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Archive: 2005 November
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Apple’s Aperture: Adobe Bridge Rival, not Photoshop Killer
New high-end photo-processing sofware from Apple highlights specific workflow problems for pro photogs; may herald new era of innovation, says writer
When Apple Computer debuted its new high-end photographic management software Apertureâ„¢, conventional wisdom, noting functional similarities between it and Adobe’s Photoshopâ„¢, seemed to assume that Apple was ramping up to deliver a “Photoshop Killer”.
Read more on Apple’s Aperture: Adobe Bridge Rival, not Photoshop Killer…
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At Last: Fontographer is Mac OS Native
Fontlab completes migration of workhorse font creator to modern Mac OS
Six months ago, Fontlab Ltd.(http://www.fontlab.com) purchased Fontographer, a type-composition workhorse that has been in use since 1987 and is still widely used today, with the intention of making it Mac OS X native (the then-current version was an OS 9 app, only usable by OS X users in the so-called “classic environment”).
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The Wednesday Format: The Role of TIFF in Desktop Publishing
TIFF is a graphic format best suited for printing purposes. Here is a list of resources that will provide an insight of this file format
TIFF stands for Tag Image File Format and it’s a file format that has been around the block for quite a few years. Even though PSD seems to be pushing this format in the dark, TIFF is still a universal file format which most printers can support without problems. Following is a list of resources that will help you better understand this format and its uses.
Read more on The Wednesday Format: The Role of TIFF in Desktop Publishing…
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Photoshop Jargon: Edge Contrast
“Edge Contrast” is an option of the Magnetic Lasso tool, and used to be one in the Magnetic Pen tool before it was absorbed into the Freeform Pen tool’s options. Edge contrast refers to the amount of contrast between two pixels within an image, and is used by the tool to determine where to snap into place. A higher Edge Contrast setting will increase the contrast necessary for the tool to snap toward it.
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Corel Essentials 3: A Taste of Painter
Geared toward hobbyists, Corel Painter Essentials 3 has a few things full Painter doesn’t, like Auto Painting, and cloning a painting has never been easier. But is that enough to justify the price tag?
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Integration Perfected, Photoshop Unleashed?
Some hints to future trends with CS3 and Quark have large implications for Photoshop and what it will do years from now
This article on QuarkVsInDesign.com is a bombshell: it appears some information on Adobe Creative Suite 3, Quark 7 and beyond was leaked to the design community through a simple survey asking some questions about hypothetical future products. There wasn’t much detailed information but just enough to see how Adobe and Quark are testing their users for new products that may be months or years away. When you’re done reading this article check it out at QuarkVsInDesign.com, because it’s very illuminating.
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InDesign Quick Tip: Importing Spot Colours
Working with spot colours and the Swatches Palette
There might be times when you will need to place images in InDesign which contain spot colours. In those cases, you might want that spot colour to also appear in the InDesign Swatches palette. There are certain file formats which support spot colours and once placed into your InDesign document will also automatically import the spot colours they contain in the InDesign Swatches palette. You don’t need to do anything else, just import the graphic in InDesign and the spot colour in the graphic will appear in InDesign CS’ Swatches Palette.
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Are You Ready For the New Browser Wars?
It wasn’t so long ago that conventional wisdom said the Browser Wars were over, and Microsoft had won. With improvmements coming to Internet Explorer,Mozilla’s Firefox, and Opera, is a new horse race in the offing?
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Choropleth Mapping In The News
Mapping displaying regional “chunks” abstract information, make certain impressions
A famous choropleth map – Electoral College results – from the 2004 US presidential elections (credit:”Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results“, Gastner, Shalizi, and Newman, Univerisity of Michigan). -
Photoshop Jargon: Grabber Tool
The “Grabber Tool” is an old name for what is now called the Hand Tool. Quick tip: Hold down the spacebar to access the Hand Tool at any time (except when you are using the Text Tool in a text box.
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Here’s how you use channels to create spot colours in Photoshop
How many times have you wondered why, no matter how much you save spot colours in other applications, you cannot preserve a spot color in Photoshop? There is a way of course, and this is what this article will cover. This tutorial has been made using Photoshop CS for Mac, but it should be OK also for previous versions of Photoshop up to version 6, and of course also for whoever has the Windows version of Photoshop. This is not the only method to use spot colors in Photoshop, but it is a simple one which you could find useful.
Read more on Photoshop Tutorial: Preserving Spot Colours in Photoshop…
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The Widening Spread: Response to the Big Squeeze
As a follow up to the article, entitled, “The Big Squeeze” in which I outlined the challenges and progress made by the print community, I ended the article by challenging the creative community by asking a simple question. Has the creative community, long thought to be early adopters of technology, actually adopted new technologies that not only offer them a greater tool set but enable them to be more productive and create well-constructed supplies for various marketing channels?
Read more on The Widening Spread: Response to the Big Squeeze…
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The Week in New Type
A Roundup of Newly Announced Fonts. This time: T.26, Linotype, MyFonts
In this edition there’s a bit of new font activity out there, as typefounders vye for your hard-earned (and budgeted) font dollar. T.26 brings us some nifty sans-serif and display and and a townful of human-silhoutte glyphs, Linotype graces us with handwriting grace and Sci-Fi goodness, and MyFonts has scripts that announce that they are indeed ready for thier close-up.
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A Redeemed Quark?
Listen to the company that listens
Hate it or love it, Quark is changing. Their marketing has shifted 180° from a “look at who is the best” viewpoint to “the company that listens”. -
An intriguing survey, sent to a list of chosen, reveals the secrets of the two forever-enemies.
My name is XPress, QuarkXPress. That’s how the survey mailed yesterday to what seems to be Quark’s press list could have been entitled. The purpose of the survey seems to be to find out what users think of the current two Desktop Publishing giant applications. However what’s more intriguing is the list of features listed in that survey, features that allegedly belong to QuarkXPress 7 and InDesign CS 3, the upcoming releases of the two top rated layout applications.
Read more on InDesign CS 3, QuarkXPress 7: A Survey Worthy of James Bond…
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Photoshop Jargon: GIF87a and GIF89a
“GIF87a” is the bitmap graphics format originally created in 1987 by CompuServe as a standard for Internet images. “GIF89a” was created in 1989 to succeed GIF87a due to its ability to allow image transparency, progressive rendering and multi-image animations (making possible the animated GIF).
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Segura, Inc Unveils New Web Face
Noted design agency debuts new look website, invites comments
Segura, Inc. took its new website design live today, announcing it with an email to it’s news mailing list:
After months of effort, Segura Inc, the design firm responsible for TheT26 Digital Type Foundry, 5inch and now Cartype has a new presence online. While a site is truly never done, we hope you enjoy what is up for now.
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Archive Type Announces Five New Fonts
Creator of antique-style fonts announces new offerings
New fonts from Archive TypeVia email to its news subscribers, typefounder Archive Type has announced the debut of five new fonts, bringing its total range to 35. the Archive Black Title Text, Archive Blackcap, Archive German Text, Archive Steeler and Archive Tinted.
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Online Survey Suggests Adobe Creative Suite 3/QuarkXPress 7 Makeup?
Survey of wired creatives asks pointed questions about future software wants, seems to drop big revealing hints about upcoming Adobe/Quark releases. But are they just educated guesses?
Over the last few days a survey has been traveling, via e-mail, to wired creatives the world over. Offering an inducement of a chance at a $500 American Express gift card for responding, the survey goes on to ask a great many probing questions about preferences, hopes, and tastes in layout and creative software – specifically, QuarkXPress and the Adobe Creative Suite/InDesign.
Read more on Online Survey Suggests Adobe Creative Suite 3/QuarkXPress 7 Makeup?…
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The Wednesday Format: The Truth About JPEG
Find out what JPEG stands for, how it works, its uses and pitfalls
I was crawling around forums and I noticed a few questions related to graphic formats and their capabilities. Therefore I decided to collect a number of links related to the various graphic formats which will give a basic understanding of how they work and will also take up several misconceptions. This week I will start with one of the most popular formats around, especially amongst users of digital cameras and web designers: JPEG.
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Ancient Soviet Secret: Cold War Maps of the British Isles
Cartographic researcher makes public his findings of Soviet military mapping of Britain and Ireland
The desire to have accurate maps of your adversaries in global politics and conflict is self-evident. During the so-called Cold War of the latter half of the 20th Century, the Soviet Union embarked on an ambitious global mapping project which apparently produced a great many amazing maps, many quite accurate, typically without the knowledge of the area being mapped!
Read more on Ancient Soviet Secret: Cold War Maps of the British Isles…
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“Pixel depth” refers to the number of tones a pixel can display, determined by the bits used to display the pixel. One bit can contain one color (black), four bits can contain any combination of the binary numbers 1 and 0, so 16 shades are possible (0000, 0001, 0011, 0010, etc.). Photoshop works with 8, 16 and 32-bit images. In 32-bit images, only 24 bits are available (the others are reserved for masking and other functions) but each pixel can still produce 16.7 million colors.
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The final installment of our four-part series covers the Extract filter, a powerful tool to remove backgrounds
The Extract tool was added to Photoshop back with version 5.5, and by version 7 it had been moved to the Filters menu (it used to reside in the Edit menu). It was added in order to fill Photoshop users’ need to extract backgrounds from finely-detailed images, such as ones that are made difficult by hair, leaves and other very tough details in the foreground object. Applications such as Corel’s Knockout are still around to help users tackle these difficult images, but the Extract filter actually fills the role very well. The interface is a bit complex and unintuitive in my opinion, but if you get used to it you’ll find the Extract filter a lifesaver for those images that no other tool can touch.
Read more on Removing Backgrounds, Part 4: The Extract Filter…
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New To CS2: Flash-Based Web Gallery Layouts
Photoshop CS2 includes a couple new Web Photo Gallery styles with Flash power!
If you haven’t noticed yet, Photoshop CS2 has some new styles in its Web Photo Gallery options, and the exciting part is that two of them are Flash-based! If you’ve always hated showing off your pictures online with plain transitions or no transitions at all, give one of these Flash styles a try. You don’t need to know a single thing about the Flash application because Photoshop CS2 takes care of all the hard work for you. Select your style, point the application to your source images and destination folder, and it will generate all the files.
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FontShop Brings Back “font” Magazine
FontShop’s magazine returns after a three-year break
From the FontShop website:
FontShop’s acclaimed magazine of typography and design has returned after a three-year hiatus with font 004: Community. Some of our favorite creative luminaries tackle this issue’s theme, with writing by Margaret Richardson and John D. Berry and design by Punchcut, Underware, and Marian Bantjes.
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