CreativeTechs Tips

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For the last year-and-a-half at CreativeTechs, we’ve been experimenting with different ways of delivering software training for professional graphic designers and photographers. We started with live 90-minute seminars for our Seattle-area clients; we experimented with several months of online webinars; and most recently we’ve developed a hybrid workshop environment that combines the best of both.

We invite you to browse through an archive of clips from past webinars and video tips. The sound quality in our earlier webinars was pretty rough, and our recording techniques have evolved over time. Read the Full Tip »

This video clip comes from an October 2008 workshop digging into the new features in Adobe CS4. This clip focuses on a cool new technique for resizing brush sizes in Photoshop CS4.

We’re posting a few early video tips from several years ago. This tip came from the February 6, 2006 issue of our weekly Tips email newsletter.

A newer (non-video) version of this tip - “Indent to Here” in InDesign or Quark - is available on our tips blog.

We’re posting a few early video tips from several years ago. This tip came from the February 13, 2006 issue of our weekly Tips email newsletter.

If you find yourself needing to quickly remove the background from an image in Photoshop, take a moment to play with the background eraser tool.

We’re posting a few early video tips from several years ago. This tip came from the February 20, 2006 issue of our weekly Tips email newsletter.

Most of us work with Photoshop’s crop tool every day. Can this basic tool still hold any magic we haven’t already uncovered?

We’re posting a few early video tips from several years ago. This tip came from an unpublished tip from February 2006.

This video clip comes from a recent workshop on building Interactive PDFs in Adobe InDesign CS4 and Acrobat Pro. This clip focuses on the new button palete in InDesign that makes rollovers and other interactive effects easy and quick.

If you ever built PDF Forms the old way in Adobe Acrobat, you know how tedious it used to be drawing each form field individually. Happily, Adobe saved us all a lot of time by adding the ability to auto-recognize form fields back in Acrobat Pro 8. That auto-recognition only got better in Acrobat Pro 9.

But what if you are designing a form that doesn’t mesh with Acrobat’s auto-recognition features? Say a layout that does not use dark black lines to define field borders. Are you doomed to return to the dark days of drawing your fields by hand?

Not if you know this trick using InDesign layers! Read the Full Tip »

About halfway across InDesign’s Control panel is a big P surrounded by brackets. When a you select an object that has been rotated, flipped or skewed, that P changes. It rotates at an angle matching the object. If the object has been flipped, it turns to an outline. It also leans to match an object that has been skewed.

What I don’t know is why Adobe picked a P. Got a guess? Leave a comment:

Read the Full Tip »

Stop using the “Reduce File Size” option in Acrobat! When you want to save smaller, more effecient PDF files, learn to use the powerful PDF Optimizer feature instead. This video was recorded during a recent CreativeTechs Webinar on Preflighting and Preparing PDFs for Printing.