Tutorial: Varying Strokes over Time in Synthetik Studio Artist
AUGUST 7—As one reader pointed out to me last week, it's been a little too long since our last look at Synthetik Studio Artist. I had promised I'd show you a post-processing technique that allows you to vary strokes over time. Let it never be said that Dave fails to follow through on his promises, even if such fulfillment does take some time. Now, this is not the same as making strokes longer or shorter over time. I'll cover that one in a future installment (just as soon as another reader reminds me that I'm lagging). Instead, this technique allows you to change the actual number of strokes that appear in your video.

Tutorial: Color Correction—Curves or Levels?
JULY 10—For anyone using Photoshop to correct the highlights and shadows in an image, that is the question. In this lesson from "Total Photoshop 6," Deke McClelland first attempts to bring out shadowy details using the Levels command. For this particular image, however, Levels won't do the trick. This looks like a job for Curves!

Review: Macromedia FreeHand 10
JUNE 27—Macromedia is nearly as dominant in certain areas of graphic creation as Adobe is in others. Although the two graphics giants do clash in many areas, nowhere is the battle as fierce, or relatively unsettled, as in the vector drawing arena. Macromedia's FreeHand 10 is the latest version going against Adobe's Illustrator 9.

Review: Hemera Photo Objects Vol. 2
JUNE 19—Here's a slight change of pace for a review. We usually look at software applications and plugins for graphics software. But this week we're taking a look at a collection of royalty-free images from Hemera Software. Normally I wouldn't review a royalty-free image collection because, first of all, most of them aren't very good. Second, the ones that are good are usually quite expensive. And, third, how much can I write about a collection of royalty-free images? Well, as you might have guessed, this collection is different.

Tutorial: Post Processing in Studio Artist
JUNE 19—When you think of rotoscoping, you probably think of labor-intensive techniques used to remove wires from movie scenes or to clean up mattes or to perform some other technical clean-up job. Or maybe you think of Max Fleischer and his original rotoscope device, wherein an "artist" would trace over the individual frames of a live-action sequence to produce cartoons like Gulliver's Travels or Popeye the Sailor or Superman.

Tutorial: Painting with Style in Adobe Photoshop 6
JUNE 13—This weekend I was working on a project in Photoshop and trying to figure out a way to apply a multi-directional motion blur onto a path. So I was busy experimenting with a bunch of filters and brushes, when all of a sudden I decided to play around with the styles palette. What I stumbled upon was a feature whose application was so obvious that I can't believe I haven't seen this discussed anywhere. It has nothing to do with motion blurs (at least not yet), but it's still pretty slick.

Review: Human Software Classic Frames 1
JUNE 6—This is the first plugin I've reviewed for this site that borders a bit on the consumer level. Human Software, maker of a number of higher-end image editing and effects plugins, publishes a filter called Classic Frames 1, which is designed exclusively to add frame edges to images. This is, of course, a one-trick filter, but it has several variations and a few pretty decent professional applications as well.

Printing Duplexed Booklets from Adobe InDesign
JUNE 5—InDesign documents are in a format called reader spreads. Meaning, the front cover is the first page with the back cover being the last page. At times a format called Printers Spreads, where the first page is output with the last page, is required for final output. This is also useful when trying to build a composite with your laser printer.

Review: Creating Web Graphics in Photoshop 6
MAY 31—Regular readers of Digital Media Designer should be pretty familiar by now with the work of Total Training. They supply us with the bulk of our QuickTime-based video tutorials, which always prove popular with our readers and are always loaded with handy tidbits that you're not going to find in your manuals.

LiveMotion: Audio Synch
MAY 30—As you probably well know, it's virtually impossible to synch audio in a Flash file that's distributed on the Web. Even if you can get it to synch up in your own browser consistently, chances are very few people in your audience can. This is one of the reasons so many Flash designers resort to audio loops as accompaniment to their presentations. I don't like loops.

Photoshop Tutorial: Screen Mode Secrets (Mac/Win)
MAY 15—In this lesson from Total Photoshop 6, Deke McClelland gives a tour of Photoshop's various screen modes. In addition to demonstrating the three basic modes available in the Toolbox, Deke shows how you can create your own perfect working environment by customizing these screen modes. Get rid of that distracting document window! Make the menu bar appear and disappear at your whim! Get those palettes out of the way with the tap of a key! See what your image will look like on the printed page, in a field of black, or framed in any color you wish! Deke concludes with a special "hidden" Photoshop screen mode feature available only for Windows users.

Photoshop Tutorial: Screen Mode Secrets (Mac/Win)
MAY 15—In this lesson from Total Photoshop 6, Deke McClelland gives a tour of Photoshop's various screen modes. In addition to demonstrating the three basic modes available in the Toolbox, Deke shows how you can create your own perfect working environment by customizing these screen modes. Get rid of that distracting document window! Make the menu bar appear and disappear at your whim! Get those palettes out of the way with the tap of a key! See what your image will look like on the printed page, in a field of black, or framed in any color you wish! Deke concludes with a special "hidden" Photoshop screen mode feature available only for Windows users.

Flaming Pear Flood (Mac/Win)
MAY 9—Flaming Pear is a company that you might not be familiar with but that has put out some pretty serious effects filters for Photoshop. I've previously reviewed two of their products, BladePro and Super BladePro, both of which are designed to generate general material effects like stone and metal. This week we'll look at a plugin of theirs that has a much more limited scope but that might prove pretty useful to you compositing folks out there. It's called Flood, and its sole purpose is to place bodies of water onto an image.

Curious Labs Poser Pro Pack (Mac/Win)
MAY 2—You're probably familiar with Poser, the 3D character animation suite formerly owned by the company formerly known as MetaCreations. When MetaCreations killed off its software division to focus on Web technologies, Poser went on the auction block (along with Painter, Carrara, Canoma, Bryce and a host of other well respected titles). It was snatched up by the team that originally created the software and others involved with its development and marketing. Thus was born Curious Labs.

Photoshop: The Secret of Good Gamma (Mac/Win)
MAY 1—Cross-platform computer users have probably noticed how different the same image can look when viewed on a Mac or PC screen. This lesson from Total Photoshop 6 is of especial interest to Macintosh web designers; instructor Deke McClelland shows how to use the Levels controls to approximate-and correct for-the gamma differences inherent in the two platforms. Let Deke help you to see your onscreen images the way "the rest of the world" sees them!

Studio Artist: Working with Source Images (Mac)
APRIL 25—For the visitors of this page who are already familiar with Studio Artist, this tutorial may be a bit too simplistic. However, for those who come to this fabulous application for the first time, I hope the tutorial will help them enter an exciting environment.

Photoshop: Mysteries of the Magic Wand (Mac/Win)
APRIL 24—The principle behind Photoshop's Magic Wand tool is simple: You click in an image, you make a selection. But did you know there's a "hidden" influence on the Magic Wand, nowhere to be found in the Magic Wand Options palette, that can give you widely varying results? In this clip from Total Photoshop, Deke McClelland demonstrates this little-known factor and shows how you can use it to your advantage.

CValley FILTERiT 4: Filter effects for Adobe Illustrator (Mac)
APRIL 17—FILTERiT is probably the most remarkable set of tools I've ever seen for a vector illustration program. This is a package of innumerable effects for Adobe Illustrator 8 and 9, ranging from new types of transformations to object distortions to effects that can be applied to text without even converting text to paths. I reviewed version 3.0 of this set of filters last year and was impressed with its variety, power, stability, performance, ease of use, versatility and price point. (You can read this review here.) Version 4.0 adds even more to the package, while still maintaining the incredibly modest price of $129.

Recreating Apple's Aqua Gel Effect with Xara X (Win)
APRIL 17—Brendon Carr is responsible for this month's tutorial that has touched off a one-upspersonship contest in the Xara X Conference, one of dozens of graphics-related forums found at TalkGraphics.com. It all began innocently enough when Brendon visited a tutorial posted on a web site called Wardspring.com. The tutorial attempted to recreate the secret process used by the Apple design team to create the gel-like buttons featured in the new Macintosh OS X Aqua interface. Brendon posed the question how to replicate this effect in Xara X, not Photoshop, to the visitors to the Xara X Conference.

Future Fantastic Genesis V2 Pro: Special lighting effects for Adobe Photoshop (Mac/Win)
APRIL 11—I first encountered Genesis V2 Pro just a few months ago when I was compiling our guide to commercial Photoshop filters. I had left it off the list because I had never heard of it. So a reader wrote in and said, "Man, you have to check this out," or something like that. So I did. True story. What I found was an incredibly powerful plugin for Adobe Photoshop whose sole purpose is to generate lighting effects and related special effects, such as glowing fogs and the like. Probably familiar to those of you who come from the 3D side of things (3D Studio Max or NewTek LightWave), Genesis V2 Pro is, nevertheless, relatively new in its form as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop and not even a year old as a Photoshop plugin for the Macintosh. (It was introduced for the Mac back in May 2000.)

Digital Washes (Mac)
APRIL 10—This week we're back to Synthetik Studio Artist to take a look at another one of those features that makes this program unique, namely the ability to use media that interact with one another like liquids. Those of you with natural media backgrounds, particularly life drawing, are familiar enough with washes and the great ways they can interact with dry media like charcoal or Conté. I can remember in my art school using everything from watered-down Dr. Martin inks applied with a rag to transmission fluid applied with a very expensive sable brush. (In retrospect, maybe I should have done things the other way around.)

Nowhouse Propeller Paint Engine: Paint and effects for Adobe Photoshop (Mac/Win)
APRIL 4—If there's one thing lacking in the most popular image editor in the world, it's paint capabilities. Sure, you have a tool shaped like a paintbrush and one that functions like an airbrush, but paint functionality in Adobe Photoshop is incredibly limited.

Review: Creature House Expression 2 (Mac/Win)
MARCH 28—Over the course of just the last couple years, vector-based illustration programs have begun making their first serious strides into the territory of bitmap painting tools. That is, programs have introduced vector tools that behave in many ways like bitmap tools but retain the editability of vectors. These include Macromedia Fireworks and Freehand, which retain most of the functionality of traditional vector (formerly known as EPS) applications, and Synthetik Studio Artist, which you would never identify as a vector tool unless you were to engage in some research to discover this fact.

Masking in Amorphium Pro (Mac/Win)
MARCH 27—Last week I reviewed Amorphium Pro 1.1 from Electric Image. Amorphium Pro is a 3D modeling and animation package targeted toward designers, with a particular bent toward Flash designers. Its features have been implemented in a way that 2D artists can understand very easily, and these features are quite robust. So I thought we'd take a more in depth look at one of these today—namely masking—and see how it fits into the overall workflow of Amorphium Pro.

Synthetik Studio Artist: Paint Fill, Path Application and Brush Types (Mac)
MARCH 20—It's been quite a while since we last took a look at Studio Artist, the painting and rotoscoping tool from Synthetik Software. This week we're going to explore some of Studio Artist's functions to help you create the effect of a charcoal or bronze rubbing, an effect similar to that of placing a quarter under a piece of paper and scratching a pencil over it. This is also used with grave stones, typically with the person placing a large sheet of paper over the relief and rubbing a stick of soft metal across it. For this tutorial, we'll be using a stained-glass window and creating the effect of taking a rubbing with a piece of bronze.

Revisiting Popup Menus in Fireworks (Mac/Win)
MARCH 14—One of the great new features in Macromedia Fireworks 4 is the ability to create interactive menus practically on the fly. When I reviewed Fireworks a couple of weeks ago, I touted this feature as one of the best reasons to upgrade from version 3 to version 4. I might have jumped the gun there. It seems there are some problems with the interactive menu feature in Fireworks 4. So let's take a look.

Part 3: How To Make Your Own Photoshop Filters (Mac/Win)
MARCH 6—It's been a few weeks since we last worked in the Photoshop Filter Factory. If you haven't read the first two parts of this series, it would probably be advisable for you to do so. In Part 1, we look at the basics of Filter Factory, along with a few examples of how to get some basic effects working by manipulating color channels. In Part 2, we used ResEdit to customize the interfaces of the Filter we created. Now we're going to go a little deeper into what Filter Factory can do to help you create your own Photoshop filters.

Getting Started in Amapi 3D (Mac/Win)
FEB. 22—This week we're going to be taking a look at Amapi 3D and learning some of its basic workings. We're presenting the Windows interface for this tutorial, but all of these tips apply to the Macintosh version as well. (On the Mac, substitute COMMAND for CONTROL and OPTION for ALT. If you want to right-click on the Mac, just hold down the CONTROL key while clicking.) Future installments will mix Macintosh and Windows interface shots.

Review: Macromedia Fireworks 4 (Mac/Win)
FEB. 21—I've been using Macromedia Fireworks just about every day for the last year. I've been impressed with its ability to crunch large files into tiny JPEGs with virtually no loss in quality, and I've fallen in love with its effects and batch processing capabilities. Now, for the last few weeks, I've switched to Fireworks 4, which is available as a stand-alone product or in a bundle with Dreamweaver 4. This latest release builds upon the firm foundation laid in Fireworks 3 with a refined interface, some improved functionality and a smattering of new features.

Tutorial: A Special Effects Mask in Adobe Photoshop (Mac/Win)
FEB. 20—In this lesson from Total Photoshop 6, Deke McClelland demonstrates how to turn a photograph into a delicate "line drawing." He starts by creating an edge mask using the Find Edges command, and follows that up with one of his favorite combinations of filters: Maximum, Median, and Gaussian Blur. After applying an appropriate Blend Mode, the end result is a lovely Conté crayon "drawing," created from the original photographic image of a girl's face. You'll find this technique to be an easy way to give a beautiful "hand-made" touch to your digital images.

Review: Synthetik Studio Artist 1.5 (Mac)
FEB. 14—It occurs to me that with all the squawking I've done about the virtues of Synthetik Studio Artist, I haven't yet done a review of version 1.5 or explained its broad range of features all in one place. I'll rectify this now. Studio Artist does everything, so it's a difficult application to pin down. However, it's not too hard to describe the overall effect of Studio Artist. Since it's only available on the Mac, I'll describe it this way: It makes you feel the way you felt the first time you used your Mac. That is, it's the kind of thing you use and then have dreams about. (Yes, I have dreams about my Mac and Studio Artist. Further details are unavailable at the moment.)

Tutorial: Customizing Your Filter Factory Interface (Mac/Win)
FEB. 13—Last week we took a tour of the Filter Factory for Adobe Photoshop and learned how to create some basic effects with some pretty simple mathematical formulas. We also learned how to save these filters as Photoshop plugins for your repeated use or distribution to other Photoshop users. Now, before we get into some more complex functions in Filter Factory, I thought it would be a good idea to teach you how to make your own custom interfaces for the filters you create. After all, the basic interface of a Filter Factory filter is a bit Spartan, and you're a designer, so....

Tutorial: How To Make Your Own Photoshop Filters (Mac/Win)
FEB. 6—So you want to write your own Photoshop filters, huh? Understandable. After all, there's a special little place inside all of us that yearns to be a programmer. Unfortunately, this special little place is inhabited by a twisted little gnome named Avery who hates programming code and does everything in his power to prevent the knowledge of such code from entering this special little place. Sure, it'll let in a little HTML every now and again. But C++? Forget about it. Avery don't cotton to no C++. (In case you're wondering, yes, there are ways to break down Avery's defenses and turn yourself into a real programmer, but the methods for doing so can be quite taxing on the user. These methods include living exclusively off Tina's™ bean & cheese burritos during college, driving a Gremlin and giggling at FORTRAN jokes. Seems a pretty high price to pay just to write code for other people to enjoy.)

Video Tutorial: Dodge & Burn in Adobe Photoshop (Mac/Win)
JAN. 23—If Photoshop's Toolbox were a "real" tool box, there are two tools that would probably be buried at the bottom of the box for many users: the Dodge and Burn tools. In this lesson from Total Photoshop 6, Deke McClelland gives a striking demonstration of these often neglected tools. Starting with an image of an approaching tornado, Deke uses Dodge and Burn to bring out details in dark areas of the image, and to heighten the dramatic effect of the overall scene. After watching this clip, we suspect these two tools will be promoted to the top of your toolbox!

Review: Panopticum Plugin Galaxy (Mac/Win)
NOVEMBER 29—Here's a great set of utilitarian plugins for Adobe Photoshop. Plugin Galaxy, distributed by Panopticum and developed by Harald Heim, offers 20 plugins that generate about 120 basic effects, from noise and alpha manipulation to texture, lighting and magnification tricks.

Video Tutorial: Channel Effects in Adobe Photoshop (Mac/Win)
NOVEMBER 21—This week we have a wonderful tutorial on Adobe Photoshop 6 from the good folks of Total Training. This week's tutorial is hosted by noted Photoshop expert Deke McClelland, who, among many other credits, is the author of the Photoshop Bible from IDG Books and host of the Total Photoshop series from Total Training. (If you think you know everything about Photoshop, you've either memorized Deke's book and series or you've never seen either one.)

Review: Flaming Pear SuperBladePro (Mac/Win)
NOVEMBER 17—We previously reviewed regular ol' BladePro from Flaming Pear Software and gave it high marks for its ability to create metallic textures inside Photoshop. Super BladePro, which was released just a couple of weeks ago, comes out even stronger—and $15 less than the original filter. What could I do? I had to buy it—and that's saying something for a guy who gets his software for free.

Review: Alien Skin Eye Candy 4000 (Mac/Win)
NOVEMBER 16—If you're anything like me, your Photoshop Plug-Ins folder looks like a junk yard. It's full of old, decrepit filters that you haven't used since you stopped designing your own custom Dungeons & Dragons character sheets; demos of filters that expired before computers were even invented; and shareware filters whose usefulness you've never quite figured out, but somehow you can't bring yourself to throw them away. Hey, I still have Gallery Effects loaded on one of my Macs!

Video Tutorial: Layer Effects in Adobe Photoshop (Mac/Win)
NOVEMBER 1—This week's tutorial on Adobe Photoshop from our friends at Total Training covers layer options. The goal of this tutorial is to create interaction between two layers without using masking. Since we've been covering so much Mac stuff lately, this one is shown with a Windows interface. (Mac users out there should remember that the Alt key in Windows is equivalent to the Option key in Mac, and this tutorial applies to Photoshop running under either platform.)