The Mac and Home Improvement

Working with our onsite team, I’m always intrigued by what our customers achieve with their Macs. The creatives we visit constantly have something cool on screen. Sometimes, though, it’s the everyday Mac accomplishments that wow me.

My wife, Martrese, and I just moved to Portland, landing in a house we love, where by chance all the walls are white at present. We discussed adding some color, but I couldn’t easily envision the outcome of a paint job.

Last weekend we hit a paint store and picked up swatches of sample colors we liked. Back at home, Martrese put those samples and her MacBook to work.

She taped our favorite color sample to our living room’s east wall, grabbed our digital camera, and snapped a picture of that wall in the afternoon sunlight. She connected the camera to her MacBook, brought the image into Photoshop, and used the tools there to extend the sample color over an image of the entire wall.

It took her only minutes to show, in our actual lighting, exactly what a wall of “Bicycle Yellow” adds to the room.

It’s perfect, and we’re painting the first chance we get.

www.macforce.com

How Did You Learn All This Stuff?

Recently, I was talking with some students in one of our weekend classes about learning resources. We were talking about how one gets the knowledge necessary to teach others. I had to think about it: How did I pick up all this information? Did someone train me? The answer is yes and no.

Sure, in art school I had a Photoshop class here or there, and when I did a stint at Apple Computer I definitely got some training, mostly on their professional products like Final Cut. But really there have been two other ways which I feel gave me more valuable information.

First, I find that being genuinely interested in the subject matter is key. I bore easily and tend not to retain info that doesn’t apply to me (you can probably guess that high school didn’t really go well for me). The way I grab my own attention is by coming up with a project that makes it relevant to me. A while back, I wanted to play around with those cool books that Apple allows you to make in iPhoto, so I told a bunch of people I was on vacation with that I was going to make one and asked if they’d like a copy for $50. Suddenly, I had the motivation needed to explore this little feature to its fullest. Plus, I made $10 on each book for my time. Not a bad deal and more than a bargain for my friends and acquaintances who would gladly have paid $80 or $100 for the book they got.

The other way I do it is by teaching others. This may sound crazy to you, but the best way to go from knowing a little about something to knowing considerably more is to place yourself in a situation where you have to teach about it. All the baggage that people have about being in front of a group, looking foolish, not knowing really what you are talking about, sweating profusely, vomiting nervously or just generally breaking down tends to go away when you have no choice but to succeed. At least for me, that has always been the case.

I see teaching as a give and take kind of deal. You are teaching people valuable skills, but at the same time, they are unwittingly driving you to be better at both communicating and at the given task simply by expecting it from you.

So if you’re in a class sometime in the near future, do your best to challenge the teacher while respecting the time of your fellow students. Teaching is always a heck of a lot easier when people are engaged and excited, so have a project in mind that you want to work with. Often, what you need to know is not how to do something, but the best way amongst many options. A teacher can offer you that. Plus, the rest of the class can learn a lot from your real world examples.

www.macforce.com

MacForce Crew Review: Aperture 2

I have been using Apple’s iPhoto for a number of years to store my photos and do some simple edits when I didn’t want to fire up Adobe’s Photoshop. But just recently, iPhoto was not cutting it for me anymore. The tools, albeit useful, were just not letting me edit my photos in enough detail.

I had used Apple’s Aperture version 1 before and knew it to be a very powerful program, but being a Photoshop user, it seemed like one more program I didn’t need. It felt like a chore to use and I ended up exporting my photos back from Aperture to iPhoto in the end. iPhoto was also already compatible with iWeb, iTunes, and .mac, and that integration was very important for me.

Aperture 2 was released not too long ago, and I decided to give it another shot. It was very easy to start using—porting over my iPhoto library was a simple one-click process and I was ready to use Aperture. It has a similar layout to iPhoto, easy-to-learn interface, and built-in integration with the .mac web gallery so you can instantly upload your edited pictures to the web.

Having an iPod touch and the ability to have my pictures with me everywhere I go is important to me. iPhoto was my bridge that interacted with iTunes. When I learned that Aperture 2 had that connectivity, my curiosity peaked. It was just as easy to add photos from Aperture as it was with iPhoto to iTunes.

And the limits I had with iPhoto’s editing features disappeared. I can edit an image much easier than I ever could with Photoshop. Aperture lets you control minute detail, from fixing a lens spec to the getting every drop of color exactly right.

It’s a true photographer’s tool, allowing you to focus on the image you’re editing, not the tools you’re using. Like the camera you used to take the picture, you focus on the picture at hand and not the camera. I’m impressed.

www.macforce.com

Adobe Is Back To The Mac

Today Adobe officially announced Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Adobe CS3), and it’s been a long wait, especially for creative Mac users on Intel Macs. They’ve been running the old CS2 in a slow emulation layer. CS3 should run twice as fast because it’s code is native to the Intel processor.

The new CS3 versions cover: InDesign, Photoshop Extended, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute, After Effects Professional, Adobe Premiere Pro (it’s back) and Soundbooth (new to the Mac).

The new CS3 bundles/packages are: Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Web Standard, Production Premium and Master Collection.

They’ll be shipping some of the software starting in April and finishing in June. Be sure to call us (503-231-7707) if you have upgrade questions or want to get your order in the queue. Adobe’s CS 3 info.