Download audio file (slavery_dlux.mp3)

Description of the track:

I tried to make a hip hop beat that was on the lines of a slavery aspect.

Terms of Use: This track is available for download.

Have a listen to the track and offer your constructive criticism for this Workshop in the comments section.

• Do you enjoy the song or track itself? Does it have potential?
• Can the arrangement be improved?
• How did you find the mix? What would you do differently?
• What do you enjoy about the rhythm track? What can be done to improve it?
• Is the choice of instruments relevant and effective for the style/song?
• Are the lyrics (if any) effective? Does the style, arrangement and genre of the song suit them?
• Can you suggest any specific techniques that might improve the track?
• Do you have any other constructive feedback?

Need constructive criticism on your own tracks? Submit them for a workshop using this form (new link). Most but not all submissions are published. There may be a wait of up to two months.

So how many websites does your company really need? As many as you need.

Why?  Most companies, and I’m betting yours is the same, doesn’t just serve one singular audience nor do you have one singular offer.  Having websites that can address these different audiences and offers is a very effective method for generating more awareness, interest and trust for your company.  Now I’m not talking about full, blown out multi-page websites.  Instead, these sites are mini-sites, or what we call magnet websites in our organization, that are one or two focused pages.

Here are some reasons why every company should have multiple websites:

Domain Names – Most company websites are branded with their name (i.e. www.pfizer.com).  This is great if someone knows about you already and will type in your url but what about all those people that don’t know you exist but are looking for you based on the problem they want you to solve for them?  (i.e. www.deepradiatingpain.com) By having multiple websites you can own domain names that represent the generic categories you represent.  Not to mention the amount of people who type in the exact search directly into their url with a .com right after it.  By having multiple websites that represent the problems you solve for audience, you will show up when they are looking for you.  And we all know, showing up is 90% of success.

Single Minded Purpose – How often do you go to a website and have to sort through a lot of useless information get to what you are looking for?  A lot I bet.  By having multiple websites, you can focus your message in a way that matters and has meaning to your customers and prospects.  In the example above, if I was experiencing deep radiating pain and found www.deepradiatingpain.com, when I searched, I would expect when I went to that magnet site to find information that would help me solve that problem.  In this example, the site would be sponsored by Pfizer who makes a product called Lyrica specifically designed to help people experiencing deep radiating pain.  The site could have all kinds of resources and tools to help educate me and get me interested in learning more and ultimately trying out this product.  Don’t you think that would be useful?

Alternative Tactics and Testing – Most companies follow a traditional sales approach that they have found successful.  This is great to draw on your past successes aimed at your traditional customer base.  Except for the fact that it limits you from reaching new audiences for your products and services.  There may be markets you are afraid to approach or you feel may conflict with your current strategy.  Magnet sites are a great way to test different messages, different offers and go after different audiences to grow your business and stay ahead of the competition.

Inspire Immediate Action - If you are relying on your main company website to deliver information, it may take your visitor some time to search for and find the relevant details they need.  This may, and often does, frustrate them so they leave before they take an action.  Magnet sites can get right to the point.  If someone has deep radiating pain, do you think they want to read through mounds of information or learn about an offer that allows them to try a new product that promises instant relief?  Magnet sites can create urgency and impact although you may need to test different offers (see above) to determine what works the best.

Reach New Audiences – Magnet Sites can be a tool to create new markets for old products or services.  You typically can not approach every audience for a product or service with the same tactics.  Magnet sites can be used to customize your approach for new or alternative audiences so you can speak directly to that market’s needs.

Support Other Advertising Efforts – Magnet sites can be great landing sites for print, television, online, video, banner and display ads as well as for articles, newsletters, and news releases.  By separating your campaign site you can track results and effectiveness more accurately.  You can experiment with marketing tactics aimed at new  audiences without impacting your regular site visitors.

Make Money with Niche Marketing - You’ve heard about the “Long Tail” by now right?  The internet is the world’s largest customer network.  You can reach anyone, anytime, anywhere which opens up new opportunities for every business.  What are you doing about it though?  If you are like most companies, you are probably selling the same product, the same way, to the same audience, so that your audience is probably no longer paying attention.

Companies have to be different to be heard.  They have to be bold and innovative.  They have to constantly try new approaches to reach their audiences.  By having multiple websites (i.e. Magnets) delivering targeted, alternative presentations to different, alternative audiences, you can expand and build your business without adversely affecting your current visitors.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how to use Magnet Websites to increase your audience, contact us  today.

Attracting a niche audience is extremely valuable but we all know the ultimate goal is building a relationship with each visitor so they become a customer and refer you to others.  So how do you do that?

Magnet Websites can, and should, be a vital part of your marketing strategy to help you determine how to build relationships with your audience.  Magnet Sites provide a great platform you can use to supercharge your marketing.  For instance:

Research - Magnet Sites are a great vehicle to use to engage your visitors in a conversation about information you may be looking for.  You can do this in the form of a survey or a discussion board to name a few.  Also the domain names themselves can be a great test to see what people are searching for.  If you are thinking about a new product and want to get an idea on what people are searching for and responding to, magnet websites are a great tool.  It’s like a focus group that’s always available.

Ideas/Messaging -  How many times when you are in a meeting do multiple people have ideas but you can only implement one?  Well no more, magnet websites are a great vehicle to test different messages or ideas and measure the impact they have.  You may be surprised what gets the attention of your audience.  Rather than try to guess what the best idea is in a  room, test it in the real world.

Pricing - Ever wonder what the right price to charge for a new service or product is?  By having multiple magnet websites that your traditional customers aren’t visiting, you can test different offers to determine how visitors respond.  This can give you valuable insight into your pricing strategy that you can then carry out on a larger scale.

These are just a few of the ways your Magnet Websites can Supercharge your marketing.  If you are interested in arranging a FREE brainstorming session to talk about ways to use your magnet websites contact us today by email or call us at 954.294.6467.

When compositing photos in Photoshop, sometimes the story you tell can be just as important as how well you combine the images. Frequent Psdtuts author Tony Aubé is not only good at combining the images he uses, but he is also great at combining them in an emotional way. Let’s take a look!

Ever Belonging Seaheart

In this piece, it is clear that this ship is in trouble. Will the ship’s crew make it to land safely or will they be smashed against the rocks?

Maiden’s Prospect

This maiden is waiting for her prince. Will the suitor on this ship be the one?

David and Goliath

This climber has a tough, if not impossible journey ahead of him. Will he be successful at climbing the face of this mountain?

Awaiting Summer

In this apocalyptic piece, Tony explains how to combine several photos to create a panoramic image in Photoshop. Then he explains how to turn that image into a snowy apocalyptic wasteland.

Red Silk

In this piece, Tony explains how to create an Asian-inspired scene using several photos.

Toscane’s Skies

This composite shows a person enjoying what looks to be a beautiful day, atop a large hill or mountain. In this piece, you get the impression that this person is reflecting upon a major life event. You can see the steps Tony took here.

Returning Home

This rider is almost finished making the long journey home to his castle.

Hitoban Musumegokoro

In this piece, Tony depicts a sleepy Asian-inspired town using several stock images. This image is also available as a tutorial.

As photographers, we’re always being told that light is the most important element of our work, that the shots we produce are dependent upon the light available and the artificial light that we bring to a situation. Whether we’re tired of hearing it or not, it’s true.

However, photographers are often posed with tricky situations in which the lighting is less than adequate and doesn’t match with their intentions. This tutorial will hopefully offer you some creative ideas for dealing with low light scenarios and making the most of the light that you have to work with.

Why low light?

Many photographers avoid dealing with low lit situations because it often doesn’t make sense to work without adequate light. If you are a produce photographer, there are no demands upon your work to shoot in situations where you don’t have the correct light sources on your chosen subject. However, as a photographer who works with a large variety of subjects, I am met by a whole array of situations that require me to know how to work best with the light on offer.

As you read through these tips, consider how they might be best applied to the photographic work that you undertake, whether any of the creative ideas might be worth considering for your own work. Hopefully this practical advice will come in useful when you are next confronted with a low lit situation.

Photo by jliba

What about flash?

I can hear you saying it already. In this modern age, we have a vast array of lighting options so that we no longer have to struggle with a lack of light. I don’t want to detail here how to approach a low lit situation and compensate for that by using artificial light.

Obviously, in any given scenario you have the option to use flashguns, studio style lighting or even something basic such as a torch to make up for the lack of natural light, but I want to focus on the ways in which we can use situations with limited light to our advantage and make the most of the scene we are faced with.

Photo by lightknight

Dealing with low light by using camera settings

So first things first, when confronted with a low light situation, there are means by which you can alter your settings in order to get the shots you want. One of the main things you can do is make the most of the ISO settings. Turning up the ISO will let in more light, the only downside being that it will increase the noise in the shot.

You can also work with the shutter speed in order to let more light in, select shutter speed priority on your camera and experiment with the settings according to the situation and the light available. It can also be beneficial to try using bulb mode on your camera, a feature that will keep the shutter open for as long as the shutter button is depressed. When using bulb mode, it is very beneficial to have a remote shutter release so as not to apply any pressure or vibration to the camera while the shutter is open.

Photo by yazmdg

Step 4 – Equipment to help with low light

If you are working with long shutter speeds and bulb settings, then it is essential to use a tripod. If you try employing shutter speeds of anything under around 1/50, then you’ll begin to see the deterioration and lack of focus in your shots if you’re just holding your camera.

However, if your shutter speed doesn’t require it, then please don’t feel bound to your tripod, I often find my tripod stifles my photographic eye and is a hindrance to my creativity, so if you can, pop the ISO up another notch, select your shutter speed at around 1/125 and go handheld!

You may also have heard the term ‘fast glass’ in reference to lenses that have wide apertures. My favorite lens to use in low light situations is my Canon 50mm f/1.8, which was amazingly affordable, is very light and is extremely ‘fast’ with it’s f/1.8 aperture.

For me, this lens makes the difference when it comes to working in low light scenarios. It can let in a lot of light and I don’t have to worry about noise by turning the ISO up quite so high.

Photo by linh_rom

Urban evening shots

It’s a common presumption from photographers that as soon as you start talking about low lit situations, they will automatically starting thinking about night cityscapes and urban shots with neon lit streets. Now I’ve nothing against these types of shots, they just have to be taken tastefully and creatively.

When you head out to shoot a night cityscape, go out before it gets dark, just before sunset. This way, the light will be low enough to look dark, and the lights will be on, but you’ll have enough light to highlight the necessary detail in the buildings and architecture.

Photo by simonbray

Working with landscapes

I’m sure you’ve read many times that the best times to take landscape shots are during ‘The Golden Hours’, essentially, the time around sunset and sunrise, in which the golden sunlight is poured sideways onto the subject matter. Well, utilizing the extremes of the golden hours, just before sunrise and after sunset, can also prove extremely rewarding.

The low lit hours before sunrise are filled with an air of expectancy for the day, as light begins to seep through the sky and light your subject matter. However, my favorite time of day to shoot is twilight, having watched the sunset, and just for a short while, the atmosphere changes, as the diminished light becomes less adequate, visual judgement reduces and everything looks slightly unreal.

For me, it’s all about picking your moment. Be sure you have plenty of time on location, firstly to appreciate the amazing natural surroundings, but also to take in the details of the scene. Don’t wait too long before getting your camera out, as where sunlight is concerned, the scene and the light will be changing constantly.

Try utilizing long exposures for your low lit landscape shots, especially when involving water, in order to smooth out the scene, you could even use a low grade neutral density filter to enhance this affect.

Photo by simonbray

Try black and white

Low light shots naturally lend themselves to black and white processing because without the color distraction, the focal point of the shot changes. The importance of the light involved in the shot increases as the light and dark draw the attention of the eye without the intrusion of the color.

Working in black and white also draws more attention to the composition and subject matter of the shot, I wouldn’t recommend shooting directly in black and white, but it should be an important consideration for when you come to process the shots. This can be particularly useful if you’ve had to crank up the ISO in order to achieve the correct exposure and are suffering with a lot of noise in the shot. The increased ‘grain’ may lend itself to the atmosphere of a black and white shot rather than intruding upon a color shot.

Photo by justinmclean

Working with people in low light

It is often assumed that working with portraits and trying to capture shots of people in low lit situations isn’t going to work, but there are in fact ways to capitalize on this scenario.

Try using motion creatively, especially when looking to capture a crowd of people. Experiment with shutter speeds and find a setting that’s long enough to blur those moving, but short enough to capture those standing still. Also, consider any jobs or scenarios that involved people working in situations with a light source. For example a welder provides his own light source.

Photo by dk_spook

Use HDR

Another option to make the most of shooting in low light is to try merging two or more shots taken with different exposure settings in order to ensure that none of the shot is under or over exposed. This way you are using the atmosphere of the low light situation without compromising the quality of the exposure of the shot.

Photo by kennytyy

Over to you

So hopefully you’re now well equipped practically and are full of creative ideas of how to work in challengingly lit scenarios. I think it’s a real shame when photographers shy away from low lit shots. Some of my favorite photographic work is quite sparse and shot using minimal light and there is an awful lot of potential within low lit scenes for creative and eye catching shots.

If you’re not sure where to start, why not begin with a simple personal project such as capturing light trails from stars using long shutter speeds, or possibly using minimal lighting for a portrait project, maybe using a solitary lit match or a single lamp.

Photo by benny4bs

Just because you missed that awesome conference, doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! This weekend we’re sharing an interesting talk by Storyteller and Richard Seymour at TED. In this talk you will ponder the questions, how do we tell that something is beautiful? And why does it matter so much to us?

Excitement about goals is often diminished by our fear of failure or the drudgery of work.

If you’re short on passion, it might be because your goals are too small or the fear is too big.

Do a job for a long time and achieve what you set out to achieve, and suddenly, the dream job becomes a trudge instead. The job hasn't changed--your dreams have.

Mostly, though, it's about our fear. Fear is the dream killer, the silent voice that pushes us to lose our passion in a vain attempt to seek safety.

While you can work hard to dream smaller dreams, I think it's better to embrace the fear and find bigger goals instead.

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

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  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

  Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

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  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

  Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

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  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

  In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

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  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

  Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

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  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

  In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

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  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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• 

  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

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  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

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  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

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  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

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  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

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  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

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  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

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  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

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  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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In today’s quick tip tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a cinematic “Transfarmers” Text Effect using the layer styles. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial.

• Transformers Solid font
• Dark Metal texture from Texturemate.com
• Brushed Metal Pattern

Step 1

Make a new .PSD document, 1000 x 500 pixels, RGB color, 100 dpi and grey background (color #33333). Create a new layer and fill it with brushed metal pattern from tutorial assets section (any metal texture will do though). Now using the Blending Options, fill this layer with a Light Blue color and set the blending options to “Overlay”. Finally if you want you can add a gradient that include several white and grey tones, with a bright area in order to create a better effect for the background.

Step 2

Now create the text using this font: Transformers Solid. Use these settings: 70 pt – Anti-Alias: Sharp. Now rename this text: “3D”. Then go in the menu Layer > Layer Styles > Blending Options and use these settings:

Step 3

Duplicate the text and rename it “Base”. Right click on his layer and click to “Clear Layer Style” or in the Styles Palette click on the first style “Default style (None)” (It’s the same thing). Now move this text slightly to the right in order to create a “pseudo 3D effect” with the text below (Look the Step image). Then go in the menu Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options and use these settings:

Step 4

Duplicate the text “Base”. Right click on his layer and click to “Clear Layer Style”. In the Blending Options menu on the right set the fill to 0%. Now and use these settings in the menu Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options:

Step 5

Your text effect is almost completed. Now we have to create a text reflection. Insert all 3 levels of the text effect in a group. Duplicate this group. Right click on it and click to “Convert To Smart Object”. Right click on it again and click to “Rasterize Layer”. Then go in menu Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical. Now move it as the image shown and then with the Eraser Tool delete as long as you want in order to create a realistic reflection. Finally to make the text effect nicer I added some sparks with simple brushes and color lights with soft brushes.

Conclusion

Now your text effect is completed!

Valentine’s Day is almost here and what better way to express your love for design than to send a letter? This Quick Tip explains how to create an envelope icon, you’d love to click!

Tutorial

Most of us have experience using the Adobe Suite, but how much do you know about InDesign? This powerful program has an entire host of features that you wont find in Illustrator or Photoshop, it’s for this reason that it has remained one of the most popular programs for graphic design and typography. The thought of learning InDesign may seem daunting to some, but there’s some really useful functions that are easy to learn and will save you hours of work. In this tutorial you will gain experience working with the page palette and special characters to make a basic page numbering system. You will also learn a few shortcuts that will help you work faster with InDesign.

May of 2010

Step 1

Open the multipage document you wish to add page numbers to. Go to your page palette, if it is not visible you can activate it by selecting Window > Pages.

Step 2

Within the page palette double click on A-master (you can do this by clicking on the text or page icon). You are now working in the master page.

Step 3

Select the text tool from your Tools menu (T), if the tool bar is not visible you can activate it by selecting Window > Tools.

Step 4

Position the cursor where you want your page number to sit. Click once and drag to draw a text box wide enough to hold the required amount of numbers.

Step 5

Select Type > Insert Special Character > Markers > Current Page Number. Once you have completed this step a capital "A" will automatically appear. The capital " A" represents the " A" master page. You can select, Command + A, and edit the character to any font, size, alignment and color to match the style of your document.

Step 6

We are now going to create the adjacent page number. However we need to switch back to the selection tool first (Escape + V). In my document I have set the left hand page up first. So, instead of going through the steps again, to place the right hand number we will simply copy (Command + C) and paste (Command + V) the text box you have just formatted.

Step 7

Position this text box on the right hand page, go to the paragraph palette and change the alignment to align right.

Step 8

You can now switch back to your main pages, you will find that every page is numbered. You will also notice that it is not possible to edit the numbers, this is because they are located on the master page and not the main document. To edit the number go back into the master page and use the techniques outlined in steps 1-6.

Step 9

By default number 1 starts on the front cover. Traditionally you wouldn’t need the cover numbered. It’s possible to remove the number without disturbing the rest of the page numbers. Click once on the page icon you wish to edit, in this case it is the first page. Select the options menu for the page palette, which located in the top right hand corner of the palette and scroll down to Override All Master Page Items. Now click on the page number/text box you want to remove and delete it.

Step 10

To start page number 1 on the second page of the document go back into the options menu for the page palette and make sure that ‘allow document pages to shuffle’ and ‘allow selected spreads to shuffle’ is not selected. To deselect highlight all of the pages by clicking on the first page, hold down shift and then click on the last page in the document. Go back into the page options menu and deselect.

Step 11

Click on the grey of the palette to deselect all of the pages, then click once on page 2 > page options menu > numbering and sections options. Select ‘Start page numbering at’ > ok.

Conclusion

There you have it, how to easily number pages in an InDesign document. Once you learn this feature you will love it. Auto numbering takes the stress out of proof reading and editing documents later and will leave you with more time for the things you do best… creating!

Friday Photo Critique is our weekly community project, where we publish a photograph submitted by one of our wonderful readers, then ask you all to offer constructive feedback on the image. It’s a great way to learn more about photography, express your viewpoint, and have your own image critiqued!

Quick Ground Rules

1. Play nice! We’ve deliberately chosen photographs that aren’t perfect, so please be constructive with any criticism.
2. Feel free to offer any type of advice – composition, lighting, post-processing etc.
3. You can also link to photographs that you feel offer a great example of this type of image shot exceptionally well.

Without further ado, here is this week’s candidate for Friday Photo Critique!

The Photograph

Photo Details & Inspiration

• Canon T2i
• 50mm
• f/10
• 1/400, 1/800, 1/1000
• ISO 100
• Three Exposures, Tonemapped

On the way to Tahoe last spring, I stopped at a turnout and took some pictures. I used bracketing because of the contrast between the snow and the trees. This was my favorite of the set because the peak on the right dwarfs the rest of the photograph, especially the bird seen on the left.

Please let us know what you think in the comments – how would you have approached the scene or taken the photo differently? A massive thank you to everyone who commented last week.

The most constructive and helpful comments will be featured on the site. Interested in submitting your own photo? You can do so here!

It’s time for the second part in our SimpleAdmin screencast series. In the previous video we covered the login page, today we’ll design our dashboard including tables, a sidebar and tabbed interface.

Part 2: Designing the Dashboard

Further Resources

• Crisp web app icons – Webdesigntuts+
• Wireframing kits – Smashing Magazine

Are you leaving behind an easily found trail of accomplishment?

Few people are interested in your resume any more. Plenty are interested in what you've done.

The second thing you'll need to do is regularly note what you produce in a log or find some other way to keep track.

The first thing is more difficult: If the work you do isn't worth collating and highlighting, you probably need to be doing better work.

March of 2009

However, with a little dive into Logic’s environment and Piano Roll editors, you can make sophisticated, arpeggiated lead lines (hereafter: arp line) just like the pros.

Step 1

At the heart of any arp line is a great synth patch. Logic hosts a number of synths that would make excellent sources, but we’ll use the oft-overlooked, yet powerful ES1 synthesizer for its punchiness and simplicity.

Load one instance of the ES1 synthesizer in a new instrument track in Logic Pro. From the drop-down menu of presets, select 06 Sequence Elements – Saw Sequence. Set the octave to 8, select Wave 2 for the Sub-Osc waveform, and add a slight amount of Glide to the patch. Your final patch will look something like this:

ES1 Patch

Step 2

Now that we have a sound, we can hop into the dreaded Environment window. The Logic Environment is feared by many, but the truth is that once you have a basic understanding of it, you can accomplish some powerful things.

Open the Environment window by pressing Command + 8. In the upper left corner, click the down arrow to expand the drop-down menu of Environment layers. Select Clicks & Ports. You should see a set of connections similar to those in the image below.

Clicks and Ports

This window essentially shows the MIDI I/O of your keyboard controller or interface. You’ll notice that at the end of the chain is the ‘Sequencer Input’. This is the last item in the line where Logic receives and routes MIDI input to your tracks.

Step 3

While there are several ways of connecting an Arpeggiator Object, I’ve found this method to be quick, reliable, and relatively straightforward. It has the additional benefit of allowing you to record the arpeggiated MIDI signal, which helps if you wish to edit the notes later on.

From the ‘New’ menu, we’ll select Arpeggiator, and the result should be an Arpeggiator object in the window. Drag the cable output from your ‘Input Notes’ object to the input of the Arpeggiator object. Likewise, drag the cable output of the Arpeggiator to the input of the Sequencer Input object. The result will look something like this.

Arpeggiator object layout

Step 4

After completing the steps above, select the Arpeggiator object and note the panel to the left of the main Environment window, which displays the properties of the Arpeggiator object. Here is where we can begin to tune the way in which the object will affect our incoming MIDI signal.

Have some fun experimenting with the effects of each parameter. For this tutorial, I’m going to use the following settings:

Arpeggiator settings

Step 5

Now that we have our basic setup, we’ll begin recording a few arp lines! Select a tempo that’s appropriate for your tune – I’m going with 110bpm here.

By putting your transport into PLAY or RECORD mode, your incoming MIDI data will now be modulated by the Arpeggiator object. Experiment with this for awhile to get a feel for how it works, then record a few variations using simple chords and intervals. You’ll find that while using this Arpeggiator is an imperfect art (occasional missed notes and late changes), a few short moments in the piano editor to move a few things around will help clean things up to perfect sync.

Download audio file (1.mp3)

First arp line of ES1

Step 6

Now that we have a few variations of our arpeggios, let’s liven them up a bit using a couple of simple techniques. First, we’ll add in some variations to the arpeggios in the Piano Roll editor.

For the first arpeggio, I have a simple alternating octave of 16th notes. I’ll select all the notes in this section and use the Transform – Fixed Note Length function. This will shorten the duration of the notes and give them a bit more punch. I set mine to 120 ticks.

Next, I’ll add in a few third and fourth octave variations to some of the notes, resulting in something like this.

Octave variations

I’ll use a similar process on the second arpeggiated section, adding in some octave variations and adjusting the note duration.

For a closer look at creating cool ostinato effects, check out this tutorial by Ryan Leach.

Download audio file (2.mp3)

Adding more detail to the arpeggios

Step 7

Now that we’ve tuned our arp lines, we’ll add some simple effects to them using Logic’s delay plugins. For this particular style, I really like Logic’s Tape Delay, so we’ll insert one instance of the Tape Delay plugin into the insert track of the Arpeggio arrange track.

We don’t want the delay to overpower the punchiness of the arp line, so here are the parameters I’ve used for this plugin.

Tape Delay

Here’s the final result of our arpeggios using Logic’s ES1, Tape Delay, and the Arpeggiator Object from the Environment window.

Download audio file (3.mp3)

Final arp lines

And for good measure, here’s the whole lot, blended together with a nice dance beat. Enjoy!

Download audio file (4.mp3)

Final mix!

SOLD OUT. Thanks.

The bestselling ShipIt journal has surprised me in how much impact it has had on the teams that have used it. I ended up selling tens of thousands of them.

I have about 600 left and rather than pay warehousing fees, I lowered the price a whole bunch and will leave it that way until they are sold out. (The rest of the inventory is here). I don't expect to reprint them, sorry.

Also, Jess Bachman's Death and Taxes poster is available at a great bulk price for the next 28 hours at an already funded Kickstarter. I think every classroom and office ought to have one.

Sometimes using a highlighted effect text gives a stronger emphasis and style to your design. In this quick tip we are going to achieve that effect by utilizing Paragraph Rules in Adobe InDesign. Let’s begin!

Step 1: Insert text

Create a new document at any size you want. Then insert the text that you are going to highlight. The font I use is Calibri. Change the font size to 48 pt.

Step 2: Disable Hyphenation

It is not good to have a short text with hyphenation. To fix this, click the text frame and then open Paragraph panel (Command + Shift + T). Remove the tick mark before Hyphenate on the panel to disable the hyphenation.

Step 3: Create New Paragraphs

In order to highlight the text later on, make each line in the text frame into a new paragraph. The process is pretty simple; by the beginning of each line, except the first line, press Backspace to remove the space that links the previous line.

Press Enter to put the sentence after the cursor into a new paragraph. Repeat the same process for the next line.

The text structure looks the same with the previous step, but this time the text has three paragraphs. You can check it by using Type > Show Hidden Character (Command + Option + I). You will see a character like a reversed P which indicates the end of the paragraph. It means that the line below the character is a new paragraph. The # character means the end of the text/story.

Step 4: Change Text Color to White

Change the text color to white to make you easier to adjust the Paragraph Rules later. Double click the text frame and then select all paragraph (Command + A). Open Color panel (F6), click the "T" icon on the panel, click the Fill icon which is represented by the square. Set all color values to zero to turn the text color to white. Press Esc when you’re finished changing the color.

Step 5: Open Paragraph Rules

Make sure the text frame is selected, open the Paragraph panel (Command + Option + T). Click on the small icon on the top right corner of the panel and then choose Paragraph Rules (Command + Option + J)

Step 6: Paragraph Rules Set Up

Activate "Preview" to see the live result of the adjustments and then set up the paragraph as follows. Choose Rule Below, and activate Rule On box, Weight: 50 pt, Color: Black, Width: Text, Offset: -13 mm, Left Indent: -3 mm, Right Indent -4 mm.

Press OK when you are finished with the set up. That’s it! You have created the highlight for the text!

Conclusion

You can use this technique for short text like title, quotation, and captions in your layout design to give them more style and emphasis. Experiment with the text size and Paragraph Rules options for different variation.

Applying the right atmosphere and lighting to your artwork can be a tricky task. In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, author Wojciech Pijecki will explain how to create a mechanically enhanced subject, in a sci-fi environment, using advanced shading techniques in Photoshop. This tutorial is available exclusively to Tuts+ Premium Members. If you are looking to take your photo manipulation and retouching skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!

Tuts+ Premium Members can login now for instant access to this tutorial. Membership to Tuts+ Premium gets you access to hundreds of exclusive premium tutorials, top selling ebooks, in-depth courses, member forums, and much more. To learn more about Tuts+ Premium, Take the Tour or Join Today.

Portraiture can be a challenging subject, especially for newcomers to photography. There’s something about asking someone to be a model that’s a little nerve-racking if you’re not accustomed to it. Not only do you have to find a willing subject, but you also need to figure out where and when the shoot is going to take place, and how to direct your model once the shoot gets going. All without coming across like someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. Luckily, I’m here to help.

My first piece of advice is to relax and enjoy it. You’ll get the best photos that way. Also, if your model enjoys the shoot they are more likely to work with you again. Once you’ve mastered the skills required and have some confidence, portraiture is tremendously rewarding.

The cool thing about portraits is that each shoot is a one-off. It’s just you, your subject and a camera. It’s not like landscape photography, where the subject is static and can be photographed over and over by other photographers as well as yourself. That means that the results of each shoot are unique. People change as they get older and portraits freeze moments that become more meaningful as time passes.

Find a model

Before you can start, your first requirement is a model. A good place to begin is with family or friends, as your relationship means that you are not dealing with strangers. But if you don’t know any willing subjects, you need to look a little further afield. The internet’s a good source – my favorite website for finding models is Model Mayhem. The standard of photography on the site is also very high and a worthy source of inspiration.

If you can’t find a suitable subject, self-portraiture could be an option. Miss Aniela has found fame and fortune through her self-portraiture work. A look through her photos will inspire you. A couple of other self-portraits I like are Olivia Bell and Carmen Gonzalez. All three take photos of other people too.

When you approach your model, have an idea in mind. Also, it’s important to realize that modeling is hard. Work out some type of compensation, even if it’s just prints from the shoot.

Practice shooting indoors and out

Indoors (lit with portable flash)

Outdoors (lit with natural light)

Perhaps the first decision to make is whether your shoot will take place indoors or outside. I prefer to go outside, but if you are lucky enough to have a photogenic home or a room you can use as a studio then shooting at home frees you up from being at the mercy of the weather. If you are shooting inside, you can use either natural daylight or flash.

Natural light works well if you have a photogenic location with big windows to let in the light. For some inspiration take a look at the work of Jan Scholz, he has some of the best natural light work I’ve seen.

Flash can take a while to learn to use well but it means you can take photos whenever you like, even at night. The Lastolite School of Photography is a good resource for learning about studio flash and you can learn about portable flash from Strobist, Joe McNally and Speedliting. The last three websites have lots of articles about using portable flash both indoors and outside. There are also many resources available at Phototuts+.

Mitchell Kananshkevich has a great eBook about lighting, covering flash, reflectors and natural light here. Piet Van den Eynde has two more here.

Choose your portrait lens

Short telephoto lens

Wide-angle lens

Lens choice dictates the approach you take during the shoot. One approach is to use a short telephoto lens (around the 85-100mm range on a full-frame/35mm film camera). These lenses are traditionally called portrait lenses for a reason. You can take headshots, full body shots, waist-up shots and just about any other kind of portrait shot with them.

Prime lenses are also useful for portraiture because their wider maximum apertures let you take photos in lower light levels and also throw the background out of focus. You can experiment with selective focus with these lenses. A 50mm prime lens (a great portrait lens on a crop sensor camera) is the least expensive way to start with prime lenses. You can learn more about 50mm prime lenses here.

Another approach is to use a wide-angle lens. This lets you include more of the background and get more of the scene in focus. You need to take care to get close enough to your model with a wide-angle lens, else they may be too small in the frame. Wide angles perspectives are a favorite among environmental portraitists.

You can learn more about environmental portraiture here.

Advance your knowledge of camera settings

The simplest option is to set your camera to portrait mode (if it has one) and let your camera take care of the settings. This lets you forget about the camera settings as the camera is doing the work and concentrate on taking good photos. However, it doesn’t give you as much control as some of the other modes.

My preference is to use either shutter priority or aperture priority modes, depending on the effect that I want. If I want a specific aperture (say I’m shooting wide open with the maximum aperture of my lens like in the photo above) then I use aperture priority and make sure the shutter speed is high enough to prevent camera shake.

Alternatively, if aperture isn’t so important, I use shutter priority and set the shutter speed I want. I can then change the ISO and aperture if I want more or less depth of field

Take photos of your family

Taking photos of your family is very rewarding. As the years go by you will create a record of your family growing up and changing over the decades. There’s no reason why you can’t move beyond taking ‘snapshots’ and take some good quality portraits.

I admire Chris Orwig in this area of photography. Take a look at his blog to see some inspirational photos of his family. His book People Pictures: 30 Exercises for Creating Authentic Photographs is an excellent resource for learning about all types of portrait photography.

Experiment with fashion and editorial portrait photography

This is a genre of photography whose intent is to create photos, often of models or celebrities, to illustrate magazine articles, for fashion spreads or for advertising. It’s a difficult area to get into as the top fashion and editorial photographers have access to resources the rest of us don’t, such as top models, make-up artists, stylists and art directors to help come up with the concept of a shoot.

It’s a team effort. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to do the same. All today’s best photographers were once students and many started out with only basic equipment, a desire to learn and creative vision.

For instance, look at the work of Lara Jade on Deviantart. She started off as a beginner, and has gone on to be a professional fashion photographer. By going back to her earliest photos you can see how her work has progressed over the years.

Jingna Zhang’s post “The equipment and where the money comes from” explains how she started out learning with minimal equipment.

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Try to capture ‘character’

Fashion photography takes place in a make-believe world. Capturing ‘character’ is almost the opposite approach. You are trying to capture the reality of your sitter, and express something about their personality in the photo. A tip is to ask them to wear clothes that they would normally wear in everyday life, rather than dressing up for the camera. If they have an interesting job or hobby perhaps you will take a photo of them doing that.

You can learn a lot about portraiture from some of the masters. Yousuf Karsh was an expert at capturing character. This photo of Ernest Hemingway is one of my favorites. There’s an amusing story behind his image of Winston Churchill, too.

Alex Alexander is a contemporary photographer who is good at capturing the character of his subjects. Some of his models are artists and actors and he works with them to create beautiful portraits.

Experiment with alternative printing processes

Some photographers are using alternative printing processes to create some interesting portraits. Alternative printing processes can be difficult to master, but this also means that not many people will try them so they can be a good way of creating portraits with a unique look. Christopher R. Perez has some beautiful black and white portraits created with a variety of techniques and equipment.

You can learn more about alternative printing processes at alternativephotography.com. If you like the look of some of these processes, you can create similar effects using the Topaz Black & White Effects plug-in.

Try to make your early sessions encompass a lot of techniques

Early on, a lot of photographers get a model and try to replicate a specific technique with them. It occasionally works, but many times it just causes frustration.

I would encourage people to initially try out a lot of things with a model. This means if something isn’t working out, you just move on to a new idea. It will keep both you and your model from becoming bored and frustrated.

These photos above of Abbey were all taken on the same afternoon, in a suburb of Auckland. I used an 85mm prime lens for them all. The idea was to take a simple approach and vary the portraits by finding interesting backgrounds. The post-processing treatment, a mixture of colour and black and white, has also added variety.

Conclusion

Portraiture, for me, is one of the most challenging and rewarding types of photography there is. But with so much inspiration available online and so many places to learn from, there is nothing holding anyone back from improving their portraits. All it takes is the desire to learn, a touch of creative vision and plenty of practice.

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favourite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

• 

  Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

  Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

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  Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

  Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

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  The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

  In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

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  Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

  Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

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  An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

  In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
  needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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  Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

  Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

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  How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

  The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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• 

  Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

  This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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• 

  Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

  If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

• 

  A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

  Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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• 

  Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

  With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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  Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

  Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

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  HDR: Love it or Leave It?

  There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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• 

  Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

  Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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• 

  Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

  While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

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  Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

  In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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• 

  Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

  Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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• 

  SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

  Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

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  Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

  In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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• 

  Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

  Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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• 

  Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

  Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

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  Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

  Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

  While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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• 

  Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

  This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.
  
  Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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  Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

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  Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

  In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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  Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

  If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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  An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

  As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

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  The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

  2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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  Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

  In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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  The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

  Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

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  iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

  Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.
  

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  PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

  Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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  Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

  In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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In this Tuts+ Premium tutorial, you will learn how to create a vector golf illustration. It includes creating a golf hole scene, complete with numbered flag for the hole and a cutout section of turf where the golf ball has landed. You’ll also learn to illustrate some dynamic text that fits well with the illustration’s theme. If you are looking to take your skills to the next level then Log in or Join Now to get started!

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Step 1

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Circles”, change the resolution to 200×200 and set the duration to 7 seconds.

Step 2

We don’t need a background solid so we can skip that part and click on the Toggle Transparency Grid button.

Step 3

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 200×200 and name it “Circle”.

Step 4

With the “Circle” solid layer selected, go to Effect->Generate->Circle. Under the effect properties we have to set the color to #302B2F and click on the Radius stopwatch to add a new keyframe. Move forward 2 seconds and change the Radius property to 93.

Step 5

Let’s duplicate the “Circle” solid layers, offset them and change the circle effect colors on each layer.

Step 6

Let’s duplicate the top “Circle” layer once again. Offset it and right click on it and go to Time-Reverse Layer or you can use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+alt+R). Now we have a looped circle animation. We can use this animation in Trapcode Particular as a custom particle for example, but because in this tutorial we’re dealing with default plug-ins, I will use Foam.

Step 7

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Abstract circles”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 7 seconds.

Step 8

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “BG”.

Step 9

With the “BG” layer selected, let’s go to Effect->Generate->Ramp. Change the Start Color to #9BB58F and the End color to #FFA601 and set the Ramp shape to Radial Ramp.

Step 10

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “Foam”.

Step 11

With the “Foam” layer selected go to Effect->Simulation->Foam. Before we move, on let’s drop the “Circles” composition inside of this composition and turn it off. In “Foam” I didn’t change too much. I changed the Bubble Texture Layer to the “Circles” composition and changed the view option to rendered and that’s it.

Step 12

Finaly I just add this crunched paper image and changed it to multiply. It’s an optional step but it just gives a little more depth to the animation.

Step 13

Now you should see something similar to this… Let’s go to the 2nd animation : ).

Step 14

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Radio waves fun”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 10 seconds.

Step 15

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “BG”.

Step 16

Create a new solid clicking by Menu->Layer->New->Solid. The color is doesn’t matter. Change the resolution to 1280×720 and name it “Radio waves”.

Step 17

Go to Effect->Generate->Radio Waves and set the following properties. I used #FA0047 as the stroke color.

Step 18

Go to Effect->Time->Echo and set the following properties.

Step 19

Here’s what you should see now…. Now, let’s finish the 3rd and final animation.

Step 20

Create a new composition clicking by Menu->Composition->New Composition. Name it “Circle text Animation”, change the resolution to 1280×720 and set the duration to 12 seconds.

Step 21

The method is almost exactly the same as what we did before. The only difference is that now we have to choose different solid layer colors.

Step 22

With the “Circle 1″ solid layer selected go to Effect->Generate-> Circle and apply it. We need to animate the radius just like we did before, but in this case I need to change the Blending mode to Stencil Alpha.

Step 23

Let’s duplicate the Green solid layer couple times, change the colors on every duplicated layer and offset them.

Step 24

Finally, I just put a text layer on top of all the duplicated layers.

Step 25

Let’s select the Ellipse Tool to create a circular mask on the text. Hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift while dragging to create a perfect circle mask.

Step 26

Let’s change the mask to Add mode and we’ll need to animate the Mask Path as well.

Step 27

I am just trying to create a simple growing circular mask path animation as you can see here. You can add the previous paper texture to the top and change the blending mode to Multiply to create a more dramatic or realistic look and here’s an another trick that I used..

Step 28

We can add a simple point light and then turn the 3D layer option on for all of the duplicated solid layers.

Conclusion

So this is it! I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and learned some new things. Try your own variations or customize the free project file that you can download at the top. My name is Tibor Miklos, thanks a lot for your attention and I’ll see ya next time! If you have any questions or just get stuck, just shoot me an e-mail. sir.tibor.miklos@gmail.com

Final Image

Sooner or later, you'll ask for something or read something or expect something and you won't like what you get. You'll feel like I wasted your time, wasted your money or didn't meet your expectations.

Not just me, of course. Everyone. Even you. You will disappoint someone, and the organizations you depend on will disappoint you. Expectations keep rising, and promises keep being made. We keep bringing more magic into the world, but rising expectations mean that there's more disappointment as well.

That's part of the deal of being in the world.

The alternative, I'm afraid, isn't to choose a path where we make everyone happy and always exceed their expectations. Nope. The alternative is to hide, to fail to engage and to produce nothing.

A pretty easy choice.

What To Backup

There are primarily two data pools that you will need to backup, your project data and system drive. It is clear why you need to backup your project data, simply because it is your work and it is probably what gets you paid.

It is also important to backup your system drive so as to minimise the downtime should your system drive fails. Having a clone of your system drive allows you to quickly replace your failed system drive and get back to where you were again.

You can also backup your sample libraries but quite often you can recover those from your installers if you do not want to use more backup space. That would fall under personal preferences.

Getting Started

Using an automated backup system takes the pain out from remembering to backup your data. It runs on a scheduled time and knows what backup source and destination. There are many software solutions out there that allow you create such a backup system.

Depending on your choice of a PC or a Mac, the software and method that you would use will defer. Being a Mac user, I will be able to recommend some specific choices for the Mac but it will not be difficult to find a piece of software that does the same job for the PC.

My choice of software for the Mac is Carbon Copy Cloner. It allows me to schedule a backup task and choosing my source folder and destination folder. These are just basic functions that most backup software will have.

Choose a good time for the backup task to run. Obviously, the computer will need to be running at that point of time. If you chose to do an incremental backup, the task will not take long unless you constantly make huge file changes to your drive. I am only working on individual projects at a time so my backups usually take a minute or less.

You can also choose to run the backup manually when you wish to. This could be after a large amount of work and you’re playing it safe.

Choose a Backup Type

There are slight differences in the type of backup that you can choose from. The differences are how the program handles data that have changed.

Firstly, there is the clone option. The program just ensures that there is an exact clone of the backup source. Files that no longer exist on the source are deleted. This type of backup will help when you have a drive failure but does not help if you need to recover a file that you had deleted.

Secondly, there is the backup and archive method. Files that have been changed or deleted are moved to another folder and archived. This takes up more space on your backup drive but provides the possibility of recovering a file that you have deleted.

Backup Your System Drive

Besides backing up your data, it is also good to keep a backup of your system drive in case that it fails. Having a backup of your system drive minimises downtime by allowing you to replace the failed drive and clone your system to exactly the way it was before.

For Mac users, Time Machine which ships with OS X was designed to help recover from such a disaster. However, it still takes a few hours for your drive to be restored using a Time Machine backup. You can use a backup software like Carbon Copy Cloner to perform an exact clone of your system drive to reduce the time needed.

For Windows users, the backup methods mentioned above would work well too. However, a backup and archive method would require a lot of backup space since files changes are much more common on the system drive. A standard clone should suffice for most users.

Its Not That Complicated

Building a backup plan might sound complicated but it is rather easy if you take it a step at a time. Know what is most important to you and make sure you have an extra copy.