Unhandled Perception

When I was choosing examples for this article I visited some design galleries and roundup posts and took screenshots of design details that are used (sometimes overused) in web design. I don’t encourage you to follow trends but rather develop your own style. Nevertheless, it is always useful to polish your Photoshop skills a bit more. Let’s get rockin’!

Well put together article on 5 techniques any web designer could use.

Link: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/…

You probably know what Photoshop disasters look like, but your photos can benefit from more subtle and elegant touch-ups. With these tools and techniques, you can sharpen, texturize, re-contextualize, and remove tourists, among other problems, from your shots worth saving.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/5555512/…

Seems that Adobe released Acrobat.com quietly. I saw a little buzz around it but not a whole lot. Acrobat.com is

Acrobat.com is a set of online services — file sharing and storage, a PDF converter, an online word processor, and web conferencing — you can use to create and share documents, communicate in real time, and simplify working with others.

Probably in an effort to compete with the many Software as a Service (SaaS) marketplace.

The one that had interested me was the Online PDF Converter that:

provides an online PDF converter so you can easily create Adobe® PDF documents from your existing files in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and many other applications. It’s as easy as selecting your file and clicking Create PDF.

Until I remember that I run a PDF Printer on my system that lets me ‘print’ to PDF from any application. What would interest me, as a developer, is the ability to send documents to Acrobat.com to create, and return PDFs on the fly from a website. Gonna look around to see if they allow this. If not, I have no real interest.

Is anything else worth a second look at Acrobat.com? Buzzword? ConnectNow? Share? MyFiles?

Link:
https://www.acrobat.com/

This year we decided to try something a little different. In the past, we’ve invited some of the best designers and trainers in the industry to share their top secrets. This usually took a lot of bribing and just a little physical coercion—okay, a lot of physical coercion. Most of them just didn’t want to give away their most-guarded secrets.

This time around we decided to go straight to the horse’s mouth: the Senior Product Managers at Adobe. We have never seen so many people so eager to share all of their favorite tips. They were almost breaking down our doors. (In fact, we’ve had to request a few restraining orders, but that’s a story for another time.) And not only that, everyone on their teams wanted to get involved, as well: Product Managers, Evangelists, and even the janitors. We’re glad to report that we’ve survived their barrage of tips, and we’re proud to be able to share those tips with you. Please enjoy.

Link:
http://www.layersmagazine.com/…

As a small and fast PDF viewer, Foxit Reader currently has over 50 million users all around the world. After keeping users waiting for almost two months, Foxit Reader 3.0 has been released and introduces many fascinating new features such as multimedia design and Foxit OnDemand Content Management.

Whats New:

• Enticing Multimedia Design – Now users can not only play multimedia in Foxit Reader, but also are empowered to add, edit or delete multimedia files with the incredible Movie Tool and Sound Tool.
• Attachment Panel – Lists all the attached files in the PDF document, and provides a number of common options that helps users manage the attachments, such as opening, deleting and adding description to the attachments. Users can also change the security settings when opening an attachment in this panel.
• Thumbnail Panel – Shows thumbnail images for each PDF page and allows users to quickly view relevant portions of a PDF file. Now users can navigate through PDFs with page thumbnails.
• Layout Panel – Lists PDF layers in the document, allows users to control the display of some certain content areas.
• Metric Unit Support – Within the preferences dialog box it gives users the option to set the unit of page dimension in either metric system or imperial system.
• Auto-scrolling with Middle Mouse Button – In the Hand Tool reading mode, users can perform auto-scrolling by holding the middle mouse button/wheel mouse button down.
• Awe-Inspiring Foxit OnDemand Content Management – This new add-on enables users to organize, share and collaborate on documents and forms online. Users can upload from Foxit Reader or send documents with ease. Advanced features include workflow driven document sharing, revisions of documents, CollabRoom for group collaboration.
• Firefox Support – With Firefox Plugin, users can view and work with PDF files loaded in Foxit Reader with Firefox web browser.

I have been using this for years and its works great. One of the best things about FoxIt is it isn’t a resource hog like Adobe Acrobat reader and FoxIt starts in seconds…

Link:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

This conversion service will convert to text Adobe PDF files that are in English and most West European languages.

If it comes from Adobe it will probably do the best job since its their format.

Link:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/…

This is the main interface of the online version of Adobe Photoshop called Photoshop Express. Once you have uploaded an image, through the My Gallery manager, you can access and modify your images. What Adobe has done is make this as dead simple as possible. Nothing too complex, but still pretty powerful.

The menu of options seems limiting at first but when you get into modifying your image you will see it covers pretty much everything need to do (at least for the person using an online version of Photoshop). What they have done that is very cool is when you apply or use one of the menu items it becomes checked and that option is applied. You can simply uncheck the item to see your original image.

Everything is done through an AJAX, interactive, interface which means things are done without having to refresh or reload pages.

I changed the color of the corvette in the image with two clicks: select Pop Color from the menu and then select one of the preset choices.

Did I mention all menu items, when selected, give you 6 or 7 choices to try so you don’t have to worry about figuring out what the settings should be.

Link:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopexpress/…

Title says it all. A collection of very high quality, print quality, brushes for Adobe Photoshop. Some of these brushes are amazing.

Link:
http://…/100-awesome-high-resolution-photoshop-brushes/

Not a huge selection but they are very well written and produce some very cool effects. For all you Photoshop freaks out there this is a website to bookmark.

Samples:

• Advanced Glow
• Snow and Ice
• Chrome
• Message Strip
• Old-world look

Link:
http://psdtuts.com/

Man am I glad to finally dump Adobe PDF Reader. The straw that broke the camels , besides the 110Meg+ install, was the constant and annoying updater. In comes Foxit reader to the rescue with its very small under 2Meg install and fast opening of PDF files.

Run don’t walk and remove Adobe’s bloatware and grab Foxit.

Link:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

How Adobe’s Photoshop Was Born: “Photoshop was not the result of an elaborate skunk works in the depths of Adobe. Rather, it was developed by Thomas Knoll and his brother, John.”

Link:
http://siliconuser.com/?q=node/10

I like it! Kuler is nothing more than a color scheme library where users submit color schemes. For anyone looking to design something, like a website, Kuler can make locating a color scheme an enjoyable process. If you’re colorblind like me, its a little toturous, but useful nontheless.

Link:
http://kuler.adobe.com/

The top 5 new features in Flash CS3: “After digging into Flash CS3 a bit and talking with Richard Galvan, the new technical product manager for Flash, I’ve come up with 5 new features that will help both developers and designers who are new to the CS3 version. Flash gained a lot from the Adobe-Macromedia merger, and this first version should give people using Flash a lot of things to cheer about. I’ve also got some screenshots of the new features in the Flash CS3 Features Gallery.”

Link:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=336