CreativeTechs Tips

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.

Read the Full Tip »

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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If you download a lot of custom Photoshop brushes, you have probably found yourself looking for an easy way to preview what those brushes look like before loading them into Photoshop and trying them out.

Our friend, James Dempsey at The Graphic Mac wrote up two handy tools that make previewing your custom brushes a snap. Both tools are quicker and easier than loading all your brushes into Photoshop in order to see what they look like. Read the Full Tip »

This is it folks! Jason Hoppe’s worldwide 10-Week Photoshop Course is complete. It has been a blast. We’ve really enjoyed meeting so many of you over the last many weeks together.

We have full downloadable recordings of the live course available for purchase. Which is great if you missed any of the weeks along the way. We’re going to keep the discounted $65 offer going for two more weeks:

Purchase: Special: Online Bundle of all 10-Weeks ($65 Special)

Purchase: Photoshop Wk 1 – Basics ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 2 – Layers ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 3 – Selection Basics ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 4 – Advanced Selections ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 5 – Layer Masks ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 6 – Pen Tool ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 7 – Brush Tools ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 8 – Retouching ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 9 – Color Correction Pt1 ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Wk 10 – Color Correction Pt2 ($15)
Purchase: Photoshop Bonus – Color Management Theory ($15)

Note: These bundles are for online access to the videos and PDFs (which you can also download to your personal computer for long-term access).

Includes Retouch Tuesday Recordings: We’ll be include in recordings of the next three Retouch Tuesday sessions in the full online purchase (sorry, we don’t have a good recording of our first Retouch Tuesday, but more great ones are coming!).

I’m starting work on a physical DVD set. We hope to have that available by the end of April. It looks like that is going to take more work than I originally anticipated. Once that DVD set is done, we’ll offer it at our cost to anyone who has already purchased the downloads. So anyone buying the downloads today still gets a better deal.

The cost of each week’s download includes a 1-hour QuickTime movie of that week’s class, along with a PDF handout, and up to 1-hour of extra audience Q&A. We’re offering a special prepurchase discount of the full 10-weeks.

Lots of web designers rely on Chris Pedrick’s Web Developer extension for Firefox. It’s one of many reasons Firefox is such a popular browser for web development. I’ve used this Firefox every week for years. We covered this in a tip back in 2006:

Archive Tip: Great Web Developer extension for Firefox.

So you may appreciate my happiness at discovering the greatly improved web inspector Apple has built into the new Safari 4 beta. Apple’s marketing claims this is the best set of development tools ever included in a browser. As I get to know Safari 4 better, I’m inclined to agree. Read the Full Tip »