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!

The acceptance of mainstream eBooks is just getting started, and publishers are very interested in the future of digital books. Apple’s new iPad will use the open EPUB format for selling and distributing electronic books (iBooks) on their new tablet.

If you work in the publishing industry, it’s time to learn what the EPUB format is all about. A good place to start is with a series of three new how-to guides from Adobe on producing and exporting EPUB eBooks from InDesign:

PDF: How to export EPUB eBooks from InDesign.

PDF: Working with images in InDesign for export to EPUB.

PDF: Common questions about exporting EPUB files from InDesign.

Link: Adobe How-To Guides: Producing EPUB eBooks from InDesign.

Source: This tip inspired by a post by Anne-Marie Concepcion on InDesign Secrets. Designer’s in Seattle may be interested in The InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference May 12–14, 2010.

Here is a great little treat.

Photoshop Product Manager, Bryan O’Neil Hughes, shared a glimpse of new selection technology that offers better edge detection and masking results in less time—even with the trickiest images, like hair.

Video: Photoshop Selections Sneak Peek.

The video is only about a minute long, but it reveals that Adobe has some powerful tools slated for future versions of Photoshop.

Source: We don’t know when CS5 will ship (or even if that’s what it will be called) — but rest assured that as soon as the new tools are unveiled, you can expect a slate of live worldwide classes exploring the latest features in our online classroom.

I love the solid feel of a clean grid-based layout. Get started with this handy collection of resources for working with the 960 pixel grid system many web designers use to streamline web development.

Link: 960 Gridder Overlay. (shown above)

Link: 960 Grid System – Resources and Links.

Link: The Grid System – Grid systems for designers (print & web).

Link: Typogridphy – Working the 960 grid with Type.

Source: I’d been thinking a lot about grids lately. This tip inspired by an upcoming website redesign for the CreativeTechs Training site.

Last week Steve Jobs unvieled the new Apple iPad. Happily, almost everything we’ve been learning about developing iPhone Web Apps looks like it’s going to work the same for Apple’s new tablet.

Here is a short video exceprt from the first week of Elisabeth Robson’s course, Learn to Build iPhone Web Apps, showing how to use a simple CSS Media Query to easily customize your website for visitors on mobile browsers.

Note: Although this was presented two weeks before the iPad announcement, the first question asked in Q&A was about Apple’s upcoming then-unconfirmed tablet device.

Source: We demonstrate a simple CSS Media Query for sample CreativeTechs Web App. Visit this page from an iPhone, and you see a sample App. Visit from a desktop broswer and the page is tucked into a simple iPhone preview:

http://creativetechs.com/iphone

Planning just the right time and location for landscape photography can be challenging. Landscape photographers typically want to plan their shoots around the times of sunrise/sunset or twilight.

That’s why photographer Stephen Trainor created the Photographer’s Ephemeris, an Adobe AIR application that provides a visual and simplified solution for finding vantage points for dusk and sunset photography. It integrates satellite and terrain maps from Google into a visually pleasing interface.

Link: The Photographer’s Ephemeris App

Read on for a couple video tutorials showing this tool in action. Read the Full Tip »

This free collection of 220 Photoshop Layer Styles let your quickly sort through glow, gradient, glass, gel, and other effects. Nothing too complex, but a helpful assortment of effects that you can explore and modify for some quick designs.

Link: DezinerFolio’s 220 Amazing Free Photoshop Layer Styles

Source: DezinerFolio.com keeps a slew of fun freebies on their web design & development site. A similar collection was mentioned in the January issue of Design Tools Monthly.

Here is a question we get periodically from clients: How can I import videos from a DVD into a Keynote presentation? The answer is HandBrake, a wonderful free utility that easily converts video on a standard DVD into presentation-friendly QuickTime movies.

Link: HandBrake 0.9.4

HandBrake is a small freeware utility that lets you easily capture clips from DVDs as H.264 video files. The resulting files can be played using the QuickTime player, imported into the latest version of iMovie, or placed into a Keynote presentation.

Of course the most common use of HandBrake these days seems to be converting DVD movies into a format you can watch on your iPhone. But we’re sticking with business uses for today’s tip.

Photoshop CS4 introduced document tabs that make it easy to switch between a variety of open images. It’s a terrific feature that I usually like a lot.

But there are days the tabs feature drives me crazy! If you’ve ever dragged one Photoshop window over another, only to have it sucked in as a new tab, you know what I mean.

So for you, a checkbox in Photoshop’s Interface preferences: Turn off "Enable Floating Document Window Docking" and say goodbye to that annoying feature.

Source: Working with lots of small images for our tips newsletter, this is one of the very first preferences I disabled in CS4. Adobe even posted a recent technote covering how to How to un-tab image windows in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

I was working on this week’s tip, when I got an email from Steve Laskevtich from Luminous Works with a PDF handout titled “11 Ways to Zoom in Photoshop CS4.” There are SO many ways to do the the same thing in Photoshop, that I (like I expect many of you will do) immediately set out to find ways of zooming that Steve had missed.

So let’s call this a group project. How many different ways are there to zoom in Photoshop CS4? I’ve started us off with the eleven from Steve. I’ll be contributing my own additions in the comments along with the rest of you.

Read the Full Tip »

We teach clients how to manage their professional image libraries using a combination of Adobe Lightroom and Bridge. I typically don’t recommend iPhoto for most professional libraries.

Then Apple added Faces (facial recognition) in the latest version of iPhoto. I’m loath to give up my professional workflows, but easily keywording photo libraries with people’s names is a game changer for many businesses.

This week I started testing Picasa 3.5, free software from Google, which now includes face-matching. It works great, integrates easily with Lightroom or Bridge, and did I mention it’s free? Read the Full Tip »