I took part in the 10-Week Photoshop Course, and am doing a 10-Week Illustrator Course in progress now. They are great! A 10-Week Flash Course is starting July 14, and more info can be found here: http://creativetechs.com/freeflashcourse.

I found the teaching methodology to be very good for me… your milage may vary. The ability to communicate with the presenters via twitter or the GoToWebinar app used for the classes provides feedback, so questions can be answered… my big gripe with most online or DVD classrooms.

If you cannot be available for the 11 am Pacific Daylight Time classes (they run about 2 hours, counting Q&A following the 60 minute class) the classes and any necessary files can be downloaded a few days after the event, for a fee. I’ve subscribed to both the Photoshop and the Illustrator courses, as I’ve not been able to attend all of them, and I like having them available later, to repeat if I need a reminder.

An alternative is for you to record the classes yourself. CreativeTech is fine with that, as long as you don’t post them on the ‘net or share with others.

All courses are using CS4 apps, but if you are using an earlier version, you can still participate. A lot of the information will apply to earlier versions, and during the Q&A, or even during the course, you can ask about earlier versions.

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OK, most of us know that we should not take a jpeg image and save it, edit it and save again.

Want to know why? Here’s a little video called Generation Loss by hadto ib vimeo. He saved a jpeg, and saved again with slightly more compression. 600 times! And made the individual images into a video!

Generation Loss from hadto on Vimeo.

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Where’s the Ơ? or the Ű??

John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts

John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts is a great tool, a comprehensive PDF showing how to find nearly any special character in any font on either Mac or Windows. The 16-page PDF includes cheatsheets for accented characters, ligatures, punctuation, currency, legal symbols, math, and greek symbols. Print out the pages for the characters you forget most often, and post them near your computer.

Keystrokes are listed for Mac and Windows, as well as HTML codes for the web. There is also a section on special non-printing characters in QuarkXPress, and a handy typographer’s glossary.

PopChar

Another alternative is to use PopChar(EUR 29.99), which lives in the menu bar and when clicked provides a window listing more special characters than I have ever seen before. Click on a character and it will insert into your open document, wherever your cursor is located. It also provides a font list, so you can select a character in any font installed on your computer. If the font you are using does not have the special character you need, you can substitute one from another font easily.

Differences between the two

“John Brandt’s Special Character Shortcuts” contains only those characters that can be reached via keyboard shortcuts. PopChar displays ALL special characters and can insert all of them — even if they do not have any keyboard equivalents.

John Brandt’s table contains the shortcuts for the U.S. keyboard. Many of these do not apply to keyboards for other languages, such as German, French, or Spanish (to name just a few). The shortcuts are also useless for all those who use custom or special-purpose keyboard layouts (e.g., Dvorak or the Mac’s “Unicode Hex Input” layout). PopChar is independent of the language or keyboard layout. Even better: If a character has a keyboard equivalent on the currently used keyboard, PopChar displays it when you select the character.

My only gripe with PopChar is that you have to renew your license every 2 years, albeit at a reduced upgrade fee.

CORRECTION! Gunther Blaschek, the developer of PopChar, reminded me that you need to renew ONLY if you want to continue to get updates and upgrades. If you are happy with the current version, no renewal is necessary.

For me, I want to have the latest version. Gunther has been improving PopChar continually since the first version, and it is a much better app than it once was. I don’t need to use it often, but when I do, it is a HUGE time-saver.

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MacFixit’s lead article today addressed a couple of dissimilar subjects, unusually.

First, in some cases the finder may not load after connecting a 3rd-party external drive. The menu bar may “flicker” or desktop icons may disappear and reappear. The article has a link to solutions, which include making sure the computer name in Sharing prefs is not blank, and that the computer name includes only certain ASCII characters. Changing Time Machine settings may help, as well. Apple posted information here.

If your Adobe apps are launching slowly after the Mac OS X 10.52 update, clearing font caches may help. Smasher is a good tool for clearing font caches, or Linotype’s FontExplorer X (Tools > Clean System Font Caches and Tools > Clean Application Font Caches). The article includes a link to Managing fonts with FontExplorer X.

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Macworld.com has a very interesting article posted 21 February, explaining how to use the new features in iPhoto 08 to keep your images organized effectively. See the article here.

Importing your photos is very different. You can now import just the photos you want from your camera or memory card. Command-click on the photos you want, then click Import Selected. iPhoto will add the images to your library, and offer to delete the originals from your camera. DON’T do it. It is always best to reformat memory cards in the camera, using the camera controls. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing photos in a directory glitch.

The article also addresses:

• Titling printed images, adding captions, etc.Titling printed images, adding captions, etc.
• iPhoto can adjust fonts in books, calendars and cards, and both ways are explained.
• Keyword assignments – without displaying the keywords pane
• Smart keyword searches, to help locate photos based on content. Searching by date, and correcting bad dates are also covered.

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Adobe announced that its Adobe Stock Photos service will be discontinued as of the first of April, and just released an Adobe Stock Photos for Macintosh uninstaller. According to Adobe, this permanently removes the service from Bridge CS3, as well as certain functionality associated with your comp and purchased images, including the ability to “Get Price & Keyword”, “Find Similar/Keywords”, “Add to Cart” and “Purchase This Image” from Adobe Bridge CS3, InDesign CS3 and Illustrator CS3 software. Adobe Stock Photos folders on  your hard drive and contents ( Downloaded Comps, Previous Searches, Purchased Images) will stay as they are.

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Adobe released Adobe Acrobat Pro version 8.1.2 on Feb. 6, to address the issues Acrobat had with Leopard. It also resolves several PDF forms-related issues, and should be more stable. For all those who were reluctant to upgrade to Leopard because Acrobat is an essential tool, the wait is over! Or so Adobe says. I haven’t had a chance to play much, but hope to have some real-world experiences to report. If anyone reading this has something to report, please comment.

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