Gary's new book, "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended: Retouching Motion Pictures" should fill in the entertainment gap this summer, because Jurassic Park 4 isn't even into production yet! Seriously, if you've ever wanted to edit videos like a pro and have some experience with Photoshop, this book is your ticket to creating custom wipes, transitions, composite work with animations and special effects. Over 600 pages, full color, with over 200MB of example files to download. It's very special stuff and a thing you'll want to be part of.
Barbara and Gary have finally figured out how to install a commerce module into this site (!), and we're pleased to now offer prints, T-shirts and sweatshirts in one-of-a-kind styles, and offer the first of several services—logo design.
Check our bill de faire out using the links below or in the left colum!
It's spring and time to virtually redecorate--Payload 4 has 25 seamless patterns, ideal for your modeling composition, for Photoshop, you name it. It's free to registered members (resistration is free, we do not datamine or solicite, see the laft panel below), in themes and color schemes from Victorian to mod!
Payload III: Only Bumps
This is an amazing collection of bump maps, for modeling or for using with Photoshop's Lighting Effects plug-in (using the Texture Channel). You can also use 'em to displace objects in Poser and other modeling apps to create alien foliage, vegetables, and other important roughage!
Have You Been Framed Yet?
Our Clipper Collection has some new additions in the Freeloads section! Now you can download high-resolution, aplha-masked images of 8 by 10" frames in gold, pewter, and bisque. Put them around images you want to print, but you don't want to pay for a frame that looks this expensive!
Flamingcomes, Flamingos!
Popsicles now come on a single wooden stick; so much for sharing. Try finding a prize in a Cracker Jacks box these days—and try find a box; they seem to come in foil bags now.
And yet another American Icon bites the dust as of November 1st: the original plastic lawn flamingo, age 49, has ceased production in Leominster, Mass. By Union Products, Inc., purportedly due to the rising cost of plastic. We don’t know—saltines, pre-sweetened cereal and countless other goods have gone from waxed paper to you-know-what! Perhaps it’s the Asian knock-offs of this high-kitsch lawn ornament, Americans are migrating to condos and apartments with no yard…or perhaps founder Don Featherstone who must be in his early 80s is just ready to fold his feathers.
An iPod for your Desktop (sort of)
I’m one of the 3 people on Earth who doesn’t own the near-ubiquitous Apple iPod, and most likely the single person who doesn’t want one. I prefer to rip my mp3s to CD and play ‘em on my trusty pocket Panasonic, which was $30 less than Apple’s teensiest iPod Nanao. However, I do like to play mp3s on my notebook, preferring not to get up and shuffle a boombox—and I bought a JBL system with a subwoofer, which sort of defeats a notebook’s portability! I’ve grown out of my romance with Winamp; it faults almost as much as Win Media Player and its GNDB takes an eternity to catalog and usually gets it wrong.
Enter Apple QuickTime 7; I was obliged to download it when a new program complained it couldn’t run tutorial movies. Surprise of surprises...
Free Bonus Chapter 6 Photoshop Elements All-In-On Desk Reference for Dummies
When your kids or spouse complain, “there’s nothing good on TV tonight”, surprise them with a Photoshop Elements movie, produced and directed by you! Elements 4 makes easy work of writing images with neat transition effects and sound to a DVD you just plop into your player and hit the remote. Additionally in this chapter I show you how to make your own Web gallery without knowing anything about that nasty HTML, and even how to create animated GIFs—make your own moving Happy Birthday ecards and bamboozle your friends!
It’s all right here, completely free to download in PDF format, and if you like what you see, there’s scores more chapters at your favorite book store...the book’s also in book stores that aren’t your favorite; take your pick.
Download Bonus Chapter 5 for Free! Buy the book now!
Outsourcing Your Prints
Free Bonus Chapter 5 Photoshop Elements All-In-On Desk Reference for Dummies
At some point in your hobby or career, you're going to want output that's of much higher quality than an inkjet printer. So where do you take your files and how do you get them there? How big a file do you need? I answer all these questions and more in this chapter—learn about the service bureau right down your block, locate the best place to put your images on T-shirts, mugs, keychains, 35mm slides—you name it. I teach you the lingo of professional output places so you know what you're talking about…and what you're getting.
Download Bonus Chapter 4 for Free! Buy the book now!
Printer Options
Free Bonus Chapter 4 Photoshop Elements All-In-On Desk Reference for Dummies
If you want prints that look as good as your hard work onscreen, download this chapter! I get into all the necessary stuff you'll want to do so Elements talks to your inkjet nicely, how to preview in CMYK so if you're planning on sending work to a commercial printer, the output looks superb, and how to gang up 4 by 6s or 3 by 4s so you can print lots of wallet photos to a single page. Also, you learn about archival inks and papers and where to get them so your images last. And framing tips are in this chapter—inkjet prints need special care. Finally, I take you on an excursion into black and white laser printing; how to get the best results on inexpensive media.
Download Bonus Chapter 1 for Free! Buy the book now!
Fun and Fanciful Editing
Free PDF Bonus Chapter 1 Photoshop Elements All-In-On Desk Reference for Dummies
In Fun and Fanciful Editing , you learn how to make historic, vintage photos using the Adobe clip art that came on your Elements installation CD. You'll also see how to antique your vintage photo so it looks like your just rescued it from your great-great-grandparents' attic. I also teach you how to create a 3-D photo cube—you know, like you buy in Spencer Gifts—by showing you how Elements' Perspective Free Transform feature works.
DownloadBonus Chapter 2 for Free! Buy the book now!
Scrapbooking Elements-style
Free Bonus Chapter 2 Photoshop Elements All-In-On Desk Reference for Dummies
In Scrapbooking Elements-style I show you the all-important secret to good page layout, using a grid — it's not as simple as it might sound, but it's critical for a polished-looking scrapbook.Then I show you how to create a brushed aluminum, photorealistic background image for a real classy-like scrapbook presentation. And of course you'll need those photo corners for digital images; using Shapes in Elements makes doing this a snap. To keep your pages from becoming hum-drum …
Download Bonus Chapter 3 for Free! Buy the book now!
Beyond the Native Tools of Elements
Free Bonus Chapter 3 Photoshop Elements All-In-On Desk Reference for Dummies
Photoshop Elements is a wonderful program, but it's not the only game in town, in this chapter I tune you in to a host of plug-ins for Elements that are free or inexpensive, plus some outstanding graphics applications that play nice with Elements for effortless importing and exporting. Painter, Xara, and other creative applications can add zest and remarkable special effects touches to your Elements compositions.
Sounds Interesting!
If you're like me:
1. I feel sorry for you.
2. You've had your creative head around pixel editing for so long, you’ve missed the digital audio revolution.
I picked up a D.A.W., a Digital Audio Workspace software in late 2006 and became totally hooked; no more arcade games, very few desktop icon designs for the past two years. A D.A.W. can be roughly compared to the audio equivalent of Photoshop, although the parameters are unique to audio and you can’t really apply a Gaussian Blur to a Hip Hop tune.
Starting An Audio Studio
There are two routes you can take if you want to get into composing songs in a DAW: you can bring in audio tracks you’ve recorded or record live into the DAW, or (and this is the interesting part) you can compose music and then let the DAW play your tune through a piece of software called a Virtual Studio Technology Instrument—a VSTi. Digital audio Workspaces are not to be confused with a digital multi-track recording studio, although some DAWs serve as a multi-track studio. Apple's Garage Band is an entry level workspace as is Adobe's Audition (formally CoolEdit). Features vary as do prices. Actually Magix has a serviceable workspace called Music Maker 12 (less than $100, usually on sale) which includes several VSTis; you can run up a serious bill collecting virtual instruments so it's good to begin with a few when they come for free.
Score another one for technology killing off cultural icons: perhaps within ten years, the incandescent light bulb will cease to shine, due to rising energy and ecological concerns. A little background: Thomas Edison did not create the light bulb, but instead refined the technology and developed a standard for lighting, around 1879. It’s debatable who invented the lightbulb, but Humphry Davy demonstrated the arc lamp to the Royal Institution as early as 1810. But poor Humphry didn’t recognize the need for popular electrification in homes nor a standard thread for the lamp, which Thomas developed.
Already, Australia and Venezuela have passed legislation banning incandescent lights, giving different due dates and the European Union is anticipated to follow.
I’ve lost count of exactly what generation of computer graphics we’re into now—it has to be the 8th on 9th by now. But whether it’s photography or creating photorealistic graphics, we now have noise as both an ally and an enemy. Noise can be described as the random placement of pixels that don’t conform to the general scheme of a composition, photographic or entirely synthetic. The capability to filter noise into rendered scenes out of Poser, Maya or other photorealistic rendering application can actually help the verisimilitude of the composition; it doesn’t add compositional detail, but often it helps disguise the artificial nature of the artwork by subliminally suggesting that the scene was photographed using physical emulsion. If you own Photoshop and want to grunge up a rendered scene,
Able RAWer is a great little program for digital photographers on the go. Pop this tiny program on your thumbdrive and anywhere you can find an open USB port you can set up your digital darkroom and get to work on your RAW files.
There's an Amish folk-saying plaque my grandmother used to have on the kitchen wall that read: Too soon aldt, too late shmart.
It seems like "The Good Old Days" is relative. For example, if you went
to college last month, chances you are 18 and therefore were born in
1988.
Here's a list of what you missed, and what fossils like The Boutons consider "the good old days":
• You don't remember the space shuttle blowing up.
• You never knew safe Trick or Treating
• There has always been an embargo on Cuba.
• There has always been AIDS.
• Your grandfather was in the war?VietNam, and your dad might have served in the first George Bush?s first Middle East War.
• Bottle caps have always been screw off and plastic.
Betcha didn't know the following nerdy statistics about the world:
Los Angeles
Los Angeles's full name is El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los
Angeles de Porciuncula ~ -and can be abbreviated to 3.63 percent of its
size: L.A.
New York City
The term "The Big Apple" was coined by touring
jazz musicians of the 1930's who used the slang _expression "apple" for
any town or city. Therefore, to play New York City is to play the big
time ~ The Big Apple. There are more Irish in New York City than in
Dublin, Ireland, more Italians in New York City than in Rome, Italy,
and more Jews in New York City than in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Creating believable people has been a pastime of God, shortly
followed by Man...in the arts. We can easily wander back to the Greek
myth of Pygmalion, and the Renaissance paintings of Pygmalion &
Galatea. Now flash-forward a few centuries and Geek mythology
has put such contemporary heroes as M-m-max Headroom on the tube via
some heavy-duty face makeup and tricky video editing to make Matt
Freuer look like a video simulation, specifically what simulations
looked like in the 1980s.
But as (Gordon) Moore’s Law has proven, technology in 2006 has advanced
to the point where motion picture CG has not only recreated Sir
Lawrence Olivier (Sky Captain and The World of Tommorow) and Marlon Brando (Superman Returns), but the technologies come in home versions! Curious Labs’ Poser is about $300 for Mac or Win version 6,
This is actually on the Tesco's Tiramisu dessert (printed on bottom): Do not turn upside down. Well, isn't it a bit late?
For the past 30 years, our lawyers have been protecting consumers from acts that seem to fly in the face of common sense. I think it began with someone who scalded themself on a cup of McDonald's coffee--the incident was tragic, but do any of us operate this way with our brain in gear--1.) Order hot coffee; you can see the steam rising. 2.) Spill it all over yourself. 3.) Get a lawyer and sue.
Our friend Barbara sent us the following collection of lawyer-driven prose that we sure can learn from:
On a Sear's hairdryer: Do not use while sleeping. Well darn, and that's the only time I have to work on my hair.
Japanese acoustics expert Dr Matsumi Suzuki has synthetized what he believes to be the voice of the Mona Lisa, whose true identity— which is speculated from the wife of Francesco del Giocondo to Leonardo himself (Leonardo was a great kidder) is as much a mystery as her hair style. Suzuki, who uses his skills in forensic work, measured the face and hands of the famous 16th-century portrait to distill the information about what Mona would sound like. You can hear the clip at MSN (the site is in Japanese and the clip's in Italian, no subtitles). Suzuki has been nominated for Harvard's Ignoble Award for his research.
