Browse Graphics and 3-D Help and Tips

Browse Graphics and 3-D Help and Tips

Extracting content from PDF files
Contrary to popular belief, it's really easy to retrieve content from finished PDF documents.
Photoshop tip: Global Light
What is the Global Light setting and when should you use it?
Integrate your iWeb site with Facebook
Here's a few tips on bringing iWeb and Facebook together.
Outsource your photo scanning projects
Scanning all your old photos is a daunting process. Should you use a third-party scanning service can help you migrate old photos from the shoe box to the computer?
Cartoon you: Quick avatars with Photoshop filters and effects
How to use Photoshop filters to build creative avatars for social networking and Web sites and chat clients.
Cartoon you: Illustrator’s Live Trace converts your photo into a drawing
Illustrator's Live Trace feature is the subject of our fourth article on how to create your own avatar portrait for social networking Web sites and instant messengers.
Cartoon You: Creating easy avatars
Part one of our Easy Avatars series on how to create cool characters for your social networks and IM clients.
Create a digital ID with Adobe Acrobat
Need a digital ID? Here's how to create one with Adobe Acrobat.
Sign electronic documents with your own handwritten signature
Did you ever wonder how to create your own handwritten signature? Look no further.
Better handout printing from Keynote
Learn how to get nicer handout prints from Apple's Keynote presentation software.
Extend Keynote's power with OmniGraffle's stencils
Learn how to use fully-scalable images (complete with transparency) in Keynote by working with OmniGraffle.
Get better group photos
Jeff Carlson shows you how to combine multiple flawed shots into one winner with Photoshop Elements 6
Brushing up your Creative Suite skills
With Adobe’s new Creative Suite 4 now available for download, James Dempsey assembles a list of some of his favorite sites for tutorials, tips, and news for the applications that make up the Design Premium suite.
Create: Make captivating charts and graphs
Want to spice up your presentations and documents with better graphics? Terri Stone and top design experts share their tips on how to make charts and graphs that will enthrall your audience instead of boring them.
Annotate non-PDF images in 10.5’s Preview
Learn how to use Preview’s annotation tools on non-PDF images in OS X 10.5.
Turn to Path Styler Pro for logos, title graphics
Path Styler Pro helps you produce high-quality logos and title graphics in either Illustrator or Photoshop with a noticeable ease of use. James Dempsey takes a closer look at the plugin.
Photo Booth and flipped images
You say you'd like to reverse Photo Booth's mirror images? It's easily done with a single command.
Disable the 10.5 X11 warning-on-quit dialog
If you use X11 in OS X 10.5, you’re probably annoyed by its new ‘are you sure?’ warning whenever you try to quit the program. Learn how to disable it.
Digital Photo: Master your image library
Much of the attention for iPhoto ’08 has focused on the new Events pane, which organizes your photos based on when they were taken. But Apple’s newest photo manager has many more tricks up its sleeve.
From iPhoto to Aperture
As your photography skills and gear advance, you may start running into iPhoto’s limitations. Perhaps you need more image-adjustment tools or want a better way to manage and back up pictures. If so, it’s time to make the transition to Aperture.
Eliminate color casts
Accurate exposure, faithful color, and sharp focus are the technical cornerstones of good photography. Of the three, color is the most often overlooked. The key is understanding your camera’s white-balance settings.
Stop seeing red
Portraits in particular can require a certain amount of retouching to flatter the subject. Frequently, this requires only basic cleanup—remove a mole, take out a stray hair, and so on. But other problems, such as uneven skin tones, are less straightforward.
Take command of keywords
Want to find every close-up taken of your children during summer vacation? When put to good use, iPhoto 6’s keywords feature makes complex searches like this easy. Keywords are descriptive words that you can use to label and categorize your photos, regardless of which album they’re in. More important, keywords are searchable.
Weighing the pros of Raw
Talk to just about any professional digital photographer these days, and you’re sure to hear about the wonders of shooting in Raw mode. But it has its drawbacks. Before jumping on the bandwagon, make sure you know how to put this format’s strengths to best use.
Beauty in black and white
Most image editors make it easy to turn color photos into gray-scale images, but their default conversions don’t always end up creating the best pictures. For better results, you may need to try some exploratory surgery.
Optimizing Photoshop CS2
Most people would prefer not to see the spinning beach ball when working in Photoshop. Although eliminating it is not always possible, you can go some way toward doing that by managing your resources wisely.
Take command of color
Whether you’re creating a brochure in Apple’s Pages or coding Web pages in a text editor, choosing the perfect combination of colors for your design can be an intimidating process. Mac OS X offers color tools that can help anyone use color more effectively.
Extend your dynamic range
High-contrast scenes can be the bane of a photographer’s existence. Solving the problem used to require special equipment or extensive image editing. But Adobe Photoshop CS2 now makes the process easier.
Automate Photoshop chores
As a photographer, you tend to run through the same mind-numbing tasks over and over again: editing, resizing, saving, and so on—it’s a glamorous life. That’s why Automator, Tiger’s easy-to-use automation tool, is one of the most exciting parts of Apple’s latest operating system.