The time of the season
September 30, 2009 by admin

It’s the time of the season – travel season, that is. And, today I kick it off with a trip to Photoshop World in Las Vegas! I’ll be attending three days of madness, mayhem and intense Photoshop learning, and you can be sure I’ll be bringing the best tips right back here.

I’ll be Photo blogging the conference in conjunction with Photoshop.com, and I’ll keep you updated here with photos, links, news and updates – and more Photoshop tips.

This is just the beginning of travel season for me; over the next six weeks I’ll be bringing your daily dose of Hoffman Art Design goodness from a variety of locations. You can bet I’ll have travel photos to post also! So, stay tuned…

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Adobe Bridge Favorites – a faster way to navigate
September 29, 2009 by admin

When you browse the internet, you create favorites within Safari, Firefox or Explorer, in order to give you a shortcut to sites that you visit frequently. Having these “favorites” saved and organized allows you to navigate quickly and easily to web sites you visit most often, without having to type long and cumbersome URLs into the address bar of the browser.

When you work with Adobe’s creative suite, and manage multiple projects on your computer, you can use Bridge CS4’s “favorites” feature in much the same way as you would create shortcuts in your browser. Bridge Favorites allows one-click navigation to all your commonly used file folders within your system.

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Cormorants – the fisherman’s companion
September 28, 2009 by admin

Cormorant-10 Mondays here at Hoffman Art Design are for the birds! And today, keeping with that theme, we are going to take a look at cormorants. As it happens, there are over 40 species of cormorants worldwide, and about a half dozen in the US, with the most common and widespread being the Double-crested Cormorant. Since that is the one that can be sound in my part of the US, that’s the one we’ll be seeing in today’s pictures!

Cormorants are somewhat related to the anhinga, whom we met a few weeks ago. Both are strong swimmers and dive for fish, and both tend to perch with their wings spread after prolonged periods in the water. Cormorants are easily distinguished from anhinga, once you know the key features. The most telling is the heavy yellow hooked bill of the cormorant. This bill is quite different from the needle-like bill we saw on the anhinga.

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Adobe InDesign and InCopy get a refresh to 6.0.4
September 23, 2009 by admin

Adobe Systems Incorporated today rolled out updates to their publishing flagship product, InDesign CS4, and its partner program InCopy.

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Adobe Releases Photoshop Elements 8 and Premier Elements 8
by admin

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced the release of Photoshop Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8, along with bundles and their "Plus" versions.

New features in Photoshop Elements 8 include:

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Browsing safely, browser updates, and a brief look forward – security news
by admin

Safe Browsing – Tip of the Week

This week’s tip comes courtesy of the Security Now! podcast, a great weekly treatise on all things secure. This is a really cool tip, thanks to Steve Gibson for producing a very informative podcast!

There is a “diagnostic page” on Google, that consolidates malware reporting of a given domain or site based on Google’s crawling of the website. It will give a report on the website, indicating whether Google’s web crawling bots have detected malware in the site or any of its links. The diagnostic page is accessible using the following URL text:

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Adobe Bridge CS4: How do I preview? Let me count the ways
September 22, 2009 by admin

It’s Tuesday again, and around these parts that means it’s time for another tutorial. Today, we will continue our exploration of Bridge, which I’ve been calling the Swiss Army Knife of the Creative Suite. In this series, we’ve begun to enumerate the many ways that Bridge is oh, so much more than a file browser.

Today’s tour leads us to the many varieties of viewing, reviewing, and previewing that Bridge offers within its interface. As we’ll see, the options are many, although some of the capabilities are not quite obvious, if not downright cloaked in obscurity.

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Black Skimmer: bemusing bird with a big bill
September 21, 2009 by admin

Skimmer-6 I just love Black Skimmers.

Rarely does a bird fit its name as well as they do, and equally rarely to you find a bird at once silly and graceful, gaudy yet plain, striking yet subdued. They can be one of the more entertaining shore birds, and have a knack for being one of the most frustrating as well.

Black skimmers are primarily a seabird, resembling in appearance and habits a sort of odd tern. They are found throughout the US Gulf coast (which is great for me, since I live in the Tampa bay area) and along the Atlantic coast up as far as Cape Cod, and south through the Caribbean and into South America. They are also found along the Pacific coast in southern California, down through Central and into South America.

The adults are black above and white below, which makes for a striking, if plain contrast. However, they are adorned with bright orange webbed feet, and a monstrous black and orange bill, which they employ to great advantage in the activity for which they are named: skimming.

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Transform again – and again, and again
September 17, 2009 by admin

image Last week’s tip focused on Photoshop’s Free Transform tool and the various ways in which Free Transform could be applied to combine all the power of every transformation tool in Photoshop’s toolbox, all at the tip of your fingers.

But wait, there’s more!

Yes, Photoshop is one of the most multi-dimensional wonders of modern technology. There are many ways to accomplish your tasks, and I’m here to provide you with some of the easier ones!

In NAPP’s User Forums, a member asked how to start with a small object in the center of an image, and create a spiral getting progressively bigger. Free Transform to the rescue! Except, in order to accomplish this effect, we’ll start at the outside and work our way in.

You’ll see why in just a moment.

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Weekly security roundup – Apple of my eye
September 16, 2009 by admin

Snow Leopard, we hardly knew ye :)

It seems Apple moved quickly to release an update to Mac OS X 10.6.1 – primarily, it would seem, to upgrade the Flash Player plug-in to the current 10.0.32.18. You may recall from last week’s security topic, that Apple’s initial release of Snow Leopard included an older version of Flash Player that was vulnerable to malicious attacks. Apple moved quickly to fix this, but with that response time, you have to wonder if this wasn’t an oversight as they were rushing to get Snow Leopard shipped. If you’ve made the move to Snow Leopard, make sure you get the update!

Apple had a busy week last week, however; with a flurry of releases.

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