Many PS tutorials are all about special effects. In fact, no matter how ugly, any kind of effect was well received, because designers and artists were starting to discover the Web as an invaluable source of inspiration.

As time went by, the need for more complex, better looking and usable effects began to prevail. Tutorials writers replied with a new wave of awesome, eye catching well designed tutorials with loads of cool ideas inside them.

Some of these new wave of tutorials can be  Text Effects on the Web, Photoshop Photo Effects Tutorials,  Digital Makeover in Photoshop, Horror, Blood and Gore Photoshop Effects and Brushes and Grunge and Dirty Photoshop Tutorials, Brushes and Textures.

For this article, I collected perhaps the newest trend in tutorials: Dreamy, magical and lighting photo effects.

A quick visit to sites like PSDTuts, Tutorial9 or Abduzeedo, will confirm this new trend where dreamy compositions or impressive lighting effects are catching everyone’s attention.

To keep this article into a manageable size, I only selected photo effects related tutorials, leaving outside all illustrations or text effects tutorials. All the tutorials contained in this article, are based on photos.

For some unknown reason, each time we try a new graphics application, we feel the uncontrollable desire to apply the most cheesy effects to beautifully designed typefaces. These so called text effects or type effects are carefully hidden guilty pleasures that most designers enjoy to try, but would never dare to apply in real life work.

For those like me that love text effects and have the courage to admit it, here’s a thorough guide to the best 80 text effects available on the web.

To some these may be not the best tutorials on the web, but certainly they are some of the best around. I had to eliminate those that looked nice but had very little preview images. This guide includes 78 Photoshop tutorials and 2 impressive collections of Photoshop Actions, plus 3 books on the subject.

If you have created a cool text effect and you believe it should be mentioned in this list, just leave a comment with the link to your tutorial or resource in the comments section.

Text Effects Tutorials for Photoshop

Click on each image to read the tutorials

Text Effects Photoshop Actions

Action FX free Photoshop text effects actions Al Ward is not only a renowned Photoshop Guru, but also the King of Photoshop Actions. Check his site and download all the wonderful stuff he is giving away for free.

Webteknique’s Free Photoshop Actions These text effects are the most creative, unique, complex, wild and fun of all effects I’ve ever seen. These actions were created for Photoshop 5 and 6 but they should work in newer versions. There are a lot of actions to download!

Text Effects Photoshop Books

Photoshop Type Effects Gone Wild

Photoshop Type Effects Visual Encyclopedia

Adobe Photoshop CS Type Effects

 I must admit that there is no other love for me rather than the iPhone but when I first saw the HTC Touch Diamond mobile I was amazed because it looks so good. It looks so good that I decided to write a tutorial to show you how I made it. This will be a long tutorial so go get some coffee for this.

Final Image Preview

Before we get started, let's take a look at the image we'll be creating. Click the screenshot below to view the full-size image. As always, the layered Photoshop file is available via our PSDTUTS Plus membership.