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.

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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!

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.

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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.

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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.

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Finally, we’ve got a free, 10-week Flash Course starting in July. This class will be taught by Erik Fadiman. Erik is faculty at Seattle Central Community College Graphic Design and now teaches at our Seattle-area training partner, Luminous Works.

Want to enroll? Sign-up here: Flash CS4 Course Enrollment.

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!

Week 1, July 14 - Animation Basics
Week 2, July 21 - Drawing Tools
Week 3, July 28 - Timeline Basics
Week 4, Aug 4 - Advanced Animation
Week 5, Aug 11 - Symbols & Library
Week 6, Aug 18 - Movieclip Symbols
Week 7, Aug 25 - Type Effects
Week 8, Sep 1 - TBD
Week 9, Sep 8 - ActionScript Basics
Week 10, Sep 15 - Working with Video

And yes, you can pass this offer along to friends, or even post it on your blog. Help spread the word. As I mentioned, we need a minimum of 1,000 people enrolled to make this free class viable.

Read on for an extended Q&A, and to ask your own questions in the comments. Erik is planning the class weeks. If you have a topic you’d like to see him cover, mention it in the comments below.

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This June, after many requests, we are delighted to offer a free, 10-week, worldwide, Illustrator course. This class will be taught by Steve Laskevitch, founder and lead instructor at Seattle’s Luminous Works Training Center. Steve is consistently rated one of the top 5 Adobe Certified Instructors in the world. We are very lucky to have convinced Steve to join us for this fun 10-week experience.

Want to enroll? Sign-up here: Illustrator CS4 Course Enrollment.

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!

Week 1, June 8 - Artboards, Basic Shapes, Swatches
Week 2, June 15 - Transformation tools (Precise and Sculptural)
Week 3, June 22 - Drawing with the Pen Tool (Bezier Curves).
Week 4, June 29 - Layers, Alignment, and Blends
Week 5, July 6 - Transparency, Gradients, and Recoloring
Week 6, July 13 - Clipping masks, Opacity masks, & Pathfinder
Week 7, July 20 - Graphic Styles & Symbols, Live Paint
Week 8, July 27 - Type, Gradient Mesh, Envelope Distortion
Week 9, August 3 - Patterns & Brushes
Week 10, August 10 - Live trace & output to web or print

And yes, you can pass this offer along to friends, or even post it on your blog. Help spread the word. As I mentioned, we need a minimum of 1,000 people enrolled to make this free class viable.

Read on for an extended Q&A, and to ask your own questions in the comments. Steve is currently mapping out the class details. If you have a topic you’d like to see him cover, mention it in the comments below.

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Last month we added Retouch Tuesday to our weekly online training calendar. This was an experiment. Instead of Jason Hoppe’s structured classes, each week we’re letting people sit in on personalized retouching sessions that let people see Jason at work.

Recently, a friend pointed me to Dave Cross’s Thursday Fix It Challenge. Each week, Dave posts a challenge image for anyone who feels so inclined can download and fix it. Here is the post for Challenge #6:

Dave Cross: Thursday Fix It Challenge #6

This seems like a perfect match. So we decided to throw Dave’s challenge images into the mix for our weekly retouching webinars. Today’s example was a lot of fun. You can watch some of the ways Jason attacked the challenge, and some of the blind alleys he went down in the process.

In the end, the 30 minutes of exploration captured in this video is probably more valuable as a journey than the end result. But we certainly had a lot of fun.

Ever been working on a project in your favorite design application and found yourself hunting for a calculator? You might be surprised how many of today’s creative tools will happily do the math for you.

In this short 3-minute video clip, Jason Hoppe shows you how to place guides precisely in the fast way, letting InDesign do all that annoying arithmetic for you.

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This 5-minute clip comes from last week’s Flash Basics webinar. Erik Fadiman has been doing this long enough to know that almost all Flash classes start with the bouncing ball. If you’ve read anything about Flash, you’ve seen this before. How do we make the ball bounce?

Source: Big news! It looks like we are on track to offer a FREE 10-Week Flash course starting in June. Still working out some of the details. The best way you can help this happen is spreading the word.

Share the fun: Tweet about this Flash Basics video!

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