objects

This week, I shift back to Illustrator. In which I explore one of the oldest---not to mention, one of my favorite---features in that particular piece of software: blends. These things were introduced waaaaaaaay back in Illustrator 88 (which came out in 1988, when I was a mere child of 26 and Guns N' Roses played its best hand with "Sweet Child O' Mine," not that I was paying all that much attention to the song thing because I was a nerd using Illustrator). Between you and me, blends were originally Illustrator's bizarre response to FreeHand's automatic gradients (which Illustrator didn't add until a few years later). These days, you probably won't use blends to make an everyday-average gradient backdrop. I mean really, what the feck's the point? But blends're useful as a sack of srewdrivers for creating all varieties of intermediate objects. Which are precisely what we need to fabricate this week's topic, shooting stars.

Assuming you're still with me, here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

About a dozen years ago, I engaged in the only cosmetic surgery of my life (so far!), LASIK. It corrected my far vision. But now that my aging crystalline lens is as impliable as a piece of beef jerky, I require reading glasses. And there's not a thing Photoshop can do about it.

Photoshop is similarly incapable of correcting a photograph that was captured or digitized out of focus. Consider the following examples. In the first, the image is simulated to be out of focus using Photoshop's powerful (but not Top 40) Lens Blur filter. In the second, I slather on a heaping helping of the Smart Sharpen filter with little evidence of positive transformation, not to mention lots of clipped highlights and shadows.

Compare that to the same image as it was actually captured by Jason Stitt of the Fotolia image library. With accurate focus at its disposal, the Smart Sharpen filter is capable of rendering tactile detail, even with a tiny Radius value (the number after the slash below).

Read more » 

Do me a brief favor and ignore this feature's name. Smart objects aren't all that smart. And they aren't objects. In other words, smart objects aren't "smart objects."

What "smart objects" are is envelopes. The kind that hold things. And keep them safe. Place an image or vector file into one of these envelopes, and nothing you do can cause that file harm. Which means you can apply nondestructive transformations, nondestructive filters, nondestructive everything. The world is your pixel-based oyster. Read more »