an All Creative World site

Must visit Mac blogs.

Special welcome to the people coming over from Macsurfer, as the top referrer to CreativeBits! I visit Macminute for my news, but here are some related blogs that are definitely worth at least one click:

Windows monitors are a bit darker than Mac monitors, therefore if you're sending an image to a client of yours who is using Windows you might want to consider correcting the Gamma of your image to make sure your client sees similar range of colors as you do on your Mac. Same goes for optimizing a web site for PC users. Once you're happy with the image on your Mac and ready to send to a PC, jump to ImageReady (Apple-Shift-M) to compensate your Gamma. Select Image/Adjustment/Gamma...

Remember when Steve Jobs introduced iTunes for Windows? Well, this is a similar situation for me: I'm going to recommend a Microsoft application for your Mac. Expression is an amazing free illustration tool. You can simulate water color, chalk drawings or any other illustration tool realistically in no time. Most importantly all you illustrations will be vector based, which means you freely scale them to any size you want. Also, you can export them from Expression to PS in layers for further manipulation.

Did you know that you can compress your files in OSX without any third party plugins? If you need to archive a huge folder or email a big file, just Ctrl-Click the file/folder and select Create Archive of ... from the contextual menu. It creates a Windows compatible .zip file and does it fast. It can't be any easier.

Here is a jewel for Mac OSX. Long time ago, I think Time magazine had a cover page made with such technique. At that time the mosaic was made by a skilled artist who manually created a visual that was made up of hundreds of smaller images. Now you can create similar mosaics using MacOSaiX.

There is a quick solution to bring back under/overexposed photos to life in PS CS. If your subject is underexposed you can select Image/Adjustment/Shadow/Highlight to lighten up only the dark areas of your image.

In fact you can use the same command with different settings to darken images where the flash has overexposed the image.

Safari is a great browser, but Firefox is even better. Both browsers give a better surfing experience than Internet Explorer, but Firefox is really pushing the limits. It supports all the standrads and it's fast. (BTW, if you can't see the png image on the right, you might be using IE).

If you need to make pixel correct designs, there is a free application for OS X called Pixen.

PS CS has an amazing new feature that helps you create panoramas, which can be very impressive, because they break out of the usual perspective that we are used to see. Wide angle lenses can create a cool effect, but nothing can beat a well done panorama.