www.affiliateconfession.com

As you can see to the left, today we are featuring a very special guest, none other than Hillary Clinton as she might appear in the afterlife if she isn’t careful. Or maybe this is how she appears to her campaign staffers when Obama wins another state and gets more delegates, who knows. I’m not saying that Hillary in any way resembles Jezebel of the Bible or any other historical tyrant, I wouldn’t dare say that, but just in case you think she might and her final resting place is a hot one, here’s how to make Senator Clinton look like she’s preparing for the trip.

Let’s have some fun…

Kids, please don’t try this at home without your parents supervision.

The first thing we want to do is separate Hillary’s head from her body, no, not with a black masked ninja, but with Photoshop (aren’t you glad I cleared that up?). We’re going to go into quick mask mode by pressing “Q” and then paint her big head red. Once you have just Hillary’s head, make a copy of that layer (important) and then place it into another file and set it on fire.

In another file you flatten Hillary’s head (just the file) and change the mode to grayscale and you might want to use levels to get a nice contrast grayscale image. Now comes the fun part.

First, invert the file so the background is black by pressing Ctrl+I. Then, run the Ripple filter under Filters > Distort > Ripple and use 100% and Medium for the settings. Turn the image 90 degrees CCW by going to Image > Rotate Canvas > 90 CCW and then run the Wind filter under Filters > Stylize > Wind and check Wind and From The Right. You might have to run it a couple times depending on your file size or how big Hillary’s head actually is.

Run the Ripple filter again at 50% this time and then turn the image back 90 degrees CW, run the Ripple filter at 50% again and see what you get. You also need to now change this image back so the background is white by using the Ctrl+I command.

Now that you have a nice scary image of Hillary (scarier than she already is) change the image mode to Index under Image > Mode. Then go to Image > Mode > Color Table and choose Black Body and checkout what happens…the heat really gets turned up. Cool!

Copy this entire image or just drag it to the original Hillary image and place it right over the top of Hillary’s head. This is the tricky part because it may take several adjustments to get it to look just right. Once the image of Hillary’s burning head is placed over her body, bring up the Layers Style pallet by double clicking on that layer. To get rid of the white background, go to the layer blending sliders at the bottom of the box and slide the This Layer, white slider over to the left just until the white disappears from your image. Alt+click the left part of the right slider to separate them so you can make a nice transition on the edges of the white background. You can also mess with your layer modes to get a nice effect.

To get a better look, take the extra layer of Hillary’s head that you saved at the beginning (remember, I said it was important) and place it over the top of what you’ve done and again mess with the layer modes to get the desired effect. To add a little depth I added a faint drop shadow and an outer glow to the flame layer. I also made a copy of the flame layer and took off all the effects, placed it behind the original flame layer, filled it with white and ran the ripple filter once more with a setting of 250%. I then enlarged the layer and gave it an opacity setting of around 15 to 20% to get the smoke effect.

So after all that, we get a nice Hillary Clinton (this creature is not known to really exist) turned into a flaming torch signaling the end of her campaign. See…

Now of course you don’t have to just set Hillary on fire, you can set up Bill Clinton so he needs an asbestos suit as well and they can be a pair of matching book ends on the ash heap of history.

This post has very little to do with affiliate marketing, but I just thought I’d have some fun today and show you what you can do, if you needed to, with Photoshop.

Disclaimer - This post was purely intended for fun and no politicians were harmed in the Photoshopping effects portion of the preceding tutorial.

Several days ago I wrote a guest post for John Chow about some basic things you can do to improve your blogging and earnings online. One of those things was to leave comments on other blogs. If you don’t think that works, you should probably talk to Tom Ross of Push Standards, because that’s exactly how Tom got my attention and more importantly, my business.

Tom left a comment on a post here at Affiliate Confession and as I do to many who leave comments, I visited his blog and was really impressed with what I saw. I had been semi-actively looking for a designer or company to give Affiliate Confession a custom look and the web sites Tom features in his online design portfolio caught my eye. Tom’s work is uncluttered, pleasing to the eye and being that I spent 7 years designing Yellow Pages advertising, his designs just made me want to hang out and study them for awhile. I love to look at nice work and think, ‘I wonder how he did that?’ or ‘Hmm, how many Photoshop layers did he use on that one?’

Since Tom is an independent “Young entrepreneur and web designer” as he states in his blog header, I thought I’d shoot him an email through his Hire Me page and see what we could work out. Now, if you’ve seen the prices that some of the larger design companies like Unique Blog Designs have been charging, you know getting a custom Wordpress theme is an expensive endeavor. But after sending a few emails back and forth to confirm what I wanted and the look I was trying to achieve, Tom’s rates were very affordable. I can’t give you an exact quote because there are specific things that you have to work out with Tom, or any designer. However, the level of complexity in a blog design has a lot to do with the price.

Not knowing what to expect when dealing with a designer completely online, I was very impressed with Tom’s professionalism, enthusiasm and patience. The whole process from my initial contact to finished project and getting the theme implemented, took about 20 days and Tom was incredibly helpful in working with me to get the design online and in working order. He researched problems, emailed me code a couple of times and patiently explained some issues to get things working just as I wanted.

When you are ready to get a custom design for your blog or want to put together a nice, clean looking web site, I highly recommend Tom at Push Standards. I know you will be pleased with his work.

Now, if you already have a cool looking web site that’s CSS based and not full of tables, Tom has another interesting project he’s recently completed. CssGalleryList.com promises to be a constantly updated list of sites that accept nicely designed CSS sites. I guess a problem with many of these gallery sites is that they come and go and Tom wants to help out designers and owners of custom designed sites by keeping his gallery list updated.

Tom has already compiled a list of nearly 50 galleries to submit your site to and links directly to their submission page for your convenience. It only takes about 30 minutes to submit to all of these sites if you don’t get stuck like I did, looking at cool designs. Some of these galleries have nice PR4 and PR5 rankings and would be a great asset to get an incoming link from. However, don’t think you can just submit a Blogger.com site, a standard Wordpress template site or just try to spam these galleries. They are looking for high quality, customed designed sites.

Many thanks goes out to Tom Ross for helping me brand Affiliate Confession and giving me the custom look I wanted. If you need a designer for your blog or web site please contact him and remember, keep commenting because you never know how it will turn out.

Alan