I recently took this shot of our cat and felt I needed to do something with it! Here is a little Catmas Christmas card! If you interested in purchasing this image it was recently accepted to shutterstock.
Design Tips
Animated graphic for a newsletter created in photoshop
Tis the season to make little holiday graphics so I thought I would share how to make a little animated graphic you might embed in an email to encourage someone to click it.
Below is several I put together along with how to create one in photoshop. These were to encourage viewers to click through to view a video. Videos are harder to actually get to play in an email but an animated GIF usually does play. I must say the cute little snowman below was drawn by our extremely talented intern Ali Cameron!
The first step is to design the each design that will be in sequence. The fewer the better because each frame will slow down your load time.
Using the first graphic as an example there is only two frames. One with one set of lights on and then the other with the alternating lights on.
1. Create the graphic along with the layers that will include the graphics for each frame.
2. Select window>timeline. If asked choose animation for graphic instead of animation for video.
3. The first frame will already be visible. Select the duplicate frame icon.
4. Now turn on and off the visible layers to show what the next frame will look like.
5. Select how long you want each frame to display and if you want to the animation to loop forever.
6. Select file>save for web and choose GIF as your file type!
Another year!
Always fun to make a new calendar for my parents business. They hand these little calendars out each year and it’s a magnet. It’s always a challenge to get all the months into a small space and still have room for contact information. I especially like this circle format. I am reminded of the a clock and the marching of time.
How to clip a section in a flip book
I’ve been a fan of ISSUU for a pretty long time. Besides the fact it sounds like you are sneezing when you say their name it’s a pretty easy and relatively low cost option for embedding printed documents in your website and adding some interactivity. Sometimes you just have to present information exactly as it was laid out in a print layout program and ISSUU does this.
Sometimes all you need is just one page or a section of a page within a pretty large document to share with someone. ISSUU recently released that feature and I think it’s pretty useful! I recorded a little video that shows this.
The black and white challenge
A friend of mine recently challenged me to post a black and white photo every day for 5 days. I figured 5 days wasn’t too bad so this is what I posted and this is what I learned When I started out on the rainbow image I used Silver Efex Pro which has some “recipes” for black and whites. They are pretty nice.
As I went on though I found the black and white adjustment layer of Photoshop CS6 was more than enough. Simply converting an image to black and white depending on the image can just look kinda look dull gray. The black and white adjustment layer can give your images some pop.
Once selected another panel appears where you have a choice to use one of their presets or just adjust the color sliders. The color sliders were great. In the image of the chemist he was wearing a blue shirt and as I adjusted the blue and cyan slider it went to black making some nice contrast with his white lab coat.
My iPad painting attempt
This is not really my first iPad painting but it’s the first one I’ve done that I actually like! I wish I could say I imagined the scene but I used my friends photo of a fire access road in Oregon for inspiration. He said the light on the road broke through the mist and created this wonderful glow. I wanted to see if I could capture that. I used the drawing program called Procreate. Hope you enjoy!
To be 19 feet tall!
It’s always fun to see your images being used but it’s not often they are 19 feet high!
