Sometimes presenting your designs in a browser/screen/electronic environment can give it just the right look and feel.
This is a photoshop tutorial on how to make your images and graphics look like they were photographed off a real monitor. When you take pictures of the monitor screen, you often get very bad contrast, refreshing lines and odd color temperature. So in fact this tutorial is better than the real thing.
Forget all about pixelating your images. The secret is making your image look like it consists of very small RGB particles. Take a close look at the white areas on your screen, and you might be able to see them.
PART 1: THE RGB PATTERN
First we need the pattern with the RGB particle structure.
1. Copy this image to a new document in Photoshop.
2. Select all [CTRL + A] and click define pattern [Edit > Define pattern...].
3. Name it "RGB".
Part 2: Applying the pattern
Now locate the image you wish to apply the effect to. Off course it can be just about anything, but tv- and computer graphics tend to work very effectively. For example, if you're going to apply this effect to a website sketch, don't import anIllustrator document into Photoshop. Instead, take a screendump using [Print-screen].
4. Place your image in a new Photoshop document. I will be using this screendump.
5. Scale your image to 200% using 'Bilinear' resampling.
Your image should look something like this:
6. Create a new layer.
7. Select all [CTRL+A] and choose [Edit > Fill]. Choose Patten and select "C64".
8. Now apply the layer effect 'Multiply' to your new pattern layer.
9. Your image should now look like this:
10. We are close to being done now. However, adding the pattern lowers the overall brightness. Therefore, adjusting the contast of the underlying image might improve the result.
Choose [Image > Adjustments > Curves] and make a curve like this:
11. If you wish, you can tilt the image a little bit. That way it doesn't seem so 'constructed'. This is what we end up with: