Ivan's blog

Music is probably one of the most inspirational things in life. Pay attention to what motivates you and make sure you feed yourself with the right tunes. As they say there is good music for every occasion. So, what's good music to support your work? I can create three categories for the kind of music I listen to while working:

Hello my friends!

First things first. If you had a membership in the old forum, you don't need to re-register. Your old forum memberships and all messages were transferred over to the new site. However, for security reasons you will need to request for a password reset. If you have any problems, please contact me on creativebits@gmail.com.

Sorry for the downtime. We worked hard day and night on bringing you the new creativebits. It was not easy to convert the blogger.com based blog and the phpbb based forum into Drupal. A brand new conversion code had to be written by Tim. But it's worth it. Drupal is one of the best content management systems available with clean code and a great future. This site is still a beta, so please do comment if you find any glitch.

Here is a list of what's new in order of importance:
1. We have our own domain and reliable Dreamhost server.

PhotoShop CS has an excellent file browser built into the application. You can access it from the File menu or by pressing Apple(Cmd)-Shift-O. It can do all a regular functions Finder does and much more. Many don't realize that you can actually delete/rename and move images, create/delete folders, etc. in this mini application with the benefit of having really big preview icons for your images to help your navigation.

But don't you miss the old times, when you could mark the transparencies on your lightbox and easily arrange them for a selection?

The Mac Design Magazine has changed it's name to Layers to attract digital photographers and video editors.

They have some nice free PhotoShop tutorials. Actually, the one explaining the displacement maps (illustrated on the right) is so very similar to my post about fitting artwork on t-shirts.

I'm happy to announce that Jim, our author at CB decided to start his own professional blog about graphic design called CreativeGuy! Jim will continue to contribute in the CreativeBits forums and will stay to be an author at CB. Wish him good luck with his project!

One of the generally neglected functions in PhotoShop is the Distort filter called Polar Coordinates... You can use this filter to create a cylinder anamorphosis - art popular in the 18th century - in which the distorted image appears normal when viewed in a mirrored cylinder. Check out this video for a self portrait made with this technique of a Hungarian artist Istvan Orosz.

Yes, the rumors were true. Microsoft contacted us four weeks ago that they are interested in buying CreativeBits. At first we said no, but than they mentioned a 6 figure number we couldn't resist, so we gave in.

What does it meant to you? Nothing changes, we're still the same cool guys posting extremely useful tips and tricks. Oh, but from now on we are posting tips about Windows rather than OS X. Also, PS tips will be approached from a Windows user perspective. Sounds cool? We thought so!

We will be posting less for a while to dedicate more time for the new version of CreativeBits. We've been working on this project for quite some time. We've been through at least two major mockups so far that we learned a lot from. We definitely going to have many changes coming and we were also asked to sell CreativeBits to an upcoming very cool on-line design magazine, but nothing has been decided yet.

Most of the time when I'm trying to find a specific desired effect I would go through several layer blending modes. This can mean a lot of clicking if done from the tiny drop down menu. I would have to focus to the menu to remember where I was.