from the comments using Random.org. The winners were Tammy, Mary, and Katrie. They will all be emailed shortly with their BannerSnack premium codes!

Thank you to all who entered!

So, you may have noticed that Obsidian Dawn has been going through some strange times lately. Sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down, sometimes the downloads weren’t working, and now it’s back to how it should be, minus some comments. What in the heck is going on, you may ask?

Well, it’s about time that we moved to a dedicated hosting account, and that’s just what’s going on. From now on, Obsidian Dawn won’t be sharing bandwidth with anyone…. so we should be running much more smoothly from now on, and without many hitches. However, while this transition period is going on (and while I learn the in’s and out’s of the wonderful world of dedicated hosting), you may notice some odd goings on.

So, please bear with us for now, and thank you so much for your patience!

Note to those of you that commented on the BannerSnack post: If your comment has disappeared, HAVE NO FEAR! I saved them all, so even if it isn’t showing up under the post anymore, you will still be entered into the contest. Feel free to re-post if you’d like, but it isn’t necessary (and won’t double your chance of winning, since there’s only 1 entry per person).

First off, sorry to those of you that are on the mailing list or RSS that get this twice. I’m finally moved over to a dedicated server, and in doing so, this post was lost. So, I’m re-publishing it.

This tutorial will walk you through how to create a faux bokeh background in Photoshop. For those of you that are unsure about what bokeh is, it is a Japanese term used in photography. It is used to describe the qualities of the area of a photo that is out of focus, and is used to help draw your eye to the subject of the photograph. Some pretty cool things happen with bokeh, too. Especially where lights or heavily lighted areas are concerned. Have you ever looked at a photograph or been watching a movie, perhaps where it was dark out, and the lights in the background are all blurry, but instead of just being blurry they appear as these odd gatherings of circles and/or polygons? I didn’t notice it all that often until I started looking, and now I see it everywhere!

You’ll need to grab my Bokeh Photoshop & GIMP Brushes to follow along with this tutorial. This tutorial is specifically geared toward Photoshop users. If you’re a Photoshop Elements or GIMP user, you should still be able to follow along, though the steps may not be exact for you.

Let’s get started!

This comes from several requests that I’ve gotten in the last few months. Some of you will know what bokeh is, and some may not. But ALL of you have seen it at one point or another, as long as you look at photographs or watch movies. Check out the preview image below for a visual example.

Bokeh is a Japanese term used in photography. It is used to describe the qualities of the area of a photo that is out of focus, and is used to help draw your eye to the subject of the photograph. Some pretty cool things happen with bokeh, too, and that’s what these brushes will help you to create. Also, keep your eye out for a bokeh tutorial that I’ll be coming out with, hopefully in a few days.

This set of Photoshop & GIMP brushes is composed of various bokeh designs. It comes with several brushes for painting your own bokeh, as well as some that are already put together into scattered groups like the ones you see in my preview image. Some are circles, some are polygons, some are more blurry than others. They are all high resolution, with an average size of about 2000 pixels.

As a big “thank you” to all of you loyal Obsidian Dawn resources users out there, we’re offering 3 FREE Premium Plus Subscription to BannerSnack. And it’s easy. Read on!

As an aside, I haven’t forgotten about those of you that entered Obsidian Dawn’s first contest – those winners will be released soon!

So, what IS BannerSnack, you might ask?

BannerSnack is an online tool that allows you to create watermark-free flash banners – without needing to know or understand Flash programming! Here’s some of BannerSnack’s features:

1. It contains tens of transitions, effects and filters that will enable you to easily create text and image animations.
2. It has editable banner templates.
3. It works like a presentation software.
4. No flash programming is required.
5. It works 100% online.