Illustrator Tutorial - Create a Cool Ad Design with Shapes and Patterns

I recently saw a holiday advertisement that had this cool effect to it. It had a pattern of shapes with a few of the shapes outlining some text. I thought it was a neat concept so I tried to reverse engineer what they had done and this is what I came up with.

We will be creating this design inside Adobe Illustrator. While this design can be made inside Photoshop, it’s much easier to layout in Illustrator and you will end up with a more versatile master file in case you need to recreate the design for multiple purposes.

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List All File and Folders with DOS tree

I’m constantly amazed by how often I turn to DOS to finish a task. The more Microsoft tries to push us into a graphical world, good ‘ole command line brings us back in. Perhaps this is why so many prefer to run Linux.

Anyway, I recently needed to generate a list of every folder and file that is in a particular directory. Windows XP doesn’t offer a way to do this and I’m not aware that Vista does either. So, to DOS I turned once again to make this list. It only required typing one little command and, when it was done, I had a nice little text file that presented my list in a fully expanded tree. Read more

Adobe Lightroom Workflow - Importing Photos

What? You’re not using Adobe Lightroom? Well, you should be. Lightroom is a very powerful image editor and management system, and since it was created by Adobe then it integrates great with Photoshop. It has quickly become a vital program in my photography workflow and one of the easiest programs to recommend to friends who are looking for a better way to manage and edit photos.

The starting point of any workflow is the importing of the files. (Yes, I know the actual starting point is the creation of the photos, but for the sake of staying within the scope of this article, let’s agree that our starting point begins with the import). This is the foundation of your workflow, getting your photos imported to relevant locations on your hard drive and named accordingly.

This article details the steps I take when importing files in Lightroom. There are no definitive right ways to import your files, so I am by no means preaching the gospel here. I’m just offering suggestions on what has helped me over the past few years in organizing my photos for effective use and archiving. Read more

Mozy Remote Backup

As you know, everyone needs to backup their computer files. Mozy is the first and only full-featured, remote backup system in the world that’s offered for free. And as of this writing, Mozy also offers unlimited backup for just $4.95 a month (or $54.50 a year). If you have files your care about, or files that you can’t replace, there’s really no excuse to not have everything backed up. Mozy makes it easy!

Mozy offers several backup options to help you pick the best plan. Of course, they are best known for their free service, but if you have more than 2GB of files that you want to keep safe (and it’s really easy to do, now days), you can protect everything you care about for less than $5 per month. So, for the cost of a foot-long sandwich, all of your files and precious family photos can be safe and secure.

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Photoshop Tutorial - Change Eye Color

When working with portrait photography, you may want to change or enhance the color of your subject’s eyes. This can be easily done inside Photoshop CS3 and CS4. In this example, I will be using CS4, but this can be done in just about any version of Photoshop.

This technique can also be used for elements other than eyes. You can effectively change or enhance the colors of any object or photo inside Photoshop. For our purposes here, we’ll stick with stick with the eyes. Just keep in mind that you can apply these steps to any object to change its color.

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Edit Multiple Pictures with Photoshop

One of the best things about digital photography is how easily you can take dozens of pictures and quickly share them with your friends and family. No longer do we have to keep up with envelopes of negatives or worry about getting your film developed. However, with each improved model of digital camera, the number of pixels used to create our photos increases, often by the millions.

This isn’t a problem when it comes to printing your photos. In fact, the more pixels you have the better your printed photos will look. The problem arises when we just want to share these pictures on the web or email a few of them to a friend or relative. You see, the more pixels an image uses, the larger its file size will be. Large file sizes means longer downloads for your friends and family, and can also be the reason why your emails won’t go through (many email servers won’t accept messages larger than 10mb).

So, we are often left with the task of resizing these images so that they are “web ready.” That is, reduced in dimension (how large they appear on screen) and in file size (how much room they take up on your hard drive). Resizing images is a simple task, but it can quickly become a boring and tedious task if you have more than just a few images to resize. Read more

20+ Cheap Gifts and Gadgets for Christmas 2008

It’s that time of year again when you need to find some cool gifts for office parties, family gatherings, and the poor saps with birthdays this close to Christmas. Sure, it’d be great if you could get everyone on your list an LCD HDTV, GPS device, or iPhone, but not everyone has that kind of dough? (And if you do have that kind of dough, just let me know what I need to do to get on your Christmas list!)

Here are a few of the hottest gadgets of the year (in no particular order) that won’t break the bank, and will definitely earn you some cool points with your geek friends and family members.

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Force Your Computer to Shutdown

Just this morning my mother-in-law called to tell me that her laptop wouldn’t turn off. She had tried the obvious stuff: initiating a shutdown through the Start Menu, pressing the power button. Nothing seemed to work. Her laptop was effectively locked up.

There’s a trick to solving this problem and I forget how few people know about it. I’ve yet to see it fail and, if it doesn’t work for you, you’re either being too impatient or something is seriously wrong with your hardware.
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