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Upon first digging into Adobe Photoshop CS3, a few features have really popped out at me as incredibly useful. I would like to offer a brief overview of some of these new ways of attacking your creative challenges using the latest version of Adobe’s flagship app. PsCS3 will run you about $649 to buy it outright if you do not own any previous versions. If you own Photoshop 7, CS, or CS2, you are eligible for upgrade pricing – looks like $199 for the upgrade. Check Adobe’s store on their website for more info. For more information about what comes in the different versions of CS3, and what your suite configuration options are, see my previous post.

My current favorite five new PsCS3 features in order are:

1. Nondestructive Smart Filters
2. Quick Selection Tool & Refine Edge
3. Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending
4. Automatic layer alignment and blending
5. Vanishing Point with adjustable angle

Feature Overviews:

* Nondestructive Smart Filters

Adobe has finally given us non-linear, nondestructive filters. Can I just say “HOORAY!” In the past, you applied filters and effects in a linear order: one filter would alter your image, and the second filter would alter your now altered image, and a third filter would alter the altered altered image. The problem with that workflow is that if you decide you want to slightly tweak the second filter, you’d have to either undo back to that point (losing your subsequent edits), or use the history palette to step directly “back in time” to the point before you added the second filter, add your “revised” second filter and then add your third manually. All too often, you don’t quite remember what exact parameters you had set on that third one – or worse, your real world project involved applying 20 filters instead of the 3 in my example and changing the second filter would mean redoing the 18 that follow it. What a drag. Because of this issue, people developed many work arounds (often involving saving off multiple “partially completed” versions of files all over your hard drive with iterative file names, hoping that if you needed to go back to a certain point in time you’d be able to figure out where you needed to be), and while these workarounds were clever and well-conceived in many cases, there was a perfect, real solution, waiting to happen.

The real solution to all this is what we have been given in CS3: Nondestructive Smart Filters. In this new version, each filter and effect that you apply to a layer, remains live and continually re-editable, in real time, and the parameters that you adjust will all cascade down through whatever subsequent filters or effects you might have added to your layer. These are savable, movable, copy and pastable, and most importantly scalable.

* Quick Selection tool & Refine Edge

A design mentor of mine once told me “Photoshop is all about the selection. You select something, and then you do something with the selection. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember that, and you’ll never go wrong using this app.” Almost 10 years later, I must say she was absolutely correct. Using Photoshop is all about “the selection.” There are more tools in Photoshop for selecting than for any other single task.

As in just about every version of Photoshop that has ever been released, CS3 has made even greater strides in the area of “making your selection” than comes to memory in recent years. The new Quick Selection Tool used in combination with the Refine Edge palette is about the most helpful and clean way of selecting the edges of an object in your image that I have ever seen. This new revised Quick Selection tool is so smooth. You basically set the parameters of your Quick Selection tool – as if it were a brush – and paint the general area of your image edges (like trying to select just a kid and his soccer ball out of the photo of the big game) and Photoshop is watching what you do, and interpreting what you consider to be the general edges of what you are wanting to select and it figures out what’s kid and ball and what’s grass and goal posts and sky and crowd and selects just what you want it to. It’s VERY fast and clean. Then, you can invoke the Refine Edge palette, and you have seemingly infinite control over exactly how the edges of that selection behave. Check out the palette to the right to get an idea of what you could do to “refine” that edge. With radius, feathering, smoothing, and various display settings, I believe this new combo will cut down on my masking and selecting time in a quantifiable way.

* Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending

Ever tried to stitch together a series of images that you took, that you intended to “put together” into a panorama? Even with some of the stand alone tools that have been available over the years—even those for doing quicktime VR’s—are clunky and difficult to use – with mixed results at times. I have always wanted something built into Photoshop to let me do these “photo merges” – I never expected that Photoshop would actually be able to automatically do it for me. This feature floored me. The technologies involved in my number four choice “Automatic layer alignment and blending” are at work here in this feature as well, and the new auto layer alignment features in CS3 are far-reaching and crop up again and again in different areas of the application. It’s really one of the revolutionary things about this new version.

All of the things that have made making panoramas a difficult task in the past are all done automatically. The primary among these being 1. those times when you have to actually distort, rotate, skew or transform one of your elements because the perspective is screwy, 2. those times when the sun or lighting or a window made the white balance, color space or over all wash of brightness and contrast different from one image to the next (especially when doing 360′s) and of course 3. actually finding and aligning those overlapping areas of consecutive elements. Photoshop CS3 does these all for you and with surprisingly amazing results. It’s not just about the typical “panorama” either… I saw a demo of someone standing “too close” to a building, and taking pictures zoomed all the way out, of the front door, windows and window-boxes, front brick walk way, tilting upward and taking a picture of the balcony and roof line of the second floor – in other words, many elements that were WAY out of whack in terms of perspective, lighting and color space, and these 4 or 5 images were distorted, tweaked, rotated, matched, blended, lighting and color density matched… and I was amazed in like 5 seconds, there was this “wide angle” almost “fisheye” photomerge of the front of the building, from brick walkway to roof-line, and it looked incredible.

* Automatic layer alignment and blending

Another powerful application of this new alignment and blending technology is with a series or stack of images of the same subject. Let’s say you wanted to take a picture of a statue in a park somewhere, or a huge fountain, or the front of a monument or building. There are always people walking through the frame – if you can’t close down the area and still need a picture of the statue, in the park, in it’s beautiful setting, but with no people or birds or random elements – what are you to do? In the past, it was a painstaking process of shooting a bunch of images, selecting the “closest” one to your vision of a nice, clean, tourist-less frame, and begin the hours and hours of painting, cloning, healing, brushing etc., to remove all of your “randoms.” There are artists who are very good at this process, but I’m fairly certain they would agree that if there was a way to not have to spend all that time, they’d take it. Well, it’s here. Photoshop CS3 can take your stack of images and by analyzing all of them, figure out which things are permanent (things that appear in all the images like that building in the distance, the big tree, the sidewalk, and which parts of the image are obscured in one of the frames but not all of them, are healed automatically by borrowing pixels from other images in the stack and building an advanced composite of all the images and doing 90% or more of the work for you. There’s even a set of “fuzziness” sliders letting you say “eleminate things that are in X% of the images in the stack or less.” This is so impressive to see in action. You have to try it on some of your own images. It’s really hard to believe that it’s this easy to do this sort of process now. This is one of those new areas that I’m sure we’ll see artists finding incredibly creative ways to utilize this feature. Again, this one floored me when I first saw it.

* Vanishing Point with adjustable angle
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These days, people are interested in building their connections thereby increasing the number of people or friends in their circle. This could help them make more friends with people who are from other parts of the world. Ever since the internet was introduced, it has taken over our lives and we now carry out every possible activity on this platform. If a person creates a personal space on the internet or is into blogging, they can promote work and use to browse for funny images and watch funny video clips. Not only do they make you popular among your peer group, this is a way to share new websites with each other.

Blogging has become a rage these days with almost everyone owning a blog URL, which is like a personal diary, except it is maintained online. For some it is a way to express their inner feelings and jot them down on a daily basis. Others it’s a platform that allows them to showcase their talent and invite new business opportunities and these people are referred to as Bloggers. When we surf the net, we look for humor related sites or those that have funny pictures and videos in them. This is a way to break the monotony of the busy day and enjoy those few moments of laughter. There are many sites that have funny videos in them, and if a person desires, he can embed these videos into personal blogs. All they have to do is copy the html tag given with the video and post it on their blog and it will remain up there for all visitors who stop by and enjoy a good laugh.

Among the many networking sites that have come about, MySpace is the third most popular in the United States and the sixth in the world. A place where you can make friends, get to know people from across the world, impart information about you and look for job options is what this is. You can put up your blog URL, any pictures and funny videos you wish to share with others and they would get noticed instantly. It is a way of drawing attention to oneself through which the member can leverage on the features offered at MySpace.

The Flash videos available on various sites are videos created as Windows Media or MPEG files, and later converted to flash. The reason flash players are the new wave in video media, is that they offer more GUIs than the old players. GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. Simply put, the controls you see in flash players are created in flash, and are unlimited. Flash players are also very popular because most computers have a built-in Flash player, making these videos available to everyone online.
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PDAMill Arvale II: Ocean of Time Review

Author:

There’s an adventurer in every one of us. Free yours and enjoy the outstanding experience of playing Arvale II – Ocean of Time 4.0, which will be your gateway to a world of valor and great deeds. Your fate and the fate of the world are in your hands!

There’s an adventurer in every one of us. Free yours and enjoy the outstanding experience of playing Arvale II – Ocean of Time 4.0, which will be your gateway to a world of valor and great deeds. Your fate and the fate of the world are in your hands!

No spoiling here, but the plot of this captivating game is Epic from a capital letter, involving powerful gods and goddesses, time travel and, of course, saving the world. The story begins and develops in a vast World of Arvale composed of eight different continents each with its peculiar climate, geographical conditions and settlements. The amazingly beautiful and very detailed world is a true pearl of this Pocket PC game – try not to forget about the actual quest when marveling at the picturesque views!

But the World of Arvale is definitely more than just a beautiful decor. It is a living world with its own stories and riddles. The man you accidentally meet in a village may turn out to be an outcast lord from another continent, and what looks like an ordinary stick may actually be a mage staff lost ages ago and now recovered by you. Interact with more than 500 NPCs and hundreds of objects to get to know the story of this enthralling world. Cut scenes unveiling some parts of the plot will help you find your bearings and decide on what to do next.

The game is tightly packed with action: apart from the main line, there are lots of side quests and additional puzzles. Travel through space and time, engage in various games of destiny and feel the true freedom of an adventure. Your fate depends on the path you choose, and so does the ending of the game. Fighting monsters and villains, rescuing princesses and collecting ancient artifacts – the whole epic hero pack of activities in one game on your PDA!

All the diamonds and pearls of the plot and gameplay are artfully set into a mount of wonderful visual and sound effects. Hear the whistle of the wind in the rich green leaves and enjoy the ambience of the game environment with more than 125 sound effects and a total of 27 soundtracks. The vivid colours of the game and amazing visual effects will make you want to play again and again – luckily, there are three levels of difficulty to choose from.

Compatible with all current Pocket PCs, this version requires a Windows Mobile 2003 or newer device. Thousands of users have already tried the game; join them by downloading a trial version to lift the veil of mystery covering the story and come back for the full version.
An immense world that has its own spirit awaits a hero that will take the challenge and face the evil in the greatest battle of all. This game is definitely worth the 40 hours (or even more) you’ll spend glued to your Pocket PC as well as the money it costs. Arvale II – Ocean of Time 4.0 is truly an ocean of joyful and interesting time.
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Control your computer securely and reliably from anywhere in the world no matter how many miles away you are going.

Many travelers set up their desktop computers to accept connections with Remote Desktop program built into latest versions of Windows only to find out in a hard way that they can’t control their PC from where they are. This is a very common problem because of the complexity of modern networks and the Internet itself. Just about anything can prevent you from controlling your desktop remotely: a firewall securing your network, an Internet provider blocking everything except Web pages and images, or any of the numerous reasons that exist in different segments of the Internet. These are all important and valid causes of connection problems, but the number one reason is much simpler and has nothing to do with the complexity of the Internet.

Depending on the ISP, your home PC can get a different IP address every once in a while. This type of addresses is referred as ‘dynamic’, and is a common practice among practically all ISPs, except if you pay extra for a ‘static’, thus permanent, IP address. But even if you secure a permanent Internet address for your computer, the firewalls will still stand in the way of establishing a successful connection between your PC and your location while on the go.

Anyplace Control by http://www.anyplace-control.com offers a revolutionary new approach to bypassing all the obstacles and remotely accessing your computer from anywhere in the world. Leave your heavy desktop PC at home while you are traveling! No need to carry even a notebook! Gain immediate control over your desktop and its files while on the go with Anyplace Control!

Accessing your computer remotely works in a few very simple steps and does not require complex setup or expert network configuration whatsoever. You simply create an account with Anyplace Control, and assign a name to your computer. When you need to access your PC from a remote location, you simply enter your computer name into the small and lightweight client application, and Anyplace Control manages the rest. No need to configure network settings on the remote PC, and no need to worry about the firewalls and other obstacles!
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