Focus on Blur By Miwa Hirano In a few steps, a very straightfoward graphic created in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator can be transformed into a fluid moving background for use in motion graphic designs. When the client provides specific artwork, and requests it to be used, here's one way of blurring the boundaries of the "use" definition. ...Read More »

RAINDROPS IN AE By Steve Toyama Ame, ame, fure, fure..." Rain, rain, fall, fall. It's the season for rain in Los Angeles. While we do have falling leaves here, and other seasonal icons, most Angelenos think of "rain" as a winter season icon. In this tutorial, Steve Toyama takes you through a procedure to make wet pavement. ...Read More »

C4D RELEASE 10 By Ko Maruyama If you're still running a previous version of CINEMA 4D (and at the time of this article, you probably are), you can check out my older article about setting up new commands (click here), but MAXON's CINEMA 4D Release 10 makes things a whole lot easier. Here's how. ...Read More »

3D Ghosts Sheets By Ko Maruyama In the world of broadcast promo, it's been a mad push for fall campaigns all summer long, and chances are that you've already finished your Halloween campaigns by now (and they're airing), but if you haven't, here's an easy way to create some 3D 'bedsheet' ghosts with CINEMA 4D's MOCCA module. ...Read More »

Using Cue Points To Trigger Video Transitions in Flash In this excerpt from Flash Professional 8 Video Integration from lynda.com Lee Brimelow shows you how to use Cue Points in Flash to create transitions from one video clip to another. ...Read More »

Animating Materials By Ko Maruyama There are several parameters that most C4D users are comfortable animating. Obviously position, scale and rotation, the basic transformation attributes are easily modified and animated, but what happens when you want to animate a texture. You have multiple options. ...Read More »

Incorporating Alpha Channel Video in Flash In this excerpt from the lynda.com training course Flash Professional 8 Video Integration Lee Brimelow demonstrates how to add video overlays into your Flash productions using alpha channels. ...Read More »

Flash 8 Filters and Blend Modes This tutorial from Photoshop CS2 & Flash 8 Integration is designed to show you the most efficient methods to take advantage of the new bitmap features in Flash Professional 8 such as filters and blend modes ...Read More »

imageSynth for Photoshop By Ko Maruyama Many people know modo. What some don't know is that the company who makes the premiere 3D software is called Luxology. In addition to the 3D modeling, animation and paint software that Luxology has created, they are now offering a new tool called "imageSynth" which works within Photoshop. ...Read More »

JUST THE BASICS By Ko Maruyama While there is a lot of control to be had by modeling using polygonal shapes and NURBS objects, there is no reason you can't start your exploration of CINEMA 4D software with some serious modeling using only primitive shapes and some simple modeling tools. I put my assistant, Will Goodan to the task of modeling as much as he could without using splines, NURBS or editable meshes. For rigid objects like this speaker, primitives worked just fine. ...Read More »

From After Effects to Flash and Back, Part 2 By Kevin Schmitt If you were with me for the last installment, you're already hip to the palpable excitement in the air that has already worked its way into a fever pitch. Today we're going to--wait for it--take the content we made last time in After Effects and put it all together in Flash. I, for one, can't wait, so let's get this party started. ...Read More »

Questions Answered 3: Illustrator Brushes By Dave Nagel Chris from the Bay Area writes in, asking about custom brushes in Adobe Illustrator: "... Is there a way to save a new brush to a custom brush library? I would like my new brush to be available at all times, not just in the file for which it was created." Yes indeed. In fact there are two methods you can use, each with its own advantages. ...Read More »

Enabling Interactivity For Usability In Flash 8 In this video-based tutorial excerpted from the Flash Professional 8 Beyond the Basics training course, Shane Rebenschied shows you how to build Flash 8 applications that include user interactivity via ActionScript. ...Read More »

Using The Woodcut Effect in Corel Painter IX In this excerpt from Getting Started with Corel Painter IX, a training course from Lynda.com, Tanya demonstrates how you can use the Woodcut Effect to create beautiful artistic renderings from your photographs and digital art. ...Read More »

Creating & Saving Custom Brushes in Corel Painter IX Learn how easy it is to create custom brushes in Corel Painter IX and how to save them, allowing you to build your own library of custom brushes and brush effects. ...Read More »

After Effects 7 Animation Techniques In After Effects 7 Animation Techniques, Jeff Foster shares methods and best practices for creating fantastic animation. From setting up a camera and getting the right angles, to imitating the movement of the human skeleton and animating text layers, Foster explains everything you need to know to create and edit animations for the most realistic effects. In this segment Jeff demonstrates animating text layers in After Effects using Photoshop text layers with displacement. ...Read More »

Photoshop Tip: Tinting the Grays in a Color Image By Dave Nagel We've recently looked at a few methods for desaturating selective elements of a photo, with a particular emphasis on minimizing the manual labor involved. So what if, after desaturating parts of an image, you them want to colorize them to create even more of a nostalgic feel? No problem. ...Read More »

Photoshop Tip: Color Range in Hue/Saturation By Dave Nagel In our last Photoshop tutorial, we desaturated an image of all but a single color to create a nostalgic photo effect. For the particular image we used, the process was simple, since the object we left saturated was the only one of that particular hue in the image. But what happens when there are elements in your photo composed of similar hues to the object you're trying to isolate? ...Read More »

Photoshop Tip: Desaturating Parts of a Picture By Dave Nagel One common way to create a nostalgic effect in a photo is to desaturate all but one element in the photo--a balloon, a flower, a dress, what have you. And if you have a particularly complex element that you want to leave saturated, this can be quite a masking chore. But there are other techniques that can save you some time in the process. In this first Photoshop quick tip, we'll take a look at one simple method: using Hue/Saturation to desaturate all but one color from a picture. ...Read More »

Distributing Objects in Adobe Illustrator, Part 2 By Dave Nagel In our last tutorial on object distribution in Adobe Illustrator, we looked at a fairly routine method for spreading out objects evenly across and down a page. But there were limitations to that technique. So this time around, we'll take a look at a different method--one that gives you a bit more control over the results and also allows you to introduce rotation into the objects that you spread over the page to create spirals, wreaths and other geometric patterns. ...Read More »