There are a plethora of ways to treat a portrait for a myriad of uses, but that is for another feature. Let’s tackle adding drama or a cinematic quality to a regular, humdrum portrait. Let’s even throw in a little bit of faking HDR. That way if you work on a project that requires a stunning shot without the stunning photography, you’ll be able to cobble something together using your mad skillz!
Bring velocity and meltdown to your subjects with a little Photoshop magic. Doucin Pierre, aka Soemone, shows you how
I like to create dynamic work that conveys a sense of velocity in its subjects, and the visual featured in this tutorial is a prime example of that style.
In the following steps, I’ll let you in on one of the most effective and easily mastered techniques that I use to make striking, dynamic distortions of subjects – in this case I’ve used a model, although the technique can be adapted to any objects that you wish to feature in your work, such as cars or trees.
In this tutorial we’ll use brushes to create what look like stains of paint, but in your future work you can use similar techniques with any number of style forms to dissect and distort your subject.
London, England (CNN) — Real-time is a top 10 Web trend for 2010, I proposed in this column last week. Now the stage is set: Google this week launched real-time search, bringing live updates from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more into a scrolling pane in your Google search results.
How will the real-time trend evolve in 2010? Rapidly, no doubt. Why will it sweep the Web? Because it fuels our insatiable info-addiction.
Why real-time?
What’s driving this real-time trend anyway? In large part, lowered barriers to content creation: Posting a 140-character update to Twitter is so effortless that Web users are becoming conditioned to create.
They’ve learned to expect a response, too: The immediate feedback provided by Facebook comments and Twitter replies is an incentive to make continued contributions.
But the real answer may be in our heads. These technologies are literally addictive, says psychologist Susan Weinschenk, fueling a “dopamine-induced loop” of seeking behavior and instantaneous reward.
New email! Unread Tweets! New comment on your blog post! Each new alert is like Pavlov ringing a bell.
Real-time search
If this new paradigm stimulates our seeking behavior, it follows that search is central to the real-time Web. Before Google entered the fray, OneRiot and Collecta stood out among real-time search engines.
The reigning champion of real-time search, however, is Twitter Search, which provides instant updates whenever new Tweets are posted. “108 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them,” implores a message below the search box. Enter the topic du jour here and you’ll no doubt find yourself in one of Weinschenk’s dopamine-induced loops.
This thirst for the new and novel is by no means limited to search, however: It looks set to pervade the entire Web in 2010. Let’s look at a few more examples. Continue reading
Mountain View, California (CNET) — Google’s first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone.
On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.
The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what’s been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.
“It is our goal to be able to identify any image,” he said. “It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query.”
However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the “nascent nature of computer vision” and with the service’s present shortcomings. “Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories,” he said.
Google Goggles was one of the big announcements at an event at the Computer History Museum here to tout the future of Google search. The company also showed off real-time search results and translation of a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone. Continue reading
This video I stumbled upon when searching for Web Trends for 2010. The video is hosted on CNN here is the link: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/12/09/data.doctors.seg.02.cnn
(TIME) Probably not a big shocker that the minds behind Facebook are a little dweeby. Proof positive? They’ve incorporated an old video-game code into the site.
The Konami code, named after the Japanese company behind classics like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series and the Nintendo Contra classics, is one of video-gaming’s most storied cheats. During development of the 1985 Konami arcade game Gradius, a programmer found the game to be too difficult and programmed in a key sequence — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A — that, if entered, gave the player a set of the game’s power-ups. As word of the shortcut spread, other programmers aped his cheat, working the same sequence into their own games. The Konami code works in nearly 100 video games now, including Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution. (See the 50 best websites 2009.)
And now it works for Facebook. Try it for yourself — log in to Facebook and type the code: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, enter. It doesn’t matter where you type it: just have the Facebook page open and active. The result? Lens flares — those groovy circles that appear when pointing a camera into the sun — appear on your page with every click of the mouse. Useful? Not in the slightest. But they’re easy enough to get rid of — logout and they’re gone. (Facebook users, comment on this story below.) Continue reading
(CNN) — A large pop-up box will greet Facebook users logging on to the social-networking site on Thursday, asking them to modify their privacy settings.
The company says the changes will help streamline privacy controls that have confused many of its 350 million users and were sprawled over six separate pages.
What is getting the thumbs-down
Complaints have started flowing in, focusing on three areas:
The changes treat as “publicly available information” the following: your name, profile picture, current city, gender and networks, and the pages you’re a fan of.
Until now, you had the option of restricting much of that information. That option has been removed.
The ramifications, as the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation sees them:
“For example, you might want to join the fan page of a controversial issue (like a page that supports or condemns the legalization of gay marriage), and let all your personal friends see this on your profile, but hide it from your officemates, relatives or the public at large.” You cannot do so now. Continue reading
(CNN) — Her choppy blue-and-blond hair hiding the fear in her eyes, a 15-year-old voiced her dislike for a hip-hop music group and got punched in the face by a classmate. The whole thing was caught on tape and social media helped police in their investigation.
A crowd of six to 10 classmates were following the self-described emo girl and her boyfriend home from school in Newark, Ohio, on an autumn day in September. Some kids were taping it and others were egging on the assailant, who was on the school wrestling team. It all started because Alexis Xanders doesn’t like Insane Clown Posse.
One of the students who recorded the incident contacted Xanders on MySpace and sent her the video two months later. The teen says she wanted something done, so she uploaded the video to YouTube and CNN iReport last week.
While only six to 10 people witnessed the alleged assault, the video has received more than 1,000 views on CNN iReport to date.
A local newspaper reporter saw the video and alerted the local police department, says Newark Police Sgt. Scott Snow. A police report was filed on September 24, and authorities are now investigating the other kids in the video who were goading the suspect. Continue reading
Tampa, Florida (CNN) — Dianne McLeod recalls her husband, Stanley, getting so visibly upset when the debt collectors called that she had to take the phone away from him. She believes constant harassing phone calls and other tactics eventually killed him.
“I think they were a major contributor to his death because of the stress and what I saw it doing to him,” she said.
McLeod is suing her mortgage company, Green Tree Servicing, for the wrongful death of her husband. McLeod said she thinks he would be alive if not for the stress caused by Green Tree’s debt collectors. She said they sometimes called up to 10 times a day and also called the McLeods’ neighbors.
“He would begin to sweat; he would also get very red in the face and complain about chest pains,” McLeod said. “We were worried he was gonna have a heart attack right there on the phone.”
Stanley McLeod had a heart condition and in 2002 was airlifted to a hospital after a second heart attack. He went on disability and Dianne McLeod says they fell behind about three months on their mortgage payments. Continue reading
NORWALK, Conn., Dec 09, 2009 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Marketing Drive is pleased to welcome Bill Wiechers as VP/Creative Director for their Chicago location and Joe Kantrowitz as Creative Director based in Norwalk, Connecticut.
In his previous position as VP/Creative Director for DraftFCB Chicago, Bill developed retail communications and promotions for some of the world’s top marketers: GlaxoSmithKline, Kmart, Motorola and the United States Postal Service. With over 15 years of marketing experience, and several highly-acclaimed industry awards such as an Echo, POPAI and Reggie under his belt, he will lead Marketing Drive Chicago’s creative department. “Bill fills a vital role for our Chicago team and will be instrumental in developing effective creative solutions for our clients that successfully integrate all disciplines of the marketing mix,” said Gene Chmiel, Chief Creative Officer, Marketing Drive. Continue reading
So now that you’ve heard all these great CS4 announcements, lets get into some constructive details about Flash CS4 (whoo hoo, I can finally talk about what I’ve been working on!). But before we start, this is the first time I’ve written in detail about a non-released product, so bear with me and please comment about whatever is really confusing or assuming you have the product already, below.
There have been sneak peeks of some of the upcoming features in Flash thanks to conferences and keynotes, and you may have seen that one of the big new features (and to some of us on the feature, *the* big new feature) is a new way of creating animation. So yeah, tweening has changed. Finally. In Flash version 10. No more arrows on purple blackground. Um, now it’s blue with diamonds. And a whole lot better in many ways.
Update: articles on Adobe Developer Center for the new motion model:
We are living in an exciting time for consumers. Never before has it been so easy and empowering to shop and gather information. Instead of reading newspaper or magazines, we search Google, blogs, and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Instead of buying in store, we complete our transaction, from research to purchase, online. Continue reading
This was a email blast developed and designed for Terlato Wines for one of their email blasts. With this design I needed to stick with the clients theme of staying real simple with the design while having some fun by adding subtle bubbles within the design. The color scheme was very limited and I needed to stay within their style guide. This design was developed using Adobe Illustrator and Abobe Photoshop. The final blast was developed in HTML.
Today I’ll take you through the creative process of making intriguing light effects and applying them in your work. This is more a process description of making this illustration, than a detailed step by step how to. I’ll give you some good guidance on how to deal with an illustration like this and cover the overall workflow. Let’s get started!
In this tutorial I will be showing you how to use the displacement Filter to your advantage and create a stunning black and white illustration. You will learn how to create clipping masks by using splatter brushes and how to manipulate image adjustments to sort out coloring and shadow composition. This tutorial is very easy to follow and you will learn quite a few new little tricks by doing the tutorial. Hope you enjoy it and have fun.
Jason Uzarraga 