Posts from — December 2006

I know with the holidays and all the other things that come up this time of year you’ve got some extra bandwidth to spare!  Yeah probably not, but if you do, lend your creative hands to some good causes.  Design 21 has some good opportunities to put your creative talents to the test this holiday season.  Check it out and see if you think you have some good ideas and designs to contribute to the cause.

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With my pictures I like to get the pesky red out and light up their eyes a little. Here are the steps that I normally take.
Step 1: Open the photo and duplicate the background layer by pressing Command + J (PC: Ctrl + J).

Step 2: Choose Window > Arrange > New window for [document name]. Anything you do in one window is automatically reflected in the other. It’s a good way to work on these.

Step 3: Grab the Dodge tool, and take a look at the top of your screen. Lower the Exposure to about 30%. Mouse over to the photograph and size the brush cursor so that it fits only the iris area.

Press the left bracket key, [, to cycle up in brush size, and the right bracket key, ], to cycle down.
If you go a little too far, decrease the opacity of the duplicated layer to lessen the effect.

That’s it!

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My first holiday present has come early!  I will be attending a conference on Macromedia’s Flash product next month.  FlashForward is the longest running and largest Flash conference.  I didn’t get to attend this last September but will not be missing the 2007 conference this January.  It’s important for any web designer to attend, or at least that’s what I think.  I love being around all the creative’s and hearing and seeing all the magnificent work they do.  It gets my creative juices flowing.  Well to my surprise, this year it’s partnering with the Macworld Conference & Expo.  That’s right I will be attending the same conference as Mr. Steve Jobs.  May sound dumb, but I’m really excited.  I will be on the Power Tools conference track.   It is made up of several sessions of Mac-focused Flash education classes during the first two days of Macworld in San Fran January 8-12.  Let me know if you’ll be attending as well.  I will be sure to post pictures from the conference and put in some tutorials on what I will hopefully be learning throughout the week.

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“Social bookmarking brings to the equation something that search engines can’t compete with - the human touch. Just as the internet has millions of pages, so it also has millions of users, and if even a fraction of those users share the sites they’ve found interesting, useful or just plain bizarre with each other, there is suddenly a vast resource for anyone searching the web to tap into.”

Michael Pick at Robin Good blog has a great post explaining why social bookmarking, is becoming the best way to find information that you really want without the 5,843,902 results you’ll get from a search on Google.

I invite you to check out sites such as digg.com to see this revolution in action. It’s a user driven social content Web site. It’s powered by the masses, much like wikipedia.org. Its success rests on the shoulders of its users. Join it! Then Digg your favorite stories! Maybe the site or story or video you digg will be digged by other users and will hit the front page of the site.

If you want to hear more the Digg founder (former TechTV-er) Kevin Rose is joining Leo and Amber Mac tonight live online from 9-10pm EST on net@nite.   I plan to find out what’s new at Digg that I may not be aware of.

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I thought this was funny, and needed to be shared with others.

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