I have been working with Illustrator for some time and I have had a lot of people ask about problems with the color black. There are several problems that can crop up when using black in Illustrator, understanding how to use the “Appearance of Black” settings should help clear this up. As a note, this setting also shows up in Adobe InDesign and is imporant. What do the “Appearance of Black” settings mean in human terms? Appearance of black is a setting in Adobe Illustrator that allows you to change how the color black is shown on your screen and how it is output to your printer and exported RGB images. What is “Rich Black”? Rich black is a deep black that is very dark. Regular black is a very dark grey. The difference mainly matters in printing. A typical rich black mixture might be 100% black ink, and 50% of each of the other three inks (Cyan, Yellow and Magenta). When you use the “Black” swatch in Illustrator, you get regular black (100%...

 Have you ever wanted to create vector or bitmap graphics but did’t have all of the expensive programs to work in? Well I got wind of this website/project called Aviary which allows you to do just that.  Aviary has created applications mimicking all of the popular graphics programs out there today. I will list the different programs, what they do and some examples of work created by people. I find it quite amazing what you can do with these programs — and they are all free.  Aviary uses names of bird species for each of their programs. Image Editor (Similar to Photoshop, Paint Shop, Gimp, etc.) which is called Pheonix and is depicted by a very nice Peonix icon. Pheonix has all of the basic things you need to edit an image which include: clone tool, magic wand, filters, selection tools, smudge, layers and image resizing. To Give Pheonix (image editor) a try click here. Here are some of the popular images that I really like. These were created in Pheonix by regular users:   Apple...

This tutorial will give you an idea of how to productively clone an object out of an image. Some people might wonder why it is called cloning. This is because you are creating a part of the image that was not there from other parts of the image. In this tutorial I will tell you some of the basics. Please bear with me, it is difficult to show you in detail every step without overbloating the post with images. Level: Intermediate (can be useful for advanced Photoshop users) Photoshop Version: CS4 (Can apply to Earlier versions up to Photoshop 6) Tutorial: In this image is a bug that we are going to remove. We are going to clone it out by placing pieces of the image over it until it is gone. Each person using Photoshop will have their own way of doing this — so take note: this is my way of doing this particular action. The first thing we want to do is to clone out the major part of the image by using a piece of the image, here we select a square part of the petal. Next,...

  Level: Intermediate (can be useful for advanced users) Description: This is a tutorial on changing specific colors in an image using the color range tool in Photoshop. You can use this tutorial to easily change regions of color in an image to different colors. This can be very useful if you want to make a part of an image fit into the color scheme of the background or even just changing the color of someones dress or a clothing item. Photoshop Version: CS2 (Can apply to Earlier versions up to Photoshop 7) Tutorial: The first step here is to go to the menu [Select->Color Range]. Then click on the area of color in the image that you want to change. Here we are clicking on a red part of the women’s dress. The end goal for this tutorial is to change the color of her dress. You can use the plus and minus eyedropper buttons to add more regions of color to the selection. Here we are just using one sampling of red. Adjust the fuzziness. (The amount of similar colors to the one...

Make a glass looking button. This is a similar style to the Windows Vista Task bar. Level: Intermediate Photoshop Version: CS2 (Can be done in Earlier versions up to Photoshop CS) How to: First create a blank photoshop document using these settings: Width: 4 inches, Height: 1 inch, DPI: 300.      Select the rounded rectangle tool as shown here: Draw a rounded rectangle in a similar fashion to this. I used a Corner Radius of .125 in. You can change the radius as you like. More radius makes the corner more rounded, less radius makes the corner sharper. Change the foreground color to white and draw another rounded rectangle as you see here. You can change the radius for this as well. To make a more glossy look, decrease the radius, to make a duller shine, increase the radius. You can make many different variations of glass buttons using this technique. There are many other techniques as well for creating glass buttons. This is one of them.      Next, change the opacity of the...