Photoshop Cafe

PhotoshopCAFE Presents:

It’s been exactly three weeks since the Photoshop World Convention in Las Vegas. I haven’t had a chance to write a thing about what I had seen and what products we had a chance to look at and bring back with us from the convention.

I’ve tested out some of the products we brought back like Fluid Mask 3, the #1 still-image masking tool and SiteGrinder 2 which turns Adobe Photoshop into an easy-to-use and powerful website design and production tool. I’m also going to take a look at LicenseStream, a product by ImageSpan that lets you manage the rights, permissions, and licenses for your photos and videos.

The product I did get a chance to test out and use in depth was the training video that I received from Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe. The Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration Tutorial DVD he hand us at the conference has saved me hours and hours of website design work.

This training tutorial has been the most useful tool for me as a web designer. Yes, I’ve seen videos on YouTube that helped me in certain areas of what I do but the Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration Tutorial Video from Colin Smith helped me in ALL areas of what I need to do for the Photoshop designs that I created.

Mr. Smith also gave us “Flash CS3 for Designers” to try out and I am excited about this DVD as well since we are finding out more and more that our clients really want to add some Flash on their websites. I have only scratched the surface when it comes to Flash, but I know that Mr. Smith will teach me quite a bit more of what I need to know to help our clients!

So, if you are searching for a tutorial video that will help you in your web design skills, I highly recommend Colin Smith’s PhotoshopCAFE Training Tutorials. You can find his Tutorials by visiting http://www.photoshopcafe.com/.

Take a look and browse around the site. He has some useful snippets of videos for products like the new CS4 products, CS3, Lightroom and much, much more!

Adobe Launches Creative Suite 4

Adobe this morning outlined the offerings in the companies new Creative Suite 4. For Web Designers, graphics designers and multimedia producers; each suite offers something for everybody. A Master suite is available which combines the design, web and production suites.
For more infomation, check out the article at http://www.techtalkradio.com/articles/adobecs4launch.html

ANSI versus Unicode

After our radio show, we received a call from Rudy. He wanted to know about ANSI…

The American National Standards Institute is an organization that promotes standards. One of them was the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set (letters, numbers, and symbols) that computers use. One major draw back to ASCII was you could only have 256 different characters.

Unicode allows for up to 65,536 different characters. In the past, Unicode was not compatible with all operating systems. If you are using a current operating system, I expect you should not be concerned about choosing Unicode.

if you say it, you could serve time

A reminder that “free speech” does not have a universal definition…

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Malaysian blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin was arrested under The Internal Security Act which allows for detention without trial because his articles had insulted Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.

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An American blogger has been sentenced to three months’ jail for accusing a Singapore judge of “prostituting herself during the entire proceedings, by being nothing more than an employee of Mr Lee Kuan Yew and his son and carrying out their orders”…

The sentencing Justice said to him: “The rights of freedom of speech and expression are qualified and… do not entitle you to insult Justice Ang in the way that you have done.”

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We’ve all been told we should “think before we speak”…and that applies to any, and all types of, communication. The rules are not the same all over the world.

(It’s one of the reasons I have a blog hosted in a country where it is very difficult for it to be removed from the internet.)

free courses from Stanford

Stanford is offering “ten courses from Stanford’s School of Engineering…including the three-course introductory sequence in Computer Science…free of charge.”

Introduction to Computer Science
Programming Methodology CS106A
Programming Abstractions CS106B
Programming Paradigms CS107

Artificial Intelligence
Introduction to Robotics CS223A
Natural Language Processing CS224N
Machine Learning CS229

Linear Systems and Optimization
The Fourier Transform and its Applications EE261
Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems EE263
Convex Optimization I EE364A
Convex Optimization II EE364B