Putting Images under the Microscope in Photoshop cs
Digital images fall into two camps: vector images, which are created based on mathematical formulas, and rasterimages, which are made up of pixels. Photoshop allows you to produce both types of images [more…]
Correcting Color Cast with Photoshop Variations
Photoshop can provide magical transformations to images, making them unrecognizable from the original, but sometimes what you really want is simply to make an image look the same as the original — only [more…]
Animating Digital Video Clips
Now wait a minute; don't you call these things "movies" because the pictures are already moving? Why would you need to animate a video clip? You may not need to animate the actual [more…]
Drawing with the Pencil Tool in Photoshop Elements 4
Drawing with the Pencil tool in Photoshop Elements 4 creates hard edges. You can't get the soft, feathery edges that you can with the Brush tool. In fact, the edges of a pencil stroke can't even be anti-aliased [more…]
Waving the Magic Wand Tool
Sometimes you want to select an area so uniform in appearance that you want to simply tell Paint Shop Pro, "Go select that red balloon" or whatever it is. To you, with your human perception, the area is [more…]
Knowing Multiple Ways to Save Documents in InDesign CS3
The InDesign File menu contains a group of commands — Close, Save, Save As, Save a Copy, Check In, and Revert — that provide options for saving the active [more…]
Converting Office Documents into PDF Files
PDFMaker 5.0 for Windows makes it ridiculously easy to turn any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document you create or edit with the Office 2000 or Office XP [more…]
Creating Curves with the Flash 5 Pen
Creating your own graphics in Flash can be big fun — really! The Flash graphics tools offer you the opportunity to easily create interesting and professional-looking shapes. Of course, you can also import [more…]
Adding Dirt and Grime to 3D Game Animation
Although most game-animation textures are created externally and wrapped onto objects, most 3D software programs also include a separate set of tools for painting directly on the objects themselves. Using [more…]
Working with Clients as a Flash Web Designer
Unless you're independently wealthy, you create Web sites for friends, or you play with Flash as a hobby, you need to generate a profit from your work. If you're going to survive working with clients and [more…]
Using Create PDF in Acrobat 6
Acrobat 6 includes a File menu command, Create PDF, that you can use to open files saved in the HTML file format (that is, as Web pages) and simple text files, as well as a number of common graphics file [more…]
InDesign CS3: Synchronizing Styles in a Book Document
The Synchronize feature in InDesign CS3 synchronizes the styles in each chapter of a book document with those in the style source. This feature ensures consistency in paragraph styles, character styles [more…]
Using QuarkXPress as an Illustration Tool
Back in yesteryear, QuarkXPress was thought of as only a page layout program. Previous versions of QuarkXPress had limited drawing capabilities; if you needed to draw a curved line or curved shape, you [more…]
Adobe Premiere Elements: Playing Clips in the Monitor Window
Video clips that you capture or import into Adobe Premiere Elements all wind up in the Media Window. When you select a clip in the Media window, a preview of it appears in the tiny preview window in the [more…]
Dealing with Imported Graphics
Vector graphics — graphics that are defined by equations, rather than dots used in bitmap graphics — from any drawing program become a grouped object that you can use like any other Flash object. The WMF [more…]
Getting Acquainted with Flash 5
Flash offers a powerful system for creating animation on the Web. Here's an overview of what you can do with the system: [more…]
Trekking through Web Design Tips
The majority of Flash movies end up on Web sites. To help ensure that your Web site is as attractive and useful as possible, consider these pearls of wisdom, some of which apply to all Web sites and others [more…]
Debugging Your ActionScript
When you design a Flash Web site, you need to ensure that your interface, and every movie that loads into it, plays flawlessly and that your ActionScript executes without a hitch. If you can see what's [more…]
Getting to Know QuarkXPress Style Sheets
Although you've heard about them, you've probably never really been into style sheets. Yet you know some people who use them on every single document. Still, something inside you says, [more…]
Creating a New Story in Manga Studio
Manga Studio provides a great organizational tool for those who may be working on a book (or a chapter of a book). Creating a new story allows you to have as many pages as you need in one convenient place [more…]
Removing Noise (Speckles) with Paint Shop Pro 8
Removing noise from an image sounds a bit illogical, like subtracting apples from oranges or removing odor from a TV program. Okay, you can perhaps imagine ways to do the latter, but apply that same imagination [more…]
Getting the Red Out without Eyedrops
Red eye occurs when the subject of a picture looks directly into the flash, and the unfortunate result is that eerie reddish luminescence in the eyes that says, [more…]
Compositing Digital Video
Moviemakers are always coming up with creative techniques for making better movies. One of the most common special-effects techniques used today is called [more…]
Getting to Know Your Manga Studio Layer Types
Manga Studio provides a selection of layer types to use in your work. When you get to know and understand how layers work, you'll wonder how you ever did your work without them. Here's an introduction [more…]
Counting on Ten Third-Party Acrobat Plug-Ins
As versatile as Acrobat 6 is right out of the box, you can make the program even more multitalented and yourself more productive by investing in third-party plug-ins for Acrobat. Here is a smorgasbord [more…]
