Adobe Photoshop -- Create a Page Peel / Curl -- Video Tutorial.

For a clearer and/or larger video choose “HD” in “Full Screen”

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I was just looking for information on the use of the FLAR technology using Adobe Flash. The FLARToolKit is an AS3 version of ARToolKit and is something really cool to behold. I believe Papervision3D is also used in conjunction with the toolkit to produce something called Augmented Reality. It involves the use of a web cam or such where the sofware can “See” certain shapes that are in the view of a cam and then use those shapes as anchors to project images. I have seen different examples, but this video I found at this blog (projectx4) showing it off is really great… very creative. A great example of the use of FLAR. Kudos guys, well done! I almost wish I had not seen this video, now I am really going to have to download the FLAR toolkit and get to figuring it out. There is a post at this blog that has a short list of links to some reference materials. If you have or know of any more examples of FLAR, Please tell us in the comments section below.

Check out the video at the Projectx4 blog

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Adobe Photoshop CS4 Rotate View Video Tutorial.

For a clearer and/or larger video choose “HD” in “Full Screen”

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Out of all the little design tools and applications that I use, I use it the most. I am a very anal about graphic placement and symmetry. This little Calipers app lets me make sure everything is always where I want it to be. Very simple, but it does just what is needed.

Screen Caliper

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Most graphics programs use rasterized images. When applying transforms like resizing or such the original pixel information is lost. Most of you know you can’t play around with an image in Photoshop and preserve the pixel information of the original image. Well, this is where Smart Objects come into play. They don’t call em’ Smart for nothing.

Smart Objects can be placed or imported as a layers. Smart Objects allow the designer to transform the original image using  – scaling, distorting, skewing etc. all the while maintaining the original pixel resolution of the original image. A dream for designers. One can scale the image to the size of an icon and then back to its original size without a loss of image quality. No rasterizing is taking place until the final output when you “flatten” said image.

Here’s a quick example…

Create a Smart Object… there are a couple ways

1. Using Photoshop click File > Open as Smart Object. This is for when you want to open an image directly as a Smart Object.

2. You can paste from Adobe Illustrator. You will be able to choose to past as a Smart Object in a the dialogue box.

3. The other way is within a Photoshop image document, click File > Place – then choose the image file you want to place as a Smart Object. This is for placing an image as a Smart Object layer into an existing project document.

After creating a Smart Object, you will notice in the Photoshop layers palette that the layer looks a little different than a normal layer. It is now easy to tell the difference between Smart Object layers and normal layers. There will be an inset or “badge” in the Smart Objects layer.

Once this Smart Object is created you can go ahead with all your transforms back and forth without losing the resolution of the original image that you placed in as a Smart Object.

Here I placed a Smart Object layer next to a normal layer. They are both the same image, but the one on the right was placed into the document as a Smart Object. Here they will look the same on the canvas except for how they are shown in the layers palette.

Now, After I a re-sized the canvas to 25% then back to its original size, then back to 10% then back to it’s original size you can really see where the Smart Object does it’s magic. Notice the pixelation that has occurred with the normal image layer on the left. You will notice the Smart Object layer on the right has maintained it’s original resolution throughout all the transforms that I put it through! Awesome.

Remember, both these images are layers in the same document canvas. The Smart Object clearly shines. The normal layer is highly degraded. The Smart object holds it’s original quality because during the resizing transformations that I put it through, each time I transformed the image the Smart Object re-sampled the original Smart Object image.

This is just a prime example on why the usage of Smart Objects is a wonderful thing.

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