Latest Posts in Creative Notes
Brushing up with Brush Pilot
If you use Adobe Photoshop for design work, you’ve no doubt used a custom brush at one time or another. Experienced designers probably have a handful of custom brushes installed. Then there’s people like me—Photoshop Brush freaks, who have hundreds upon hundreds of brushes at the ready, just waiting for the perfect excuse to use them.
The problem is, once you download and install a custom brush set, it’s easy to forget what they look like later on. This is especially the case when the brush author names the incredibly handy grunge paper brushes he designed something really clever, like “cool brushes by Bob.”
Until recently, there were only two options for previewing Photoshop brushes you download from the Internet. Unfortunately, while handy, neither was a truly great option.
Brush Pilot, by Jay Hilgert, is a simple application which allows you to preview, install and delete brushes anywhere on your hard drive. That’s right, you don’t even have to install the brushes to preview them. This alone makes it worth its weight in gold because 9 times out of 10, the sample image listed on a brush preview site looks fantastic, but when you actually download the brush you often times don’t get what you think you are.
Read more…News: Toon Boom Studio 5 released
Toon Boom Animation has released Toon Boom Studio 5, rebranding and repositioning the animation application as an educational tool for multi-technique animation. The release includes a new stop-motion animation feature, as well as traditional, digital, cut-out, and rotoscoping animation techniques.
Version 5 gives users the capability of creating stop-motion animation and time-lapse imagery. It also offers onion-skin positioning, live view/image capture, the ability to change backgrounds with Chroma Key Screens (in green and blue), rotoscoping, optimized image playback, annotated layers, and the ability to import Flip Boom Classic and Animation-ish projects. The new version also features easy export of projects to YouTube and Facebook.
“Studio is widely used to create animated shorts using traditional, paperless, and cut-out animation techniques,” said Karina Bessoudo, Toon Boom’s vice president of marketing and communications. “The new stop-motion capabilities relate to the ability to capture a sequence of images of your favorite figurines (moving them slightly from one pose to another) and to animate them within Studio. The beauty is that you can combine hand drawn backgrounds with an image sequence of figurines done using plasticene.”
This version of Toon Boom Studio also sports a simplified user interface targeted to hobbyists, students, and teachers, and is designed to make the program’s concepts and operation easier to use and discover. “New buttons have been added to give quick access to the new features. As for the previous buttons, they have been redrawn and colored to make the interface more user-friendly,” Bessoudo said.
Accompanying the upgrade is the new Stop-Motion Animation Workout, a step-by-step tutorial on how to create stop-motion animations. It’s available via electronic download for $27.
Coinciding with the new release, Toon Boom has also revamped the Education and Community sections of its Web site. The education section re-design makes it easier for teachers, students, and schools to find and purchase products, while the community section emphasizes various free services, such as forums, the company blog, a job board, and more.
“As we are promoting Studio to hobbyists, students, and educators, we feel it is critical to deliver to them a platform where they can exchange information, showcase their talents and connect with other users and potential employers,” Bessoudo added.
The new version will be available at the promotional price of $350 until July 8; after that date, it reverts to its regular price of $400. Anyone who purchased the previous version on or after May 1, will receive a free upgrade. The normal upgrade price from version 4 or 4.5 is $99.
Nik Software releases Complete Collection Lightroom edition
The following article is excerpted from Digital Arts.
The Complete Collection for Photoshop has been updated to include Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 support as well and also includes installers for Adobe Photoshop and Apple Aperture. Current registered owners of the Photoshop versions of Nik Software products can download and install the Lightroom compatible versions free of charge.
With the Complete Collection Lightroom Edition, each individual software product is installed as a plug-in for Lightroom 2. Once installed in Lightroom, Dfine 2.0, Viveza, Color Efex Pro 3.0, Silver Efex Pro and Sharpener Pro 3.0 are accessible via the Photo ->Edit In menu. Edits made using the plug-ins within Lightroom are non-destructive in nature, with edits applied automatically to a newly generated TIFF file and not the original. Each product also takes advantage of Lightroom and its efficiencies for every day tasks, like the ability to edit multiple images in one session, saving time for photographers.
All the products in the Complete Collection feature Nik’s patented U Point technology which the company claims revolutionizes the way photographers edit. U Point powered Control Points give photographers precise selective editing functions without the need to create complicated selections and layer masks. This allow photographers to make selective enhancements in a fraction of the time needed by using other methods, says the company.
The Complete Collection Lightroom Edition as well as the Complete Collection Aperture Edition are available to buy online from Nik Software or in boxed versions from Nik Software and through specialty camera retailers.
Customers who currently own Photoshop versions of Nik Software products may use their product keys to install the Lightroom versions.
Enlarging images with Alien Skin's Blow Up 2 plugin
Enlarging photos appears to be a simple and mundane task for the average user. But as a pro, you understand the ramifications of firing up Photoshop and just using the Image Size dialog box, or worse yet, just stretching an image in your page layout application.
Blow Up 2, from Alien Skin Software, is a Photoshop plugin that produces high-quality image enlargements by using an algorithm which temporarily converts pixels in your photo to vectors. The results are a sharper, more detailed enlargement.
Read more…Image-placing shortcuts in Adobe InDesign
One of the things I love about Adobe InDesign is that there’s usually more than one way to accomplish virtually any task. Take placing images in your document. InDesign offers a plethora of options to improve productivity in this area, thanks to keyboard shortcuts.
Read more…Adobe launches BrowserLab preview
Adobe Wednesday will unveil Adobe BrowserLab, a fully hosted online service that lets professional Web designers preview how their sites will look in various Web browsers on the Mac and Windows platforms. The service uses virtualization technology to produce real-time screen shots of how different browsers will render Web sites, without users needing to have all the browsers installed.
Like a browser within a browser, BrowserLabs' built-in diagnostic tools let users view and compare site pages to ensure design integrity across browsers and platforms. “It’s increasingly difficult to determine browser compatibility and it’s a bulky and time consuming task to test Web sites in all of these browsers,” said Scott Fegette, product manager for Adobe Creative Suite. “Right now the testing is arduous and painful…It’s almost like designers have to moonlight as IT pros, and that’s not their core competency.”
BrowserLab launches as a free preview of the service, available to the community on a first-come, first-serve basis with a goal of quickly gathering 3,000 to 5,000 test users. The preview is in English only. By early July, the preview will be open to additional users by invitation. Adobe is looking for feedback from users to determine the future direction of the service. According to Adobe, international versions and the list of supported browsers and operating systems will expand in the future, based on user demand. Eventually, BrowserLab will be a paid service, but there’s no timetable for that yet, Fegette says.
BroswerLab is part of a broader strategy by Adobe to add significant services to its creative pro applications via the Web, while at the same time breaking out of the 12- and 18-month calendar that traditionally has characterized its desktop software upgrade cycles. BrowserLab joins Adobe’s other creative-pro hosted servcices, such as Kuler and InContext Editing.
Exploring Photoshop Actions
Adobe Photoshop has offered a feature called Actions for quite some time, though it rarely gets the attention it deserves. Actions allows you to automate many of Photoshop’s advanced features in a simple manner that increases your productivity and allows for exact application of filters, scaling, file-saving, and much more.
Sure, there are plenty of shareware and freeware apps out there that can help you batch crop, size and rename files, but none of them give you access to Photoshop’s powerful feature set, including the multitude of third-party filters available.
Actions fills two distinctly different needs, the first being production. You can use Photoshop Actions to create production shortcuts that streamline your particular workflow needs. Say you frequently find yourself converting an RGB image to CMYK, resizing the image to a specific size, rotating the image 90 degrees, applying a particular filter (or multiple filters) such as sharpen, and then saving it as a specific file name with an ordered number sequence—creating an Action to do all this for you can save a lot of time by taking care of those tasks on large batches of images. You simply open one image, create a new Action via the Actions panel, apply all the attributes mentioned above, then stop and save the Action, giving it an appropriate name.
Once you’ve done that, you can use the File -> Automate -> Batch command to apply the saved Action file to a folder full of images. The Batch dialog box also allows you some extra features such as batch renaming and saving of the files in a folder of your choosing. Running Actions in Batch mode does have one drawback, in that you really can’t run actions that require user intervention, such as making selections, choosing colors, and the like. But anything you want to do to an image that simply requires a number or percentage as input or clicking the OK or Apply buttons will work perfectly in batch action mode.
Simulating tilt-shift photography with the Bokeh plugin
In last week’s blog entry on adding focus to your images with Bokeh, I showed you how you can use Alien Skin Software’s Bokeh plugin for Photoshop to draw attention to the subject of your photos by adding and adjusting out-of-focus areas of an image to enhance the subject matter.
Another unique feature of the Bokeh plugin is the ability to simulate tilt-shift photography on an existing image. Tilt-shift photography simulates the effect of turning your subject matter into a miniature model. You produce the effect through special camera lenses that adjust the image plane via camera movements when taking the photo. You can see some fantastic examples of tilt-shift photography on Flickr.
As with the lenses that give the previously covered bokeh effect, tilt-shift lenses are rather expensive, and require you to carry them around and fuss with swapping out lenses when shooting. But there are ways to simulate tilt-shift photography without the expense and hassle of carrying these lenses around with you, allowing you to apply the effect after the photo has already been taken.
TiltShift Maker is a site that allows you to upload your photo and apply a tilt-shift effect to the image. However, you’re limited to a horizontal plane for your focus area, and only a bit of control over the focus area, but little beyond that.
Add focus to your images with Bokeh
In photography, the term bokeh (derived from Japanese, meaning “blur” or “haze”) refers to the visually distinctive appearance of light in the out-of-focus areas of a photograph. Various lens manufacturers sell lenses designed with specific aperture controls to change the rendering of the out-of-focus areas; unfortunately those lenses can cost $1,000 and up depending on what your needs are. Thankfully, creative pros have other options available that can help achieve the bokeh effect without costing a fortune in new lenses.
You could go the do-it-yourself route, but this requires you to plan the shots in advance. So what if you want to apply the bokeh effect to an existing image?
Enter Bokeh, from Alien Skin Software, a plugin for Adobe Photoshop, Elements, or Fireworks. Bokeh takes your existing image and draws attention to the subject by manipulating the focus and depth of field, adding a vignette or simulating tilt-shift—another popular photography effect which turns certain images with a wide area of focus into what appears to be a miniature model.
Universal Audio brings vintage sound to audio plug-ins
Most of the music we hear today is processed through digital audio workstation software such as Apple's Logic or Digidesign's Pro Tools. In order to mix and master the audio, engineers use plug-in versions of EQs and compressors to dial in the sound. While there are a lot of plug-in choices, I have found none better than Universal Audio (UA).
I've used a lot of different plug-ins over the years and one of the things that I learned is that I love the sound of older, analog gear. There is a warmth to the Fairchild Compressor, Pultec EQ, and Neve consoles that just grabs me. Naturally, it was that warmth that I searched for when looking for a great set of plug-ins.
The Universal Audio 1176
I bought the $1,899 UAD-2 Quad, installed it in my Mac Pro and installed the software. I now have a card that takes care of the plug-in processing and a collection of plug-ins that have changed the way I approach mixing music.
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