How to reduce the clutter on your Mac desktop
(from Episode #25 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
Desktopple Pro is a system enhancement for Mac OS X made by FoggyNoggin Software. It started out its life as simply Desktopple (which is still available for free from FoggyNoggin) and it was intended as a method by which you could hide your desktop. People who write tutorials or tech manuals take a lot of screenshots and Desktopple allows you to do that without showing the ever increasing collection of Picture.png files on your Desktop. The original Desktopple also found a market among those that give presentations in Keynote or PowerPoint as it allowed them to project their computer’s screen without giving people a glimpse at their private desktop files. It serves as a bit of a “boss button� for your desktop files.
When Desktopple went “pro� it took on the customary price tag (only $17 in this case) but it also added a bunch of new features:
First off, Desktopple Pro is a preference pane, which means that when it is activated it shows no Dock icon. It doesn’t use “Application Enhancer� so don’t worry if you’re concerned about keeping your system APE-free. It is accessed by a key command, from a menu bar icon or from a Dashboard Widget.
Desktopple Pro’s bread and butter is still Desktop Hiding. What the software does is kind of slip a second desktop picture (aka wallpaper) over the original desktop and all of its icons. You desktop is still there, you just can’t see it anymore. The appearance of the desktop picture is entirely of your choosing: you can make it the same as your current desktop picture, you can choose a different picture or a solid color or gradient.
You can make Desktopple Pro always hide the desktop or you can have the software be triggered by a key command or by asking Desktopple Pro to activate whenever you launch certain programs. Desktopple Pro also plays nice with Exposé, multiple monitors, and Spaces (Leopard’s multiple desktop feature).
Desktopple Pro has added Window Cleaning, which hides any application that isn’t the foreground application. FoggyNoggin has provided an out in the form of an exceptions list that allows you to exclude certain applications from being hidden. Fans of SpiritedAway (the Mac OS X system enhancement, not the awesome anime film) will be happy to see this feature, especially if they are using an Intel-based Mac.
Menu Dimming is another new feature. It hides the menu bar and brings it back whenever you move your cursor to the top of the screen. It doesn’t remove access to the menu bar, it only hides it when you’re not using it. This feature is very similar to a freeware system enhancement called Menu Shade, but rolls it and all these other features into one neat package.
Productivity fanatics from the David Allen “Getting Things Done� cult should love Desktopple Pro. In fact it brings to mind the “Distracted Mac� episode of MacBreak only Desktopple Pro replaces 3 of the recommended applications does away with all those extra dock and menu bar icons—AND—Desktopple Pro runs as a Universal Binary. So it runs quickly on Intel-based Macs today.
To use Desktopple Pro is simple. Install it by double-clicking the .prefPane file, activate it in your System Preferences and then choose which features you want and set them up to your liking. Then it’s as simple as toggling Desktopple Pro using the key command you chose or from the Dashboard Widget, and customizing it from the menu bar (if you chose to use the menu bar icon).
The clutter just vanishes.
Desktopple Pro costs USD$17 and offers a FREE 15 day trial. Desktopple Basic is available for FREE but only gives you desktop hiding.
Download Desktopple Pro from www.foggynoggin.com
Mac Backup, Beyond .Mac Backup
(from Episode #37 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
We’ve all heard it over and over: you have to backup your data. You really do. Hard drives to not last forever and you have to prepare for the inevitable day when your drive fails. According to Scott Forstall, Apple’s Vice President of Platform Experience, at last year’s WWDC, 74% of users do not backup their files and he admitted that he is among their number. That’s pretty odd considering Apple makes a Backup utility called…well…Backup. Why is he not using the Backup solution offered by his own company?
Many people have beefs with Apple’s Backup utility. The main beef being that it’s only available to .Mac users which puts it $99 further out of reach for many people. The second problem is that the method it uses is confusing and offers you no assurance that you have really protected your data—the files you’ve backed up aren’t files anymore. Apple Backup says you’re protected, but you’re never really sure. And for $99 you should be sure.
What’s the best backup solution? Well, the Sunday School answer is “the one you actually do� because even using Apple Backup is going to be more helpful in a data disaster than having no backup at all. So, if you decide not to follow the advice I’m about to give, at least implement some kind of backup regime. Seriously, it’s important.
The backup solution that I recommend is one by Dave Nanian at Shirt Pocket Software called SuperDuper!
What Dave has done with this application is take a lot of the intimidation out of backup. All backup utilities offer you choices about how you would like to backup: do you want to backup the whole drive? or just you user folder? do you want to erase your backup each time and start over or do you want to merely adjust the last backup with the files that have been added, changed or deleted? Huh? Which is it!? What do you want to do!?! SuperDuper offers those options but explains every step of the way “What’s going to happen� Just read the messages on screen and the program will let you know what to expect.
I asked Dave about what his thinking was behind SuperDuper and he told me, “rather than engineer a solution for the minority, we’re designing for the vast majority who want a program that makes a full, complete backup that they can understand and feel confident about. They don’t need to do a lot of selecting: they just want to click a button and be reassured that their precious files have been taken care of, and that they can recover with a minimum of hassle and inconvenience.� I love that philosophy. Most people don’t want to have to think too much about backup; it’s a chore. Make it easy, or I won’t do it.
SuperDuper! is highly skilled at making bootable accessible backups of your entire drive. It’s just a matter of selecting the drive you want to backup, the drive you want to use to store the backed up files, the backup method you want to use and then you just click “Copy Now.�
The program comes with presets for backing up your whole hard drive or just backing up your user account. I recommend backing up your entire hard drive and creating a full bootable backup. In the event that your computer’s hard drive dies and won’t allow you to even boot the machine to get at your email, much less your data, a bootable backup will give you a drive that you can boot your computer from and carry on with your life while you leisurely comparison shop for a replacement internal drive.
You may wonder how long a full backup of your entire system will take. Well, the first time, it could take well over an hour. But, using SuperDuper!’s Smart Update option, all future backups will only take is long as it requires for the program to determine which files have been created, changed or deleted since the last update and make them match on your backup drive. Smart is right!
There is also an option for making a “sandbox� backup of your system. This feature is probably a bit advanced for some users but comes in handy if you want to be able to restore your system to the state it was in before you installed a flakey bit of shareware or a system update that you were better off without.
Start up SuperDuper! and you will be faced with a screen that starts with the word “Copy…� From the pulldown menu to the right, choose your boot drive if it isn’t already selected.
So, now the screen reads “Copy your boot drive to…� Now, select your backup drive from the pulldown menu to the right of “to.� Simple. It’s like filling in the blanks.
Now the screen reads “Copy your boot drive to your back driveâ€? and on the next line “using…â€? Now choose from the four Standard Scripts the method by which you’d like to backup your drive. For our purposes, you’ll want to stick to the ones that begin with “Backup – “ the “Sandbox – “ scripts are a bit more advanced and you can read SuperDuper!’s User Manual for more information on those. For now select “Backup – all files.â€?
At this point you could just click “Copy Now� in the lower right corner, but instead click “Options…� and check the box beside “Repair permissions on your boot drive�. This ensures that when you make the backup, your files are preserved with the correct permissions. You’ll also want to select “Smart Update your backup drive from your boot drive� from under “During copy�. This saves you time when backing up after that initial big backup has run.
Click “OK.�
Now click “Schedule…� and this will bring up SuperDuper!’s Scheduled Copies window and a sheet that will allow you to program SuperDuper! to automatically backup your boot disk everyday, any day, any time you like. Read the “What’s going to happen?� at the bottom of this screen to make sure SuperDuper! is setup the way you want. Click “OK� and close the Scheduled Copies window.
If you’re ready to go, you can click “Copy Now.�
Then comes the question of how often you should back up. The answer to that question really depends on how drastically your system changes from day to day. If you don’t do a lot with your computer, you could probably get away with backing up once a week.
Personally, I live on my computer. I have two regular backups I have scheduled to automatically occur during the night while I’m sleeping: one that runs every night and backs up the whole system and another that backs up the whole system every week. This gives me a few days to discover that I have lost a file before the next scheduled backup takes it away for good. It also gives me that extra level of protection in having multiple backups. (At work, I even have a third “just in case� monthly backup.)
My official recommendation, start a daily backup routine. Go download and purchase SuperDuper! and every night make sure your computer is on and connected to your backup drive. Setup SuperDuper! to self-activate while you’re asleep and backup your whole hard drive to that second drive. And, make sure it’s a second drive—if you only backup to a partition of your boot drive and it fails, you will have lost your data twice. Backup this way every night and be ready for data disasters when they come.
Two Mac Apps that give your Blog pics more Oomph!
(from Episode #40 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
Do you have a blog? It seems most people do these days. What about a Flickr account? Or maybe you frequent an online forum or two. If you’re involved in any of these popular online activities, you have probably needed to post an image at one time or another. (I can’t imagine why anyone would have a Flickr account if they had no intention of posting images!) I’m going to show you two Mac applications that simplify the process of creating images for blogs and one that will even help you upload and post the images after they’re created.
PICTURESQUE
First, we’ll start with Picturesque from Aqualia (ah-KWAH-lee-ah). The program’s chief function is resizing and beautifying images for your website. You can add borders, fades, shadows, glows, rounded corners and reflections and adjust each effect to your liking. The interface is very clean and straight forward and it takes all the fiddling out of making your blog graphics consistent. You might even be able to develop a combination of effects that can become your blog’s “look.�
Speaking of a consistent look, Picturesque allows you to batch process a group of images so that they all have the same effects and scaling applied. You can drag multiple images to the Picturesque window and apply the same scaling and beautifications to them all before saving them all out to the desired image format.
SKITCH
Skitch has some of the same features as Picturesque, but not many. Skitch resizes, but not in the same way that you resize in Picturesque. Here all you do is grab the corner of the Skitch window and drag. It looks like you might merely be zooming in, but you are actually scaling. This method makes it difficult to work with images larger than your screen resolution, but if you’re using Skitch for its intended purpose you really wouldn’t be using images that big.
To crop an image, you just drag from the edge of the image inward until you find the cropping you like. Skitch crops in on the image and resizes the Skitch window to accommodate you.
Skitch’s left edge is populated with drawing tools so that you can mark up your images with shapes, lines arrows and text. Embellishments made using Skitch’s drawing tools are movable as individual objects after you draw them and are vector-based so that if you decide to scale the image up after making notations, your drawings will not lose detail or crispness. Skitch even works with WACOM tablets and allows you smooth pressure sensitive drawing.
When you’re done with your image, you can just drag it out to your desktop, to your email client or you can configure Skitch to upload to your web space, Flickr account or Plasq’s own MySkitch service. When you enter in this account information into Skitch’s preferences, you can also ask the program to automatically put the URL, HTML or forum code into your clipboard so that you can immediately go about posting your new image to your blog or that forum you lurk in.
Skitch is integrated with iPhoto, so you can Skitch your latest pictures of your dog. And it even keeps a record of all the images you’ve made, posted, emailed or archived so that you can continue to manage them if you need to.
RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
Skitch: http://plasq.com/skitch
Picturesque: http://www.acqualia.com/picturesque
PRODUCTS SHOWN
Skitch (Price unknown, public beta available now or very soon)
Picturesque (USD$19.50, free watermarked demo)
Taming Mail
(from Episode #49 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
Anyone who spends a lot of time online will eventually come to realize that coping with email is a far more daunting challenge than dealing with postal mail ever was. There is the obvious nuisance known as “spam� but even processing the deluge of legitimate correspondence is more than some people can bear. Each email carries with it as an unseen attachment—the responsibility of the recipient to appropriately deal with that email. It’s like every email is a debt owed by the receiver to the sender. Is it any wonder that email can be a source of stress for people. Is it any wonder that every so often people will deal with this “email debt� by claiming “email bankruptcy� and deleting all of the unread mail in their inbox.
The strategies I’m about to show you probably won’t solve all of your problems in processing your email inbox, but if you find the task overwhelming, any help should ease the pressure.
The first thing you’re going to want to do is to filter out the spam. If you’re finding that Mail’s own Junk Mail filter is too often fooled by the industrious spammers, I recommend C-Command’s SpamSieve (USD$30). This shareware application uses something called “Bayesian filtering� to learn what types of email you consider spam by “profiling� the content of your unwanted email. In a matter of days, SpamSieve can be trained to accurately identify and remove spam and prevent it from confounding your inbox in the future.
If you use an IMAP email account and own a spare Mac, you can use SpamSieve to keep your other Macs, PC, PDAs and Mobiles spam free. You can even train SpamSieve remotely! Here’s the tutorial: http://www.macmerc.com/articles/Mini_Media_Mac/368.
Now that you have reduced the contents of your inbox to legitimate mail, the task comes down to categorizing it based on how you intend to respond to it. This process can be simplified by the use of Mail’s built-in rules function and by using multiple email addresses.
Most ISP and web hosts allow users to set up several email accounts and some people find it useful to use these extra addresses for special functions. You might have one account that you use only when signing up for online services. Maybe you’d benefit from setting up a special account that you keep secret from all but a close inner circle of friends and family—anything coming in on that account is automatically viewed as being of a higher priority.
Another method of categorizing email is to use Mail’s built-in Rules and Smart Folders to distribute incoming mail based on criteria that you program into them. The trouble with this can be that you can’t foresee how email on a particular subject is going to find its way to you, so it isn’t always possible to set up rules that anticipate accurately.
To help with this problem, I recommend Indev’s MailActOn—a donationware add-on that allows you to assign actions (like moving email to particular folders) to key commands. With MailActOn well configured, you should be able to quickly sort through the email remaining in your inbox so that you can then narrow down which messages need to be replied to, forwarded, archived, or deleted. The MailActOn website has a tips page that’s a great resource for making use of this simple but powerful Mail add-on.
Another problem with using Rules and Smart Folders to move mail is that sometimes we are so focused on our Inbox that in the process of trying to be clever, we outsmart ourselves and put our mail where we don’t tend to find it.
To put this new, categorized email back in front of your face, you can use Ecamm’s DockStar (USD$8). What DockStar does is add 4 new numerical indicators to Mail’s Dock icon. This means you can have up to 5 colored shapes keeping tabs on the unread, flagged, junk or combined number of emails in any of your mailboxes.
DockStar also comes with a Dashboard Widget that reproduces Mail’s DockStar-ified icon as well as a Screen Saver that shows your custom indicator shapes bouncing around your screen with live updating of the number of emails in their associated mailbox.
One caveat with DockStar is that it is an InputManager. The word from developers is that Apple has removed support for InputManagers from their yet to be released operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. InputManagers are also considered to decrease the overall efficiency of your system because they are constantly polling and processing whatever your Mac is doing in every application that you use regardless of which application the InputManager actually affects. That having been said, DockStar has been running quite well on my system for several months…no complaints.
So, there you go. Hopefully one or more of those ideas is going to help you better tackle your email challenges.
Trim the fat on your Mac’s Hard Drive
(from Episode #46 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
What is it about data that makes it always seem to expand to fill the space it’s given? There is never enough hard drive space. Just when drives get to a size where you say to yourself “Woah! I’ll never be able to fill that!â€?, the next edition of Apple’s OS X, or the latest Photoshop version or even the very files they produce greedily gobble up every gigabyte. We used to get by transferring files on low capacity floppy disks and now we frequently deal with individual files that require a CD-ROM to effectively transfer them.
Think about it: say you have a high end MacBook Pro with a 160GB hard drive, once you synchronize all the music and video from your 80GB iPod and partition 10+ gigabytes to run Windows and a few of its applications, you quickly start to see the ceiling on that spacious new drive. And remember, the fragmentation preventing benefits of Mac OS X on HFS+ are only effective if there is enough free space on the drive to allow the file system to do its job.
The three programs I’m going to introduce to you will show you where all your drive space is going and help you to keep the Finder’s most common “dumping groundsâ€? free of excess weight.
WhatSize
WhatSize is a freeware utility that scans your drive and shows you which files and folders are the major offenders when it comes to drive usage.
You simply launch the application and let it scan your drive. When it’s done, it color codes the largest files and folders to show you just how far yu have gone astray with your organization. Do you really need all those Garage Band loops? Do you actually use iDVD?
WhatSize offers pretty crude file deletion functionality (ie: you could use it to delete the oversized files and folders, but you might be better off to properly uninstall them or maybe use a utility like AppZapper to remove them more efficiently). WhatSize’s main strength is in being a bit easier to use than the Finder’s own “calculate all sizesâ€? function.
Common places for your hard drive to put on pounds include the Applications, Library, Music, Pictures and Documents folders (be careful deleting anything from the Library folders). Often the best places to trim the fat on your drive is to sort out your dump zones. Namely, your Desktop, Trash, and Downloads folders. For this we’re going to use automation….
Hazel
Named after the title character of the 60s TV series played by Shirley Booth, Hazel (USD$16) is a maid for your Mac. You open up your System Preferences and you program it to make sure your Trash gets deleted if anything sits in there for too long or if it gets above a certain size limit.
It’s not limited to Trash though. You can get Hazel to check any folder on your drive. I use it to move applications, music, etc. out of my Downloads folder and into the folders they were intended to occupy. I then tell Hazel to set the Label color on the remaining files once they have lingered in Downloads for more that a few weeks.
I have a similar set of chores for Hazel on my Desktop. Since all the screenshots I take for tutorials and blog posts automatically get saved to the Desktop, it quickly gets cluttered. I get Hazel to sweep them away after they’ve sat there for 24 hours.
If you’re an Intel Mac user, you might want to set Hazel to scan your Applications folder and label any applications in there that contain the keyword “Universalâ€? or “Intelâ€? –then you’ll be able to avoid launching slower PowerPC optimized apps in favor of the ones built for your processor.
iTunes and AutoRate
Your iTunes Library is another place where your hard drive puts on weight. If you’ve got one of the current 5G iPods, you have the potential to duplicate up to 80GB of music on you Mac and iPod. In fact, the way iTunes is set up, you can hold more music on your Mac than you sync to your iPod, so your Mac can really pack on the pounds.
The best advice I can give someone with an out-of-control music catalog is “archive.â€? Sure you pride yourself on your extensive music collection but, c’mon, how much of it do you actually listen to? Don’t know? iTunes does! Try something like this Smart Playlist on for size:
If you have music that you don’t think much of, haven’t played more than 10 times that has been hanging around on your drive for over 6 months, I’ve gotta ask: why did you buy it? And secondly: why are you hanging on to it?
Set up this Playlist and then burn a data disc of the songs it finds. Then delete those songs off your drive. (Highlight the contents of the Smart Playlist and hit Option-Delete, Click “Removeâ€? when iTunes asks you if you are sure and the click “Move to Trashâ€? when you are asked how you would like them removed. Don’t worry you backed them up, right?
Maybe you’re like most people and you haven’t gone through each and every song in you collection and entered in your Star Rating. Go get a copy of AutoRate and run it on your entire music library. AutoRate sets the Star Rating for your music based on how often each track has been played and how often it has been skipped.
I hope these tips will help you shed your Mac’s unwanted pounds and keep the weight off.
We got your iTunes covered
(from Episode #62 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
iTunes may be the most popular music, movie and podcast organization tool, but that may only because it is a package deal with the most popular portable personal media device; the iPod. The software is good, but it’s not perfect.
You have probably noticed that the recent addition of “CoverFlow� to the iTunes interface isn’t nearly as exciting when the music you acquired from anywhere other than the iTunes store displays a blank black cover with a couple of beamed eighth notes on it. Sure iTunes will try to figure out what cover belongs on your music, but it’s still hit-or-miss… with a definite leaning toward “miss.�
Have you ever noticed, in the “Get Info� information for your music that there is a field in there for “BPM�? That stands for “beats per minute.� Have you ever seen a value in that field? Probably not. In an ideal world, every song would come with that information already on board. Then you could make Smart Playlists of a range of songs that, say, have a driving beat that helps your workout.
The software also is a bit desperate for attention. You get no way to control playback or search your music library unless you keep iTunes frontmost. It might also be nice to have a visual readout of how many unheard podcasts you have.
Let’s see what we can do about these “whines� while also revisiting a caller question from a few weeks ago.
CoverScout
For $19.95, equinux’s CoverScout will scour the interwebs for cover art your music was intended to have. It searches international Amazon image catalogs, Google images and, if that doesn’t turn up your missing cover art, it even allows you to use your iSight camera to grab the cover art off the CD you ripped the songs from in the first place. (You did get that music from a legally purchased CD, didn’t you?)
Some “good news/bad news� with CoverScout is that it handles cover art differently than iTunes in that it adds the artwork to the music file instead of keeping it in an external folder. This means that anywhere you might use that music file, the artwork will follow. But it also means if you associate an exceedingly large image file with a song, the file size of that song will increase also.
Tangerine!
Tangerine from Potion Factory ($24.95) analyzes your iTunes music library and determines the number of beats per minute for each song. Adding this information to your music files allows you to make smarter Smart Playlists that filter music based on the tempo of the songs.
iTunes can take care of making those playlists, but Tangerine can do you one better: it can assemble taylor-made playlists of a specified duration that consist of songs within a range of beats per minute and then it orders those songs so that the playlist increases in tempo with each song. There are actually 5 different variations on the tempo pattern that Tangerine’s playlists can follow. When played sequentially, a playlist can coincide with your workout’s warm-up and cool-down times.
DockArt and Quicksilver
With DockArt, iTunes gains the ability to display album art in the dock and as your desktop picture (though, I’ve found that this bogs down your machine) and also shows a numerical indicator in iTunes’ dock icon showing how many unheard podcasts you currently have on file. DockArt is donationware. In this case, donations are to be sent to the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation.
Quicksilver is a favorite of many Mac users, but few who use it even come close to taking advantage of its full power. For instance, by installing the iTunes module and configuring it in the Triggers menu, Quicksilver can give you full control of iTunes from any application on your Mac…for free! You can finally leave iTunes in the background and still have it at your command!
Extra Credit — iBeeZz
On one of my ealier visits to The Lab, a caller asked if there was some way to schedule iTunes to start-up in the middle of the night to download his podcast subscriptions. At the time, we recommended that he set up an event in iCal to launch iTunes every night at a certain time. The part we couldn’t help the caller with at the time was how to get iTunes to shut down again after it was done.
Enter iBeeZz.
For 12.50 Euro (about $17 US), you can program all kinds of sleep and wake-up times for your Mac as well as files and applications. It has a special setting for iTunes that allows you to schedule iTunes to startup at bedtime, lower the volume to a soothing level and start a playlist of your choosing (possibly a low-BPM playlist you made using Tangerine or a “nap� you saved out of Pzizz).
Experimenting with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Comic Effect Deconstructed)
(from Episode #74 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
Photoshop is supposed to be a creative outlet, right? But it has so many features and settings that sometimes we’re so overwhelmed that we become afraid to just play with it. We might have an effect in mind and we search the internet for it. When we find it, sometimes it’s not what we have in mind or often we don’t find it at all and we just give up. “Photoshop can’t do that.� we tell ourselves.
We have to give ourselves the freedom to play and we have to give Photoshop the freedom to do things that it was never expected to do.
For instance, Photoshop has a Photocopy filter, right? Have you ever tried using it for something other than making an image look like it was photocopied? Give it a chance! Most of Photoshop’s filters can be adjusted to the degree where the effect they produce looks nothing like what its label in the Filters menu would have you expect. What is important to note in those situations is not that the particular combination of settings doesn’t look like a photocopied image, but what does it look like? What effect can you use this combination of settings to achieve?
Don’t be held back by the labels on the menus!
This kind of thinking can (and should) be applied to Photoshop tutorials you find online and in books as well. Follow the tutorials as they were written and see how the effect materializes as it was intended by the tutorial’s author. But then, after you’re familiar with what it does, play around with the tutorial a bit and see what else comes out of it.
Here, we’re going to take my Comic Art Effect tutorial and apply Alex Osborne’s S.C.A.M.P.E.R. principle to see what other effects we can make from it.
S.C.A.M.P.E.R. stands for:
Substitute
Combine
Adapt
Modify
Put to some other use
Eliminate
Rearrange
A brief Breakdown of the Comic Art Effect
This is an effect is based on a Tone layer and a Color layer to approximate the coloring of a vintage comic book illustration and 3 Ink layers to give the effect of “hand drawn� outlines and shading. At the end of the tutorial he recommended adding another color layer to tweak skin tones that may have gone astray, a white layer to brighten teeth and eyes, and a dot screen layer to give the image that course dot pattern associated with old comic books.
Substitute
Try Substituting different filters in tutorials. In the case of this tutorial, you might substitute the second and third Ink layers with one where you have copied the original image to a new layer above Ink 1. Set the new layer to “Multiply� with an opacity of 50% and then apply Filter>Sketch>Graphic Pen using the settings 15, 43, Left Diagonal. It gives a much softer illustrative effect.
Combine
If you have Adobe Photoshop CS3 as part of a Creative Suite bundle, you probably have Adobe Illustrator CS3 as well. Why not combine its abilities with Photoshop to create effects that could not be achieved using either application on their own? He had saved a copy of my finished Photoshop Comic Effect where I turned off all of the Ink layers and saved it as a flattened TIF. He then opened that TIF in Illustrator and used Live Trace to simplify the colors to look a bit like and Andy Warhol pop-art painting.
Adapt
If you look on MacMerc.com, you’ll find that this tutorial has been Adapted for use as a Photoshop Action. It has also been adapted for Adobe Elements. If you don’t happen to own Adobe Photoshop, that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying a free open-source creative outlet—namely, Gimpshop! I unfortunately haven’t adapted this tutorial for use with Gimpshop but that’s only because I have Photoshop. I welcome and encourage any of you Gimpshop experts out there to take a crack at the Comic Art Effect and and let me know how it goes. I’d love to link to your tutorials!!
Modify
Photoshop has long offered non-destructive ways of modifying an image; affording safe experimentation where any mistakes or undesired results are entirely reversible. Once you’ve finished a tutorial, don’t be afraid to go over it again and change the filter settings. Use Smart Filters, if you can, and then you can go back again and again and try new effects and settings. Layer Masks and Adjustment Layers also allow for experimentation.
I have added an Adjustment Layer to my file to cycle the color of my image through the rainbow to create a psychedelic result.
Put it to some other use
Who says Photoshop has to just be for static images? Go to video! After all, video is just a string of still images strung together and displayed in quick succession. Look at what one person has done using the Comic Art Effect tutorial (click to view video above).
Eliminate
For “Eliminate,� try turning off all but the Ink layers. For many photos I’ve tried this effect on, turning off everything but the Ink layers creates and pretty cool looking illustrative effect. This was the inspiration for my Frank Miller Sin City Effect.
Rearrange
While my experiments with rearranging or reversing the Layers and steps of this tutorial didn’t return any pleasing results, the technique of Layer shuffling often does produce new and interesting effects that you can call your own.
Conclusion
So, bottom line, I hope you’ll be encouraged to play a bit with Photoshop and apply the S.C.A.M.P.E.R. principle. The only way to feel comfortable using any software is to become familiar with it and an excellent way to do that is to explore and experiment.
Have fun!!
Turn 2-D images into 3-D masterpieces!!
(from Episode #76 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
Have you ever seen one of those movies or a still image that appeared to be in 3-D when you wore special red and blue glasses? It’s easier than you think to make one of those images. In fact, I’ll show you 2 methods to achieve this effect. The first one requires you to take two pictures of a stationary subject and merge them in Photoshop. The other will take an existing photo and convert it to 3-D.
First, I should explain how 3-D images work. We view the world in 3 dimensions because our two eyes see things slightly differently and our brain interprets the two pictures our eyes see as being 3 dimensional. We unconsciously calculate depth, width and height based on the similarities and the differences between those two pictures. It just happens. We don’t even realize we do it.
These artificial 3-D images we’ll be creating, called anaglyphs, simulate in a 2-D image the 2 pictures our eyes see when we look at actual 3-D objects. The red and blue lenses of the 3-D classes block out certain information in the 2-D image allowing the blue lens only see the red channel of the image and the red lens to only see the blue and green channels. This allows a single 2-D image to hold the 2 slightly different images our eyes need to see in order to perceive 3-D information.
Here are a few methods you can can use to make one of these images:
The 2 picture/1 camera method (this method works on stationary objects)
With a digital camera affixed to a sturdy tripod, take a picture of the stationary subject. Carefully move the camera and tripod 2.5 and 3 inches to the right and take another picture.
What you have effectively done is taken a left eye image and a right eye image.
Open both images in Photoshop. Using your first image (your “left eye” image) open the Channels palette and click the Red channel (Ctrl-1 on PC or Command-1 on Mac). Select all (Ctrl-A on PC or Command-A on Mac) and copy (Ctrl-C on PC or Command-C on Mac).
Now go to the second image (your “right eye” image) and click the Red channel (Ctrl-1 on PC or Command-1 on Mac) in the Channels palette. Paste the Red channel from the “left eye” image in Red channel of the “right eye” image (Ctrl-V on PC or Command-V on Mac).
Click the RGB composite channel in the Channels palette (Ctrl-~ on PC or Command-~ on Mac) and put on your 3-D glasses (make sure the left lens is red and the right lens is blue).
The 2-D to 3-D conversion method
The problem with the 2 picture/1 camera method is that you can’t capture action. No pictures of your dog jumping to catch a frisbee. No 3-D pictures from the airshow. None of that.
The 2-D to 3-D conversion method allows you to alter an existing 2-D image and make it 3-D.
I’m going to start with this image of Dr. Tiki and Leo on the set of The Lab…
What you need to do is select the frontmost item in the photo and save the selection as a channel. Then select the next most foreword item and save that as a channel and so on and so on until you reach the background. How detailed you want to be is up to you. I have selected Dr. Tiki’s face, then his body, then Leo’s arms and camera, then Leo, then the column behind Leo and then I left everything else as the background. Here’s what my Channels palette looks like:
Now, create yet another new empty channel and fill it with white. In your Swatches palette, select 20% Gray, load the back-most item in the Channels palette as a selection (in my case, “Alpha 5″ in the screenshot above) and then fill the selection with 20% Gray in the new channel. Continue to select progressively darker shades of gray and use the color to fill the selections of each increasingly more foreground channel in our new channel. So, for my image, I’ll make a selection of Alpha 4 and fill with 40% Gray, then make a selection of Alpha 3 and fill that with 60% Gray, then Alpha 2 with 80% Gray and Alpha 1 with Black. Plan out your selections and grays so that you can make a smooth progression from the background in White to the foreground in Black. Here’s what my channel looks like:
I know it looks scary–bear with me.
Go Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur… and use a setting of 10. Click OK. This with blend the levels a bit. Now we need to expand the coverage of the different levels of depth a bit. To do this we will use a Filter called Minimum which shrinks the coverage of the lighter areas of the affected image.
Go Filter>Other>Minimum… and plug in a value of 10. Click OK.
Select All (Ctrl-A on PC or Command-A on Mac) and Copy (Ctrl-C on PC or Command-C on Mac). Create a new Photoshop document and Photoshop will automatically plug in the height and width of the image held in the clipboard’s memory, so you need only click OK.
Paste the funky channel in the new document (Ctrl-V on PC or Command-V on Mac) and save this new document as a Photoshop (.psd) file and save it somewhere where you will easily find it again. Close this new file and direct your attention back to the main document.
Click the Red channel in the Channels palette (Ctrl-1 on PC or Command-1 on Mac) and activate the “eye” icon next to the RGB composite channel in the channels palette (just activate the “eye” don’t select the RGB composite channel itself). It should look like this:
You should see the full color image in the document window but what you’re about to do will only affect the Red channel.
Go Filter>Distort>Displace… and enter 20 in the Horizontal Scale field and 0 in the Vertical Scale field and click OK.
And that’s it! It’s in THREEEEEEEEEEEEE-DEEEEEEEEEE!!!
Still need more 3-D stimulation?
Check these anaglyphs on Flickr.
Do you just need to buy some 3-D glasses? I bought mine here.
May the Force be with you! Release your Jedi spirit!
(from Episode #79 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
“If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine…”
These were Ben Kenobi’s words of warning to Darth Vader in the original Star Wars film. Until the sequel, us fanboys really weren’t sure what old Ben was prattling on about. But in The Empire Strikes Back we were led to believe that to be a freely roaming, blue, glowing spirit was the utmost power any Jedi on either side of the dark/light spectrum could achieve.
Hmm….
Well, now with the aid of Adobe Photoshop, you too can add your ghostly form to any of your digital photos. Here’s how…
Step 1: The Photo(s)
Ideally, you will be using two images: one of you looking masterful and wise and hopefully on a background that you can easily separate yourself from and another of the setting in which you will be placing yourself. We will want your Jedi spirit to be translucent and that will be much more difficult if we must first remove your opaque, live and living self from the photo. I’m not going to spend time explaining how to remove yourself from the photo. If you take the 2 pictures you need, you don’t need to worry about this procedure… this is not the tutorial you are looking for… you may go about your business… move along…
So I have one image with without me in it and I also have another photo that was taken at about the same time that does have me in it. This is the photo I’m going to use as my source image for me as a dead Jedi (aka Darth Yaeger).
Step 2: The Chosen One
Working on the photo “with you in it” and using Adobe Photoshop CS3′s Quick Selection tool (or the Extract Filter or whatever means you feel most comfortable), select yourself and Copy (Ctrl-C on PC, Command-C on Mac) yourself. You can now close this image (the one WITH you in it).
Go to the photo “without you in it” and Paste (Ctrl-V on PC, Command-V on Mac). Position yourself in the picture, scale, rotate, skew, etc. until your image is in the exact part of the image where you want your Jedi spirit to materialize.
Step 3: A Disturbance in the Force
Ctrl-Click on PC or Command-Click on Mac the thumbnail of the layer in the Layers palette that represents the image of you. This will create a selection.
Create a new layer (Shift-Ctrl-N on PC or Shift-Command-N on Mac) and fill the selection on the new layer with black. (You can first reset your foreground and background colors by hitting the D key the hit Alt-Delete on PC or Option-Delete on a Mac and the selection on your layer should fill with black) You can deselect now (Ctrl-D on PC or Command-D on Mac)
You will need to add the Jedi Styles.asl file that I have provided for you. To do this, click the flyout menu on the right side of the Styles palette and choose “Load Styles…” and navigate to where the Jedi Styles.asl file is located on your hard drive and click “Load”. With your new black silhouette layer active in the Layers palette, click the “Force Distort” style in the Styles palette (hover your cursor over the styles to have Photoshop show you the names).
Your Jedi should look like the picture above. If the “ripples” inside the silhouette don’t cover enough of the body’s shape or if they cover too much, go Layer>Layer Style>Scale Effects… and adjust the effect until it more closely matches what I show here. Don’t stress too much about this.
Create a new layer and drag it below the silhouette layer. Fill this new layer with white. Then, Select All (Ctrl-A on PC or Command-A on Mac) and Copy Merged (Ctrl-Shift-C on PC or Command-Shift-C on Mac) –this will copy the current state of the selection as if it had all of its layers flattened without requiring you to flatten the image.
With the merged copy still in the clipboard, create a new Photoshop document. Photoshop will automatically plug in the height and width of the image held in the clipboard’s memory, so you need only click OK.
Paste the merged silhouette in the new document (Ctrl-V on PC or Command-V on Mac). Now save this new document as a Photoshop (.psd) file and save it somewhere where you will easily find it again. Close this new file and direct your attention back to the main document again.
Back in the main document, click off the “eye” icons next to the silhouette and white layers–we’re done looking at them.
In the Layers palette, duplicate the layer containing your original “without you in it” image and drag the duplicate to the top. Go Filter>Distort>Displace… and enter in these settings:
Click OK and Photoshop will ask you for a file to use as a displacement map. Point Photoshop to the file you just created using the silhouette layer and click Open.
See what happened? Photoshop displaced the image using the silhouette shape and those ripples we made.
Go Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels… and match these settings:
Then, when the Levels dialog comes up, match these settings and click OK:
Now Ctrl-Click on PC or Command-Click on Mac the thumbnail of the silhouette layer in the Layers palette. This will create a selection. Keeping that selection, click the thumbnail of the displaced layer to activate it. Go Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal Selection.
If you dig Predator movies more than Star Wars movies, you may be tempted to quit now. This is an example of how one tutorial can teach many effects: you just created the cloaked effect from the Predator movies.
Let’s proceed, Photoshop Padawan….
Step 4: More powerful than you could possibly imagine…
Near the bottom of the layers in the Layers palette, you still have your Jedi. Drag the Jedi’s layer to the top of the palette. And make sure this layer is selected in the Layers palette.
Now click the “Dead Jedi” style in the Syles palette and you’re done!
Step 5: Your training is complete…
Well, it can be if you want. But here a little “extra” if you want to create the Hologram effect from the Star Wars movies:
With the layered file we’ve been working with up until now, click off the “eye” icon next to our displaced layer in the Layers palette. Now, create a new layer and drag it to the top of the Layers palette. Go Edit>Fill and copy these settings:
Next, go Filter>Sketch>Halftone Pattern…Â and match these settings and click OK:Â
Now, go Filter>Noise>Add Noise… and give it the settings shown below before clicking OK.
Now, in the Layer palette change this layer’s blending mode from Normal to Screen. Go Layer>Create Clipping Mask and you’re Jedi is now a hologram! Help me Leo-Wan Laporti, you’re my only hope!
May the Force be with you.
Giving Leopard Stripes and Tiger Spots
It’s unanimous! Everybody loves Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard! The afterglow has worn off and yet we all still love it without there being one single thing we miss about Tiger.
Wrong.
Even before it was officially released, some Mac geeks who had gotten their hands on the Apple Developer Connection seeds (either legitimately or otherwise) were already complaining about the esthetics of the translucent Menu Bar, the 3-D reflective Dock and the lack of any option to retain the hierarchical folder listings in docked folders (now called “Stacks”).
You can never please everybody.
The easy solution is to simply stick with Tiger; and that will work for many for a while. But what happens down the road when all the cool software starts requiring you to be running under Leopard? And what about the people who buy new machines that simply will not run Tiger?
What follows is a list of third-party applications that will allow you to change Leopard’s spots. And what’s more, it will change them from spots to Tiger stripes.
Dock Dabbling
These apps will help you change the Leopard Dock to something more pleasing to your eye.
PimpMyDock (FREE): http://www.malcom-mac.com/pimpmydock/
Offers a Quickstart Guide, but is pretty non-intuitive.
DockDoctor Widget (FREE): http://innermindmedia.com/dock_doctor_widget.html
This one puts the power to choose either Leopard’s 2-D or 3-D Dock into a Dashboard widget. I can’t see it getting much simpler than this.
DockDoctor (FREE): http://innermindmedia.com/dock_doctor_app.html
From the same people that brought you the DockDoctor Widget, the DockDocktor App toggles the 2-D and 3-D dock, makes hidden application icons appear translucent in the Dock, turns off the Dashboard (weird since they make a Dashboard widget) and, most importantly, comes packaged with a handful of Dock themes you might like better than the Leopard one (it requires a restart to see the new Dock, unfortunately). This one is my pick.
DockEdit (FREE): http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/26299/dockedit
Don’t like Dashboard widgets? Fine here’s the same function of DockDoctor as a stand-alone app.
TigerDock (FREE): http://riotgames.se/riotgames-se/tigerdock.html
This one adds the ability to display hidden applications as transparent icons in the Dock…otherwise the same as the DockEdit.
DockChanger (USD$10): http://www.whimsplucky.com/Whimsplucky/Software/Software.html
This is my favorite. It works simply and lets you chose Dock themes including active application indicators and the separator bar.
CandyBar 3 (USD$12.95) http://www.panic.com/candybar/
Replaces the Dock graphics with those of your choosing. Also replaces System icons with pre-baked themes.Â
Get various Dock Themes from: http://www.dockulicious.com/docks/ or http://leoparddocks.com/
If you’re comfortable using Terminal, you don’t even need another application to help you. Here are some links to show you how:
Use Tiger’s Dock in Leopard: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071031111443331
Banish the 3D dock from 10.5: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2007101815375480
Menu Bar Manipulators
The list below shows some applications that will let you customize your Menu Bar and getting looking much the way it did in Tiger.
LeoColorBar (FREE, and no affiliation with Mr. Laporte): http://homepage.mac.com/mdsw/md%20softworks.html
This doesn’t mess with the Menu Bar at all really. What it does is tweak your desktop picture to have a colored stripe just below where the Menu Bar is, thus making it appear to be colored due to its unaltered transparency. This allows you to put white beneath the Menu Bar and make it appear to be opaque. By not actually tweaking the system, this means you can change the look of your Menu Bar without restarting. LeoColorBar also does the 3-D to 2-D Dock switch. This one is my choice for Menu Bar Manipulators.
Leopaque (FREE): http://www.macparc.ch/mirror/Leopaque/
Leopaque makes adjustments to system settings that you can access via Terminal (see below) to set the opacity of the Menu Bar. All setting changes require a restart to take effect.
OpaqueMenuBar (FREE): http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/opaquemenubar/
Allows you to adjust the opacity of the Menu Bar
Again, if your “Terminally Inclined,” you can follow the instructions here and tweak your Menu Bar without the need for third-party help:
Get rid of the translucent Menu Bar :http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071115135215262
Subdue your Stacks
Some people long for the old hierarchical folder listings of Tiger’s docked folders. Here’s some help to get you there.
Quay (In beta. Might cost about USD$10 when finalized): http://www.brockerhoff.net/quay/
This does a great job of taking you step-by-step through the process of adding a folder to your Dock that shows a hierarchical list when selected. Even if they do decide to charge for it, Quay is my choice.
HierarchicalDock (FREE): http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/hierdock/
HierarchicalDock does much the same thing as Quay, but not quite as elegant. I like Quay’s interface more and docked folders from HierarchicalDock have .essdocker file extension which is kind of lame.
Giving Tiger Spots
Now what happens if you are absolutely in love with Leopard but you can’t upgrade. You’ve seen John from the Apple Store in that video demonstrating all of Leopard’s new features and you are clamoring to get in on that 10.5 action. But maybe your current system won’t support Leopard or your most used applications are not ready for 10.5. You have your reasons and they’re good ones—but maybe you can still enjoy some of Leopard’s features without leaving the comfort to Tiger.
Here are some Leopard-like applications that will run under Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”.
Dock Manipulation
ClearDock (FREE): http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8808/cleardock
It won’t make the Dock 3-D or make it reflect your Desktop, but it will make it transparent. It requires Unsanity’s controversial Application Enhancer ( http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/ape/ ).
Hesitantly Mentioned: Liger (FREE) http://spiderlama.deviantart.com/art/Liger-57706188
This ShapeShifter() theme is a bit buggy and no longer being developed, it seems, but it does somewhat accurately emulate the look of Leopard under Tiger.
WebClip for 10.4 users
Dash Clipping Widget (FREE): http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22442/dash-clipping-widget
A simple Dashboard widget that requests a URL, allows you to position the web page displayed in an adjustable frame and then lets you lock in your work. Functions just as well under Leopard.
Tigers…in…Spaces
VirtueDesktops (FREE): http://virtuedesktops.info/index.php/downloads/
No longer under active development, but a really good app. I know a few Leopard users who prefer this over Spaces and want it updated NOW!
QuickLook for Tiger
MacGizmo (USD$20): http://www.hyperbolicsoftware.com/MacGizmo.html
It’s not as slick and sexy as Leopard’s QuickLook and it doesn’t work on as many file formats, but it’s slightly better than nothing. The USD$20 price tag seems a bit steep though.
iChat Effects
ChatFX (USD$20): http://www.scriptsoftware.com/chatfx/
Works on 10.4.9 and below!
CamTwist (FREE): http://allocinit.com/index.php?title=CamTwist
Okay, technically this one doesn’t count—it doesn’t work in iChat. It does work with Stickam, Yahoo, Ustream.tv, Operator11, amsn and Skype(though, don’t use it when you call in to The Lab)
Screen Sharing from Tiger with Leopard
VINE Server (FREE): http://sourceforge.net/projects/osxvnc/
Chicken of the VNC (FREE): http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/
As Mac OS X Hints explains ( http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071028163313650 ), Leopard’s Screen Sharing uses standard VNC protocol to do its magic. So, all you need to do is get VNC running on your Tiger Mac and it should show up as a shared screen in the Finder windows of Leopard users.
That’s it for this stripy, spotty installment. Next time I’ll make both OSs paisley!
