September, 2004 | CreativePro Network

Creative Fuel: Evaluating Good Design Objectively

Fall is my favorite time of the year. Sure, I enjoy leaf peeping and bulb planting, but autumn has additional attractions for me. Because summer is over and a new school year is starting, it has always been, for me, an opportunity to reflect and renew. By the time January and the depths of winter […]

Photoshop How-To: Retouching Images with Bert Monroy, Part 2

This story is excerpted from “Commercial Photoshop with Bert Monroy, published by New Riders. In the first part of this excerpt from his book “Commercial Photoshop with Bert Monroy,” Photoshop artist extraordinaire Bert Monroy showed his image-retouching techniques for repositioning elements, adding content, cleaning up highlights, and eliminating items while enhancing others. In this second […]

Framed and Exposed: Buying a Digital Camera, Part 6

Over the last five installments of this column, you have been presented with a barrage of questions and options related to choosing a digital camera. If you’ve been following along, you’ve asked yourself what type of shooting you do, what features you think you want, what you need in terms of size and weight. After […]

Acrobat How-to: Traditional Proofreading in PDF

It is interesting to note the advances that have been made in the concept of softproofing over the past couple of years. Way back at Seybold San Francisco in November 2001, I sat on a panel discussing PDF Workflows. A question from the audience asked about softproofing. At that time I responded that at GTS […]

The Digital Dish: Making Headlines, Not Setting Them

Most creative professionals have a hard time explaining the intricacies of their jobs to family and friends. This is especially true for typographers. Details such as the differences between type families, font widths, x-heights, or superscripting are lost on an acquaintance who barely knows the distinction between smart and dumb quotes. So it was quite […]

Photoshop How-To: Retouching Images with Bert Monroy, Part 1

This story is excerpted from “Commercial Photoshop with Bert Monroy, published by New Riders. What is retouching, anyway? Smoothing over a scratch in a negative or getting rid of red-eye reflection are obvious examples of retouching. But it’s also adding elements that were never there to begin with or eliminating those that are distracting to […]

iView MediaPro 2.6: Quick Cataloging of Many Media for Both Platforms

The best media-creation tools in the world are of dubious value if you’ve amassed so much media that you can’t find the particular image, illustration, or video clip that you need. For a while, iView MediaPro has been one of the best media cataloging programs available. Now with version 2.6, the Windows and Mac versions […]

The Art of Business: In Praise of the Cursed Partnership

Friendship, so the adage goes, doubles happiness and halves the pain, and if all is dandy, the same can be said of professional partnerships. But a partnership gone bad, even more so than friendship, can turn that adage on its head; you can say adios to a friend, but you may be stuck with an […]

Illustrator How-To: Using Stroke Offsets for Depth Effects

This video tutorial is excerpted from “Total Training Inc.” Total Training has many more titles like this one. Click here to learn more. To make text come alive, add stoke outlines to it. But to make text stand out, add depth to it with offset strokes. It’s a familiar look often seen in comic book […]