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Shadow/Highlight com­mand vs. Selections/Curves Tech­nique in Pho­toshop CS

Thanks Cari! Pan­theon

Pho­toshop Per­form­ance Tests: 512Mb to 8Gb of RAM. Moral of the story. Get lotsa RAM and the fast­est com­puter that you can afford.

OK here we go. 4 new products. 2 new ver­sions of clas­sics, and 2 com­pletely new Adobe applications.

• Adobe AfterEf­fects 6.0: AfterEf­fects is Pho­toshop with time + 3D. Best text edit­ing and com­pos­it­ing around.

AfterEf­fects is for MacOS X 10.2, Win­dows 2000 or XP. The fol­low­ing applic­a­tions are Win­dows only

• Adobe Premiere Pro: more edit­ing, less ren­der­ing. Pic­ture in pic­ture is way easier. (no more hav­ing to be a rocket sci­ent­ist with Picture-in-Picture)
• Adobe EncoreDVD: wow! this is a fun product; eas­ily cre­ate DVDs
• Adobe Audi­tion: This is the res­ult of Adobe’s pur­chase of Cool Edit Pro. I’ve been using this today to clean up some old audio tracks I had lying around. Wow.

Video (Win­dows Media Player 9) of the Sydney MINI2 Meet 18 May 03 here: MINI2 Video, 18^th May 2003. Cre­ated with Adobe Premiere Pro, of course.

Adobe’s vis­ion for the Enter­prise: Intel­li­gent Doc­u­ment Architecture

Add one Pho­toshop 7.0 ACE to the list. Now that was a hard one!

Woo­hoo! Now I am offi­cially an Adobe Cer­ti­fied Expert (ACE) in InDes­ign 2.0 and Acrobat 5.0.

Cari Jansen goes crazy with three more tips: Adobe Page­Maker 7.x — Using the rota­tion tool, Pho­toshop 7.x — Cache & the File Browser and Pho­toshop 7.x — Amend­ing File Browser width for palette well.

This has been in my head for a while: InDes­ign 2.0: Pho­toshop, Duo­tones into InDesign

In my time I have seen vari­ous ‘com­plaints’ that Adobe does not pub­lish the spe­cific­a­tions for the PDF (Port­able Doc­u­ment Format) in a timely fash­ion — thereby gain­ing mar­ket advant­age. Well, the Draft PDF Ref­er­ence, Ver­sion 1.5 is avail­able before Acrobat 6.0 ships! Whilst this is a Draft ver­sion, and sub­ject to change, it does go to show that we are a friend­lier com­pany than some people claim.

Now, at 1107 pages in length — its not going to be a read for all of us!

What a strange day. Spent the morn­ing doing “sales man­age­ment” stuff (part of my new job) and the after­noon look­ing at SVG, C# and debug­ging SOAP/Webservices style com­mu­nic­a­tion with the Adobe Graph­ics Server.

Cari poin­ted this out: Pho­toshop Cam­era Raw and JPEG2000 plu­gins for Pho­toshop 7.0. These are pur­chaseable down­loads from adobe.com. Cam­era Raw gives you much greater con­trol when load­ing images from Digital Cameras.

For a while there, the world began and ended on Monday Decem­ber 2, 2002. Sorry about that. Cod­ing error my end. Been a lot of that lately on my end. Thanks Mark.

New art­icle: InDes­ign 2.0: Pho­toshop to InDes­ign workflow

As prom­ised, I am start­ing to doc­u­ment the tech­niques shown at the recent Adobe roadshows

Illus­trator 10: Illus­trator 10: Mak­ing Good Text Go Bad. Pho­toshop 7: Pho­toshop 7 File Browser Auto­matic Num­ber­ing Technique

Apart from writ­ing the above art­icles, I decided to noodle around with the GD lib­rary that is a part of PHP4. GD per­mits the dynamic chan­ging of images pro­gram­mat­ic­ally, rather than hav­ing to do it by hand in an image edit­ing tool. In my example, the code is grabbing a ran­dom Neil Finn lyric from the Ran­dom Neil Finn Lyric Server. The end res­ult looks like this:

The text is gathered from a SOAP stream, and com­pos­ited on top of another dynam­ic­ally served image.

OK, I have another con­fes­sion. I abso­lutely can­not miss an epis­ode of Meet the Osbournes. Its partly the fact that this dys­func­tional fam­ily seems to work, a Simpsons in real life. Ozzy, obvi­ously suf­fer­ing from too many non-natural sub­stances in too great quant­ity, is really a pussy cat. This per­sona belies his 30-plus years of a proto-high priest of the dark side. The irony of see­ing Ozzy go bana­nas over his noisy neigh­bours is deli­cious. What a riot.