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The official monthly newsletter of DMAGVolume 3-2009 In this issue:
Letter from the Group ManagerGreetings all! Well things have been busy for DMAG and in this issue of DMAGAZINE I’ve got a lot to talk about. I would love to start having your input in this magazine too. Aren’t we a group? So from the end of this month I will begin sending out newsletter info requests. Let me give you some ideas of what I would like to see.
Now, about the meeting, at this last meeting we gave away another piece of software from Alien Skin. This time we gave away Bokeh. I think it is pronounced as Bouquet (like a bunch of flowers). Anyhow, our lucky winner was Rekkai Steed. I look forward to seeing what he will do with it for the next meeting. John Collins a new member kept up the tradition of a new member winning something on their first meeting. He won a plug-in from Flashloaded. As a freelance web designer I think that will suit him well. Next meetingNext meeting we will be giving away: Software
Books
We should have a lot of books for the next meeting, so don’t miss out. If you are already a member, don’t forget to send your software and book requests. Use your memberships wisely. AnnouncementsThe Adobe suite raffle is coming soon! Each year we give away two suites. We will likely give one away this coming May just before we take our July break. JOIN NOW to get in the drawing. There will be a cutoff point for becoming a member and getting into this drawing. Meeting HighlightsOld/New news was covered. We looked at our newest sponsor’s websites and products. Book and Software Reviews
This unit gives you good quick treatments of using the selection tools found in Photoshop. This book excels at getting you up to skill quickly and these exercises are no different. You will learn some great quick and easy ways to make excellent selections in your photographs.
Image warp was a feature that was improved in Photoshop CS2 and keeps getting better. This unit spends a lot of fun time helping you to get better at creating better photomontages through the use of the transform tools. Photomontage is really the art of combining a bunch of images and making them look like they were taken together. Photoshop gurus have all tricked us in one way or another with their trade of photomontage. I think we may have all seen the Great White shark leaping out of the water to eat the diver climbing into the military helicopter. Guess what? That is a fake, and yes, a photomontage. This unit is a necessity in the art and even provides a lesson on CS4’s new Content Aware Scaling.
This is a great unit that helps you to get better at showing and hiding selections of your images with the use of layer masks. Photoshop’s real power is in these layer masks because the only other alternative is deletion. In photo editing, deletion is one of those no no words which tends to be a synonym for destructive editing.
This unit is another diamond in this diamond mine. As when you bring four or five separate images into a single work, you are bound to have different colors and often even shading. Here is where your help is to take control of your image again and make them all mesh.
Have you ever taken a picture with a particular mood or composition in mind but once developed it just doesn’t have the same feel as you imagined? That’s composition and that is what Photoshop is for and this section helps you get your imagination back into your photos.
Perspective can often be one of the trickiest things to master in your efforts at getting a shot or image to look just right. In this unit you will learn about a special tool called the Vanishing point filter which will make all your perspective fears go away.
Shadows and light are two things that you need to be skilled at to make really good photomontages. Here you will do some really fun, and short exercises that help you get your light and shadows in the right places. You also get a chance to create a neon sign that looks like the real thing and simulate an image on a screen.
Turning heads, combining body parts, and making people lose their hair gets you into the more exciting things that you can do with Photoshop. This section is helpful in the respect that it teaches you how to easily turn people’s heads in a still image and make it look convincing.
This is a really neat unit where you get to spill stuff, create water out of thin air and work with reflection. You even get to make a glass of water turn to a glass of ice water with bubbles and all. That was one of my most favorite exercises in this book. The plastic wrap tool is an amazing tool that helps you easily cheat into what you may have thought was impossible.
In this unit you work with a variety of surface types and often change them to being completely different just with a few clicks. By now, you should be well familiar with how Photoshop is not really as difficult as you imaging, especially with the right training.
This is the “antithesis” of the previous unit because it deals with things that flap and are floppy. Some of the exercises covered teach you how to make a piece of digital paper look crumbled and how to make a flag flap in digital wind.
Photoshop has improved how easy it is to create the appearance of 3d. This section is vital to help get you up to speed.
Adding a blur to an image can be one easy way to make it look like it is in motion. However this is a tricky effect to master. This unit will help get you on your way. There are also some Hollywoodesque effects that you apply to a business man’s face to turn him into a flesh eating zombie. The final two units cover some advanced techniques and how to tips on how to create outstanding images for print and the web. All in all this was a fantastic book if you are looking for quick tutorials that you can easily apply to your own work.
O’Reilly knows that it has a winner with anything from Deke McClelland. Adobe InDesign CS4 one-on-one is no different. I like to use two different book series to learn my software: the Classroom in a Book series from rival publisher Peachpit, and these one-on-one guides from O’Reilly. However, if you put me on an island and I just had a computer, software, and some books. I would choose the one-on-ones to bring with me. Mainly, because they have always had a much better method of teaching practical application of the software’s functionality rather than just teaching the interface. With books from Deke, you know you will leave with more than a handful of golden nuggets that will help you work with the software better, and faster.
One thing that I really like about this series of books is the high quality files that you get to work with. These make completing the lessons very fun; and at the end when you look at your work you feel like a professional. Another very useful thing is the videos. Each lesson comes with a Deke narrated video of how to complete certain steps in the tutorial. They are broken down into smaller chunks and can be helpful if you just get lost in the software. With the videos, and step-by-step tutorials you get the closest thing to working with a private instructor. And when Deke is your instructor, you know the results will be good. The only thing that I don’t like about the step-by-step tutorials is that they are text dense and it is easy to get lost in them. However, the added description is often necessary so it is only a minor flaw. Software Review
This review focuses on some of the major new tools found in Flash CS4. Each new issue of Flash has seen improvements. This version of Flash is no different. With Flash CS4 Adobe has really looked into the future of internet animation potential to establish its continued dominance for tools of this nature. However, like other versions of Flash. This one comes with a learning curve that many newcomers may be turned-off by. Briefly the pros and cons of this new version of Flash are: Pros:
Cons:
A new way to animate objects One difficult thing about Flash is its tricky timeline. Tweening objects through the timeline, at least for me was always a little less than intuitive. Re-editing or revising often was met with headaches. In many ways I wished that Flash would animate objects Like Director does. Well now it does. Now you apply a tween to an object and then move it around on the stage, making sure that you also have your timeline playhead where you want it to be. It seems that Adobe ported over some of Directors code for tweening because when you animate on the stage, a motion path appears. You can then adjust and move parts of that motion path very easily. This is much simpler than setting up various keyframe locations or numbering points to tell an animation how to move across a screen. Fantastic upgrade here. The Deco Tool Like to see stuff growing all over the place. Then Vine fill is for you. Otherwise, you need to create your own symbols to use with this tool. This new tool then still has some growing pains to go through or at least a future update of the default symbols you have available to you. 3D Tools Are Great First Effort 3D Rotation and Translation are two new tools to Flash that once again put it on par with Director esque ability. I am probably being unfair to put Flash and Director in the same sentence and say that one is better than the other. Personally I like Flash and appreciate some of the things that it has incorporated that could only be done in Director before. The 3D tools are a great enhancement that reduce the need to edit things outside of Flash. While integration with the rest of the suite is VASTLY improved these tools reduce workflow which is always a welcome addition. In addition to allowing you 3-dimensionalize your stage so that things actually scale along an x, y, z axis appropriately without much effort. This once again creates an easier environment than the simple scale tool provided. . Long-Overdue Bones
XFL file formats
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