Recently one of my colleagues was having issues in registering a piece of Adobe CS4 software on one of our user’s PCs. The product code was numeric and it was being refused each time he entered it. It even got to the point where he had another colleague check he was entering it correctly. After some frustration and a bit of research he discovered a suprising fact….

The reason the registration was failing was because he was keying in the numeric code using the numeric keypad on the keyboard rather than the top line of numbers on the qwerty keyboard. Once he swapped to entering the product code on the top row the product code was accepted and he could install the product.

Why have Adobe done this? We’ve no idea, but hopefully now you won’t get caught out next time you’re installing an Adobe product.

it’s been pretty quiet here…

on tuesday, i got bitten by a mosquito in history.  six times.  finished watching howl’s moving castle in japanese and it was a good movie – i love the doggie!  played scrabble with victor. 

voudon; voodoo

zine;an inexpensively produced, self-published, underground publication

accidentally left my laptop in the maths classroom, thank you hasmeera! 

so.  today.  was about to leave home, when i realised my low-battery-levelled laptop which i had plugged in to charge last night was NOT charged as i had very conveniently forgot to turn on the switch at the powerpoint last night.

our science class was quite, erm, interesting.  the teacher was talking about a 3km wide beach that’s almost horizontal, and the humongous tides rushing in and having to run away.  mmhm i want to go there…  and digging holes to poo in vs. not digging holes and mounds of poo…

now, because my day has been nicely uneventful, i will talk about something that has recently been annoying me very much.  i really dislike it when people take thriftiness overboard, especially at the sake of others.  and at the last minute too, when everything has been organised.  that’s all i’m going to say about it.

either the laptop i’m typing this on has a very large screen, or i’m getting used to the small government ones.  i have been having fun experimenting with all the adobe cs4 stuff though.

today was the second day of SLP (sorry if the time seems really disjointed, i’m adding on).  i would recommend the program, but sitting still for three hours an be quite discomforting.  got all these inspirational speeches and stuff.  then heard this lady teach us how to present speeches and stuff. 

was walking to the bus stop, then just remembered i had an orthodontist appointment 20m away from the bus i needed to catch.  phew.

walked home, watched anime and ate (well what other verb can you use?) a frozen popper.  i hate it when the juice melts and you’re left with ice which doesn’t taste good.  also had an american kitkat (the design looks like a cheap knock-off) and crunchy coated peanuts (my current snack food).

http://www.marketingtribune.nl/nieuws/primeur-kinderpostzegels-de-film/

Dag1:

De week is begonnen met een test van ActionScript. We moesten een doolhof maken waardoor we een balletje door jagen dat een spoor na laat. Van zodra het balletje de rand raakt, start het terug van op een random startpositie.

Dag2:

Films films en nog eens films. Het was film dag en hebben 4 films gezien. Verschillende making offs van reclamespots en muziek clipjes. Een zwart/wit film.

Dag3:

Wapenstilstand!!

Dag4:

De workshops. Ik had gekozen voor in de voormiddag van a tot alfabet te doen. We moesten zelf een lettertype maken.

Dag5:

Max msp. Zie hier een filmpje.

Sea Things Finished, Illustrator CS4 and Photoshop CS4, 20″ x 20″

Took some time to produce at least something.  I would say I’m still in a creative block, but I have some ideas in my head, I just need to execute and produce them.  Creating 16 illustrations in 2 weeks seems like a long shot at this point.  My brain is just fried.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve this piece? Or maybe just some helpful critique.

Cheers!

Onze eerste opdracht voor het vak Major Atelier.

heyhey, weer al een tijdje geleden.
Enkele weken terug kregen we de opdracht om een header te maken in photoshop. We konden kiezen uit een header voor een snoepwinkel, kaaswinkel of skatewinkel.
Mijn keuze was snel gemaakt, zie hier het resultaat.

De typografie is wel wat aan de zwakkere kant.

               Bem vindos galera do After e 3DS Max, estaremos comentando sobre um dos melhores editores de Video e Animação Gráfica, Adobe After Effects CS4 e 3Ds Max da Autodesk, muitos ainda não conhece bem essas ferramentas, que na minha opnião são muito poderozas, bem, intão vamos ao nosso exitante tutorial.
              Começaremos com alguns tutoriais do After Effects CS4 e daqui mais alguns dias faremos os de 3DsMax.
              Mais videos em www.youtube.com/user/renatorsferreira e www.youtube.com/user/VFXproducoes … link tbm um de nossos parceiros www.vfxproducoes.com ( um dos melhores Motion Designer do Mercado “Bruno Aun” ) aprendi muito com os tutoriais dele, nesse blog vocês encontrarão principalmente tutoriais deles.
               Como criar, editar, aprimorar suas tecnicas e a melhor dica “A pratica traz a exelência”, nada como aprimorar suas tecnicas exercitando sua criatividade.

Um grande Abraço.
Renato Soares

Adobe has updated the Flash Lite development.

Flash Lite requirements:

• Flash CS4 Professional
• Or Flash Professional 8
• Adobe Device Central CS4

Free videos related to mobile are available on iTune
Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast

Mac or PC?

One of the biggest debates for a small start-up, and one that we experienced first hand, is the issue of how much of your capital to spend on computer stuff.

As we began making our wishlist of software, hardware, and other capital expenses, we realized that the decisions we were making about what to invest in now would probably be with us for the life of the company. What I mean is that it’s rare that a small practice makes a massive switch from PC’s to Macs, or from AutoCAD to Vectorworks, simply because of the financial implications of converting everything and basically starting a new learning curve.
That’s why we decided that reading through the millions of forums and reviews on products (see CAD forums section) was an essential step in determining which professionals out there are happiest with their setups.

In the end, we made a list of criteria and we chose hardware and software to match based on priority. These are the decisions we made, based on the theory that we would spend a little more money to save time and improve efficiency (especially because there are only two of us in the office):

Computers and Operating Systems:
I was a PC girl. He was a Mac guy. However, in the year before the conception of Emu Architects, the frequency with which I made up excuses to use his Macbook Pro over my Dell Inspiron grew exponentially. I eventually converted, and I haven’t looked back since. This key decision to fork out more dough for the Macs ultimately afforded us more flexibility with high power software. Plus, with Parallels, we don’t have to worry when someone sends us a Windows only file format.

CAD Software:
This was to be the core of how our business would operate. After researching to confirm our suspicions, we decided that everyone in the industry who is not using BIM software is completely crazy. We settled on Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD, and we even won a free license from filling out those surveys that you always think are a waste of time (see Graphisoft’s article on our win)! Armed with this fantastic software, we completely eliminated the need for an external 3D software. In fact, we also gained a huge amount in time savings, because of the fact that all cost estimations, project documentation, and rendering are done within ArchiCAD. It truly made it possible for two people to get everything done in the same time as a team of people working on an AutoCAD project. That extra time can now be spent in the rendering or in other communications and presentation material.

Graphic Communications and Presentation Software:
One of our explicit goals as a company is to offer a higher level of communication than is standard practice here in Italy. This meant we needed tools that would allow us to create and publish well designed graphic web material efficiently. We also wanted the ability to create well formatted templates for presentations to clients and correspondence with other professionals. Our communications software now includes:

Artlantis: Although we are still in the demo mode at the moment, we are fairly certain that this secret software will be well worth it. It raises the level of presentation material with respect to time investment drastically. Look forward to future posts about our experiences with it.

RapidWeaver: We recently decided on this relatively inexpensive software for our new website design Our current published website is a quicky from iWeb and is seriously lacking in SEO (search engine optimization) features. Again – the decision to go for this software came from people’s comments in the forums about short learning curves and time efficiency.

Adobe CS4 and Acrobat: We could probably just do with InDesign and Acrobat, actually. This is what we use for all office document templates to ensure consistency of graphic layout. Everything, and I mean everything gets PDF’d before it is archived in our files. We also tend to use Photoshop a lot for quick photo fixing.

Office Administration Software:
We have been very impressed with iWork ‘09, but are also huge supporters of OpenOffice (free!). This is a good area to save some bucks and go for the open source package. In fact, other than Numbers (the iWork version of Excel), we very rarely use normal office software other than to import information sent to us from other people. For quick word processing (which I use to help me save blog posts), we use Bean (free!). The last to mention is, of course, Skype (free!)- which fortunately is becoming quite standard in Europe as a professional communication tool.

In Summary: the stuff we paid for that we couldn’t live without -

our Macs
ArchiCAD
Artlantis
RapidWeaver

And that’s it. Not so big a list, huh? Hopefully this combination will last us for the next decade or so with a few upgrades every now and then. Perhaps by the time we are veterans, BIM will have caught on as the industry standard and we’ll become the slow ones who need to hire employees to increase our CAD productivity. But until then we’ll enjoy the flexibility of remaining a two-person operation.

Niet zo een wow-photoshop werkje, maar toch iets om fier op te zijn aangezien ik nog maar een week ofzo met photoshop werk.

I had my 2nd lesson Adobe Flash CS4 today. We got a new assignment and this is my own ‘personalized’ result.
http://webs.hogent.be/camerlinckx/TehBlob.html

This was made using Motion Tweens instead of using different drawings for each Key Frame.

And while I’m at it; here ’s the Photoshop picture of our 2nd lesson.
The objective here is still to learn how to work with selection tools and layers, so again; nothing fancy.

During my first week in Devine we not only created our very ‘first’ Photoshop images, but also our very first Flash animations.
The Flash animation I’m actually a bit proud of since I never used Flash before. Again it’s all very basic and its purpose is to learn to utilize the provided tools in Flash.

link to Flash animation (best to open this in a new tab):
http://webs.hogent.be/camerlinckx/FlowerGirl.html

More (advanced stuff) coming soon!

Ah. Time to show the first Photoshop creations we made in Devine, during our first week.

It’s all very basic; the two images are supposed to teach us how to work with some basic Photoshop features like how Layers work, how to use selections, how to color things, how to cut things out of a picture and drop them in another etc.  All very basic stuff for the people who’ve never used Photoshop before.

Flash animation following!

I ran across this long but informative webinar from Calumet Photo that discusses color management for photographers. It discusses profiling and calibration, tools, monitor types, and printing from Adobe CS4 (the principles are the same for other versions too). I found it to be very useful in reinforcing my knowledge of color management.

Here is the link.

Enjoy

I started a freelance gig for photographer Dan Kutler. He sent me a nice Hi-Res photo to retouch and add backgrounds to. The problem I had with the photo was the hair. On the right side of the girl’s hair she had some odd flyaways in combination with attempting to knock out the busy background, so I just had the subject. It was challenging and I wish I could have delivered. I just wish she was shot on a solid background and had proper light so I could mask her out properly in Photoshop and then ad a good background to is. So, I did what I could with the image. Take a look for yourself…Comments?

Bob the bird, mijn eerste werkje in photoshop.

]]> http://xphcx.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/mijn-eerste-werkje-in-flash/ Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:19:12 +0000 xpeterhardcorex http://xphcx.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/mijn-eerste-werkje-in-flash/

De opdracht was om een vrouwtje te maken dat een bloempje plukt en de blaadjes wegblaast. Dit is mijn eerste werkje in Flash met nog wat schoonheidsfoutjes.

In onze eerste les kregen we uitleg hoe we zulke figuren maken adhv de toolbox. Als alles was getekend moesten we onze creatie natuurlijke kunnen laten bewegen. Dus zo hebben we leren werken met de tijdlijn, met de keyframes…

I remember the first day that I got my copy Adobe CS. It was amazing. For the first time ever, I’d be able to use Photoshop and Illustrator. There was no way any of my designs wasn’t going to be executed. Then came the day that I learned how to use InDesign, and layouts became a breeze. “I should start my own magazines, layouts are super fun”, was all I could think. A few months later, my love for the Wacom tablet was established as I learned I could draw with a pen tool, and also ERASE. How Amazing? That’s when the unthinkable happened. A newer, better version of Adobe came out, and it had a Bridge (WHAT IS THAT) and designing seemed more difficult than ever. “If only I had the new version”…Time passed, and designing became easier by working around the solutions that had been made easier by the evolution of the Adobe design products, but my interest was peaked on the film production software. That’s about when CS3 came out, and I had to have the Master Collection. Web Design became my main interest, and knowing I could look at websites, ads and commercials, and legitimately think, “I can do that” was amazing. Now the software has evolved even further, and Adobe is better than ever, making my work more fun, and simpler. Why do I bring this all up? I love the idea that this design company built its empire, expanded beyond design barriers, and has become my favorite item on my Computer. I will never lose interest in stumbling about design and advertising. Just thinking aloud…

Canon EOS 5D 1/80 @ f/2.8 iso: 640 200mm

aside from the occasional fire call that comes across the scanner or my personal projects, i don’t get out to shoot that often. so when i do get the nod, i try my hardest to get something interesting, different, or at least something that’s pretty good. unfortunately those few and far between assignments i do get tend to be on the boring side making it a tall order to get something visually stimulating.

one such assignment came this afternoon when i was given a 15 minutes heads up to go and shoot a press conference at the mattoon police department office building. over the weekend the cops had to shoot some guy who was in the middle of a domestic dispute. being mattoon, that hasn’t happened for a while. in fact the police chief could not recall an instance in his 30 years on the force when an officer had to pull the trigger. that’s one of the good things about living in a small town. it’s safe.

anyway, wresting with the three broadcasters who were there, i managed to snag a few frames that weren’t too bad.

Canon EOS 5D 1/125 @ f/1.8 iso: 320

i’ve been going for that layered look lately. although this frame doesn’t really go with the story at all, it’s good practice to be on the prowl for things to shoot through like windows, mini blinds, smoke, bodies, fences…anything that gives depth.

Canon EOS 5D 1/125 @ f/2.8 iso: 500 w/200mm

being in the mood to over-do, i decided to shoot this press conference in RAW. until a few weeks ago i didn’t really have the ability to process raw images at work since i was working on photoshop 7. that’s right photoshop 7, the one from 02. i now have the entire adobe creative suite 4 at work which really gets me going. (NNEEERRDDD)

among some of the cool features i now have the ability to process raw images from my camera. it gives you more control and latitude in the post production stage and can ultimately save an otherwise lost image. in the end you get a better quality and better resolution image. although if you don’t have it in the camera, then no software can save it. for me it’s just nice to have more control tweaking and toning.

i particularly like being able to control the white balance afterwards. the camera does a really good job guessing (that’s right i shoot in auto white balance), but in raw you get to change it yourself to get it closest to what the light really looked like.

screen grab

Adobe Photoshop CS4
Adobe Systems made the Adobe Creative Suite 4 product family immediately availabile, as of 15 October. CS4 is the highly-anticipated release of industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Delivering radical breakthroughs in workflow efficiency – and packed with hundreds of innovative, time saving features – the new Creative Suite 4 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile.

Customers can choose from six new versions: Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Web Standard, Production Premium and Master Collection.

The combination of Creative Suite and the new capabilities of Adobe Flash Player 10, also available today (see separate press release) deliver new levels of creativity and expressiveness across media channels. Designers using the Adobe Creative Suite 4 product family will gain unprecedented creative control using the new expressive features and visual performance improvements in Adobe Flash Player 10 to deliver breakthrough Web experiences across multiple browsers and operating systems.

“Creative Suite 4 and Flash Player 10 introduce vital time-saving features, new levels of integration and the jaw-dropping innovations our design and developer customers expect from us,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president, Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe.

“CS4 continues to fulfill our promise to customers to break down more barriers in cross-media workflows, while also providing new services and collaboration tools that help them manage complex client demands.” As part of the CS4 product launch, the largest in Adobe’s history, also available today are brand new versions of Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, InDesign CS4, Illustrator CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4, Contribute CS4, After Effects CS4, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, Encore CS4, Soundbooth CS4 and Adobe OnLocation(tm) CS4.
Intuitive Workflows Improve Creative Efficiency

A simplified workflow in Adobe Creative Suite 4 enables users to design across media more efficiently by making it easier to complete common tasks and move content seamlessly among applications. InDesign CS4 includes a new Live Preflight tool that allows designers to catch production errors and a newly customizable Links panel to manage placed files more efficiently. The revolutionary new Content-Aware Scaling tool in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended automatically recomposes an image as it is resized, preserving vital areas as it adapts to new dimensions. An expanded version of Dynamic Link in CS4 Production Premium enables users to move and update content between After Effects CS4, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, Soundbooth CS4, and Encore CS4 without rendering, saving countless hours in production. With deep XMP metadata support, the production workflow is simplified, resulting in online content that gives viewers new ways to interact with and search for video, while giving content owners new opportunities to track and monetize content.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 brings 3D center-stage providing the ability to paint, composite, and animate 3D models using familiar tools in Photoshop CS4 Extended. Flash CS4 Professional now offers the ability to apply tweens to objects instead of keyframes, providing greater control over animation attributes. Also in Flash CS4 Professional, the new Bones tool helps create more realistic animations between linked objects. With a searchable library of more than 450 dynamically updated device profiles from leading manufacturers, Adobe Device Central CS4 enables users to easily test mobile content designed using many of the Creative Suite 4 products.

* Some products mentioned may allow you to access certain features that are hosted online (“online services”), provided you have a high-speed Internet connection. The online services, and some features thereof, may not be available in all countries, languages, and/or currencies and may be discontinued in whole or in part without notice. Use of the online services is governed by separate terms of use and by the Adobe Online Privacy Policy, and access to these services may require user registration. Some online services, including services that are initially offered at no charge, may be subject to additional fees. For more details and to review the terms of use and Online Privacy Policy, visit www.adobe.com.

New and Expanded Services Extend Capabilities for Online Collaboration