Couple of Interesting Links

Hey guys just a quick post today, got a lot going on.

Ahh Deke great video. Calculations and creating channels for selecting complex objects is something I have a tutorial coming up on, but I ran into Deke’s today! No sweat however mine will still be coming out, but let me know how you like Deke’s tutorial. Great teacher, writer, and blogger.

Very cool Dylan Tribute Poster artwork where the artist combines both vector and raster artwork in the same document with great results! Check it out!

Here is an interesting article on sketching and this particular artist and how he works, just an interesting article/interview in general.

Have a great upcoming week guys!

[HD] Website Drop Shadow with CSS Dreamweaver Tutorial!

[HD] Website Drop Shadow with CSS Dreamweaver Tutorial!

Let’s learn how to create a drop shadow that runs along your site, and, if your site expands, expands with it! We will start in Photoshop where we will create a nice little drop shadow graphic and then it’s off to Dreamweaver for some CSS and Div-tacular fun… yep that was certifiably lame, but enjoy the video anyway!

[HD] Smart Collections: Adobe Bridge Tutorial

[HD] Smart Collections: Adobe Bridge Tutorial

I absolutely love The Adobe Bridge and Collections & Smart Collections are great work flow features available. Organizing your files without messing up your folder structure and automatically bringing files in that you want based on settings you assign to that collection. Check them out and learn a great new feature of Bridge CS4!

[HD] 3D Light Glowing Vector Ribs Adobe Illustrator Tutorial

[HD] 3D Light Glowing Vector Ribs Adobe Illustrator Tutorial

I’m sure you have seen them, but maybe did not know how they were made. Today we take a look at those cool glowing, color changing, fading, bright, neon-like, fanning spread of glowing colors. Not really sure what you want to call them, but I am going to refer to them as 3D Light Ribs. You can use these in Photographs, Illustrations, Composites, Print Work, Web Design, maybe even a logo or two!
We will learn a little about the stroke tools, copying vector artwork to Photoshop, and mainly the Blend Tool.

Wednesday Blogging

Hey guys! It’s Earth day today apparently, but I am not much of an Eco-friendly guy and tend toward believing things like recycling do not do any good and global warming is not a problem we have, but rather a cycle. Instead of getting into a shouting match about the environment which has managed itself fine amid mans presence for the past 6,000+ years I sit here an wonder if it is possible to go too far in loving “Mother Earth” and/or nature in general? How about this guy?

Don’t know if you would ever see me doing that, but anyway getting away from that whole Earth day money making spiel let’s foccus on design-worthy topics so I can stop throwing darts at the Earth day… well you get the point let’s move on.

REMEMBER THE PHOTOSHOP CONTEST! If you wanted to get any final entries in before it closed go ahead! The contest closes on the 30th so you have a few days yet, but don’t forget about it!

One of the first sites I ran into and really one of the first forums I even joined was that of Nick La over at ndesign-studio.com runs a nice site over there as well as numerous other sites (bestwebgallery.com, webdesignerwall.com, icondock.com ). Ndesign has a bunch of great tutorials as well as some killer illustrations he has created. Check out the portfolio here!

Smashing Magazine has put together a Photographic Post for the ages; Entitled 50 Incredible Photography Techniques and Tutorials it is loaded with great photos and information, great post guys! Check it out right here!

IconDock is a pretty cool site where you can buy new icons! Be sure to check out the free content as well! Click here to visit!

Tuesday Full of Workflow, Gadgets, Software, and Cool Web Stuff

Happy Tuesday everybody! Or Earth Day? Is Earth Day today?…..mmm No, Google says it is tomorrow the 22nd, my mistake.

A couple of pretty cool things, first up sort of a segue (pronounced “Segway” yep I learned that one recently too) from yesterdays HDR nonsense. We have a very cool tutorial/review on HDR and a very cool blog that I follow which I believe is linked in that tutorial.

Terry Reinert from www.tkrphoto.com has this very, very cool tutorial on HDR in general he has on his site in which he covers all kinds of great things about HDR ranging from useful info to info that is just plain cool and probably inspirational, so great stuff over there. I urge you to check it out even if you hate HDR photography because it looks like some time was put into the article (despite a few word place holders being left ) kudos to Terry for the awesome info! Check this out!

Next up would be an awesome Portofolio or Personal Blog called Stuck in Customs by a fella’ named Trey Ratcliff; Again, HDR photography and lots of cool and awesome info and photography. Trey is mainly a travel photographer and has lots of great images. Definitely a blog worth following as he usually gets a new photograph up everyday… good stuff. Click here to visit the Blog!

Visual Workflow is possibly the newest, fastest, and most convienient way to work with Photoshop and all of your preferred Adobe Applications! A program called FLOW created by Software Development company GridIron is a really great piece of software, really something I should have had written about before now, but was only reminded by a blog post I read this morning. I have the free trial, but am on my way to buying the full version for sure! This is a piece of workflow software that will help you NOT change the way you work, but simply make you be able to work faster, more organized, and with peace of mind. Check it out and at least grab the free download and try it out, words cannot explain, but they do have  a video which semi- allows you to grasp the power of FLOW. Click here to watch the video guide! Really you want to download this and you will find that for working on projects it is awesome!

Here is a pretty cool little gadget. A 7″ Touch Screen Monitor Powered via USB! We all have so many USB ports (NOT!) so why not use this little guy to take another! Seriously though, this is a pretty cool looking monitor that includes the touch-screen-ability (that is definitely not in the dictionary!),  a Webcam, Microphone, HeadPhone Jack, and more. Check it out here!

Something about Google and 3D on the Web, that sounds interesting. Read up on it right here at cNet! Again, not sure what it is all about, but it looks interesting so I though I would post for you guys to check out.

Enjoy!

One Shot 360 degrees Floor-to-Ceiling HDR Camera

I fell in love with HDR (High Dynamic Range) pretty much from the first time I saw an HDR photo and when I started creating my own it was a kind of re-falling-in-love experience.

I am not writing this to torture you guys and make you wish you knew how to create these stunning High Dynamic Range Photographs. In reality you can create them using Photoshop or preferably using a third party software such as Photomatix (www.hdrsoft.com), or FDR Tools (www.fdrtools.com), and very soon using both Photoshop and Photomatix I will have a few tutorials on creating these incredible images. We will be covering setting up your camera and shooting to the post-production in Photoshop or Photomatix.

With all of that in mind I am going to show this pretty cool camera I found a while ago. The camera is called The SpheroCam HDR and basically it mounted and takes a full 360 degree around and 180 degree floor-to-ceiling Panoramic High Dynamic Range image and stitches it together for you. The mega-pixel count is huge, but this camera captures light equivalent to 26 f-stops which is flat-out incredible! Even trying to figure the exact Bit-depth (something like 96 Bits/Channel), Megapixel Count and Resolution can cause severe dizziness so beware before counting!

With this camera you can capture some incredible images! It is used in all kinds of photography, but Forensic Imaging is maybe the most “popular” (if that is an appropriate word) use of the camera. The U.S. Government also uses the camera, but nobody should be too shocked that they enjoy a good camera and find “good” uses for one. For the normal photographer there are all kinds of great images that can be captured with a camera like this. Check out this portfolio of 360 deg. HDR images! http://www.o-mega.nl/?q=node/28 or select the image below…

You can order your own SpheroHDR Camera for about $60,000, but wait! That does include the Tripod, Case, Laptop Computer, and Camera, so it’s a steal… right? You could get any of these for around $60,000….

,but you would have to be crazy to NOT go with the HDR camera!

Hope you guys enjoyed the info be sure to check out these sites for more info:

http://www.spheron.com/en/intruvision/solutions/spherocam-hdr.html

http://www.photographyblog.com/news/spherocam_hdr_camera_system/

http://www.spheron-usa.com/

http://architech.com.ua/content/view/582/66/lang,en/

http://www.grafixgear.com/HTML/PDF/SpheroCam_HDR.pdf

Have a good one guys!

Photoshop Tutorial: Add and Remove Tattoos

For many photography projects removing tattoos is a must have skin, and for some fun projects knowing how to add a tattoo and knowing how to make it follow the flow of the persons skill is pretty cool. We will talk about using the healing brush in tough spots, how displacement maps allow us to make realistic changes to photographs, as well as using multiple blend modes to make a realistic tattoo on this brides back. Enjoy! Be sure to check out http://www.tutvid.com

Tutorial: Dreamweaver CS4: CSS Pixy Style Rollovers

Rollovers are hot, and CSS rollovers are hot-ter. Creating rollovers using CSS prevents you from having issues as far as people not having JavaScript enabled and from having to worry about JavaScript and your rollovers. The beauty of Pixy style rollovers is they are automatically preloaded due to the way we set them up so you will not have any flashing or issues showing up when people rollover your buttons. Learn how to build them in Dreamweaver here! Be sure to check out http://www.tutvid.com

Late Week Update!

Hey guys got a few tidbits of news and other goodness for you.

The folks at the PPA-specifically the Virginia division- invited me to speak at their monthly meeting, which was on the 15^th of April. I just got back late Thursday evening and boy I had a blast! My first time teaching a group so that was pretty darn cool and both groups were great. A special thank you to David and Pete for being so accommodating as well as being hilarious and kind.

A big shout out to Daniel Butler of –you guessed it- Daniel Butler Photography for his kindness as well! Check out his website here folks: http://www.butlerphotography.com/ great work and a beautiful studio. Thank you Daniel!

Alright so time to stop acting nice and show you guys some stuff that you really should see and know.

First up: Justin over at Cartoonsmart.com (if you do not follow his blog follow this link and bookmark it: http://cartoonsmartblog.wordpress.com/ he pretty well puts my blogging to shame) has a great blog post he posted recently on a perfect 3 column layout tutorial article, super cool stuff, check it out here: http://cartoonsmartblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/the-perfect-3-column-liquid-layout/

I can’t say enough good things about Lee Brimelow, brilliant and so willing to share his knowledge, the guy should be an absolute standard of excellence and source of inspiration for the rest of us. Check out this sweet tutorial on creating a custom FLEX preloader right here: http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=108

Photoshop Lovers T-Shirt! Very cool shirt! You can now identify Photoshoppers from 100 paces! Check this out right here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/reeceward/t-shirts/2769649-2-invisible

I have adopted the new YouTube Channel layout despite the minor issues it has and will soon have a cool background for it. Let me know what you think, personally I think it is cool for now, but it looks like the kind of think that will get boring after awhile. Get your channel dressed like mine by clicking here!

Don’t forget to do your 30 second drawings everyday! Improve your drawing skills for minutes a day! Can’t beat that in this economy! Check out the 30 second drawing timer tool thing for free right here! http://www.posemaniacs.com/?pagename=thirtysecond

Lastly the contest is kickin’! Entries are pouring in and remember we have about half the month left to enter so get em’ in! NO limit on the entries send me a 1000!… that was a joke right there don’t get any ideas… Best of Wishes to you guys!

Have a safe week all!

N.