Designing a Wallpaper in Photoshop

A quick yet stunning approach to design a wallpaper in Photoshop.

Designing a wallpaper for your first time can be a difficult task. There's a few things you need to consider when first starting out; such as the initial resolution to design in or whether or not you will designate space for desktop icons.

The resolution you start out with in your photoshop document (or dimensions) is very important. The higher the resolution you can start in the better. Reason being, you can always scale down while you can't scale up the image. So if you create a wallpaper for a 1600x1200 resolution, you can downsize it for 1280x1024 - 1024x768 - 800x600 and so on. But if you start at a smaller resolution, you can't scale up due to the loss of quality.

You should also pay attention to the left portion of your wallpaper design. The left side of the wallpaper is what lies beneath the average pc owner's desktop icons. You need to avoid placing any amount of intense contrast in this area, otherwise it will be difficult for them to view and/or read their icons.

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Comments (7)

Dean.robinson@tesco.

08/16/08 8:21 am

really good tutorial, thanks for it :D really helped.

Linas

08/17/08 6:11 pm

Nice and easy. :)

cien

08/23/08 12:38 pm

nice tutorials.. thanks ..

Dan

09/02/08 12:47 am

good tut for someone not know WTF to do in photoshop.

Spo

09/06/08 8:08 am

Nice and realy good effect with basic tools

Daniel

10/07/08 8:45 am

you have a lot of imagination, i like that good job

lulz

12/02/08 5:59 pm

why do you pronounce ALT as A-L-T and CTRL as C-T-R-L??? its just ALT + CONTROL lol