CreativeTechs Tips

My name is Donnie, and you suck at Photoshop!

Thus starts the funniest and oddest collection of Photoshop tutorials we've seen. The production values are terrible. The language is crude. The Photoshop techniques are pedestrian at best. These tutorials are not exactly kid safe or appropriate for some workplaces.

So on this April Fool Day week, we invite you to follow the decline of Donnie's marriage, job, and quality of life, as you strap on your stupid and get into some big-boy Photoshop work.

You Suck at Photoshop #1: Distort, Warp, & Layer Effects

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #1

You Suck at Photoshop #2: Covering Your Mistakes

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #2

You Suck at Photoshop #3: Cloning Stamp and Manual Cloning

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #3

You Suck at Photoshop #4: Paths & Masks

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #4

You Suck at Photoshop #5: Select Color Range

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #5

You Suck at Photoshop #6: Filter Liquify

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #6

You Suck at Photoshop #7: Patch Tool and Levels

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #7

You Suck at Photoshop #8: 3D Layers

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #8

You Suck at Photoshop #9: Curves

YouTube: You Suck at Photoshop #9

Source: We watch a lot of Photoshop tutorials at CreativeTechs, and we've been laughing about these for several months now. It's nice to have an excuse to share them. Enjoy

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:15 AM | Permalink

We'd like to offer up a perfect April Fools Day prank to play on the Mac users in your life — the Kernel Panic screen saver. Download and install this beauty onto your target's Mac. The result is a harmless (see warning) screensaver that faithfully emulates the horrifying experience of a Mac kernel panic.

Doomslaser: Kernel Panic Screensaver.

Or, if you've got a friend who uses a PC, we've got something for you too. Someone in Redmond obviously has a sense of humor, because the Microsoft TechNet site hosts a Windows screen saver that emulates the infamous Blue Screen of Death:

BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) Screensaver.

Have a fun (and safe) April Fools day tomorrow.

WARNING: The screensaver itself is perfectly harmless — move your mouse and the false screen error disappears. But this joke could cause real pain if you are not there to step in. If your victim thinks their computer has crashed, they are likely to restart their computer (as the Kernel Panic screen instructs) which could lose any unsaved work.

Source: It has been a while since our weekly publishing schedule overlapped with April Fools day. Our last April Fools day issue was back in April 1, 2005 when we offered up a tip to Turn your friend's Mac into Windows XP. The year after that, we didn't publish a April Fools tip, but we did provide a tip on Troubleshooting a Mac OS X Kernel Panic.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:00 AM | Permalink

InDesign lets you control the visibility of layers in your placed Photoshop graphics. That can be pretty handy when you find yourself designing a series of related ads that require minor changes to the same image.

In InDesign, select a placed Photoshop graphic and choose Object > Object Layer Options. This gives you a dialog box where you can toggle the eyeball next to any layer to turn it on or off.

In this example, a photograph of clam chowder was used for a variety of ads. Some layouts needed a yellow background at the top half of the page, while others needed the existing background. An extra spoon was added for some versions. Using this trick, a single layered Photoshop file was all that was needed.

Here is how those layers appeared in the original Photoshop file.

Source: This tip comes from Jason Hoppe's mini-workshop Mastering Layers: InDesign, Illustrator & Acrobat. This popular session covered the many surprising ways layers interact between different Adobe CS3 applications. If you missed it the first time around, we're planning to bring this workshop back in May.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:15 AM | Permalink

Do you have way too many items on your desktop? Do you hate cleaning up that mess? Camouflage, a free utility from Briksoftware, is the right tool for you. It hides all the icons and leaves nothing but the pure wallpaper. It's the digital equivalent of sweeping everything under your bed.

Briksoftware's Camouflage

Camouflage does more than cover up the desktop files. Double-click on your newly immaculate desktop, and the Finder opens the list of all your desktop items in a new window. I've run this on my MacBook Pro for about a month and it has turned out to be a lot more useful than I had expected.

Source: Mentioned by Cory Bohon on TUAW. Sadly, creating the screenshot for this tip did not require much preparation on my part.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:00 AM | Permalink

Just because most of your work is done on the computer screen doesn't mean marking up hard copy is obsolete. Print out a copy of this proofreading cheat sheet and post it near your desk.

The Chicago Manual of Style Online: Proofreading

The Chicago Manual of Style started in the 1890s as a single sheet of typographic fundamentals drawn up by a University of Chicago Press proofreader. Over the years this authoritative style guide has been updated roughly once a decade. The 15th edition was published in 2003, and was heavily revised to reflect the emergence of computer technology and the Internet in publishing.

Source: This tip inspired by the dozens of old, faded, photocopied, proofreading guides we see tacked to the walls and cubicles of designers, copywriters, and e-pro artists across Seattle. This cheat sheet comes from The Chicago Manual of Style (Printed edition is $35 at Amazon).

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:15 AM | Permalink

If you are a web designer, your clients may soon start worrying how their websites work on an iPhone. That's because after only eight months, iPhones now account for a remarkable 71% of all US Mobile Browser web traffic.

Designing websites that take advantage of the iPhone web environment requires more than simply designing for a smaller screen size. The iPhone automatically scales websites when needed. iPhone readers use multi-touch gestures to zoom or move around the page. Flash isn't supported, and neither are larger animated GIFs (a surprise to me).

Tucked away in Apple's free iPhone Software Development Kit is a terrific iPhone Simulator you can use to test and preview your websites. In the full version of this tip we'll show you where that iPhone Simulator application is hidden, and include a few tips on how to test various iPhone features.

Download Apple's Free iPhone SDK

Note: You'll have to register for a free developer account and agree to Apple's terms. Read on and we'll show you where the iPhone Simulator application is hidden, and include a few tips on how to test various iPhone features.

Where is the iPhone Simulator application installed?

As prominently as the iPhone Simulator was featured in Apple's iPhone software roadmap presentation, the actual application is surprisingly hard to track down.

The application is not actually named iPhone Simulator — it is named Aspen Simulator. This application is tucked away many folders deep in the newly installer Developer directory:

Developer/Platforms/AspenSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications

Launch the Aspen Simulator app. It takes some time to load, and once it is running you have a genuine iPhone simulator on your Mac. The only applications installed on this simulated iPhone are Photos, Contacts, and Safari. Launch the iPhone Safari web browser and start checking out websites.

How to Use the iPhone Simulator.

Rotate your simulated iPhone: To rotate your iPhone, choose Hardware > Rotate Left, or Hardware > Rotate Right from the menu. iPhone's Safari web browser will automatically rotate the website you are viewing.

Pinch-to-zoom Gestures: You can simulate the iPhones 'pinch to zoom' gesture by holding down the Option key while clicking and dragging with your mouse. This brings up a pair of dots that represent your fingertips.

Double-Tap Gestures: Users can double-tap any part of a webpage to zoom in on that section. Simply double-click in the simulator to replicate this zoom. From testing, the iPhone's zoom feature appears to be impacted by the DIV structure of your web layout. A useful detail to watch for if iPhone users are an important audience.

If you have not played with an iPhone yet, make sure to check out Apple's excellent iPhone Guided Tour videos. Pay particular attention to the web browsing multi-touch gestures about half-way through the tour video:

Apple: iPhone. A guided tour.

Source: This tip inspired by the last hold-out consultant at CreativeTechs who finally switched over to the iPhone this week. For a glimpse at what's ahead for Apple's iPhone, make sure to watch the remarkable March 6th presentation by Steve Jobs and company.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 07:00 AM | Permalink

Here is another quick-but-useful tip for InDesign and QuarkXpress. When you need to set a tab that aligns to the right edge of your text box, don't waste your time fumbling with manual tab stops. Both InDesign and QuarkXPress have a hidden feature that makes this easy. Just remember these shortcut keys:

InDesign: Shift-Tab
QuarkXPress: Option-Tab

Source: This tip comes from the February 2008 issue of Design Tools Monthly. Seattle creative teams with a CreativeTechs support plan receive a complimentary subscription to Design Tools Monthly in their monthly care package.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:15 AM | Permalink

Renamer4Mac makes it easy to rename a large number of files. You just drag files or folders into its window, then adjust what you want to change. As you define your intended changes, Renamer4Mac previews in blue what each new file name will look like. When your file names appear the way you want them, you can apply the changes.

power4mac.com/renamer

This tool is perfect for designers who find themselves with a folder of files whose names need to be adjusted. For example, adding an identifying name to photos, along with a sequential number. Or changing the names of files for a website to lower case and replacing spaces with underscores.

Renamed4Mac has plenty of options: you can remove or replace words or characters, insert text anywhere in the file name, add sequential numbers at either end of a file name, convert to UPPERCASE, lowercase or Word Caps. It’s powerful enough to process regular expressions (calculations and wildcards), and can rename files recursively through nested folders. You can also use it in the Finder as a contextual menu item — just Control-click a file or folder.

In short, Werner Freytag’s free Renamer4Mac is one of the best file-renaming solution we’ve found.

Source: This tip comes from the February 2008 issue of Design Tools Monthly. Seattle creative teams with a CreativeTechs support plan receive a complimentary subscription to Design Tools Monthly in their monthly care package.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:00 AM | Permalink

xScope ($27) is a great utility for Mac-based web and UX (user experience) designers. It provides a number of floating tools for measuring, aligning, and inspecting on-screen graphics.

xScope

You have to play with xScope to get a sense of how helpful it is. It has on-screen rulers, floating guides, and a nicely designed screen overlay that shows the usable space for any screen (including new templates for the iPhone). My favorite feature is a new dimensions tool (shown above), which instantly identifies the pixel dimensions of anything on your screen. Link to the movie below for a better sense of how cool this feature is:

Movie: xScope Dimensions Tool

Download a free trial of xScope and give it a spin.

Source: This tip inspired by the repeated suggestion of fellow blogger Jordan Bojar. With added credence from a mention on Daring Fireball where John Gruber says "xScope is my favorite utility for zooming in on and measuring on-screen graphics."

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:15 AM | Permalink

In the past, changing the size of a Macintosh volume has been a significant undertaking, requiring third-party tools or offline reformatting. But, all that changes in Leopard. In the newest version of OS X, you can grow or shrink any HFS+ partition. The resizing is done live, and can even be performed on a mounted boot volume (though we wouldn't recommend it).

For more details, read the post on Make Mac Work, our sister blog written for IT professionals who support Mac users:

Make Mac Work: Resize Disk Partitions.

Warning: This is the sternly-worded paragraph that reminds you to never resize a partition without a complete current backup. Got it?

Source: This tip comes directly from Jordan Bojar's weekly Make Mac Work blog.

Posted by Craig Swanson at 09:00 AM | Permalink