Latest Posts in Creative Notes

Font management with Suitcase Fusion 2

Posted by James Dempsey on

5 comments

There are only a small handful of apps I require to do design or print-production work: Adobe Creative Suite, a Web browser, and something to manage the 3,930 fonts currently residing on my Mac Pro. For the last few weeks, I’ve been using Suitcase Fusion 2 to manage the mountain of fonts on my system. Extensis released the $100 single-user font management tool last month. Fusion 1 or Suitcase X1 users can upgrade for $50.

To my delight, Fusion 2 has done a remarkable job in stability, speed and usability. And I’d like to give you a tour of what to expect from Fusion 2, whether you’re new to the app or considering an upgrade.

Slim down your PDFs

Posted by Adam Engst on

10 comments

You can never be too rich or too thin, the old saying goes, but when it comes to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), adding richness in the form of images and fonts causes otherwise svelte PDFs to start pining for elastic waistbands. Balancing quality and file size in PDFs can be tricky, but in my five years of publishing PDF books I’ve learned—through much trial and error—numerous tricks that can help you keep your PDFs small, eliminating problems with bounced e-mail attachments, unnecessarily long downloads, and higher-than-necessary bandwidth bills.

Audio recording dos and don’ts

Posted by Jim Dalrymple on

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It’s been a while since I’ve talked about recording audio on the Mac, but I’ still working hard at putting my album together. In fact, I’ve been at this audio recording project long enough to learn some very valuable Dos and Don’ts. And in the spirit of collaboration, I thought I would share these important tips with you, in case you find yourself recording audio on your Mac.

Do...

... make sure to click Save after you just recorded the most amazing live-off-the-floor performance.
... provide refreshments to the other musicians, but only after you’re done recording.
... make sure to always run the cables yourself. Pulling on a cable that someone else connected to the mixer may not be the best idea.

Sorry, pooch—band members only.

Don’t...

... leave the studio door open when you are recording drum tracks for a song and also have a hyperactive Border Collie that barks loudly at the slightest sound.
... believe the singer when he says it will be okay if he sets his beer down on the pool table during rehearsal.
... believe the drummer when he says it’s okay to run the guitars through your mixing monitors for a live rehearsal. Ever. (I knew better, I really did. Sadly, the monitors blew up).
... use a performance recording and then delete all of the audio when you’re creating a song template for future use. A much better idea to use a blank file.
... schedule a recording night on the same day that your 15-year-old daughter hates you more than life itself.

On a less whimsical front, I also picked up some new gear to try out on the recordings. To replace my blown-up monitors, I’m using Mackie SRM450 loudspeakers. I also picked up a Peavey 5150 amp from eBay, and I’m trying JamVOX software and the new Line 6 Pod Farm plug-in. I’ll fill you in on how that gear works the next time we talk.

NaNoWriMo: Advice from a noveling veteran

Posted by Nathan Alderman on

1 comment

I have a confession to make: I’ve never actually finished a novel in 30 days. I met NaNoWriMo’s 50,000-world goal in both my previous outings—as my editors could tell you, writing long has never been a problem for me—but I didn’t actually finish either first draft until months later. Still, my experience has given me a few good insights that might help your own noveling efforts.

NaNoWriMo’s Web site provides numerous widgets to track your progress, independently or in comparison to your friends on the site.

Think Small 50,000 words sounds like a big, scary goal—until you realize that it breaks down to just 1,667 words a day, about an hour or two’s worth of steady typing. Rather than keeping your eyes on the distant finish line, use your program’s word-count targets to work toward the end of your latest paragraph, scene, or chapter. Those words will add up faster than you think. To keep track of your progress, you can enter your word count for each day in a box on the NaNoWriMo site, and compare it with those of your friends in the contest. And the site’s Word Count Widgets let you show off your progress on your own Web site.

Five reasons to try Lightroom

Posted by Dave Johnson on

11 comments

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from the Digital Focus blog at PC World.com.

I’ve been using programs like Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, and Corel Paint Shop Pro for so many years that I sometimes have trouble remembering what photography was like before the digital age. But none of those programs have ever felt like a truly natural part of the photo process to me. When I see something I want to tweak, adjust, composite, or fix, I’ll open a program like Photoshop, load the image, and do my work. When I’m done, I close Photoshop and move on. In that sense, my photo editor is sort of like an auto repair shop that I pull my car into; it gets the job done, but I don’t leave my car there all the time.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom—particularly the new Lightroom 2—feels more like my living room. I am happy to stay there all the time, viewing and organize my photos from within its comfortable and logical interface.

You might wonder how Lightroom is different from more traditional photo editors like Photoshop. You can think of Lightroom as a photo editing program designed from the ground up for digital photographers, freed from the somewhat arcane graphical design roots of older programs like Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro. Indeed, Photoshop and its peers are intimidating to learn because of their dense assortment of tools (selection brushes, erasers, text and shape stamps, dodge and burn tools, and more). Lightroom dispenses with all that stuff. Of course, that means Lightroom doesn’t have high-end features like sophisticated multiphoto compositing. But by the same token, exposure adjustments are such a natural process in Lightroom, you don’t have to understand anything about the image masks that happen invisibly behind the scenes.

Photoshop 3.0 still works, 15 years later

Posted by Dan Moren on

81 comments

Chances are you’ve seen Bob Staake’s work at some point. Besides contributing to more than 40 books as author, artist, or both, Staake’s also done illustrations for clients as diverse as The New York Times and Anheuser Busch. His work has graced everything from advertisements and games to Hallmark greeting cards and the cover of The New Yorker.

And he’s done it all with a piece of software that’s almost 15 years old.

In September 1994, when Photoshop 3.0 was released, the world was a very different place. The World Series had been cancelled due to a labor dispute; George W. Bush had just been elected Governor of Texas; and Netscape Navigator, one of the first graphical web browsers, wasn’t due to be released for another three months. And the idea of digital art was still in its infancy.

"In 1995, I was interviewing other illustrators for a book called The Complete Book of Humorous Art," says Staake. "I was amazed at how many of them claimed they were working 'digitally'—but in actuality most had only dabbled in computers." Not long after, Staake was looking for something that would let him scan in his pen and ink drawings and color them in on the computer. An art director friend who owned a Power Macintosh 7100, one of the first PowerPC-based Macs, told him that Adobe Photoshop was just what he was looking for. “Sounded good to me,” says Staake, who ended up purchasing a 7100 as well, “so I have been working in Adobe Photoshop 3.0 ever since.”

Brushing up your Creative Suite skills

Posted by James Dempsey on

2 comments

With the recent announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 4, users may find themselves looking to brush-up on their application skills before diving in to all the new features of CS4 apps—especially now that the updated apps are available for download, with boxed copies shipping soon.

I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite sites which offer tutorials, tips and news for the applications comprised in the Creative Suite Design Premium package. My list is by no means complete, so if you wish to add your favorites, please do so in the forum thread below.

General

• AdobeTV : Adobe offers streaming video tips, tutorials, demos and inspirational material for all the Adobe Creative Suite applications. You will need either the latest version of Adobe Flash Player, or Adobe Media Player to watch the videos.

• WebAppers : WebAppers hunts down the latest and coolest open-source resources for Web developers and designers.

Working with Acrobat 9 Pro

Posted by James Dempsey on

5 comments

The vast majority of the apps that make up Adobe’s newly announced Creative Suite 4 won’t hit retail shelves until later this month. But one piece of the CS4 is already widely available. Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro—which is included in the Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, and Mast Collection suites—made its debut this summer.

Macworld has already reviewed the latest version of Acrobat. But with so much attention focused on Adobe’s creative offerings this past week, I thought it appropriate to look at the state of Acrobat and the PDF format.

It goes without saying that Acrobat PDFs are a staple of the print and design industries. Thinking back to the time before PDFs were widely accepted as a way to submit files, I can’t imagine how I managed to get through the day fighting file format, font, color, and file corruption issues. PDFs saved the day, and my sanity when I was working in pre-press.

Adobe has continued the PDF tradition of being the “universal file format” for many industries, not just content creation. But over the years the PDF format— and Acrobat itself—as gone through some major changes, some of which have been great and others that leave me wondering just where Acrobat is going.

First Look: HP Designjet Z3200 Photo printer

Posted by Rick LePage on

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Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted from Printerville, a Web site that provides information about photo printers and papers.

At Photokina in Germany Tuesday, HP announced the Designjet Z3200 Photo, a wide-format inkjet printer for professional photographers and designers, with a new ink formulation, speed and paper-handling improvements and other enhancements over previous models.

The Z3200 is the successor to HP’s Designjet Z3100 Photo, which, when it first shipped late in 2006, was one of the most innovative photo printers we had seen in a long time. The Z3100 utilized 12 pigment-based inks (including a gloss optimizer) to produce high-quality, gallery-ready prints, but it was the printer’s embedded spectrophotometer (from X-Rite) and seamless integration with networked Macs and PCs that set it apart from competitors like Epson and Canon. HP spent considerable effort streamlining the process of printing: everything from unboxing the device to profiling and adding new paper types had been thought through by HP’s hardware and software engineers. The result was a printer that created top-quality prints and was a joy to use, day in and day out.

We’ve had a production version of the 24-inch PostScript model, the Z3200ps, for about three weeks, and have tested it fairly thoroughly with a variety of papers and applications. Overall, we’re very impressed with the printer’s performance: HP is obviously determined to keep the pressure on Epson—the market leader—in the pro photo space. As was the case with the Z3100, we think that the Z3200 should be looked at by anyone seriously evaluating a wide-format device to create salable prints.

Siggraph: Rounding up the 3-D news

Posted by Jim Dalrymple on

4 comments

Every year, the top high-end 3-D companies in the world converge on Los Angeles, Calif. to attend the Siggraph tradeshow. This year’s show produced some interesting items for the industry.

E-on Software Previews Vue 7

E-on Software used Siggraph to show off some new features of Vue, the company’s product for creating natural 3-D environments. E-on showed Vue 7 xStream and Vue 7 Infinite, which is scheduled for release later this year.

The company’s flagship product, Vue 7 xStream’s tools are now fully integrated in the host application, providing direct access to the most advanced 3-D environment creation technologies, including EcoSystem Painting.

New features for Vue include the third generation of e-on’s EcoSystem

technology, Spectral 2 atmospheric engine, SolidGrowth 4 HD, and a completely new indoor Radiosity engine.

had a very busy show, showing off two new versions of its products. LightWorks Studio Edition (SE) “is a new approach to integrated rendering. It draws on a wealth of rendering development and implementation