Graphics Feeds - English

There are a number of applications out there for managing your digital photos. Some of the applications have a pretty hefty price and yet one of the best applications is absolutely free.

Google recently released a beta of Picasa3. Obviously the price is right. As much as I work with digital photos, I've never settled on a "management" application. I'm not sure if this is because none of them do what I want or maybe I just have no desire to organize my photos. If you've seen my desk, you might think I have no desire to organize anything. :)

Google has put together a nice video that gives you an overview of the new and improved features. If you aren't sure if Picasa is right for you, this video is worth a watch. I've included it below.



Like most photo management applications, it will upload photo to an online photo album. This might be the biggest downside of Picasa since it only supports Picasa Web Albums and not some of the other more popular online resources. Probably the coolest new feature is the ability to make basic multimedia movies from your photos and upload them to YouTube.

One thing is sure, Google makes sure that Picasa supports as many Google resources as possible. It is a small download, so give it a try and see if it is right for you. If you have another application that you prefer for managing photos, leave a comment and tell us all about it.

This macro allows you to intuitively change the stacking order of elements.

Shift-select them in the order you need, and run the macro. You can force the last item selected to be the bottom of the stacking order, or the top. The other shapes will correspond.

This ability is important for certain industrial processes. You can now determine where on the final output material the device will start cutting, by ordering the objects in a specific way.

Channels allows you to quickly preview color separations, right inside the CorelDRAW workspace.

The font I wanted to present this week doesn't have a page all its own. But that just means you get a link with several fonts to download. That's not such a bad deal. Wanted Fonts has hundreds, if not thousands, of fonts available for download.

I wanted a kind of handwriting font today and I liked the look of Scribblicious. It looks as if someone has taken several strokes to make up each letter. It is listed as freeware, but read any usage restrictions carefully.

As I turn my attention toward the upcoming PowerPoint Live in San Diego in September, I am thinking about fine tuning those presentations which I will be giving as an instructor in Photography and Image Editing.

When speaking in public, many presenters like to have some music playing in the background during the time in which the audience is filing in and taking their seats. Often, when I am presenting and showing a series of photographic images. Occasionally, I set the mood with music.

 
Regional artists can be a wealth of topical theme music

One of the things I like to do is shop the location for vendors selling CDs of local musicians performing music with a regional flavor. You can often find these musicians selling at clubs where they are performing or small gift shops or cart vendors in the touristy areas. Where ever possible I like to buy directly from the artist. That way you can discuss your future use of the music and any copyright snags you might encounter.

Last year at PowerPoint Live, I lead a group of 15 intrepid photographers down Bourbon Street. The next day we edited the participants photographs live during a conference session. During the intro to the session, we played a Cajun tune from a CD purchased out of the guitar case of a local street performer.  The uniquely NOLA music  added greatly to the sense of place and complimented the photographs greatly.

"The United States Copyright Law defines a public place as any place where persons outside of "a normal circle of family and friends" are gathered. In other words, even though your event is closed to the general public, the members of your industry, in attendance, do form a public. They are not an informal gathering of family and friends. So, exhibitor booths, general stage presentations, cocktail parties and banquets, as well as other ambient music use, require the appropriate music licensing."
   ~ excerpt from BMI Web site

Whenever you play copyrighted music in public you may be subject to royalty fees. It is important to know what your rights are and how they intersect with the rights of the songwriter, performer and in some cases the record label.  This web site has some great information, albeit presented from the draconian view of the music publishing industry, on obtaining license to exhibit music in public at a meeting, convention, trade show or exposition.

If you plan to use music as a part of your presentation schema, it is important that you understand exactly when and how music may be played in public and when you are subject to nominal fees for doing so-if you have purchased a license to do so. Base fees start in the $135.00/year range. If you build presentations for clients it is important for you as a presentation professional to make your clients aware of licensing so that you can hopefully mitigate liability on your behalf.

I am an artist. A significant portion of my income comes from my visual art. Respect copyrights! They are the tenuous thread of income in many artists lives.  Quality future content depends upon responsible use of intellectual property.

Software to the Rescue

To this end, I turned to other avenues for providing music to augment my video and picture production. One solution is to use something like "Smart Sound" that come with various video editing packages.  I use Pinnacle and found some Smart Sound to provide background for my short film "Swans of Monticello" For a short film or presentation, it can provide a pleasing background that wears well.

If you don't mind, I'll do it myself!

The other thing you can do is create your own music. I purchased a Yamaha YPT-400.  With no formal training in keyboard or music really, I was able to leverage the automated and manual functions to produce a little background music for a time-lapse project I did for Badlands National Park. The video, Clearing Light, albeit short, shows how a little original music and some multi-track recording software can yield reasonable results.

Three solutions. Pay for the music, use canned music or create your own. In any case, you are adding depth to your presentation by incorporating appropriate, tasteful music to your visual offering.

Rikk Flohr © 2008

In CorelDRAW, an outline is only allowed to have a solid color. If you want something fancy like a fountain fill, you can't apply it to an outline.

But this is CorelDRAW and there is a way to do almost anything. Select the object with the outline you wish to fill and select Arrange | Convert Outline to Object or simply press Ctrl + Shift + Q and the outline will now be a fillable object. In fact, you could even add an outline to that object which gives you the effect of multiple outlines. This is a very basic feature, but it packs a very powerful punch in a number of different ways. Put it to use in your projects!

If you have shaky CorelDRAW skills or want to see how I'd build a vector key, watch the video below.

In 5 minutes, I cover many fundamental CorelDRAW functions.

I remember buying my first drive to burn CDs about 13 years ago. It cost over $2000 and would take a full 70+ minutes to burn a full disc. Things have changed drastically and now that disc can be burned in under 5 minutes by a drive costing less than $50.

Some day we'll talk about disc burners, but that isn't our topic today. Most people have a burner in their computer. When it comes to labeling the discs you burn, what do you use? I bet most of you still use a Sharpie. That might work great if you are just archiving personal data, but would you present that disc to a client with pride? Probably not with pride.

As designers, we want to impress our clients as best possible with everything we provide. That's why I think it is important to have a way to properly label the discs you burn. Yes, you can buy labels that print in any printer and apply them to the discs. This is a step up from the Sharpie, but I think you can do better. In the long run, it will even cost less!

How about buying an ink jet printer that can print directly on the discs? You'll need to buy discs made for printing. They come with both white and silver surfaces. When buying them in bulk, you can find them for less than 40 cents each. For not much more you can buy printable DVDs. Then you need a printer that can print on them. One such printer is the HP Photosmart Printer shown at right. You can certainly use it for printing more than discs, but maybe you use it only for printing discs since it isn't very expensive. If you are only printing discs with it, you should be able to print quite a few before having to replace the inks. My guess is that your total cost per disc will be less than a dollar. Don't you think it would be a lot more impressive to hand your clients a printed disc than something you scribbled on with a marker?

For those who need something that prints and duplicates in bulk, you might want to explore the Epson Discproducer. We just got one in our office and love it. If you are only printing, you can print as many as 60 discs an hour. But you can also have it duplicate discs before printing. The included software is very slick and informative. The machine is fun to watch. Best of all the discs look phenomenal!

Those of you who are regular readers know that I highly recommend that you use something other than Microsoft Internet Explorer for the majority of your Web browsing. My personal suggestion is Mozilla Firefox for its speed, features and security.

In the last few days there have been some other developers in the world of browsers. Microsoft has released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8. If you are developing content for the Web, you might want to give the new version of Internet Explorer a test drive. Remember, it is beta software and it is certainly not for everyday browsing. Even when it is released, it certainly won't be my first choice.

Today, Google release a beta version of their "Chrome" browser. It is certainly different than other browsers both in looks and under the hood. Google claims that other browsers were designed for text and pictures and have been modified to handle what users are doing on the Internet today. Chrome was developed for the Internet as it is today including video, heavy scripting, multiple tabs and much more. It is also released as open source so that any developer can work on the code. Google Chrome is also a beta release. I've given it a very quick test drive and there are some things I like and some things that will require me to adjust. It is definitely something that Web developers should download and use as part of their testing process. If you aren't developing for the Web, I don't think you need to rush out and try Chrome. Just keep it in the back of your mind because it could be a major player in a very short amount of time.

Layer handling has changed dramatically in CorelDRAW X4. Some people love it, others hate it.

What's the change? X4 has independent layers per page. For Example: you can have 3 layers on page 1, and 20 layers on page 2.

However, some users prefer consistent layer quantities and layer names from page to page, across the entire document.

This macro from Brian Davies allows comprehensive control over the flexible layer infrastructure introduced in CorelDRAW X4. In my opinion, it's the best of both worlds.

For today's tutorial I'm going to go down under to the Visionary Voyager site. David Mutch has created some great tutorials for Corel PHOTO-PAINT. For me, the Fire and Ice tutorials create the most stunning effects.

While the tutorials are a few years old, they work in Corel PHOTO-PAINT 9 and up. I'm sure there are a few commands that have slight differences, but you should be able to easily adjust for the newer versions. With a few variations on the steps provided, you should be able to create all kinds of cool effects with fire and ice!

Lars, a prominent CorelDRAW user wrote:

"I'd like to see a command for going to the first and last pages in a multi-page document.

We have the Page up and Page down key commands that flips the pages, but we also need a keyboard shortcut to go to the first and last pages of a document."

This macro allows you to quickly go to the first or last page of a multi-page CorelDRAW document.

I assigned the Home key to go to page 1, and the End key to go to the last page in the document.

Sometimes requests for a particular feature come in bunches. One that I've seen a lot recently is to have the ability to put objects on a path just like you can put text on a path in CorelDRAW. There is a way using Blend on a Path if the objects are more or less the same.

Unfortunately that won't do the trick if you have a number of different shapes you want on a path. That's where today's macro comes into play. Oberon's Fit Objects to Path gives you the ability to place selected objects along the path of your choice. Give it a try, it might be just what you need.

We have added a wide variety of clip art, textures, templates and more to the Graphics Unleashed Web site this week.

This artwork is geared towards those in the sign and vehicle wrap industries, but it can certainly be useful to other artists as well. Probably the coolest feature is taking a two-dimensional template for a vehicle wrap and turning it into a 3D rendering of the finished wrap with only a few clicks. Typically 3D software is baffling to me. But this is a task so simple that anyone can create a 3D rendering in only a couple of minutes.

So not only can you get the templates and artwork to create some amazing wraps, you can also create a rendering that is sure to convince your client to order the wrap. Check it out, I think you'll find something you can use!

The waning days of the butterfly exhibit at the Minnesota Zoo prompted me to go out and do a little end-of-season butterfly photography.  There was a tough day waiting for me as I was faced with the dreaded mile-high-blue sky. In addition, the exhibit overflowed with last-minute patrons hurrying to see the ragged shreds of the exhibit before it closes on September 1.

Those of you who follow my writings know that I have been hanging out at the Strobist's Blog a lot lately and I owe much of my recent technique expansion to subtle suggestions left there.  I set out with a single camera for this shoot,  a Canon 5D with a Canon 100 MM F2.8 Macro Macro and an MR-14EX Ring Light.

Butterfly Perched

The shot came out very nicely. I exposed the image on manual at F11 at 1/125th of second at ISO 100.  The distance to subject was approximately 14 inches. The distance to background was approximately 60 inches.  The camera was mounted on a monopod with the tip placed into my belt for a little added stability.  The settings yielded a background with muted tones of green and blue and completely dissolved the screen netting that encompasses the exhibit.

The MR-14EX Light was set at 1/4 Power to properly expose the butterfly and the blossom. The light falloff at this distance prevented much additional illumination of the background.  Because I was after rich colors, I underexposed slightly. This also helped with the white spots on the underside of the butterfly's wings which were aching to blow out. Even though the shot took place in late morning full sunlight, the tones are nice and even and the shadows non-existent.

The real trick was to find a blossom frequented by the insects and set up exposure and focus in advance.  Focus was manual to prevent any errant acquiring of the background or foreground elements. All that was left was to wait out a subject and patiently watch, finger on the shutter, for the angle and 'pose' to be just right.

The gear used for this picture.

The shot, captured in the field, was ported to Lightroom 2.0 for a modest amount of adjustment including a slight pull of the histogram to the black and some subtle cropping and vignetting. Normal saturation and sharpening were applied to the RAW file prior to generating this JPG.

All in all a solid effort of shooting on manual with manually adjusted flash, paying attention to distance to subject vs. distance to background and patience.  I am happy with the shot.

You can see more of my butterfly shots from the July shoot in my Gallery.

Rikk Flohr © 2008