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.

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

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.

Photographer’s Ephemeris: Video Tutorials

Two video tutorials from Yellow Wood Guiding on the use of The Photographer’s Ephemeris software:

Source: This tip is loosely inspired by a discussion last week with nature and wildlife photographer Jon Cornforth during the live recording session of the John Greengo Photography Show. You can subscribe in iTunes to be among the first to get a copy of that interview when we post it later this week.

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.

Zoom #1. Choose the zoom tool.

You can select the zoom tool from the Toolbar (where it has always been) or at the top of the screen in the Photoshop Application Bar (shown below). Click to zoom in preset increments. Hold Alt or option to zoom out. You can also draw a box with the zoom cursor and the area you surround will fill the image window.

Tip: Press and hold in one place for an animated zoom effect.

Zoom #2. Press Z to select zoom. Press-and-hold Z to make it temporary.

With any tool active, hold down (no, not just click) the Z key to temporarily activate the Zoon tool. Release the Z key to return to the tool you were just using.

Zoom #3. Hold down Cmd/Ctrl+Spacebar to access the zoom tool.

Tip: On the Mac, the Command+Spacebar conflicts with the default Spotlight search shortcut. You can turn the Spotlight search shortcut off in System Preferences under Keyboard & Mouse (look under Keyboard Shortcuts).

Zoom #4. Type a magnification value at the top of the screen.

Same Application Bar as before. Choose the pop-down menu or type your an exact zoom percentage.

Zoom #5. Type a magnification at the lower left of your image.

Zoom #6. Hold down Alt/option and use your mouse’s scroll wheel.

On a Mac multitouch trackpad or Magic Mouse, you may also use option + two finger scrolling. (I borrowed this graphic from an old tip titled Use a scroll wheel to zoom in Adobe Photoshop.)

Zoom #7. Choose Zoom In or Zoom Out from the View menu.

Zoom #8. Use the shortcuts Cmd/Ctrl+= or Cmd/Ctrl+–

Although the shortcut is technically an equal sign, everyone thinks of these as plus (+) and minus (-) to zoom in and out.

Zoom #9. Navigator Panel take 1: Use the slider along the bottom of the panel.

Zoom #10. Navigator Panel take 2: Click the buttons at either end of the slider to zoom in preset increments.

Zoom #11. Navigator Panel take 3: Enter a magnification value in the field at the lower left of the panel.

Source: Steve Laskevtich is lead instructor at Luminous Works, author of Photoshop CS4 Photographer’s Handbook and is currently teaching a terrific 10-Week Lightroom Course in our online classroom.

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?

Download a Free copy of Picasa 3.5.

Picasa is free photo editing software from Google. I haven’t worked with the previous versions, however the latest version, Picasa 3.5, adds powerful new facial recognition features, which is what attracted my interest this time around. You can download Mac or Windows versions:

Download: Picasa 3.5 for Mac.
Download: Picasa 3.5 for Windows.

Step 1. Launch Picasa the First Time.

The first time you launch Picasa, a dialog box announces that Picasa is ready to search your computer for photos. This dialog nicely sums up Picasa’s strengths and weaknesses for our purposes.

Strengths: Picasa doesn’t move or copy your image files. You’ll be able to easily add new keyword metadata without upsetting your current file management system.

Weaknesses: Picasa makes it difficult to work on a specific photo library. The default options of searching default user folders or everything is terrible. We’ll get into that in Step 2.

Step 2. Use Folder Manager to target specific folders.

In Picasa, choose Tools > Folder Manager. This is where you tell Picasa which folder to scan for photos, and which to ignore.

We’re using Picasa to augment existing photo libraries, so you may have to do a little digging in this dialog box. In this example I’ve disabled all the folders except for the specific collection I am interested in.

Step 3. Wait for Picasa to scan your photos for People.

This will take a while. To demonstrate this tip I used a folder of family photos from our trip to Maine in 2007. Picasa took about 1 hour to scan 1,711 photos (about 4GB of disk space). Bigger collections take longer.

“Enable Face Detection” is turned on by default. You can find options for that in preferences under the “Name Tags” tab.

Note: Yes, we do take a lot of family photos!

Step 4. Start Identifying People’s Faces.

This is the fun and time consuming part. Picasa automates and streamlines the face-matching process. Here is the short version. Click on “Unnamed” under the People tab, pick a face, and start naming.

I can’t turn this tip into a detailed Picasa tutorial, so I recommend reading Google’s help files for more details.

Help Files: Adding Name Tags in Picasa.

My biggest time-saving tip is that you’ll end up identifying the same people again and again. Once you’ve started naming a few faces, you can select multiple photos of the same person in the Unnamed list and drag them over to the correct name. Saves a lot of time.

Step 5. Add People’s Names as Tags.

You just finished identifying everyone’s name right? But Picasa doesn’t embed that information in the metadata of your files. The goal this tip to get those names into your keyword lists to Lightroom or Bridge, so we need to add this extra step.

First, display the Tags palette by choosing View > Tags.

Under the People list, click each name one at a time and select all the photos in that set (Command-A on the Mac). Then in the tags column on the right, add a Tag with that person’s name. As you work, those tags are automatically added to the original image file metadata.

Step 6. Names are now embedded in image metadata!

Your work is done! The name tags are now embedded in the metadata of each of your photos. Which means they should be visible in Adobe Bridge, Photoshop or other image management tools. (Read below for an extra detail for incorporating this technique into Adobe Lightroom).

Bonus: Using this technique with Lightroom!

Unlike Bridge, Lightroom will not automatically recognize these metadata changes in your image library. If we wanted to use a tool like Picasa to quickly run facial recognition on a collection of photos, here is the process you should use:

Before Using Picasa: Select all the photos in your library, and choose Metadata > Save Metadata To File. (This writes any metadata changes from Lightroom back to the original files).

After Using Picasa: Now, back in Lightroom, select all the photos in your library again, and choose Metadata > Read Metadata From File. (This imports all your new name keywords into your Lightroom database.

Enjoy!

Source: This tip was inspired by the 10-Week Lightroom Course that Steve Laskevitch is currently leading in our live, worldwide classroom. In fact, in today’s class Steve is digging into keywording in Lightroom, and we just might throw in a live demonstration of this tip in action!