Greta Cloutier

Inside Web Design: Creating Animated GIFs with Illustrator 8 and ImageReady 2

For our example, we'll use Illustrator's Blend tool to create the foundation graphics and then export the graphics as a Photoshop file and bring them into ImageReady for animation.

Inside Photoshop: Adding Natural Textures to Graphics

In recent issues, we've shown you various ways to create texture for your graphics. Following in that same vein, this month we'll show you one of the easiest ways to apply texture to your graphics--scanning. This technique has been put to a lot of use to create graphics that look more natural or environmentally friendly.

Add Form and Texture with the Lighting Effects Filter

One of Photoshop's most useful design filters is Lighting Effects. It allows you to apply a variety of lighting scenarios to your graphics as well as to textures. For such a useful filter, it's not covered well in any Adobe literature or even the Help section.

Make Your Vector Lines Look More Organic

Lines seem quite simple, but drawing them in Photoshop can produce less than stellar results, especially if you don't have a Wacom tablet. In this article, we'll show you some effects that can be applied to lines, whether you import those lines or paths in from Illustrator, or create your own line art in Photoshop.

Calculate Your Way to Better Images

Photoshop's Calculations command hasn't been a real attention-getter. Nonetheless, it still holds interesting possibilities for enhancing images both technically and creatively.

Using Curve Control to Enhance Image Quality

Among the numerous methods of image correction, Photoshop's Curves feature is still one of the best. By learning to master curves, you'll be able to improve color casts, enhance image detail, and adjust the contrast of an image, all from a single dialog box. A lot of color correcting is subjective and dependent on what you want to enhance in a given image.

Managing Your Images

Picture management is an important part of every project. Since the images inside your QuarkXPress documents are just low-resolution placeholders, as illustrated in Figure A, knowing the location of the real images is crucial to getting good output. When it's time to print the document, QuarkXPress locates the original image and uses it instead of the low-resolution version.

Creating Synthetic Environments

(Element K) Artificially creating scenes can be a challenge and one that's called for frequently when working with stock photos. For this exercise, we'll primarily focus on creating the sand and sea effects with the help of the Emboss and Plastic Wrap filters.

Souped Up Super Step And Repeat

(Element K) Super Step And Repeat is a cool new XTension included with the QuarkXPress 4.1 update. While QuarkXPress already has a Step And Repeat command, this new one lets you quickly and easily duplicate items, while simultaneously specifying transformations to them.

The Convoluted Path to Symmetry

(Element K) Creating symmetrical objects is something computers are typically quite good at. If you've worked with illustration packages like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand, then you know it's not a particularly difficult task. There's usually a tool you can use to reflect or flip the angle of an object. Well, not so with QuarkXPress.

Step-by-Step Image Salvage

Quite frequently you'll be given less than stellar scanned images to work with, so it's useful to know several enhancement strategies that will boost an image's overall quality. In this article, we'll take you through the general process we used to correct our original image.