Adobe Photoshop Creative Design #18

Adobe Photoshop CS3

Adobe Photoshop Creative Design #18: Constructing a Building in Las Vegas Part 2

About two weeks ago, when I was killing my time at my office, I received a call from a man who introduced himself as a representative of the Office of the City of Las Vegas. He said that they wanted a new office building at the center of the city. And he said that they wanted MacHouse to construct the actual building based on a blueprint. Just as I always say to other confused people, I told him that we are just a group of mediocre graphic designers using Mac computers. Then he said that was why he called me. He had such a demanding attitude and then asked me how long it would take me to construct the building. So I said “Give me 20 minutes” and put him on hold. Then I launched Adobe Photoshop CS3 on my iMac. In a matter of 18 minutes or less, I finished constructing a building in the middle of Las Vegas downtown.

In the last tutorial, we created windows, a building wall and a roof. The second part of this video tutorial starts off right at the point where we ended last time. We will use such basic techniques as gradation, layer mask and Quick Mask to finish off the building design. By the way, The photo image used in this tutorial comes from PD Photo Continue reading

Adobe Photoshop Creative Design #17

Adobe Photoshop CS3

Adobe Photoshop Creative Design #17: Constructing a Building in Las Vegas Part 1

About two weeks ago, when I was killing my time at my office, I received a call from a man who introduced himself as a representative of the Office of the City of Las Vegas. He said that they wanted a new office building at the center of the city. And he said that they wanted MacHouse to construct the actual building based on a blueprint. Just as I always say to other confused people, I told him that we are just a group of mediocre graphic designers using Mac computers. Then he said that was why he called me. He had such a demanding attitude and then asked me how long it would take me to construct the building. So I said “Give me 20 minutes” and put him on hold. Then I launched Adobe Photoshop CS3 on my iMac. In a matter of 18 minutes or less, I finished constructing a building in the middle of Las Vegas downtown.

The following video tutorial shows steps to design a simple building, using Adobe Photoshop CS3. Our job is not to seek perfection. Rather, we want to provide a starting foundation in designing a building. By the way, The photo image used in this tutorial comes from PD Photo Continue reading

Adobe Photoshop Very Simple Tutorial: Designing a Stage Curtain

Adobe Photoshop CS3

Last Christmas, my wife and I went to a concert put on by a local church. It was quite existing till a certain moment, when the lead singer suddenly stopped singing. Then something unexpected happened. Suddenly, there was an announcement. A male voice said “Tom Bluewater from MacHouse, please come to the backstage immediately.” “Huh, me!?,” I said to myself. So I went to the backstage. Then a man who introduced himself as the concert manager said that they needed to lower the curtain immediately. I said “Hold on, how do you know about me and MacHouse?” The concert manager said “I searched the world wide web with keywords ‘Mac Photoshop tutorial’ and found you.” But how did he know that I was here? I asked him, but he just kept talking as if I had not existed. Oh, boy… As usual, I pulled MacBook out of my backpack and launched Adobe Photoshop CS3. In a matter of 6 minutes or so, I managed to lower the stage curtain.

The following tutorial shows easy steps to design a stage curtain in 6 minutes or so, using Adobe Photoshop CS3. Note that the screenshots shown below are not in a good quality because they were extracted from a tutorial video whose color depth is 8 bits. Meanwhile, the photo used in this tutorial comes from Webshots. Continue reading

Final Cut Pro: Recognizing a Problem – Frame Rate

Final Cut Pro

Yesterday, I made a rare visit to Apple’s Discussion board. I read several help questions posted for Final Cut Pro. And one of them caught my interest. It appeared that the person posting this topic had trouble importing a video clip from Stock Photography (www.istockphoto.com). He noted that the video compressor is Photo JPEG. Hmm… Final Cut Pro should have no trouble importing video clips that are compressed with Photo JPEG, I thought. I also thought that the video clip probably had no file extension, which caused Final Cut Pro to fail to recognize the file. But that wasn’t the case. Continue reading