power users

Sep 17 2010

VIDEO: How to use Actions in Photoshop

Many, many years ago, I devised and wrote the Original Comic Art Effect tutorial for Photoshop. Since then, it continues to be one of the most popular items on the site—day in, day out. It also crops up in all kinds of interesting places—even video.

ComicElementsFinal8 VIDEO: How to use Actions in Photoshop

It wasn’t long before Photoshop power users wanted to apply the effect to dozens of images to create actual comic books. To do that meant many hours altering many images…following each step of the tutorial manually. They started to demand that I offer a Photoshop Action for the effect.

So I did.

This was great—the power users loved it. The problem was, those just-a-bit-newer to Photoshop were confused by it. Many thought it was supposed to be a Filter and would show up in that menu. They had no idea how to install it or use it—they just wanted to create the Comic Art Effect!!

So now, after many years, I have now created a video to show how it’s done. And the procedure is dead easy. In fact, since you will soon know exactly how to install and use Photoshop Actions, you’ll be happy to know that there are many places online that offer highly productive ones. For instance, here is Smashing Magazine’s Ultimate Collection Of Useful Photoshop Actions.

But, for now, power up Photoshop, download the Comic Art Effect Action and watch this quick video tutorial. Then get to it!!

No Flash? No problem—click here!»

By RickMacMerc • adobe, Featured, Graphics News, Graphics Tips, graphicstips, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, poweruser, Print & Publishing, productivity, RickMacMerc, tips • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

Intro to Darwinism

By
Jon
Gales

No,
this isn’t going to be a religious or scientific battle about the origin of
our universe. It’s going to be a first look at Darwin, the underlying level
of Mac OS X. Right now you are probably asking yourself why, how, or are confused
as to what Darwin really is. I can give a you a great nutshell answer for each.
Strap on your geek boots, here we go!

 

What:

Darwin
is FreeBSD for the PowerPC processor (G3 and up actually). It is open source
and can be downloaded free of charge from http://darwin.org/projects/Darwin/1.3/release.html
(an Apple site). The download is about 120 megs and the installation can’t
be easier. If you have ever tried to install Linux you will envy Darwin’s
install. It is truly drag and drop (and there’s not even any dragging!). Just
double click, select an empty partition and you are in UNIX. I said before
that Darwin is the underlying level of OS X. Here is what that means:

Aqua
Carbon Classic Cocoa
Open
GL		 Quartz QuickTime

DARWIN

As you can
tell, Darwin is on the bottom of our chart; this means it controls all the
base level OS operations. You can access Darwin in the Terminal.app in OS
X (in the Utilities folder). That’s all good but we power users want more.
For that we move to why.

Why:

Why not? Well,
it isn’t user friendly, has no native GUI (X Windows can be installed but
isn’t part of Darwin), can’t run any of your applications, and the list gets
longer. What it does, it does well: all UNIX functions. Aqua is beautiful
but takes RAM and CPU cycles. That is a waste if you are using your box as
a server. OS X has real powerful server tools like Apache built-in, and MySQL
and PHP can be installed making OS X a powerful web server. The same server
can be run from Darwin without the wasted RAM and CPU cycles that Aqua brings.
In fact, Darwin can be your network’s NAT server (for sharing net access).
You can have an older G3 serve as your router/firewall/webserver all without
paying a dime. Even if you don’t want to use those features there is no easier
way to learn UNIX (except using it in the terminal).

How:

Once you run
the installer, go up to the startup disk control panel and select the disk
(or partition) with Darwin on it. If you don’t want to make it the default
disk, just hold Option at startup and select the boot disk at that point (instead
of using the startup disk control panel). After a few minutes you will have
a blinking cursor; type the following:

root

You will get
the following message: "Welcome to Darwin!". This signifies that
you are all logged in and are ready to do anything you choose. Here are the
commands I found most useful:

ls
= list files in current directory
cd
= change
directory (cd / takes you to the main directory)
mkdir
= make directory, creates folder
pico
= opens
up pico (a text editor). A file string followed by pico will open that file
in pico (Ex: pico /files/test.pl will open a file called test.pl located in
the /files directory)

All the OS
X directions in my Perl
tutorial apply to Darwin (since it is OS X).

To connect
to the internet I edited the /etc/iftab file in pico to read:

en0
inet 192.168.1.102 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
en0 inet -DHCP-

The IP address
is specified by my router so that will change depending on your setup. If
you aren’t on DHCP try following the directions on this site: http://www.excel.net/~clobrien/darwin/Network.html

After I was
on the net I did an FTP transfer. To connect to an FTP server type:

ftp
ftp.servername.TLD (replace TLD with the ending tld)

It will prompt
you for a username if necessary and then a password. You can use the cd and
ls commands to move around the file tree. Type: get FILENAME to download
files and: put PATH/TO/FILE.txt to upload files. Type ? for
a list of all commands.

That was my
experience with Darwin… I will write another article once I get PHP and
MySQL going (I am having some difficulties forwarding the right ports to my
computer at the moment).

 

If
you are having trouble or would like to ask me a question, please send me mail:
jonknee@macmerc.com

By admin • Articles, Coding • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

Metadata In The Finder

By: Jon Gales

To submit a trick/topic for PowerUser Monday just email it to Jon Gales. Jon
welcomes feedback, don’t be shy.

Power users are all about making things quicker. Here’s how to display useful
metadata right in the finder:

  1. While on the Desktop, press Command-j to bring up “View Options”. Once
    in the dialog check the Show Item Info box. Don’t close the box yet
  2. Open a new Finder window and click on the info window that you opened in
    the last step. It should update with a few more options. Check both the Show
    Item Info box and the “All Windows” radio button. It should look something
    like this.
  3. Now you’ll notice that when you’re browsing around in icon view, you’ll
    see handy nuggets of metadata. For instance, dimensions of photos, times
    of movies and songs, number of items in folders, and remaining disk space
    for drives. Here’s a screen shot:

    window Metadata In The Finder

    Nifty eh? As an added trick you can check the right radio button under the
    “Label Position” header and you’ll see the information show up on the side.
    Some people like it icon smile Metadata In The Finder .

Speed up your computing with easy metadata!. Check back
next Monday!

By admin • Articles, Power User Monday Tip of the Week • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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