Latest Posts in Creative Notes

Cartoon you: Your portrait in Illustrator

So you need a small portrait of yourself to paste into social networking Web sites, instant message clients, or other venues that call for an image that you’d like to be a little less literal than a photo. In the previous stories about creating cartoon avatars, I talked about some of the online avatar generator Web sites that let you create a composite cartoon from different face and body components.

But that may not be your preferred look. If you need a little more hands-on avatar creation capability than you can get with the free online avatar creators we talked about so far, and if you have Adobe Illustrator CS2, CS3, or CS4—and if you know how to draw even crude shapes with the Pen or Pencil tools—you can whip up a new cartoon or caricature self-portrait in just a few minutes. The one below took me 60-seconds from start to finish. The more practice you have with these tools, the faster you'll go. Beginners might achieve the same results, but require more concentration on the task.

Added in Illustrator version CS2, the Live Paint feature lets you bypass the traditional object- and path-centric methodology of vector-based drawing and create images more naturally. With one simple menu command shapes and paths—opened or closed—can be treated as a single cohesive picture, and, much like a coloring book, you can then fill areas created by path intersections, whether a given area is a single path, an overlapping area of multiple paths, or even an empty space bordered by paths. Objects and paths converted to a Live Paint group cease to be treated as objects: paths become fillable areas and strokes become edges..

Let’s give it a try with a quick self-portrait.

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Autodesk opens design software to Mac via Parallels

For Autodesk, the lines between the Mac and Windows operating systems are beginning to blur.

The maker of 2-D and 3-D design products teamed up with Parallels on Thursday to announce that Parallels Desktop is now Autodesk’s preferred virtualization software for the Mac. Autodesk’s favor means that its clutch of Windows products—including AutoCAD, AutoCad LT, Autodesk Inventor Professional, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk 3ds Max Design, and the Autodesk Revit offerings for building information modeling—will run on Mac OS X via Parallels Desktop.

The Parallels partnership is Autodesk’s latest move to make its Windows programs accessible to the Mac platform. In July, Autodesk added support for the products listed above via Boot Camp, the built-in utility in Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 that lets users install and run Windows on their Mac hardware. Autodesk also offers native Mac applications, including Alias, Maya, Mudbox, SketchBook Pro, and Stitcher Unlimited.

Wacom releases new Bamboo tablet line

Wacom has added multi-touch, finger-based input to its updated Bamboo line of consumer tablets. The new family includes five tablets: touch-only, pen-only, and three versions of the pen and multi-touch combo. Multi-touch gestures include zoom, scroll, pan, rotate, and forwards/backwards, and all but the Pen-only model feature ExpressKeys.

“Multi-touch provides a very natural and intuitive way for users to navigate and interact with applications,” said Dennis Hoff, senior consumer product manager for Wacom. “By combining multi-touch with our pen technology, Bamboo provides users with a new computer input approach that is not only extremely powerful and flexible, but friendly, fresh, and fun.”

All Bamboo tablets plug into your Mac via the attached USB cable. None of the new tablets ship with mice, and a handy cloth holder—anchored to the side of the tablet—keeps the pressure-sensitive, cordless pen steady and accessible. A complete audio-visual tutorial on all touch gestures is included in the box.

The new Bamboo family consists of three core products: Bamboo Touch; Bamboo Pen; and Bamboo Pen and Touch. Two additional tablets, Bamboo Craft and Bamboo Fun complete the rest of the lineup.

Bamboo Touch ($69), is targeted to users who want to replace the mouse or augment computer input. Bamboo Pen ($69) is a small, pen-only device that delivers pressure-sensitive control and allows the user to customize two side buttons with the Wacom Tablet driver software. Bamboo Pen ships with Corel Painter Essentials 4.0. Bamboo Pen and Touch ($99) offers both pen and multi-touch input targeted to home or office users seeking an alternative that allows them to navigate with their fingers or use the pen for specific work. Users can easily alternate between the two input methods: If your finger is in contact with the tablet surface, touch is the primary input; if only the pen tip is near the tablet, touch is automatically turned off and the pen becomes the primary input. Bamboo Pen and Touch comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 and Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 for photo editing and enhancement.

Bamboo Craft ($129) offers both pen and touch input and is targeted to scrapbookers and home crafts enthusiasts. Bamboo Craft ships with Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essentials, Color Efex Pro, 26 digital scrapbooking lessons from designer Jane Conner-ziser, a free scrapbooking album from Shutterfly, and much more. Bamboo Fun ($199) combines pen and multi-touch in a larger-sized tablet and is targeted to home creatives or photo enthusiasts looking for more control and freedom of movement. Bamboo Fun ships with Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essentials, and Nik Color Efex Pro.

Bamboo tablet software works with OS X 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6.

State of the art: Blu-ray on the Mac

It may have beaten out HD-DVD in the bloody battle to be the high definition optical drive standard, but in the roughly year and a half since the format wars ended, Blu-ray Disc has yet to gain any real traction in the desktop computer realm. Indeed, Apple has done its best to downplay the relevance of any kind of optical drive in this new world of streaming media—the MacBook Air ships without an internal optical drive, its DVD Studio Pro application has been almost totally ignored in the last two Final Cut Studio releases, and the company provides no way of playing movies released on Blu-ray on Macs running OS X.

But while Apple hasn’t exactly embraced Blu-ray, a couple of the company’s applications—Final Cut Pro () and Compressor (), now allow you to create Blu-ray projects and burn them to attached Blu-ray drives to watch on the Blu-ray player in your living room.

If you’re considering adding a second optical drive for DVD copying, or just want faster burn speeds than your older optical drive can deliver, you might be considering a Blu-ray capable burner. Apple has yet to offer Blu-ray as a standard or build-to-order option, but a few third party companies have been quietly testing the waters and marketing external Blu-ray burners to Mac users.

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Apple updates Logic Pro, Logic Express

In addition to updating its iTunes software for listening to music, Apple on Tuesday released maintenance updates for two programs used to create songs. Both Logic Pro and Logic Express saw updates aimed at improving stability while adding fixes and enhancements.

Logic Pro 9.0.1 updates the flagship application in the music creation suite introduced by Apple this summer. According to Apple’s release notes, the update allows flex markers to align and snap to MIDI notes and adds an option for latency compensation to the I/O plug-in. In addition, performing a punch-in recording with Replace Mode behaves correctly under the 9.0.1 update.

The Logic Express update—also version 9.0.1—makes those same changes to the mid-level music creation application released in August. More detailed release notes go into further depth about what bugs the update fixes.

In one other piece of audio business Tuesday, Apple released a minor update for MainStage, the dedicated application for playing instruments and effects with Logic. MainStage 2.0.1 makes the Reverse option for Loopback behave consistently, and recordings in Loopback can be used to define the tempo for MainStage. The update allows pitchbend data to be properly transmitted to external instruments and the I/O plug-in is now available in MainStage.

The Logic Pro, Logic Express, and MainStage updates require Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later.

New GarageBand Lessons include Rush, John Legend

Today’s Tom Sawyer, he gets high on you, and the space he invades is your personal computer. Well, if you’re using GarageBand ’09, anyway. The GarageBand Lesson Store has added three new lessons to its arsenal, including the classic tune by the Canadian progressive rock band.

Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson contributes two lessons to the new assortment, "Tom Sawyer" and “Limelight.” The new offerings are rounded out by John Legend, himself a veteran of Apple events, who explains how to play his song “Ordinary People” on the piano. Each lesson costs $5 and consists of a video of the artist walking you through the piece, in some cases with both simplified and more complicated versions of the song. All three lessons are available from the Lesson Store in Garage Band ’09.

Still missing, though, is Neil Peart walking us through playing “Tom Sawyer” on the drums, though admittedly, that may in part be the lack of a large enough drum kit accessory. Guess I'll have to stick to Rock Band for now.

Make your iPhone video pop

Anyone can record ho-hum video on an iPhone 3GS and shoot it to YouTube. Yet, it’s possible to record excellent video that looks crisp and colorful without the typical jerky-camera look. For example, you might want to make a business video of a “talking head” explaining a concept, or a sales demo video showing a product up close and personal, or even just a video blog about a news item of the day.

The following tips and tricks can make your iPhone videos really pop—and garner more attention from your audience of YouTube viewers.

1. The three main ingredients to a great video are stability, lighting, and sound quality. So, first off, it’s important to keep the iPhone perfectly still during video recording. The iPhone is meant for portable video, so–to stabilize a video shoot – I use the portable Joby Gorillapod Flexible Tripod ($22) and the Zacuto Zgrip iPhone Jr. mount ($70), which holds the iPhone and attaches to the tripod. I use the Zgrip because I can re-position the iPhone for the best viewing angle and it works with my much-more-stable camera tripod as well.

2. Lighting is critical for the best video. I use the Litepanels Micro (around $285) and attach it to another camera tripod. The LitePanel is expensive, but casts a uniform, video-friendly glow across the faces of my video participants–a glow that looks more like sunlight. Of course, if you're not ready to fork over this amount of money, try using a house lamp to boost illumination–and remove the shade for the brightest light. While most light bulbs will cast a yellow-ish light (a good reason to use a photo or video light), you can use your video editor to color correct lighting problems.

3. With the iPhone, it’s hard to get a good viewing angle for video and record sound close enough at the same time. You could try the included iPhone ear bud set for sound, but the cord is not long enough. Another option is the Shure SE210 ear buds ($180) and the Shure Music Phone Adapter ($40), which has a long cord. However, your best approach is to use a Samson Zoom H2 Handy Recorder ($200). Record audio separately, then sync the video and audio in iMovie on your Mac. Just be sure to record a hand clap – with the iPhone video and Samson audio recorder going at the same time, to sync up video and audio.

Other video tips: if you are making a business video, you can run a teleprompter on your Mac using NovaStorm AquaPrompt ($15) so your subject can read from a script. Also, be sure to include some pre-roll before and after the video so your cuts in iMovie–or on the iPhone 3GS itself, which supports simple editing cuts–don’t look too choppy and awkward. And last, don’t forget to smile.

[John Brandon is a 20-year veteran Mac user who used to run an all-Mac graphics department.]

Cartoon You: More easy avatars

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a series of articles on how to find, build, and create avatars for use on social networking Web sites and chat clients. Stay tuned for more tips on how to create your own online image.

As social networking Web sites become increasingly popular, many users seek a way to pictorially represent themselves with a small icon. While a photo can be handy, it’s not always possible or even desirable. Sometimes a cartoon representation can work as well or better, especially in social sites where you’d prefer not to reveal your face in a portrait.

Last week I showed you six free online apps you can use to make cartoon avatars of yourself in the style of South Park, Meez, Picasso, Gaia Online, the Wii game console, and Yahoo! Avatars. This week, in part two of my Cartoon You easy avatar series, I’ve got six more free online apps you can use to cartoon you. If none of these fully capture who are you online, be sure to check out the next installment in this series, which presents a do-it-yourself option.

Face Your Manga

The popularity of Japanese animation style Manga has exploded in the last decade. It’s little wonder then that “mangatars” are among the most popular styles of avatars. Face Your Manga is the premier free service for creating a Manga-style you.

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Organize Your iMovie Video Library

One of my favorite features of iMovie ’09 is the ability to see all of my stored footage within iMovie’s Event Library; versions prior to iMovie ’08 revealed only the video for each project.

The downside is that I see all my footage, even the clips I know I’ll never use in a movie. To deal with the glut of video that quickly accumulates in the Event Library, iMovie includes features for marking favorite footage and rejecting (and hiding) sections to reduce the clutter, and applying keywords to find related video.

Mark video as favorite or rejected

Do the following to highlight the best (or hide the worst) of your clips.

In the Event browser, drag to select a range of video in a clip. Next, click the Mark Selection as Favorite button on the toolbar, or press the F key; a green bar appears at the top of the selected footage. To mark footage you want to hide, click the Reject Selection button on the toolbar, or press R; that section is hidden. The Unmark Selection button removes any marking.

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Adobe to buy Omniture for $1.8 billion

Adobe has agreed to buy Web analytics company Omniture for $1.8 billion in cash, the companies said Tuesday.

The price San Jose, California-based Adobe is paying for the company—$21.50 per share—is at a 45 percent premium over Omniture’s average closing price for the last 30 trading days, Adobe said. On a conference call Tuesday, executives wouldn’t say if there was a bidding war with other companies to buy Omniture.

Adobe, known for multimedia design, Web-development and document-creation software such as Flash, Dreamweaver and Acrobat, said the purchase will help the company add Web analytics and optimization capabilities directly to those products.

This kind of ability to measure what kinds of media, Web applications or Web pages are popular with users is becoming essential as more and more business is being done on the Web, particularly in the area of online advertising, said Forrester senior analyst John Lovett. He said a recent Forrester study found that 73 percent of companies doing business on the Web had some kind of analytics technology in place.

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