Maybe this happened to you as well. You bought a nice new shiny laptop with crisp and clear shiny casing and after couple of days of usage you found that it is not so shiny anymore and your fingerprints are all over your laptop’s body. I still don’t understand why every single company in the market is producing laptops with high glossy surface. I hope someday somebody will say that is it not as cool as it looks like and will revert to good old matt surfaces.

Fortunately there is something you can do with that: Buy a laptop sticker that no longer works as a magnet for your fingerprints. Most of companies offer to print your own designs so you can create unique cover to distinguish your own gear from your friends.

Here is a short PS tutorial, how to create unique and nice sticker:

First thing you will do is to measure back of your notebook's display and create a new document with the exact proportions. You can also set the resolution to at least 120 dpi. Then download or find in your photo archive picture with nice structure, for example close up of green leaf as you can see on picture below.

Adjust the image size to perfectly fit to your new document. Then create a new Gradient Map with following settings:

Now your picture should look like this:

Create new Adjustment layer, select Curves and use following settings:

As a next step let’s add some perspective. Select command New layer from background and press Ctrl+T for transformation tool. By holding Ctrl key when resizing try to achieve something like this:

Now create a new layer on top by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E keys. Then set the mode to Linear Dodge:

Now we have something like this:

To darken the top part of the image, create new Adjustment layer and select Curves. Darken the whole image by using following settings. Now let’s apply the darkening effect only to the top part of the image. Click on Add layer mask icon and fill the mask with black to white gradient. This will hide the darkening effect for all areas except the top one.

We are almost done. Now you can create your own signature by painting on new layer in the bottom right corner. To achieve better visibility you can also darken the main image a bit by painting on your darkening layer with white brush:

That’s it – our custom laptop sticker is now ready to be printed: