CreativePro.Com How-Tos

Digital Video How-To: Add Special Effects in Final Cut Express

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 03:05:14 -0700

This story is taken from "50 Fast Final Cut Express Techniques."

To buy this book click here.

Illustrator How-To: Understanding the Zen of the Pen

admin — Thu, 06 May 2004 23:42:48 -0600

This story is taken from "The Adobe Illustrator CS Wow! Book."

Your first time working with Adobe Illustrator (or any drawing program) can be full of surprises. Lines and curves spring to life, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. And while Illustrator gives you precise control of line length and corner angle, untrained hands can lose control over these elements rather quickly.

Manage iPhone Photos

Editor in Chief — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:13:34 -0700

Editor's Note: The following article is an excerpt from Take Control of Your iPhone Apps, a $10 electronic book available for 30% off specially for CreativePro.com readers (dropping the price to only $7).

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Easy Fixes for Microsoft Word Formatting in InDesign

Editor in Chief — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:22:12 -0700

This article originally appeared on InDesignSecrets.com, which recently introduced free membership. Benefits include access to restricted content and discounts on goods and services.

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Design How-to: A Better Newsletter

admin — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 02:50:49 -0700

This story is taken from "Before & After Page Design".

You can buy this book on Amazon.com. Click here to go directly to the book.

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Design How-To: Working with Photos

admin — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 02:20:21 -0600

This story is taken from "Before & After" Magazine.

Creativepro.com readers can subscribe to "Before & After" at a discount. Click here to learn more.

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Give Portrait Photos the Spa Treatment

Editor in Chief — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:17:46 -0700

I'm a believer in subtle, gentle portrait retouching. In this how-to, I'll show you how to downplay wrinkles, brighten teeth, and give someone a more even complexion -- as if they've been to a really good spa.

Some of the retouching tools you'll use are layer masks, blend modes in the Layers panel, and the Clone Stamp tool.

Click the image below to open the tutorial movie in a new window.

Safely Export Pictures from QuarkXPress

Editor in Chief — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:19:46 -0700

Reproduced with permission of Planet Quark

Adjustments applied in QuarkXPress’s Picture Effects palette (Window> Show Picture Effects) exist as part of the QuarkXPress project file -- they do not change the original source pictures.

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Design Tips: Making Memorable Book Covers

admin — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 03:37:12 -0700

This story courtesy of BookTech magazine. For more information click here.

More books are being produced than ever before. That's good -- and bad. If you're a book buyer, the choices seem to be limitless. But if you're a book publisher, that means the competition for readers' eyes and wallets is keen.

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Combine Image Creatively in Photoshop

Editor in Chief — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:51:49 -0700

One of the most rewarding projects you can tackle in Photoshop is combining images. Whether you're swapping skies, creating a collage, or building a panorama, it's a useful procedure that's also a lot of fun.

In this tutorial you'll learn how to fade one image into another using a gradient mask, and then you'll discover a new twist on the classic oval vignette collage.

Fade One Image into Another

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Photoshop Crop Tool Tutorial

Editor in Chief — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:33:15 -0600

Sure, you already know how to use Photoshop's crop tool to remove the edges of a photograph. And you probably know how to use it to straighten an image. But did you know that the crop tool can temporarily hide portions of an image that you can later restore?

Watch and learn! For the full-size video, go to YouTube.

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Prep and Color Scanned Drawings in Photoshop

Editor in Chief — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:13:57 -0600

Since it opened in 1996, design studio The Chopping Block has always done things a bit differently. (Just look at its mission statement: 'World Domination Through Graphic Design".) Now Principal/Designer Matthew Richmond is sharing his technique for taking hand-drawn artwork from paper to Photoshop, and yes, it's a little different.

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WordPress for Creative Pros, Part 1

Editor in Chief — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:56:34 -0600

WordPress's early claim to fame was as a tool that made it easy to create and maintain simple blogs. If that were all it did, it would still be useful for creative pros, since a blog can be a good way to promote yourself.

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Composite Unique Landscapes in Photoshop

Editor in Chief — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:40:43 -0600

This article is provided courtesy of Peachpit Press. All text and images © Dan Moughamian, unless otherwise noted.

This article details useful techniques for creating surreal composite images in Photoshop CS4. We all have our own definition of what it means for something to be "surreal," but the idea is to bring elements together seamlessly that you traditionally don't associate with one another.

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One Good Kern Deserves Another

Editor in Chief — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:29:54 -0600

The old saw that "it's the little things that count" was surely coined by a typographer, and few things are littler than kerning adjustments. Consider this: A 1/100 em kerning adjustment applied in 24-point type results in a movement equal to the width of a human hair.

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