And we’re not Pink Floyd. If you know the band a little, you must be aware of their fondness of rock-opera (The Wall) or tracks that flow into one another (Dark Side of the Moon). If any band could justify not selling individual tracks, its Pink Floyd. What, you just want Summer ‘69 but not Atom Heart Mother Suite? Come on. Now, you won’t have that option.

Well, good news everyone, Pink Floyd has just won a legal battle with label EMI prohibiting their music from being sold as individual tracks. If you want to listen to Floyd, you’ll be buying full albums.

The ruling was based on a contract they signed way back in 1967, before the internet was a glint in a chubby nerd’s eye. The band argued that the contract contained a clause to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums.” EMI, on the other hand, argued that the contract just referred to physical records, as that’s all that existed at the time. The judge agreed with Pink Floyd.
As of right now you can still grab individual tracks on iTunes, but that shouldn’t last too long. So if you want Pigs On the Wing but not the rest of Animals, now’s your last chance.

Pink Floyd, I applaud you. I hope many other artists will follow suit. Technology should foster art and creativity, and not vulgarize it.

Contact the author via email

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Via Gizmodo

Madalin Tudose is the founder of OurTuts, an excellent photososhop / design blog we have a partnership with.

This tutorial is for intermediate photoshop users. You need to know how to handle layers, masks, the basic tools and filters.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create unique wallpapers thanks to photo manipulation. Using some images from the internet, you’ll learn how to blend in different landscapes in order to create a surreal effect.

Here is what we are going to make:

I found two great images that you need to download in order to follow the tutorial: one with a castle and an other with a great waterfall:

The second picture:

Let’s begin. Drag the two pictures into Photoshop. As you can see the castle is a bit too large.

Resize the castle so that its width equals the width of the waterfall and place the waterfall above the castle, as shown bellow:

Now duplicate the castle layer and set the blending mode for the new layer to “soft light”, and then merge the two layers.
Duplicate the waterfall layer and set the blending mode for the new layer to “soft light” too.
Your layers should look like this:

And your image like this:

We made those steps to make the layers look the same. You can see that the the waterfall looks a little bit darker, so let’s make some areas of the waterfall look lighter.

Select the “soft light” waterfall layer and make a new layer mask.

Now set the foreground color to black and with the soft round brush erase the darker areas of the waterfall. The areas marked in the picture are where I used the brush.

Using the pen tool (P) make the select the mountains and delete them, because we are going to put some clouds for effect at their place.

Let’s adjust the colors a little bit. Go to Layer->New Adjustment Layer and apply the next settings:

Levels:

Hue/Saturation

Now our image should look like this one:

Now comes the magic: making the images to look like one.
What we have to do is to make a layer mask of the first waterfall layer, and using the soft round brush erase the middle area from the image. It’s a more complicated procedure which can be mastered if you practice on the image. Use your imagination.

This is how my image looks:

Now, let’s create the clouds. I’ve found a cloudy image on the internet perfect for our project.

Using the pen tool(P) cut the clouds and paste them in our image.

Make a layer mask for the clouds layer and using the soft round brushes, make their margins smoother.

We now see that the sky is incomplete. To fill it with clouds, duplicate the clouds layer, flip it horizontally to make it look different from the other layer (Edit->Transform->Flip Horizontally), make a new layer mask and apply the same treatment using the soft brush.

My sky looks like this:

Now we’re going to create some nice sunshine.
Using the rectangle tool (U) draw a white rectangle with a big height. Then go to Filter->Render->Fibers and apply the next settings:

Go to Filter->Blur->Motion blur this time and put the next parameters:

Now go to Edit->Transform->Perspective and create a perspective like in the next image. Click on the top-left corner of the rectangle and pressing the Shift Key drag to the right. Repeat the process for the bottom-left corner but drag to the left.

Set the blending mode for this layer to soft light again.
I’ve made my image look a little bit darker by applying the next adjustment (Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Brightness/Contrast):

This is how the image looks:

I searched on the internet for some gradients for the last effect and I found them here.
I used a blue one and changed the blending mode of the layer to soft light.

Enjoy the result!

I hope you like it and if you have any questions, or problems leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to answer. Have a good day…!

You can contact the author via email or visit his website

So the devil called me this afternoon and said they where having a snowstorm in hell.

In other news Valve announced that their revolutionary “content delivery service” known as “Steam” is being ported to OSX and will be available as early as April 2010. No really its true, straight from the horse’s mouth. In addition the actual client and “Steam-works” being brought to Apple’s operating system Valve also plans to port all of the Source Engine games, these include:

• Half Life 2 Series
• Counter Strike: Source
• Team Fortress 2
• Left 4 Dead Series
• Day of Defeat: Source

All I have to say is: Microsoft has to quaking in their boots. For some time Microsoft’s Windows operating system has been the standard for gaming on the PC. With Valve making the push into OSX this means more than just trouble for Microsoft’s operating system. It also means their famed DirectX API that is Windows only may be in jeopardy. I say this because as stated in Valve’s official announcement in order to port their engine/games to OSX they will be reimplementing them in OpenGL. After the porting of these past released source games Valve plans to treat OSX as a “first tier” operating system. Meaning that all future releases of source games will occur simultaneously for OSX, Windows, and Xbox 360.

Not a fan of Valve’s flag-ship gaming engine? Not a problem, take a peak at these other titles already for sale on Steam that have a native OSX client:

• Aliens versus Predator (original)
• Altitude
• And Yet It Moves
• Ankh: Battle of the Gods
• Ankh: Heart of Osiris
• Aquaria
• BioShock
• Braid
• Brainpipe
• Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
• Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror
• Call of Duty
• Call of Duty: United Offensive
• Call of Duty 2
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Championship Manager 2007
• Championship Manager 2008
• Championship Manager 2010
• Civilization IV
• Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
• Civilization IV: Colonization
• Civilization IV: Warlords
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
• Darwinia
• DEFCON
• Delta Force: Black Hawk Down
• Deus Ex
• Doom
• Doom 3
• Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil
• Doom II: Hell on Earth
• Dragon Age: Origins
• Elven Legacy
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
• Eschalon: Book I
• Europa Universalis III
• Europa Universalis: Rome
• FlatOut 2
• Final Doom
• Football Manager 2009
• Football Manager 2010
• Football Manager Live
• Freedom Force
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
• Harvest: Massive Encounter
• Hearts of Iron II
• Hearts of Iron III
• Heretic
• Heroes of Might and Magic V
• Hexen
• Hexen II
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Jade Empire
• LEGO Batman: The Videogame
• LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures
• LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues
• LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
• Loom
• Luxor
• Luxor 2
• Luxor 3
• Machinarium
• Multiwinia
• Osmos
• Peggle
• Peggle Nights
• Penguins Arena
• Penumbra: Black Plague
• Penumbra: Overture
• Penumbra: Requiem
• Plants vs. Zombies
• Prey
• Prince of Persia (2008)
• Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
• Quake
• Quake II
• Quake III Arena
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein
• Rome: Total War
• Samorost 2
• Shaun White Snowboarding
• Sid Meier’s Pirates
• SiN
• Spore
• Star Wars: Force Unleashed
• Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
• Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
• Star Wars: Dark Forces
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• Tales of Monkey Island
• The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
• The Dig
• The Graveyard
• The Path
• TOCA Race Driver 3
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield
• Tomb Raider: Anniversary
• Torchlight
• Unreal
• Unreal Tournament
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Uplink
• Virtual Families
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
• World of Goo
• X²: The Threat
• X³: Reunion
• X³: Terran Conflict

Phew! Who was it that said you couldn’t game on a non-Windows operating system? Well truth be told thanks to wonderful software like CXGames some of us have been enjoying source games on the operating system of our choice for some time now. (Food for thought and maybe a future topic: What do you think this announcement is going to do to Codeweaver’s bottom line?)

What brought this seemingly sudden announcement from Valve? Well a few months back a rumor had surfaced that a lead Steam developer had posted looking for people with experience porting Windows software to OSX and Linux.

Yep, that is right and Linux.

While there is still nothing official about the latter of these two operating systems from Valve, all I have to say is that the porting of Source Engine to use OpenGL only makes the eventuality of them running without emulation on Linux much more likely (not to mention in the mean time Windows games that run under OpenGL tend to perform better under Wine).