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Photoshop CS6 Sneek Peek #3
Monday, February 13th, 2012Here’s another sneak peek from the Photoshop team
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Photoshop CS6 Preview
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012Hi!
Sorry I’ve been in a bit of a work coma and not keeping up with the site very well. I’ve got some new stuff for you – here’s a post about the new “Photoshop CS6 Sneak Peeks” that I did over on the Axiom site.
So.. what do you think?
Photoshop compositing and the never ending road
Sunday, November 6th, 2011Mastery doesn’t mean you’re done learning
Are you a “Photoshop Expert” or “Guru” ? *shudder* When was the last time you edumacated yourself? (yes. the spelling is deliberate)
The image on the left is of a composite I’ve been working on for class. I will play with more features when making “random art”. I’m a big fan of the Photoshop Disasters site. It kills me that some of those images manage to get the the approvals process all the way to final print without anyone going… “Wait! What the hell is that!“. I don’t have the same time pressures that they do and am grateful for it (one of the many reasons why I’m a software trainer and not a production artist). However, some of the mistakes that you’ll see are just nuts. Basic anatomy people. Normal human elbows don’t attach at the chest – It’s not that hard!
So… back to the purple fantasy picture… I don’t have any specific class that is if going to use those images – I just need to keep my hand in and work on all the techniques that I want my students to know.
There are specific tutorials I will sometimes use, and I need to work through those regularly too. Nothing, however, beats the value of grabbing some images on whim (bless you fotolia) and trying to make something out of thin air. I urge you to dig thru the stock photography database at your favorite site (I cannot give the Fotolia people enough love) and look for an image that captures your imagination. In this case it was the dancer and the purple background that did it.
Ok, Kirsten, we get it. So why the rant?
Someone recently expressed surprise that I have a Lynda.com membership. They said something to the effect of “but I thought you taught this stuff?” Yes, I do and have for over a decade. I also go to the NAPP website, Deke.com, have an RSS feed of tips and tutorials a mile long, and have a bookcase of software manual that takes up most of one large wall.
It’s simple – you’re never done
I’m well known for having three-too-many resources for people at the end of class. I have books and videos I recommend along with the names of people who are always worth listening too. There’s a reason I have that information – I’m a student too. Any technical trainer (heck, any teacher at all) will tell you that the best way to master a subject is to teach it to someone else. It’s true. It’s also true that you don’t really know a subject if you can’t explain it to someone. My favorite quote is on my desktop so I see it every day, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough - Einstein”.
Please don’t get caught up in the “I know that already” trap. I was fortunate enough to go to Photoshop World when it was last in Boston. Most of the classes I took covered things that I teach in class regularly – and yet I got a TON out of going. I got to see other trainers work, which is extremely valuable, and picked up lots of new ways of getting a topics across to an audience.
It’s scary to know that there is no end to what you can learn. Sometimes it seems like there’s too much to take in. I won’t lie – I sometimes curse Adobe’s release schedule, but focus on the positive. Every new features gives you a new toy to play with. There are so many fun, amazing things you can learn – become a master of – that you can pick and choose what suits you best.
Strive!
Mastery is a fantastic goal. It’s just not the last goal. The farther you go the easier that is to forget – we’re never done learning.
AdobeMAX!
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011Adobe announced a LOT of things at AdobeMAX this year!
The new “Creative Cloud”
The idea behind this is essentially to make Adobe into the central hub of your creative life. I’m a regular Dropbox user and it makes having all my files on all my devices at the same time really easy. This works along the same lines… start a file on your tablet, save to the cloud, walk to your laptop and keep working on the same file. Lots and lots of synching. Creative Cloud is a hosted service with a subscription going live in November with 20 GB storage to start.
There are three parts to the Cloud:
Part One – Apps
Along with a cloud subscription of the Creative Suite (the programs will be saved locally), these are also six flash-based touch apps
- Photoshop Touch – scribble selections are ok, tilting layers in space is awesome!
- Collage – one word… moodboards
- Debut – Presenting your mockups has never been easier
- Ideas – finger painting taken to a whole new level
- Kuler – the mobile love child of Kuler.adobe.com
- Proto – really USEFUL interactive wireframer for websites –mock up the site, create a zip with assets, open in Dreamweaver and apply CSS = done!)
Part Two – Services
- DPS Single edition – publish something to the iPad
- Typekit – show every font in every browser
- Business Catalyst – Create sites for your clients complete with hosting and lots of bells and whistles
Part Three – Community .
- An inspiration gallery and support hub
Oh, and that’s not all…
This is really a quick and dirty overview. For more information, check out these links…
Learn more about Touch Apps here
Learn more about Typekit here
Learn more about DSP, Single Edition Here
Learn more about Community here
Learn more about Creative Cloud here
Intro to ePub – part 2 of 3
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011ePub Tips, Tricks, and Links
In the first post of this series, I had you create a very simple file (with a template the Terry White was nice enough to provide) and preview it in Adobe’s Digital Editions software.
In this post I’m going to share a lot of links and some general Do’s and Don’ts for epub and digial book creation. In the third and final post we will be making a file from scratch.
What am I getting into?
If you are a regular InDesign user making content for eBooks can be a bit of a brain twister. In essence you are making webpages. Much of the control you had is gone, and some of the really fun features that can be seen in interactive files won’t work in book readers. To give you a sense of how new this might be, I’m putting some of the tips I gathered together below
General
- .epub is an XML based format designed to enable text reflow. All content will be linearized so plan for one long stream for text and images.
Layout
- Make each page one text box with inline graphics
- Make the cover ONE image
- Create separate document for cover page – have it be one image or imported ID file
- The book panel is a good way to make separate chapters that are seen in the conversion
- InDesign has an option for automatically making a TOC in an epub file. Create a TOC style and specify it on export. The Automatic ID TOC is turned into navigation men
Formatting
- You are creating Cascading Style Sheets when you convert (think like a web designer)
- Change Nested or Grep styles to regular styles
- Use Space Above, Below, and Indent to make space around images
- Soft Returns are turned into hard Returns
- Use Paragraph and Character Styleson the text (these will convert to CSS for the .epub file).
- You can’t totally control the fonts the user will see (the type of reader that is used will determine how fonts are seen)
- Convert Nested and Grep Styles to Paragraph and Character Styles
- Epub does support font embedding, but not all eBooks formats do and not all eBook readers that support the epub format will use embedded fonts
- Use OpenType Fonts
Exporting
- If you don’t want to make a new file you can apply XML tags to existing content and use the Structure pane to reorder it for export
- For long documents break document into chapters and use the book panel
- Create a Table Of Contents – this will become navigation in the e-reader
- For a true TOC you may need to make a manual page with hyperlinks or cross-ref’s
- Un-anchored content will float and end up at the beginning or end of your file
- Keep main graphics between 300 and 600 px wide
- The cover is often best at 800×600
- Images are converted to RGB
- Add Metadata
Graphics
- Epub supports several image formats, including JPEG, GIF, PNG
- Anchor Images to an empty paragraph (then center align and use space before and after) or paste Inline
- Use color images
- InDesign coverts graphics to JPEG and GIF when exporting to epub unless you choose to copy the original images
- Convert InDesign art by Cut/Paste into Il or PS and Placing in ID
Conversion
Altered
- CMYK will be converted to RGB on export
- Convert Tables to lists or images if you can
Preserved
- Hyperlinks to URL’s, files, email addresses, and text anchors
- Cross Ref’s are converted to hyperlinks on export (Note: Some eBook readers don’t support any hyperlinks)
- Footnotes are kept, but are converted to endnotes
Discarded
- Multiple Carriage returns
- Empty Frames
- Frame attributes such as Fill and Stroke
- Custom settings for Anchored Objects
- Text wrap setting. Use Space before and After instead
- Hyperlinks that reference specific pages
- Master Page Items
- Automatic Page Numbers
- Page Breaks
- TOC generated by the InDesign TOC feature (do this anyway – it becomes navigation )
- Artwork made with InDesign vector tool (those you should copy into Illustrator and place back into InDesign)
- Not all text formatting is preserved
Links
- Digital Editions Reader
- Open-source EpubCheck program hosted by Google at code.google.com/p/epubcheck
- Free, standalone, cross-platform Java™ app, ePubChecker
- More information on epub format - http://idpf.org/
- Free open-source eBook conversion tool www.calibre-ebook.com
- InDesign to Kindle – Adobe
- Terry White – http://terrywhite.com/techblog/
- Colleen Cunningham has a massive and massivly helpful list of resources here - http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/indesign-to-ebook-resources/
Ok, got it – now what?
Take an existing Indesign file (a reasonalbly fancy one) and export it to epub. Look at how the content is moved (and what doen’t convert). Next time we will finish will a soup-to-nuts tutorial – see you then!
Intro to InDesign CS5 and ePub -part 1
Saturday, April 9th, 2011Your First ePub InDesign Document
What is ePub?
Wikipedia defines epub thusly:
EPUB (short for electronic publication; alternatively capitalized as ePub, ePUB, EPub, or epub, with “EPUB” preferred by the vendor) is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Files have the extension .epub.
EPUB is designed for reflowable content, meaning that the text display can be optimized for the particular display device used by the reader of the EPUB-formatted book. The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale.
If you’ve never tried making ePub documents with InDesign, and think it will be a lot of work and/or a true pain, I have good news… Terry White is your new best friend.
There is a lot of information out there about making ePub content and it can be overwhelming. I’ve compiled some information from multiple sources and will give you a reasonably in-depth list of what ePubs can and cannot do – BUT first things first.
For this tutorial, I’m going to ask you to download two things, place a few graphics and export your first ePub file. After that please come back next week for the second article where I give you lots of links and general tips to help you if you decide to add ePub creation to your arsenal.
OK, what do I do?
The first download is Adobe Digital Editions, the link is below. This will let you view the content you make. The second is an InDesign CS5 template by Terry White that will let you place in a few images and make an .epub file in minutes. There are more resources from Mr. White and more that I have to show you but I’m going to ask you to just do these things first.
Here are your links for the two downloads you need.
Terry White’s CS5 Template
Adobe Digital Editions Installer
What’s Next?
- Download and Install Digital Editions
- Open the template in InDesign and place images into the frames and save the file
- Now look over the template. The text won’t match the graphics but we don’t need to change out the text as we will make a full file later. The template’s scary in it’s simplicity isn’t it? There is a good reason for that – epub is linearized. Everything flows in one big stream. If you tried to make an ePub document from a typical complex InDesign file you would be very unhappy with the results.
Let’s make this into a book and view it in the reader
- Export the file to ePub
- In the export dialog box make sure that “Use First level Entries as Chapter Breaks” is checked in the “contents” section
- Export (depending on your settings, the file may open right away or you may have to double-click on the ePub file, which will be found wherever you saved the InDesign file.
- Look over your book
- Come back to my site for part 2 of Intro to ePubs
Names You Can Trust – Deke McClelland
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011Deke is a verb.
If you have seen Deke McClelland work, you know of what I speak. If you want to watch good videos on Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator and you are up for a “strong cup of coffee” – go find Deke.
Here are a few places to start…
deke.com
Deke on Lynda.com
Deke’s O’Reilly video – 101 Photoshop tips in five minutes
Strong cup of coffee?
On one of the Pixar movie DVD extras (The Incredibles, I think) there are interviews with people from Pixar about Brad Bird and what it was like when he came on board. One person described him like this: “He’s a strong cup of coffee. Of course, I like strong coffee” (with a little smile). The man is brilliant… and excitable… and intense. I’ve come to love that phrase.
One thing I’ve discovered is that there is a sliding scale of intensity for video trainers. Ok, for good video trainers. At one end is Terry White, at the other is the Deke Pod videos – Not Deke – just those videos. The others he does for Lynda.com are mellower. It seems totally appropriate to me that Deke would be on my rating scale twice.
Videos are not all he does though. Some of the best books in my office are his. It is impossible for me to get a book about a design package, like InDesign, that has a horrible, dull, or amateurish layout. it’s why I stopped buying the InDesign Bible series when they overhauled the design. You think I’m kidding? I’m not. How can you trust that the author knows good design if his or her book is a second-rate train wreck.
Deke’s work is clean, graphically beautiful, with lots of clear images and white space.
How can you not love the man? The pen tool as a sex ed lesson? Brilliant!
Introducing Captivate to new users
Friday, January 28th, 2011I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but was motivated to actually do it when I met some people recently who told me “Captivate is hard”. They had taken a class at work but didn’t really use the software after that because it seemed to be too much effort. Before I begin my rant I want to be clear that I am talking specifically about one or two day in-person training, usually not professional training either.
First –
Some General Software Training Rules..
- Software is a tool. The goal for most people is to learn what features they need, which ones might be helpful, and to ignore what clearly does not apply to them.
- Users do not need to learn it or use it the “right” way – only the way that will work best for them, which is sometimes the “right” way and sometimes not.
- If you don’t know what software is for, using the software for the first time will be more confusing and frustrating than it would be if you had a sense of the software first.
- Frustration in users reduces how much room you have to help them learn. Teaching software is an art – helping people learn new pieces of information and guiding them to prioritize what they need to remember. Make it easier on both of you and reduce the frustration level as much as you can.
- If learning is not engaging and done with energy the students will have to work harder to focus on the material (this makes it harder for you – see above point).
Ok, now find someone who has taken a Captivate class. If person thinks the software is no fun and is really hard to use, my bet is that the training showed the software “the right way” (which is often a methodical tour of menus and the screen as the first topic). Ask that person how class started and you will probably hear “well, we opened the software and started to learn all the features”.
*buzzing sound* NOPE – care to try again?
That behavior is fine for teaching how to create mail merge in Microsoft Word, but Captivate is a product that needs to be introduced to most people. Saying “it makes training movies” or “It’s like PowerPoint with quizzes” does not give a clear enough picture for students who unfamiliar with e-learning tools. Before you show them the interface you need to help them to relax and be ready for what’s next The best way to do that is to show them the reason Captivate is awesome.
So… the first thing? Show what it does.
Have a few sample files, or links to ones you like. I’d suggest one or two pretty basic ones (one soft skills and one software sim if you can swing it) and then one really good one (so they can see what is possible at an advanced level).
Now you can turn on the software.
Second Step? – Learn the basic interface. One of the best ways to do this is to make a very fast little movie.
A software simulation can be a nice simple introduction. Pick a very, very basic skill (like changing the desktop wallpaper) and have the students make a quick sim. Be sure to let them know that this is just so they can see how the software works and this is NOT all they need to do in a proper recording.
What should they do? Have them get out pen and paper. Then put these steps on the board.
- Describe what you want to do
- Rough out the steps on paper
- Practice First
- UNDO ALL
- Record
- Publish/Preview
This is not the list for a final movie – it’s only for the very first movie someone makes. Have the students follow these (don’t forget the undo step). When they preview their movies you often will hear “Oh!” when they see what they have done and how much Captivate does for them.
At this point they will be in the software and looking at the interface. This is when you can show them different views and buttons.
Why not use an exercise file?
If you have people open a file they have never seen they will not automatically have an easy, relaxed sense of what the file is for. IF on the other hand, you have them review the file they just recorded you will have the benefit of automatic engagement on their part. This is their file, they know what they did – so now they will have an internal conversation that goes more like this…
“What is that? Oh, that’s when I was moving the mouse. Hey, there’s a label made for me – that’s cool”
rather than this…
“Ok.. what am I looking at? What are those things over there? Why is there a mouse icon and what is that blue thing? What are those little boxes for? Why is there text here? Do I have to type that?”
What’s Next?
There is a lot of information that goes into Captivate training and this post does not cover all of it – just the introduction piece. They will eventually need to learn about adding rollovers and hotspots, using sound, planning out a template, adding graphics, quizzing, adding PowerPoint files … you get the idea.
However – the MOST important parts of making Captivate movies are taking time to script and storyboard – this is often left out of “intro to captivate” material and that’s a huge mistake. If you don’t give them at least a little amount of practice making a script and storyboard most of them won’t really do it after class.
In a future post I will go into more detail about the rest of the class and show examples of scripts and storyboards.
The class is only the beginning of their learning experience
Make sure they leave with links to blogs, videos, and any other suggestions that will help them keep moving forward. Often the people who they work for will assume that a one , two, or three day training is all it takes to go from “never seen it” to “Subject Matter Expert”. Unless people have tried using the software, it is pretty common to have them assume that making a decent training movie is “practically magical” and that simply giving the software to someone (**bippity boppity boo**) “makes” them an e-learning expert.
Making a Captivate movie is easy. Making good and engaging Captivate is much more work – just like making a website or PowerPoint presentation is not that hard, but making a good ones? That’s a different kettle of onions.
Set your new users up for success by helping them have reasonable expectations about what kind of effort goes into making e-learning modules. If they get that it’s something they will get better at over time and that they will NEED practice, they will end up making much better work in the long run.
Captivate is a wonderful piece of software and making engaging e-learning should be a fun and exciting experience. Teaching a Captivate class is nearly the most fun you can have as a trainer – make it fun and memorable for them and you’ll get to “Oh!” much faster.
From the Blog
- Photoshop CS6 Sneek Peek #3
Monday, February 13th, 2012 - Photoshop CS6 Preview
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 - Photoshop compositing and the never ending road
Sunday, November 6th, 2011