Corel has released Corel® Painter™ X v10.1, a free update to its industry-standard Natural-Media painting and illustration software, Corel Painter X. Available for both Mac® and Windows®, the Corel Painter X v10.1 update can be downloaded from www.corel.com.
In conjunction with the launch of Adobe’s CS3, this interactive mural installation was designed by Brand New School for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco. Using some fairly sophisticated programming and tracking hardware, peoples’ movements are recorded and translated into an animated mixed-media mural that reflects the creative license afforded by the new Adobe CS3 software package. From left to right, the mural evolves from simplicty to complexity as more elements are introduced.
With its combination of accurate visual design, excellent CSS tools, and strong site-management features, Dreamweaver continues to be the premier Web-design program. If you’re not on an Intel Mac, don’t need the fancy user-interface widgets offered by the Spry framework, and don’t have trouble with your CSS layouts, you may not find the CS3 debut that enticing. However, if you’re using an Intel Mac, are hoping to ease the frustration of building CSS-based Web layouts, or want to add responsive user-interface controls such as complex, multilayered drop-down menus, Dreamweaver CS3 is quite a worthy upgrade.
In addition to writing a series of eight feature stories about what’s new in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.1 for Lightroom-news, Martin Evening, author of The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom book, has just published a free Lightroom 1.1 PDF supplement update for readers of his book and anyone who is interested in learning about what’s new in Lightroom 1.1. The PDF (20 MB) is 177 pages long and available now for download via the Peachpit website (registration required).
Have you ever returned to the edit suite only to find that the field recording you made sounds like it was recorded 50 feet away from the speaker in a parking garage? There’s too much room on the audio track, and now you’re faced with fixing it. Excessive reverb, the result that comes from sound swimming around a large room and being picked up by the microphone makes the voice sound distant and non-distinct.
You probably had the mic too far away or the room was unusually large and “live” or reverberant. Learn from your mistake and get closer with the mic next time and avoid these problems altogether. Since you can’t go back in time, try these techniques instead.
Here at Digital Arts we often have to work with images that just aren’t high-res enough, which is where tools such as Genuine Fractals are invaluable. They let you ‘blow up’ images to usable sizes without ending up with the blurry, noisy mess you get with Photoshop’s own Image Size dialog.
Our tool of choice for this is Alien Skin Blow Up, which adds detail to images while keeping edges crisp. Genuine Fractals 5 goes one better, adding a new scaling algorithm, more controls, layers and paths support, and improved performance. It also gains support for Photoshop CS3, including on Intel Macs.
Human, cockroach, alien, and more – if you can imagine a creature, you can render it in lifelike form with this app.
For animators who can’t stomach the idea of spending thousands of dollars on software, Poser 7 is the ideal choice. Poser is all about designing and editing 3D figures, and version 7 ships with some new human models (named Simon and Sydney) as well as a slew of third-party forms, including an eagle, a wolf, a crab, a cockroach, and not one, but two alien beings. There are enough sentient life forms here for just about any 3D creative endeavor.
The overall look and feel of Poser hasn’t changed much, which is comforting to longtime users (are loyal Poser users called Posers?). Even better, if you’re running it on an Intel Mac or a multiprocessor PowerPC Mac, you’ll see significant performance improvements in Poser 7. The performance boost is especially important given the app’s new rendering capabilities, including HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) support for the IBL (Image Based Lighting), which takes render quality to a whole new level of realism. On a quad-processor PowerPC Mac, you’re looking at a speed boost of two to three times over previous rendering times. Working with complex hair and cloth simulations also benefits from the multithreaded support.
If you want to get your work seen by as many people as possible, the web is the way to go. Couple that with the flexibility of the Adobe PDF format and you have a winner…Adobe’s PDF format has beaten off the competition to become the de-facto portable document format. While Microsoft Word might be slightly more ubiquitous, it lacks PDF’s ability to look exactly as the author intended on pretty much any platform you care to mention.
For designers creating a portfolio, this is a hugely important factor in an industry where presentation is just as important as the work on display. Users who have downloaded Adobe Reader software also have the ability to view PDFs inline without having to leave their browser, which means that PDF portfolios no longer have to be emailed but can live on a server somewhere. All you need to do is email the link.
The PDF format has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, such as the ability to incorporate complex interactivity, featuring buttons and links, and the ability to embed audio and video in addition to images. Using the easy-to-use Acrobat Professional application, it’s possible to completely control how users see your document.
All you need is an application to create the initial PDF, although Acrobat Professional can create a PDF from a rag-bag of image files if necessary. On the Mac, pretty much any application that can output to a printer can generate a PDF via the print dialog box, and there are plenty of cross-platform applications that will create PDFs natively.
For a multi-page portfolio, Adobe InDesign seems a good choice, especially as it has the ability to create rudimentary interactive controls that can be embedded into the PDF. For a wider range of interactive controls, it’s best to use Adobe Acrobat, but for simple navigation, InDesign is easy enough to use.
The final piece of the jigsaw is the powerful Adobe Acrobat Professional software, which comes with most versions of Creative Suite collections, and can be downloaded from Adobe’s website for a 30-day trial.
Acrobat 8.0 Professional, which is part of the CS3 software, has some great new features including the ability to collate PDFs into a single file while maintaining the security settings of the individual files, but the functionality required for this tutorial has existed in the previous versions of Acrobat going back to CS1 and earlier.
All you need is a great design, and you’ll soon be showing off your work in the most flexible and portable way possible.