CreativeTechs Tips

Interested in Adobe Creative Suite? This is a weekly newsletter for creative professionals who use Macs (but Windows users are welcome too). If you're new here, you may want to subscribe via RSS or Email or Twitter for a mix of new tips each week. Thanks for visiting!

I’m delighted to announce our new 4-week Digital Photography Course starting in two week! This special course is taught by photographer John Greengo from the PBS series Art Wolfe’s Travels to the Edge.

Want to enroll? Sign-up here: Digital Photography Course Enrollment.

July 15: Week 1 - Overview. Life of a World Traveling Photographer.
July 22: Week 2 - Your Camera.
July 29: Week 3 - Your Technique.
Aug 5: Week 4 - Composition Secrets.

Note: Providing these free training courses requires that we attract a large audience. To offer this class, we need at least 1,000 people signed up to participate, so help us spread the word! And time is SHORT!

Here is the current enrollment number:

Read on for an extended Q&A, and to ask your own questions in the comments. John is currently finishing the course content. If you have a topic you’d like to see him cover, mention it in the comments below.

Read the Full Tip »

I’ve got a special request this week. Jason and I are working on our next big online course. If you’ve ever gotten something out of an online class from CreativeTechs, we need your help now.

I’m hoping you’ll take the time to answer three questions in the comments below:

1. What makes the CreativeTechs training approach different?
(How does our class format compare to local classes, training videos, or other online webinars?)

2. Where do you live?
(We want to demonstrate the size of our audience with the comments on this post. Tell us where you live, and what time of day you join in for class.)

3. Does this live worldwide format really work?
(This is the important part. What does the experience feel like to you? Can you help describe this format to someone who’s never seen it?)

We’re planing an ambitious 6-month Photoshop course that builds from basics into advanced retouching techniques. To pull it off, we need new space, faster Internet, and some key partnerships. I’m talking with people this week, and I want to point skeptics among them to your comments to demonstrate that this online training format works.

We need your testimonials to help entice experts to Seattle for our little worldwide classroom. And I need to demonstrate the reach of our current classes in order to attract the support and sponsorship we’re going to need to keep this live class experience free.

Thanks!

PS. Scroll down to a comment I posted over the weeekend for my boldest public declaration so far about where we’re going with our online classroom. Scary and Exhilarating!

PS2. I’ve been updating and revising this post all weekend. So if early commenters don’t seem to be responding to the same questions, that’s MY fault, not theirs.

Okay, I need help. Our online classes are really taking off, and before our new 10-Week Flash Course starts next month, we need someone helping record and edit the videos for each class.

What does the job entail?

This person needs to arrive about 90 minutes before class starts to test all the sound and video feeds. They need to oversee the video and audio recording during class. After class, they need to lightly edit the final recording, and prepare final video files to be uploaded on the web.

We’re currently looking for 1-or-2 people who can handle these tasks as we continue to add additional courses to our weekly schedule.

This person should be experienced supporting various video and audio setups, very computer savvy, experienced with Final Cut Pro and other editing tools. And most importantly, reliable and trustworthy.

A bonus would be finding someone with web production skills who can update online course pages with the newly uploaded videos.

If you are interested, please email training@creativetechs.com. You should come in and watch one of our live classes in action, and we can discuss the options. I’d like to start interviewing people after this Thursday’s InDesign class (10:30am - 1:00pm), so please help spread the word.

PS. This is a paid position, however I’m not sure what it should pay. It is certainly not a full-time position (although the way things are growing around here, you never know!)

I love uncovering basic tricks I should’ve already known. This is a great one that will save me time almost every day.

Need to match a color from a web page or something else while working in Photoshop? Just click with the eyedropper tool somewhere in your Photoshop file, and drag the cursor off to sample colors from anything visible on your screen.

That’s it!

This eyedropper trick has apparently worked since Photoshop 7. Wish I’d known that a few years and a couple thousand screenshots ago!

This isn’t a tip. It’s a screenshot Kyle just sent me from one of the cooler projects we’ve been involved in so far this year. Kyle and Jordan prepared an entire network of computer images that a client took to China on a laptop drive. Kyle had to help them configure the network sufficiently over the phone so he could get in remotely and finish the office setup.

This is, from front to back, an RDC connection to a windows machine running in VMWare on another mac, which is running on a mac, when is screen shared from another mac, which is connected to via iChat Screen Sharing feature, and is in China.

Read the Full Tip »

Over the last few weeks we’ve been getting a lot of questions about printing, and prepress in our weekly InDesign classes.

For an understanding of the issues involved in reproducing your digital designs on old-fangled ink and paper, I highly recommend a newly updated book by Sandee Cohen:

Book: From Design Into Print

This book reads like a visual quickstart guide for professional printing, and does the best job I’ve seen of boiling down complex printing issues into a friendly, readable guide.

Web: From Design Into Print Blog.

iTunes: From Design Into Print Podcast.

For even more printing wisdom, check out Sandee’s related blog and podcast. The podcast in particular is a hoot.

Read the Full Tip »

Tuesday afternoons our resident Photoshop guru, Jason Hoppe, spends two hours solving real-world retouching challenges in front of a live worldwide audience. This started as an experiment for participants in our 10-Week Photoshop Course. SInce then it has grown into a weekly event with a dedicated and growing audience.

Here is an amazing example from last week. Jason spends half and hour rescuing a 1957 wedding photo that was damaged in Hurricane Katrina. If you’ve never joined us for Retouch Tuesday, this video is a great example of what you are missing.

Read the Full Tip »

In this short 8 minute video, Mark Monlux talks about his personal approach to using social networking tools for attract business as an independent professional illustrator. From a May 27, 2009 panel at the Seattle Graphic Artists Guild.

Last week, Jason spent some time working with rounded corners in InDesign. But here is a question that came up during our class Q&A that we didn’t have an immediate answer for:

What if I only want to round a couple corners on my rectangle?

You could draw those rounded corners by hand with the Pen tool, or combine two separate boxes using InDesign’s pathfinder tools. But that’s kind of time consuming. Instead, it turns out there is an easy solution in the built-in script samples that Adobe provides.

Pull up the Scripts panel by choosing Window > Automation > Scripts. Look in the Application Samples and you’ll find a script named CornerEffects. Select a box and double-click on this script. You’ll be presented with a (somewhat clunky) dialog that lets you apply the rounded effect to specific corners.

Our friend James Dempsey at The Graphic Mac has a good write-up:

The Graphic Mac: Creating rounded corner boxes easily with InDesign scripts.

Read the Full Tip »

If you do website design and development on a Mac, this is one of those tips you should love. Everyone else can skip this one (Don’t worry we’ll be back with something else for you next week).

PHP and MySQL features don’t come enabled on the built-in OS X web server. It’s possible to access those features with some command-line gymnastics. But we have a MUCH easier way.

MAMP is a free standalone web server you can download and run in minutes. Run this application and push “Start Servers” and you are running a test web server on your Mac with PHP and MySQL services already configured.

MAMP: One-click-solution for your personal webserver.

MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP. These are the four main constituents you need to design and develop a full featured website or application on your Mac. Web developers, enjoy! Read the Full Tip »