Add an Acrobat Stamp to Your PDF Proofs.
February 2008 Mini-Workshop Schedule!
Creativetechs is taking a different approach to professional training. We’ve organized our materials into dozens of smaller, bite-sized modules. The results are shorter, focused sessions, which let you get the training you need, without setting aside an entire day away from the office.
Download a PDF of our Training Brochure and see what upcoming workshops catch your eye. Then join us Wednesday and Thursday mornings for the fun:
Creativetechs Training Feb08.pdf
Missed a good one? All our topics are available for one-on-one training. Email training@creativetechs.com or call 206-682-4315 to schedule a personalized training session.
Convert Quark, InDesign, Publisher, FrameMaker, etc.
Convert FreeHand files into InDesign using PDF2ID.
Photoshop Opaque-to-Transparent Shadow Trick.
Create a Favicon for your Web site.
Creating an In-House Stock Photo Library.
Most in-house creative teams face the issue of corporate images scattered throughout their department. Each designer ends up with a different assortment of photos they’ve compiled over the years. Collections of photos end up stored in individual project folders — even if those same images end up linked later to a dozen other projects.
Over the last several years at Creativetechs, we’ve helped a lot of in-house creative teams develop image management and keywording strategies get control over their unwieldily image collections. In the end, they create something like their own private in-house stock image library.
Larger Studios, Don’t install Office 2008 (Yet).
The Best Auto-Trace Available.
Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has developed an online autotrace tool that is dramatically more accurate than the LiveTrace tool available in Adobe Illustrator, or the old Adobe Streamline utility that some designers still have lurking around their hard drive. Even better it’s free! VectorMagic is available as an online tool on their website:
You upload your bitmap image, answer a couple questions about the original image, and the system creates a vector EPS version that you can download and edit. Their example results are stunning, and from our own experiments at Creativetechs with a few real-world projects, the results are impressive.
The interface is fairly straight-forward. But if you get lost they also have a quick 3-minute video tutorial showing the system in action. Give it a shot.
