Pariah Burke's List: _GUPSP

Today we are happy to release Health and Beauty Photoshop Brushes: a free set of 67 Photoshop brushes ranging in resolution from 69 to 2463 pixels. The set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 and CS3 (you can use it in Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP and Paint.NET, too). The brushes were designed by Silvia Bukovac Gasevic, the creative mind behind graphics-illustrations.com, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Adobe's Photoshop Touch destroys the claim that tablets are no good for content creation, as well as being the first tablet adaptation of major desktop software that doesn't suck.

For all their success, tablets still come with apps that don't measure up to their desktop equivalents. Not one major desktop software maker has tried to crack through the hardware limitations to create a tablet app with the best functions of its desktop equivalent. When it comes to productivity apps on a tablet, most users still have to make do with glorified phone apps blown up to fill a tablet screen.

The FREE Web Font Plug-in brought thousands of WebINK® Web Fonts to Adobe® Photoshop®. With the update, this professional tool now includes hundreds of additional Google™ Web Fonts to enhance your website design creativity.

Web Fonts from both Google and WebINK are available FREE-of-charge for use in your Photoshop website mockups. Use the Web Font Plug-in and gain immediate, easy access to the web fonts you want, directly in Photoshop.

Download the FREE Web Font Plug-in, and start designing today.

For customers who prefer to remain on the current licensing model, we will continue to offer our individual point products and Adobe Creative Suite editions as perpetual licenses. With regards to upgrades, we are changing our policy for perpetual license customers. In order to qualify for upgrade pricing when CS6 releases, customers will need to be on the latest version of our software (either CS5 or CS5.5 editions). If our customers are not yet on those versions, we’re offering a 20% discount through December 31, 2011 which will qualify them for upgrade pricing when we release CS6.

Adobe recently announced Creative Cloud, which represents a shift in focus from software sales to a subscription model. For $49.99 per month subscribers will have access to the full range of Creative Suite programs as well as additional online services and community resources. This article is the first of two where I explore the reasons behind Adobe’s recently announced shift from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud and its implications for the company and the users of its products.

Adobe launched the Beta of the file storage/sharing part of its Creative Cloud initiative, which will eventually include a subscription to the Creative Suite software and other features for $49.99 per month. Here's the Twitter steam of my first impressions as I tested out the new service.

I also know that the clearest message you can send any company is not to buy their product and I am not suggesting in any way that we intentionally don’t buy Adobe products, but I am afraid for many people, including many of the Photoshop users I represent, that will be the case. Photoshop CS4 will wind up being their last version of Photoshop ever, and I for one would hate to see that happen. I think that would be a lose/lose for everybody.

Whether you're an expert, or just starting out, Wiley has a book that can help you get the most from your CS5 software, including InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. And through the end of the year, we are offering a 30% discount on all of the books listed on this page.

The discount will be automatically applied during checkout. If you do not see your discount applied, please enter CS530 in the Promotion Code field.

How do you feel about this kind of altering of photos of models and celebrities? Do you agree with those who want to label retouched images like these because they may promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image and contribute to eating disorders? Why or why not?

A Ralph Lauren ad, featuring a model with hips narrower than her head — so cartoonish, so grotesque, so right for Halloween — has become the latest focus of the already ongoing criticism of digitally altered fashion spreads, even though it ran only in Japan. Foes see such images as harming women by promoting a standard of beauty so false that it can be achieved solely by manipulating a photograph of an already slender model. This image is an extreme example of what happens to many ads, a practice that has become so dubious that some governments are taking action. Should ads using electronically altered images be banned?

“We’re just after truth in advertising and transparency,” Mr. Matlins said. “We’re not trying to demonize Photoshop or prevent creative people from using it. But if a person’s image is drastically altered, there should be a reminder that what you’re seeing is about as true as what you saw in ‘Avatar,’ ” the science-fiction movie with computer-generated actors and visual effects.

The algorithm developed by Dr. Farid and Mr. Kee statistically measures how much the image of a person’s face and body has been altered. Many of the before-and-after photos for their research were plucked from the Web sites of professional photo retouchers, promoting their skills.

The algorithm is meant to mimic human perceptions. To do that, hundreds of people were recruited online to compare sets of before-and-after images and to determine the 1-to-5 scale, from minimally altered to starkly changed. The human rankings were used to train the software.

His tool, Dr. Farid said, would ideally be a vehicle for self-regulation. Information and disclosure, he said, should create incentives that reduce retouching. “Models, for example, might well say, ‘I don’t want to be a 5. I want to be a 1,’ ” he said.

Saving Photoshop files of size 1GB on up has long been a productivity-killing exercise, with really big files taking many minutes to save, because Photoshop has always insisted on doing single-threaded image compression when saving files.

So it didn’t matter if you had a fast RAID capable of 1000 MB/sec— the Save ran at the speed at which one CPU core could compress the image— perhaps 80MB/sec or so on a fast machine.

Create your own 3D maps with only one click! Every shape is possible and delivers a professional result. Ideal for web graphics, infographics or presentations.

Choose between three different directions (left, right or frontal). The tileable texture can be moved unlimited and the shadows and layers of earth are placed on single layers, so that they can be edited every time. Then create your own personal terrain with the 30 detailed bonus elements, which most of them are editable, too.

Please also watch the Video Presentation and the screenshot examples. Surely there will be an inspiration for your next project with 3D Map Generator in it.

In this episode, A.J. demonstrates how to put type on a path in Photoshop.

Want a sneak peak at Photoshop CS6? Check out these videos--before they get pulled down. If you don't speak Spanish, you can get a good idea of the new features demoed just by watching.

In these 2-hour work­shops you’ll learn pow­er­ful spe­cial effect tech­niques you can employ in just a few steps in Photoshop to jazz up pho­tographs, fliers, brochures, signs, and any type of per­sonal or pro­fes­sional project. Among other things you will learn to: turn any photo into a Polaroid, type or paint in liq­uid, carve text and sym­bols into stone, burn text and sym­bols into wood, and instantly turn any photo or screen cap­ture into the face of an iPad. All within Adobe Photoshop CS4/CS5/CS5.1.

Here, we’ll composite a photo inside the silhouette of another. This is an effect I’ve been seeing a lot lately, used everywhere from movies and TV to magazines and the Web. The reason, I think, is that it definitely can look pretty cool and is really not that hard of an effect to create if you have the right images.


Step One:
Start by opening the image we’re going to build the silhouette from. You can download the Chapter 3 archive from the kelbytraining.com site, which contains the images used in this tutorial. Here’s an image that has nice drama to it and has the subject on a white background, which will make it easier to extract the silhouette shape.

Step Two:
Open the Channels panel (found under the Window menu), press-and-hold the Command (PC: Ctrl) key, and click on the RGB channel to load the luminosity as a selection.

This commercial isn't real, neither are society's standards of beauty.

Unimpressed by Adobe Systems' Creative Cloud, its forthcoming $50-per-month subscription plan? Adobe wants to change your mind.

The company offered some new details today to show people that the Creative Cloud plan gets people access to more than just the full Creative Suite (CS) Master Collection and tablet-oriented Touch programs. Specifically, according to Scott Morris, senior director of product marketing on Adobe's digital media team, there are these elements:

When the Creative Cloud goes live this spring it will be accompanied by Creative Suite 6, Adobe Touch Apps, Muse 1.0 and a preview version of Adobe Edge. Adobe Edge is Adobe’s new HTML5 motion and interaction design tool that is bringing Flash-like animation to Websites and mobile apps using the latest capabilities of HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Adobe Muse is the company’s product that enables graphic designers to create HTML Websites without writing code.