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Living In Layers | By RC | June 22, 2009 | No Comments
Hey guys.. first off, wanted to apologize here for the late post (and double posting). Seems like a couple of things were off on the publishing software and while the posts were alive.. they werent in the section that they needed to be for you guys to see that. Consider it a PEBKAC error (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.. I love that one). Couple of tutorials, and a contest coming up here!
Create a Photo Montage with After Effects
Steve Holmes gives us a cool tutorial on how to create a Photo Montage with After Effects. Check it out:
” Lots of programs and plug-ins create cool photo montages easily and quickly—handy for such things as photo DVDs and slideshows. But what if you don’t have those programs or plug-ins, or you want something a little more creative (yet still as easy to replicate and reuse) using a software program you already own? A few tricks and techniques in After Effects will have you up and running in no time at all.
1 IMPORT SLIDESHOW ASSETS
In After Effects, double-click in the Project panel to bring up the Import File dialog, then locate and import the images you wish to use. For our project, I’m importing three folders of photos of yours truly training in the Italian Alps before a big race in Spain and one paper-texture image I downloaded from iStockphoto to use as a background. Note: Though not imperative, ensuring your snapshot images are all the same pixel size will make this project a breeze to complete at the end.”
If you want to follow along with the rest of the tutorial (and download the coursefiles to follow along) click on the link below:
Photo Montage with After Effects by Steve Holmes
Contest Time
Go to the Contact page, select the Layers Blog drop-down, then fill in your name, email address and answer to this week’s following question. Remember, the contest will end Thursday 5PM,. and the winner will be announced Friday morning.
The Contest Question: Dave Huss talks about the new Joby Gorillapod Focus in our online review. How many pounds can the Gorillapod Focus hold?
The Prize:A copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 Real World HDR by Matt Kloskowski as well as a subscription to Layers Magazine!
Thanks for stopping in today everyone. Be sure to stop back in tomorrow!
Living In Layers | By RC | June 19, 2009 | No Comments
Happy Friday everyone. Cool news and tutorials to share!
Nikon Sponsors Worldwide Photo Walk and Brings It!
A very cool thanks and High Five to Nikon - They are now a sponsor of Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk - and they jumped in in a very very big way. Nikon added their D700 camera, and a AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6G. If you think THAT’s something, you should see the OTHER prizes the Grand Prize Winner is slated to get:
Copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Premium and Copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
By Adobe
A B&H $500 Gift Card
A Gitzo GT1550T Tripod By Bogen Imaging
1 Year Online Training (or extension) & Kelby Training DVD bundle
1 Composer, Optic Swap Kit, Acc. Kit 0.42x super wide lens, Composer case by Lensbaby
1 X-Rite Colormunki Photo By X-Rite
2 Years NAPP Membership (or extension)
That’s going to make it not only incredibly fun, but incredibly rewarding for some lucky person. If you have a couple of hours to burn on July 18, make sure you sign up for one of the Photo walks at www.worldwidephotowalk.com> Thank you Nikon, and ALL of our awesome sponsors for your support. You guys are the best!
Layers Magazine Makes the Top 15
The Inkd blog ranked their top 15 magazine for Print designers and I was very excited to see that our own Layers Magazine made the list. According to Inkd:
“Anything and everything you want to know about Adobe creative products. This is the go-to for early tips around all the new Adobe software.”
I’d love to extend a congratulations to Chris Main our editor, and the incredible team of writers, production, and editorial staff that work to put out the best darn magazine out there. I’m proud to be a part of it.
Click here to see the top 15 as per the Inkd Blog
Contest Winners
A very warm congratulations to Erick Wand for winning this week’s Layers Blog Contest as well as Wanda Foster for winning this week’s Layers TV contest. Way to go, guys!!
Insider Software Release FontAgent Pro Plus
Now, admittedly, i’m a bit of an addict when it comes to Fonts. You can never really find enough of them (i’m not alone here.. in the office you should see people perusing the web in search of the cool fonts). How cool is it that Insider Software has released FontAgent Pro Plus. They took FontAgent Pro, and added to it 150 book fonts, 400 creative fonts, 150 book 80 Script Fonts, 25 monowidth fonts.. 750 fonts in all for 149.95. Sounds to me like a deal!
Click here to see more about FontAgent Pro Plus
Slideshow Pro gets a Bunch of Updates
Seems like the folks over at SlideshowPro have been very busy with some updates to their software - and definitely worth checking out. In addition to updating their Director and Thumbgrid software, they have added Pan and Zoom (kinda like the Ken Burns effect on Imovie.. and .. well.. Ken Burns presentation stuff) to Slideshow Pro. If you own a copy, or are thinking about it, make sure you head over to the Slideshow Pro website to see whats new.
That’s a lot of stuff for Friday. That should keep you all very very busy. Well.. at least busy enough until Monday, where i’ll announce the next contest.. and bring you some great stuff. Have a great weekend!
Living In Layers | By RC | June 18, 2009 | No Comments
Hey everyone, happy Thursday. Buzzing along here, so I figured I’d pass along some cool links I’ve gotten as of late that you may be interested in:
CMYK 2.0 by Rick McCleary:
If you are a designer that works in the RGB space, and have wondered why CMYK output on the printer looks so drastically different, this book is for you. Rick takes a very different approach in talking about this problem, which I think is pretty refreshing. A good portion of the book is dedicated to the “whys” of the situation - what causes the problem, how profiling and gamut work, what “Assign” and “Convert” profiles in Photoshop really mean - things that really give you an understanding of the problem.
In the latter part of the book, Rick goes through a series of strategies on how to get your RGB to CMYK workflow to operate seamlessly. At the end of the day, you’ll have a proven workflow, and be able to look at the 35,000 foot view, as well as speak intelligently to collaboration, context, and process control. Definitely a great book to have on the bookshelf. Not to mention that there are some really cool images in there that have awesome color.. I’m thinking to myself “Man I hope my book graphics look as good as his.. rock!” Click on the link below to see more information on it:
CMYK 2.0 by Rick McCleary
Vincent Versace - 2 new Titles Available
Vincent Versace is at it again, bringing us a couple of new titles aimed at getting those pictures that we have pushed, ever so slightly, to look like fine art Masterpieces.
From Vincent Himself
” ‘Oz to Kansas 2.0: The Black and White on Black and White Conversions’ is the evolution of thought that began with “Welcome to Oz : From Oz to Kansas. How to convert an Image to Black and White Without Ever Leaving the RGB Color Space.” This Oz to Kansas 2.0 tutorial takes a practical applications approach to when, why and how to convert an image. In it, you will learn which methods give you the best results and when to choose a simple or a complex solution.”
In The Lazarus Effect: “This DVD not only teaches you how to bring detail back from both landscape (Pixels in the Mist) and portrait images (From Blur to In Focus), it also presents a new way of thinking about your images as well as a new approach to seeing and creating. If that’s what you would like to learn in about an hour, then this is the tutorial DVD for which you have been looking.”
You can find out more of these two titles over at The Acme Educational Website
Cool Free Training - That’s Right, Layers TV
Corey and I have the newest episode of Layers TV up. In this episode, I talk about using Fireworks CS4 to work quick Adobe AIR prototypes, and Corey talks about how to use free 3D resources to get you started with the tools in Photoshop CS4 Extended. Click on the player over on the right, see the larger version by clicking here (make sure you look at the larger version.. helps with the menus), or you can always subscribe to it in Itunes.
That’s it for today folks! We’ll see you guys back here tomorrow morning!
Living In Layers | By RC | June 17, 2009 | No Comments
Happy Wednesday everyone.. Check out this cool tutorial from Dave Cross on using Displacement maps with graphics for Photoshop CS4″
One of the most creative ways to use the Displace filter in Photoshop is to “map” an imported graphic so it follows the contours of an object in a photo; for example, adding an Illustrator logo to a photo of a T-shirt in a realistic way. Add the editability of vector smart objects and you have a match made in heaven.
1 PREPARE THE PHOTOGRAPH
First we need to choose and prepare the photograph onto which we’ll add our logo. We chose an image of a blank T-shirt from iStockphoto.com, deliberately picking one that contained noticeable folds. If the folds are a little too subtle, use the Burn tool to darken the shadows a little and the Dodge tool to slightly lighten the highlights.
2 PREPARE THE DISPLACEMENT MAP
The Displace filter uses a grayscale map to distort the imported object, so we need to create a map for our project. First duplicate (Image>Duplicate) the T-shirt photo and then convert it to grayscale. Although it’s not an ideal day-to-day way to make a beautiful grayscale photo, we’ll use Image>Mode>Grayscale to convert the photo (which works just fine for a displacement map). We don’t want too much texture detail in the map, so use Filter>Noise>Despeckle to soften the texture without losing too much overall detail. Save the map as a PSD file.
Click here to read the rest of the tutorial
Living In Layers | By RC | June 16, 2009 | 1 Comment
Happy Tuesday everyone! First and foremost, want to give a super shout out to our Nancy Masse - Social Media Ninja for the office. Nancy’s taken to Twitterifying the things we hold dear here & in addition to the many hats she wears, she’s authored a great article on the use of Social Media for your brand. The article is called, “To Tweet Or Not To Tweet”. They posted an excerpt of the article on this website, and based on popular demand, our Editor Chris Main thought it best to publish the article in its entirety. Awesome Job Nancy!!!! She’s been my compass in the world of Twitter, so a valuable resource here.
If you’d like to Follow RC on Twitter, You can Click Here. If you would Like to Follow Nancy, Click on This Link
Nancy’s Article Rocks!
What I like about this article is that it’s not just a discussion of what Twitter is and isn’t. In addition to that, Nancy started a round table discussion with some great people in the industry- people like Andy Sowards, Mayhem Studios, AcmePhoto, and Jacob Cass as JustCreative. The discussion allows you to read how “Creatives” use and build on Twitter. You also have a resources page with links to things that can help your Twitter experience as well as a dictionary of “Twitter Types” (very cool!) Click here to read the whole article:
To Tweet or Not To Tweet - By Nancy “Social Media Ninja” Masse
Time Magazine does Twitter Too
It’s interesting too, because it seems like Twitter’s getting a little bit of momentum as of late. Steven B. Johnson just wrote an awesome article about it for Time magazine, complete with a “Tweet” listed as the cover image for the Time article. In the article, one quote particularly resonated with me - different from my constant evangelizing of the brand development potential. This was a more personal one:
“For as long as we’ve had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings and “Who Shot J.R.” cliff hangers — the folkloric American living room, all of us signing off in unison with Walter Cronkite, shattered into a million isolation booths. But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you’ll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we’re actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors. Some of that conversation is juvenile, of course, just as it was in our living room when we heckled Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech. But some of it is moving, witty, observant, subversive.”
Make sure you click on this link - will take you to Steven’s blog, and will link you to the Times article
The TW8: 8 Steps to Why You Should Use Twitter
Not too long ago, I got into a discussion with some people over at the NAPP Forums (blocked.. WONDERFUL resource but must be a NAPP member) about Twitter. Generally, one opinion was:
“I really don’t get why there’s a buzz about Twitter, seems like a waste to use 140 characters to talk about what you had for lunch.” That’s not an exact quote.. that’s just a summary of a bunch of feelings.. and pretty pervasive ones at that.
This is where I usually share my TW8: The 8 Steps to Why You Should Use Twitter:
1. Fire up Twitter and Tweet “Listening to Depeche Mode while Retouching a Photo in Photoshop” 2. Within seconds, someone can comment on your “Status”
3. If you use Tweetdeck, anyone “Looking for” Depeche Mode, Retouching, Photo, and Photoshop will see the message you sent out.
4. If you’ve worded your stuff correctly, they will come to your Twitter page, Friend you, or click on any links you offer.
6. I’m Interested in Dreamweaver - so I set my Tweetdeck to “Listen” for any conversations using the word “Dreamweaver”
7. I get a realtime feed of the “Twitterverse” of everyone talking about Dreamweaver - RIGHT NOW.
8. Anyone I think can use my help, I “Follow” and tell them about my websites.
These are all new visitors. More visitors to your website means bigger website traffic, a boon to everyone. I prescribe to the belief that If you don’t really get it after that - then Twitter is not for you, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! If you do, then we’ll see you out in the Twitterverse!
I’d love to hear your feedback on this one. Do you Tweet? Do you stay out of it? What’s your impressions?
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