Design

Among the many updates in Photoshop CS2 are the new tools users have for selecting multiple layers. These new abilites are really handy, but I’ve been hearing rumors of hair-pulling from some users who aren’t aware of what’s changed, especially in the upgraded layers palette. For today’s Imaging Tip, I’d like to point you towards a few very handy remedies, tips and techniques our very own Jan Kabili at the Unofficial Photoshop Weblog has shed some light on.

First of all, it is now possible to select more than one layer in the layers palette, but you have to be careful where you’re clicking. Second, it is still possible to link layers, Adobe just tweaked how you do it, as linking now involves the aforementioned multiple-selection technique. Third and finally, it is also now possible to marquee-select layers like objects - Illustrator users know what I’m talkin about here. Head over to Jan’s explanation of how this new addition to the layers paradigm actually works.

HDRwalls offers a welcome change from hum-drum single color desktop backgrounds or the limited selection of built-in OS wallpapers. They currently have about 500 High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos in resolutions ranging from 800×600 to 1920×1200. They also provide sizes for iPod Touch, PSP, Blackberry, and iPhone.

HDR photography is the result of increasing the dynamic range of a photo through tone mapping and combining multiple exposures. The HDR group on Flickr has great examples and offers tips to create your own HDR images (and maybe even use them as desktop backgrounds).

[Thanks Michael!]

Designers, what is the number one thing your customers ask of you when they see your mockups? “Make my logo bigger, please!”

Companies spend large amounts of money on ad runs and web developments and want to stand out. Well, there are now a few things on the market that can help businesses increase the size of logos online and in print materials, fix whitespace, easily create starbursts, make designs stand out with fluorescent colors and create emotional ads.

This suite of six products will ensure customers are happy with their designs, all for just 3 easy payments of $29.99. Check out the infomercial to see if it might work for you! Also makes a great stocking stuffer!

Last week we told you that TechSmith was offering a free version of the Camtasia Studio screencasting software for free. As luck would have it, TechSmith is also giving away free licenses for SnagIt, the company’s popular screen capture utility.

The only catch is that just like with the Camtasia Studio offer, TechSmith is offering an older version of SnagIt for free. If you want all the latest features, you’ll have to upgrade to SnagIt 8.2, which will set you back $20. But SnagIt 7.2.5 (the free version) is still quite a few steps up from the Windows print screen button. Here are a few of the features you get with SnagIt:

• Capture a region
• Capture a file
• Capture a scrolling window (like an entire web page)
• Capture a freehand region (draw a shape around the portion of the screen you want to capture

SnagIt 8.2 adds Vista compatibility, the ability to save a file to an application like Word, Excel, or even Flickr, and new printing options.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Image compression technology has come a long way since the JPEG standard was set in the 90s. But JPEG is still the standard used by most digital cameras.

Microsoft has been lobbying hard to make its HD Photo format (also known as Windows Media Photo) the new standard. And it looks like the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the group behind the JPEG file format, have approved a plan to rename HD Photo “JPEG XR” and to make the format a new standard of sorts.

We don’t expect old fashioned JPG images to disappear overnight, but HD Photo files can show a higher range of colors, supports in-camera image processing, and offers more advanced compression techniques than today’s JPEG files.

[via Thomas Hawk]

The YouTube team has a surprise in store, a YouTube redesign is in the works. Please get your sunglasses ready though, it tends to be a little hard on the eyes.

YouTube will incorporate user feedback into the changes throughout the site. That’s something that a lot of companies neglect to take into account when undertaking website changes. Over the next few months new additions will be rolled out, and will include improved categories, dropdown menus to get to where you want faster, and a new look and feel for tabs and video browsing pages.

All that new red seems a little too distracting for us, and the dropdowns can be a little distracting, but it does seem quicker to get around the redesign.

A preview of what YouTube will roll out is available live here. What are your thoughts on the redesign?

If you’ve been thinking it’s been a while since GIMP 2.2 was released, you’re right. It’s been three years since the GIMP team has pushed out a major update to the open source Photoshop alternative. This week, GIMP 2.4 was released, with a new icon set, and a whole slew of other features:

• Redesigned crop, selection, and align tools
• Scalable bitmap brushes
• Reorganized menu layout
• Improved display when zooming in or out
• Support for more file formats
• Full support for color profiles
• Improved printing
• Auto red eye removal tool

There are a ton of other new features and updates. You can read about them in the release notes.

[via Slashdot]

Firefox 3 is going to have a whole bunch of new features, including a new rendering engine and a new way to organize bookmarks. But probably the first thing users will notice is the new skins. And those skins will be designed to integrate smoothly into your operating system.

In fact, as of right now, the proposed Windows Vista skin looks a lot like Internet Explorer’s, while the proposed OS X skin is reminiscent of Safari. There will also be two separate sets of Windows icons: one for Vista and another for XP.

Mozilla is also working on a standard theme for Linux, but this is a bit trickier, since there are many different Linux distributions and desktop-styles.

Honestly, it’s nice to see the team working on a visual refresh for Firefox 3. But we kind of like the standard Firefox look and feel. We can open Firefox on a Mac, PC, or Linux machine and pretty much know where the menus are without struggling with a new menu system. Of course, most computer users don’t find themselves switching back and forth between 3 or more operating systems on a regular basis, so we might just be in the minority here.

Microsoft has partnered with Dassault Systems to launch a 3D building application for Virtual Earth. In other words, the new application called Virtual Earth 3DVIA is a direct competitor to Google’s 3D Warehouse for Google Earth.

The application lets you create 3D structures that can be placed on Virtual Earth maps or shared with other users. Virtual Earth 3DVIA is free to use, which makes sense, because users are essentially adding value to Microsoft’s mapping services.

We highly recommend creating completely unrealistic models of your home and nearby buildings and uploading them so that Virtual Earth users will get the sense that you live in Rivendell and not Poughkeepsie. We’re equal opportunity here at Download Squad, so we recommend the same activities for Google Sketchup users.

You don’t need a tank to drive down the street. And sometimes you don’t need Photoshop to edit a photo. IrfanView is one of our favorite light weight image viewing/editing applications. Need to open an image, view a slideshow? Check. Want to crop, resize, pixelize, blur, or brighten a photo? Check.

This week IrfanView released version 4.10. The latest update includes support for even more file types and comes packed with new editing features:

• New paint plugin that lets you draw lines, circles and boxes on an image (just hit F12 to bring up the paint menu)
• Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF files
• Lossless JPG Crop added
• Support for FLV files
• Auto adjust colors on selected portions of an image
• A bunch of other bug fixes, tweaks, and new features for editing, opening, and viewing images and multimedia files.

And best of all, you can open and close IrfanView a few dozen times in the amount of time it would take you to load Photoshop. Oh yeah, and it’s free. That’s nice too.