First, I want to thank David Perel from http://www.obox-design and http://www.from-the-couch.com to inspire me to write this useful photoshop tutorial. So, go and visit his site and enjoy the great content and informations.

Back to this tutorial. I realized that sneak previews of upcoming websites can be very useful and drive a lot of traffic to your site, because visitors get excited to see the whole design and will check out your blog for new updates. This was the main reason why I wrote this article. But I don’t want to talk to much so I just continue with the tutorial.

Step 1

First, create a new document with the screenshot of your design, which you want to create a cool preview of. I decided to use Pacifica, a very professional wordpress template from themeforest ( link )

Step 2

Copy this layer and name it “blur”. This will be the blurred layer. Then go to Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and apply this filter with the settings below.

Step 3

Create a layer mask to the previous created layer “blur”. Be sure to have black as your foreground color selected. Then selecte the Elliptical Marquee Tool and create a small small circle of the screenshot you want to keept the attention and fill it with black. Now this circle isn’t blurred. After that don’t deselect your selection. We will need it in the next step.

Step 4

Now create a new layer and call it “Border”. Then go to Edit -> Stroke…
Add a stroke to the selection with the settings below, but you can change the color of the border in the way you like. Then deselect it with STRG -> D . That’s it. You can even add more such circles to your blurred screenshot to make your visitors more excited.

My Final Version