Downloaded from www.biorust.com on Sat Jul 04, 2009 23:38:22


	Quick Barcodes Tutorial Author - Man1c M0g (http://forums.biorust.com/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=1)

Lets face it, barcodes are everywhere! Far from being a nuisance, however, they make our lives substantially easier, reducing to a minimum the mind-numbing eons we have to stand waiting in queues at supermarkets, clothing shops, etc. Creating these little technological marvels may seem easy enough in theory, but in practice they are rather fiddly to make, and the random distribution of the lines is particularly hard to duplicate. The aim of this tutorial is to detail a semi-automatic method for creating barcodes in less than a minute using nothing but standard in-built Photoshop tools & filters. Interested? Read on...

	Step 1: Create a new 200px by 100px document with a white background, add a new transparent layer on top, and select it. Then, using the single row marquee tool, select a row near the bottom of the canvas.
	Step 2: Choose Filter > Noise > Add Noise from the menu, and input an Amount of 400, Distribution of Gaussian, and ensure that Monochromatic is checked. Once this is done, go to Edit > Free Transform > Scale and move the centre node upward to a satisfactory height. Then hit ENTER on the keyboard.
	Step 3: Now its time to trim your barcode into something a bit more manageable. Use the rectangular marquee tool and the DELETE key on excess parts of your creation until it looks something like my example on the left.
	Step 4: Of course, no barcode is complete without numbers, so use the rectangular marquee tool once again to remove a small area from the bottom.
	Step 5: Now all you have to do is add some numbers with the type tool (the Arial font work's well), and you are done. See - I told you it was easy! ;)