Adobe Releases Illustrator CS5
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Adobe Illustrator CS5 is here! Illustrator CS5 is a comprehensive vector art software pack that enables graphic designers and illustrators to create digital art with refined drawing tools such as realistic brushes and interactive components. New vector illustration tools and features are perspective drawing, a bristle brush, a shape builder tool, multiple board enhancements, resolution independent effects, integration with the new Flash Catalyst CS5 and crisp graphics for web & mobile devices. Adobe has introduced a lot of improvements and new capabilities to its flagship vector drawing program Illustrator CS5.
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Illustrator CS5 works equally well for creating print and digital media and strikes the right balance of improved productivity and powerful new graphic design, drawing and paint tools that allow you to deliver remarkable designs. Illustrator CS5 gives vector artists, illustrators and graphic designers a new horizon into interactive design when combined with new tools like Flash Catalyst. The new Bristle Brush lets you paint with vectors and imitate real-world brush strokes. You can set brush characteristics like size, length, thickness, stiffness, shape, bristle density, and paint opacity. Improvements in content creation for web, mobile, and gaming devices include the ability to align your work to a pixel grid and create readable text via anti-aliasing. You can easily move your project between Illustrator and the new Flash Catalyst as you plot and design your layout, and then add interactive elements to it without coding.
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Expanded art board options in Illustrator CS5 include a full art boards panel, where you can name and reorder art boards and work on a variety of related projects in a single file. Additional improvements include a Shape Builder tool to combine, edit, and fill shapes on your art board, various drawing, vector logo and symbol enhancements, and resolution-independent effects. With Adobe CS Review, part of Adobe's new CS Live online services, users can create and share document reviews online from within Illustrator CS5.
llustrator CS5's new Perspective Grid tool let vector artists draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1-, 2-, and 3-point linear perspectives. The new Perspective Selection tool lets you move, scale, duplicate and transform objects vigorously in perspective. Illustrators can also move and duplicate objects from one plan to another. Users can now control stroke width at any point along a path, align dashes to corners and path ends, add accurately placed arrowheads from the stroke panel, and control how brushes stretch along a path.
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Tags: Adobe, Illustrator, CS5, CSV
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No Sign Of iPad Camera
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The Apple Beta SDK 3.2 recently released to developers shows no sign on any code related to a camera, ending claims for now that the iPad will eventually include a camera.
Despite rumours that Apple's forthcoming iPad would eventually find space for a camera (or even two) the Apple Beta SDK 3.2 recently released to developers shows no sign of any code related to a camera.
It's said that the recently discovered camera tab in the Photos App, found in an earlier beta of the SDK, has been removed.
Many had hoped the iPad would include a camera for video conferencing, social networking and simply chatting online, but the latest Apple Beta SDK 3.2 has put paid to that, for now at least.
Shortly after January's Apple announcement, Mission Repair, a leading service company for electronics repairs based in Olathe, Kansas showed photos of iPad parts apparently revealing space inside to fit an iSight camera from a MacBook perfectly.
At the time, Mission Repair's Ryan Arter noted: "Guess what, it fits right in there. The camera slips in the frame, the lens fits in the hole, the LED that indicates that the camera is on, fits, and the ambient light sensor hole is also correct. It appears that the plans to have camera in the iPad is a reality. I'm looking forward to the iPad... Rev 2."
Additionally, recent Apple rumours claim the next generation of the iPhone and iPhone OS will add a front camera and video calling capabilities. O2's new iPhone tariffs now show a charge for 'UK video calls' adding to the rumours.
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Tags: iPad, Apple, Camera, SDK, Beta
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5 Common Photography Mistakes
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Mistake #1: Red-eye
Red-eye may be a small flaw, but it can still make the difference between a frame-worthy photo and one you dismiss to a dusty shoebox in the back of the closet.
What causes it
When you take photos in a dim or dark setting, the light from your camera's flash reflects off the subject's eyes. The resulting red glow (red-eye) is the blood vessels illuminated within the subject's retinas.
How to prevent it
- Avoid using your flash whenever possible. (If you're not sure, take a few test shots with flash and without to see whether you absolutely need it.)
- If you have to use your flash, ask your subject not to look directly into the camera lens.
- Look for the Red-eye reduction feature offered on many digital cameras.
Mistake #2: Lack of a focal point
Even an image that possesses many qualities of a great photo (sharp focus, accurate colors, correct lighting) can be compromised by lacking an obvious focal point or main subject.
What causes it
- Shooting your subject against a busy or competing background or foreground.
- Trying to fit too much into one picture. (The entire family, the scenery, and a famous landmark are too much for a single vacation photo.)
- Taking a photo from far away, making your subject too small to be an obvious focal point.
How to prevent it
- Physically move closer to your subject.
- Use your camera's zoom feature.
- Before you snap your shot, ask yourself: "What is the main subject of this photo?" and "Does my subject fill the frame?"
Mistake #3: Blur
Whether it's low lighting, a shaky hand holding the camera, or a subject on the move, blur can ruin an otherwise great picture.
What causes it
- A camera moving or shaking—even the slightest amount.
- Shutter lag (the pause after you trigger the shutter before a camera takes a photo) while your subject is in motion.
- Insufficient lighting.
How to prevent it
- Use a tripod or brace yourself against a stationary object so it's easier to hold the camera still.
- Avoid shutter lag by holding the shutter button on your camera halfway down, waiting for your subject to make their move, and then pressing the button down the rest of the way.
- See if your camera offers an Action mode for automatic shutter speed adjustment, or a Night or Night Portrait mode to help with low lighting. (A tripod is usually necessary for these modes due to the extended exposure times.)
Mistake #4: Underexposed photos
Exposure is the amount of light that passes through your camera lens. When a photo is underexposed, it appears too dark, making if difficult to see the subject clearly or to distinguish details.
What causes it
- Shooting in a dimly lit space.
- Standing too far away from your subject.
- Setting your camera's shutter speed (the length of time the shutter stays open) too fast.
How to prevent it
- If you're shooting indoors, move near a window or lamp to add extra light.
- Move closer to your subject.
- Manually adjust the shutter speed on your camera so that it's slower.
Mistake #5: Overexposed photos
When an excess of light passes through a camera lens, the resulting photo can be too bright, washing-out the subject, obscuring details, and creating harsh shadows.
What causes it
The main cause of overexposed photos is bright light, whether it's indoor lighting or natural sunlight.
How to prevent it
- If you're shooting on a sunny day, look for a shady spot for your subject.
- Use a flash to help even out the lighting and avoid severe shadows.
- If possible, take advantage of overcast days—they’re ideal for outdoor photography.
Tags: Photography, Mistakes, Causes, Prevention
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Photoiconic Workshops
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soulblueprints
Photo Iconic has announced a pair of ‘Short and sharp' image workshops this March. The workshops are to be hosted by professional photographer and founder of the international Travel Photographer of the Year competition, Chris Coe. The two events are to take place on consecutive Wednesdays later this month.
The first workshop, ‘Digital Photography Made Easy', is aimed at demystifying the intricacies of your digital camera. Covering everything from menu options to advanced camera settings, ‘Digital Photography Made Easy' hopes to show what makes one image better than the next, and show how to get the most out of your camera. The workshop takes place 17th March at Intrepid Travel in Islington, between 6.30pm and 8.30pm
The second course is titled ‘Shoot like a Pro', and will look at how to go about earning a living from travel photography. Host and profession travel photographer Chris Coe will take a look at potential markets and examine how to prepare images for selling and finding potential customers. ‘Shoot like a Pro' will take place on 24th March, also at Intrepid Travel, and also between 6.30pm and 8.30pm.
Each workshop costs £40, with all participants receiving £50 worth of discount vouchers from Intrepid Travel and a £20 discount voucher on other Photo Iconic photography courses in 2010. Visit the Photo Iconic website for more information and to book your workshop
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Tags: Photoiconic, Course, March, Digital, Photography
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Wayfaring Inspires Digital Art
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A solo transatlantic sailor gave up a lonely life on the high seas to create ocean-themed 3D art using thousands of tiny, synchronised lights.
Artist Anthony Rowe, 45, unveiled his latest piece Ocean of Light at the Kinetica Art Fair and admitted the loneliness and isolation of the sea has inspired his work.
He said: "That feeling of being in the middle of nowhere in the ocean on a tiny cork, it's an unbelievable feeling. Just something that's floating on the surface of a large mass of water when it's hundreds of miles to dry land and three miles down to the bottom."
In his early 20s the sailor made several daring long-distance expeditions, including the perilous solo voyage from Britain to America.
He added: "And even when there's no wind you've got this swell going across the ocean, these large waves which move slowly across the surface. It's the feeling that's inspired this latest piece."
After giving up solo sailing Mr Rowe adopted a more sedentary career as a computer salesman. He later gave this up too, admitting he was no good at selling. However, it fostered an interest in electronics and computing which helped him create his sophisticated sensory artworks.
With his international art group, Squidsoup, Mr Rowe uses interactive light patterns - which respond to sound - to create flowing movement.
The former sailor now lives in the Cotswolds but admitted his brand of art raises a few eyebrows amongst the more "traditional" art community in Gloucestershire.
He said: "I'm slightly out of place out there, there's not a lot of other digital art going on in the Cotswolds, there's just a lot of traditional stuff."
Ocean of Light is on display at the Kinetica Art Fair at the underground Ambika P3 gallery, near Regent's Park in London, until Sunday.
Tags: Sailor, Sea, Digital, Art, Inspires
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@tabletchat - graphic design enters Twitter domain
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Macworld UK and Digital Arts have teamed up with Wacom to create a Twitter-based community (known as @TabletChat) that pulls together conversations about graphic design, and tablet-based design in general.
"For us, this is an alternative to the traditional approach to publishing" said Macworld UK's editor in chief Mark Hattersley. "Instead of us pushing news stories at people, and companies placing adverts around that news, this is more about us searching for - and stimulating - discussion about a topic that lots of people like us are naturally interested in. So it's more about us trying to kick-start a conversation and seeing where it goes."
The plan is to use Twitter to search for conversations about graphic design, and to integrate this conversation with a Twitter feed while at the same time using our Web sites to ask our readers what they think about graphic design.
Every day Macworld and Digital Arts will run a question about graphic design, and the answers will be collected into a series of running polls.
Where it gets interesting is that these polls enable people to tweet their thoughts directly from the Macworld and Digital Arts website. These tweets then appear on the user's Twitter site, and are retweeted on the @tabletchat Web site.
This is early days, and a bit of an experiment for us. But we've had some great comments so far, such as:
"There is no 'copy & paste' in the analogue world of pencil and paper. Imagination and talent rule. via @andrewbriden"
"Think the best thing is it's purity, and a basic form of art that everyone can do, young and old. via @psdesignuk"
"Hand-drawn art is showcasing your "REAL" skill whereas digital art is too artificial. If only hand-drawn had Undo & redo. via @@junn_tan"
Our Twitter community has also come up with great examples of graphic design, and lots of advice on how to get the most out of tablet design.
If you have a penchant for graphic design, and like using tablets to draw in general, then pop on over to @TabletChat on Twitter.
We don't store any of your details incidentally. When you use the poll your login details are redirected to the Twitter website and we used the official Twitter API to create the poll.
Tags: Graphic, Design, MacworldUK, Twitter, @tabletchat
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Digital Art at the V&A
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Daniel Brown, now 32, is one of the world's leading digital designers whose latest work, a luscious replica of tropical greenery, marks the entrance to “Decode: Digital Design Sensations,” an exhibition of digital art and design that opened Tuesday at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Equally spectacular pieces by other designers are featured in the show, as well as dazzling examples of data visualization, the new medium that translates complex information into gorgeous — and easily understandable — digital images.
A short walk along the V&A's corridors, a smaller exhibition shows how far, and how fast, these technologies have come. “Digital Pioneers” is a selection from the museum's collection of early computer-generated imagery produced from the 1950s onward by the forerunners of the “Decode” designers, including Mr. Brown's father, Paul, who was experimenting with computer art years before his son started sneaking into the local university lab. Compellingly simple and made with rudimentary technology, much of the work in “Digital Pioneers” is astonishingly beautiful and seems both brave and prescient given the extreme sophistication of “Decode.”
At a time when more and more of the images we see every day are digital, “Decode” and “Digital Pioneers” offer a welcome opportunity to help us understand how this area of design has developed, and is likely to evolve in future. “For the last 10 or 15 years this has been a very geeky field, but now more and more people are aware of the technology, and of how digital imagery is encroaching upon their lives,” said Shane Walter, creative director of the digital art and design festival, onedotzero, and co-curator of “Decode.”
This area has been so geeky that the first examples of computer art to be acquired by the V&A — a series of lithographs produced for “Cybernetic Serendipity,” a groundbreaking 1969 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London — were originally classified as “prints” by the museum's curators. The V&A has now recategorized them and acquired more work to create one of the world's largest archives of digital art and design.
“Digital Pioneers” draws on that collection. The story begins in the 1950s when computers, restricted up to then for military use, were introduced to universities and laboratories. Mathematicians and scientists started to experiment by using them to create graphic effects, as did artists and designers. Typical is the earliest piece in the show, a 1952 photograph by Ben Laposky of electronic waves flickering across a screen.
During the 1960s, Herbert Franke and Frieder Nake developed sparse geometric images by sending instructions from computers to simple printers or plotters, machines with mechanical arms to guide a pen across a screen or paper. Artists, like Charles Csuri, then devised ways of introducing random elements to the process. By the 1970s, Harold Cohen, Roman Verotsko and the elder Mr. Brown had become so adept at working with computers that they were writing their own programs.
Many of the “Digital Pioneers” were women, including Lillian Schwartz, Vera Molnar and, later, Barbara Nessim. They may have been drawn to computer art as a new medium with fewer barriers to entry than established areas of the visual arts or technology, where women were less prominent at the time.
The exhibition ends at the turn of the 1980s with the introduction of paint programs, which simulate the traditional effects of brushes and pencils as they produce paintings and drawings. “Earlier artists, like Harold Cohen, devoted their lives to working directly with the machine without any intermediate software by writing their own computer programs to produce drawings,” said Douglas Dodds, the V&A senior curator responsible for the show. “Paint programs enabled the new generation to produce work without having to understand the underlying technology.”
Assembling an exhibition solely from its collection has prevented the V&A from presenting a comprehensive history of digital art and design. There are obvious omissions, like the work of Muriel Cooper and Ron MacNeil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Visible Language Workshop in the 1970s. Even so, “Digital Pioneers” is an intriguing prelude to the visual extravaganza of “Decode.”
Renowned for its historic collections of the decorative arts, the V&A sometimes stumbles when it encounters the contemporary, but “‘Decode” is a happy exception. All of the exhibits were made in the last five years, at a time when digital art and design have become more aesthetically refined and intellectually challenging. “Many of the projects are post-digital, less about fetishizing technology, and more about the ideas they are expressing,” said Mr. Walter.
The first section of the exhibition shows how programmers, like Mr. Brown, and his American peers, John Maeda, Casey Reas and Joshua Davis, treat the raw data of computer code just like other craftsmen work with their chosen materials, by transforming it into something that looks lusciously seductive.
“Interactivity” explores the immersive potential of technology. You can “splash” paint across a screen by waving your arms in front of Mehmet Akten's Body Paint installation, or watch the branches of Simon Heidjens's digital trees move whenever the wind blows outside the V&A. These projects offer a foretaste of the next generation of sensor-controlled computers that we will operate with our voices or physical gestures, rather than keyboards and mice.
“Decode” ends with “Network,” which examines the interconnections of mobile technologies and the Internet. It also illustrates how digital imagery is helping us to make sense of a frenzied, often confusing world. Take Aaron Koblin's “Flight Patterns,” which shows a real-time image of the aircraft flight paths over the United States, something that changes so rapidly that it would have been impossible to depict in any other medium.
Tags: Digital, Art, V&A, Exhibition
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Fotoweek DC: Digital photography is still an Art
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Over the coming days, as art lovers take in the hundreds of images mounted around town at FotoWeek D.C., most of them will probably look a fair amount like photos always have. The technology used to produce them, however, will almost certainly be new. They will have been shot and printed digitally.
David Adamson, a 58-year-old Englishman, played a part in that change. Twenty-five years ago, as a budding computer geek, he got his hands on what he thinks was the first Macintosh computer in the District -- bought, Adamson says, in the vacuum-cleaner section of Hecht's department store, with money he made working as a skilled lithographer. He never imagined the future it would bring.
Even a decade later, when Adamson became one of the first people in the country to make digital art prints, he didn't think the technology would ever be within the means of amateurs. His first digital printer, built around the complex Iris technology, cost him $150,000, and he paid for it by making prints for some of the biggest names in contemporary art and photography: Chuck Close (his first star client), Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer, Annie Leibovitz. "We were the only game in town -- in the country! . . . In the pantheon of artists, I guess I've worked with most of them." (Such art-stars still travel to Adamson Editions in downtown Washington for his services.)
Now that printers can cost a thousand times less than they used to and any hobbyist can turn out an impressive image, Adamson was asked about the ubiquity of digital photography, its virtues and pitfalls.
Here is some of what he said:
What do you see as the biggest benefit of digital photography?
You used to go out with a camera with 35 shots in it, so you had to consider each shot -- a lot of people think that was a very good thing. Yet the other side is also true: If you had thousands of shots, you could shoot limitlessly, then go back and edit and cull out the best, whereas considering each shot might stop you from making the perfect shot -- that's my belief. The best thing about digital is that you can just shoot hundreds and hundreds of images and then at your leisure go back and pick out what you felt were the best shots, or the best accidents.
What are the biggest benefits of digital printing, specifically?
In digital, you can go down to the pixel level, and control the density and contrast and brightness and sharpness throughout the film plane. So you have absolute control over an image.
What is the most common flaw you see in digital printing?
Over-processing -- you have the facility to control all the minutiae, and some people run wild with it. And gradually the image gets eroded by the constant processing, by the backwards and forwards of playing with light and contrast, sharpness and blurring. And finally the image becomes quite obviously digitally manipulated.
Is there too much digital retouching?
We did definitely go through a period where, "Wow, I can put this person here" or "I don't like her head there, but I like her body in this shot. Let's swap." I think people are pulling back to a more honest way of shooting, and only using [retouching] in extreme situations, where something has to be fixed, or something has to be taken out. I'm seeing less and less of what was overtly collaged together, and a return to a more honest look.
Now that everyone can make a decent print at home, why do you still have work?
I remember being invited to Vienna, Austria, to see the first Epson [inkjet] printers. It must have been around 2002. At that time I have five Iris printers, maybe $700,000 in equipment -- no one else does, because who's crazy enough to do this? And then I go out, and see these printers that are producing images that are demonstrably better than the Iris prints -- larger, flawless. It used to be that we'd keep two out of every three prints off an Iris; these things were repeatable ad infinitum. And the machines cost $7,000 each. I thought: "That's it. End of my studio. No one's going to be even remotely interested in using the studio once they see these -- they're going to go out and buy one, and that's it.
"And for a little while, something like that did happen. But people started to realise that the economies of having the printer themselves were not really that great, unless you were a professional photographer using it full time. It was much more sensible to come to someone and have a perfect print done. And the other thing is that the artists that I really targeted -- like Chuck Close and Jenny Holzer and Roni Horn -- are so busy doing what they do, that never in a million years are they going to want to set up a print studio in their workshop. And they're very used to working with another person to get their work done. They trust my eye and ability."
FotoWeek D.C. continues through Nov. 14 at venues all across Washington.
Tags: Fotoweek, Washington, DC, Digital, Art, Photogrop...
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