How To Save Money On Adobe Software

Adobe is one of the largest software companies on the planet. The company founded in 1982 by Charles Geschke and John Warnock had sales of close to $3billion in 2009 and has approximately 8,715 employees worldwide. A company of this size is likely to have a large user base, in fact more than 90% of creative professionals have Adobe Photoshop software on their desktops.

Some of Adobe’s core software products are Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premier Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Acrobat. A pretty impressive collection of software, which is pretty much essential to anyone involved in the digital creative fields. The problem is Adobe software is very expensive, so how can you save money on Adobe’s flagship products?

Educational Discounts

Adobe has a strong presence in the educational market. Adobe likes to create new customers for its software as early as possible and that means targeting schools, colleges and universities. Adobe knows that if people are trained to use their software from an early age, it means that employers/businesses will have to provide the software that people have been trained on, which undoubtedly will be Adobe and sold to them at a premium price.

With this in mind, Adobe are willing to offer students up to 80% off the regular retail price, with their Adobe Student Edition software. So if you are a student you can purchase Adobe software at amazingly discounted prices. Details of how to purchase the Student Editions is available at the main Adobe site.

Free Open Source Equivalents

If you just want to get the job done and aren’t fussed what software you use, open source software may be the way to go. There are number of free software packages that have similar functions to Adobe’s flagship products. For example, a good equivalent to Photoshop would be the free GIMP, which allows photo/pixel based editing, similar to Photoshop. If you are an illustrator or vector graphics artist Inkscape is a free open source equivalent to Adobe Illustrator. If you are looking for a free open source equivalent to Adobe Dreamweaver then NVU is more than capable of dealing with your web design requirements. A quick search on Google will turn up many free or open source alternatives to Adobe software so you needn’t buy expensive Adobe software to get the job done.

Adobe Coupon Sites

Adobe fortunately has a number of sales on its software throughout the year. It does this through discounts on major retailer sites such as Amazon and time limited sales on its own site. It also releases a number of coupon codes for its software, which tend to vary in discount and the software they apply to. These coupons are often short-lived so you have to be alert to when they become available. Luckily, there are a number of coupon sites that have a dedicated web page for Adobe coupons. By checking your favorite coupon sites regularly, you can scoop an Adobe software bargain.

Now Anyone Can Make A Professional Looking Video

Things have really changed in video production over the years. Once it was a world that only big companies and professionals could get into. The equipment was big, expensive, and it was hard to learn how to use. Now just about anyone can do it, with simple steps at home on their PC using software that makes it easy.

When I was in college, to get into video was fairly cheap I thought. You could purchase a camcorder for around $400.00 and a VCR with editing capabilities for around $300.00. Maybe not pro equipment, but I could make it work. I learned by trail and error how to time the preroll, and make quality edits on the wedding videos I made. I discovered how to dub in music and make my own music videos. I purchased an cheap $300.00 special effects board that switched between live cameras and added cool wipes and stop motion effects. Back then the steps to making a video were the same as today, just more expensive.

1. Get a good camera and record the footage you want. Always keeping in mind what you want your final product to be. The better the video you start with, the better the final product will be, and the less editing you will need to get the final product. Don’t get too caught up in having it perfect on the original tape/file, you can always edit out the mistakes, but try to get as much straight film without mistakes as possible.

Then the Amiga computer came out and started a change in the environment of video production. The Amiga computer made me drool with it’s advanced video production and special effect capabilities. It was way out of my price range and I never got it. About the time it finally was in my price range, everything was going to the PC. I purchased Adobe Premiere, which did everything I wanted to do in a video editing environment. It was still a very hard to learn program that mostly pros used. The software was expensive, so the average user wouldn’t buy it. Why would anyone pay several hundred dollars to edit their home movies? But it cut my editing time way down. I could edit videos quickly and make very nice looking effects that made the final product look professional.

2. Ok, editing isn’t that hard. Not like it use to be. You still have to mark all of your in and out tags. On tape you would have a time code that you could watch and write down. You would take notice of the time the good footage started and ended. Then when you actually made the final tape, you would start playing the original at those marks and recording on the final tape at the same time. A good system would start both player and recorder at the same time for you. Now, on computers, you just mark the in and out tags, then click and drag the footage over to the time line of the final product. Back when I was doing it you could just rerecord it if it didn’t look right. But if you were a little ways into the video, you had to re record everything from that point on. Drag and drop software is a miracle. You can play back and make changes to your hearts delight. Both the old way and the new way leaves the original in tact. If you want to talk about REALLY old, they use to actually cut the original and splice/tape it together in the order they wanted. Scary.

Now they have not only programs like Adobe Premire, but several others, and Microsoft had to jump in and include Movie Maker in their system. Now everyone is making videos. It is easier than ever to produce a quality video right from your PC. I have some experience with video as I have said, and my daughter just the other day asked if she could have a you tube account so she could upload some of her videos for her friends to see. I looked, and was surprised to see very good quality work, with no training. All of my experience using special effects equipment squeezed into a few clicks of a mouse.

3. In the old days, you just had a VHS tape, and you made copies of it to give out. Now, we have DVD/Blueray, YouTube, email, AVI files, WMV files, MP4 files, Ipod, etc. Lots of ways to get your video out to the world. Many of the new software editing programs actually have the formats and the upload to YouTube built right in. Once you are sure the final product looks the way you wanted, my advise it leave it alone. Stop editing. You will always see things you could have done better, but it is always best to leave that info for the next video you make. Always improve upon the work you are doing by doing the next one better. Once your work is done, it is done. You will never have a next one if you don’t move on. Besides, it is always fun to look back on your older videos and say to yourself, “well, I was just beginning back then.”

So, you want to make some videos? Go ahead. Chances are, you already have all of the software already on your PC. Look for Microsoft Movie Maker. If you want to get better video production, with more control over what your video can do, I would recommend Adobe Premier Elements. It is cheaper than the full blown program, but just as powerful and easier to use. Now, anyone can make a professional looking video.

The Sony DCR-VX2000 - The One and Only?

Introduced in the summer of 2000, the Sony DCR-VX2000 was a famous workhorse of a mini-DV camera within two years of its debut. It is still used, these many years later, by legions of both amateurs and professionals for documentaries, commercials, interviews and other fieldwork. Much of the material shot on VBX2000s is intended for conversion to mobile/web formats and the mini-DV format is supported by all leading software audio/video editing applications (Vegas, Avid, Adobe   Premiere , FinalCut  Pro , even Windows Movie Maker and iMovie). This camera is truly a – well, a workhorse!

Nothing earns the status of workhorse without a lot of people using it and attesting to its solid performance, and the term also connotes toughness, resilience and dependability. Holding to the highest standards is how Sony came to be an internationally respected brand, across a wide swath of the consumer and professional audio/video markets. As far as their video cameras, Sony has a large, proud, veteran and vocal group of loyalists, and they’re not afraid to “vocalize” their concerns about product shortcomings. Frankly, Sony engineers welcome the frank feedback, as they carry on the company’s tradition of listening to its customers, especially the pros. The VX2000, in fact, came into existence because of reaction to the first model in the new DCR-VX line.

With its excellent build quality and features that the first-generation VX1000 lacked, the VX2000 was a hit. Four years later, Sony sought to further improve it with the VX2100 but, as the online user forums indicate, Wood was not alone in sticking with the earlier model, with its reputation for durability and ease of use.

Some users feel that the unit is heavy when used for long periods of time (weight is 3 lbs., 6 oz.) but plenty of other directors are shouldering 8-lb. Canons and 10-lb. Varicams for those obligatory POV shots. Be that as it may, the VX2000 stayed close to its predecessor’s original ergonomics even as the components evolved.

The VX line’s standard battery, the NP-F330, was notorious for its short 45 minutes of use; for 16 hours of shooting, owners bought the optional NP-F960 unit. Other cost-cutting features marred the camera’s high-end aspirations, including a meager 4MB MemoryStick and 640×480 pixel resolution for stills. However, Wood does take snapshots with the VX2000 to block out shots.

Consumer camcorders use one CCD (charge-couple device) for all three colors, whereas professional-grade units use three, one each for red, green and blue. A three-CCD design contributes to the VX2000’s good color reproduction, and Sony’s exclusive high-performance HAD (Hole-Accumulation Diode) sensors include the near-infrared light region, resulting in greater range and more realistic colors.

The VX2000 has 12x optical zoom, while the digital zoom goes to 48x with little degradation. The unit also incorporates a more expensive type of image stabilizer; as opposed to digital stabilizers used in consumer models, Sony’s Super SteadyShot optical stabilization does not decrease picture resolution.

The camcorder’s seven-element, aspherical 58mm lens almost completely does away with image distortion, while the dual-mode filter combats troublesome lighting conditions. The VX2000 provides a decent amount of manual control – focus, white balance, shutter speed, etc. – as well as several automatic modes.

The 200,000-pixel, 2.5-inch LCD panel is crisp, as is the viewfinder. Avoid the onboard microphone for audio, of course, and opt for an outboard unit to take advantage of the 12- and 16-bit recording. Audio is saved in a standard PCM digital stereo format.

Finally, an IEEE 1394 connection -Apple’s “FireWire,” Sony’s “iLink” – allows uploading of video to a computer for editing. The flash memory card that was part of the specification in 2000, a 4MB MemoryStick, is woefully inadequate for this task, but today you can get a 4GB MemoryStick for what that tiny one cost at the beginning of the New Millennium. And that’s a kind of progress that would make a great article in itself. Stay tuned!

After Effects Logo Creation - Simplicity

Like many of our most successful creations, an effective logo begins with simplicity. If you review some of the most famous logos of popular business and brands, you will see their logos all share simplicity. What else is part of the magic ingredients for a catchy and successful logo?

Definitive shapes often speak to the brand or purpose of your logo but with only a little ‘real estate’ how can you make a strong impression while adhering to the simplicity guide? Symmetry and balance are wonderful tools. Even if your symmetry isn’t perfect it amplifies your statement. You can use geometric symmetry which is attractive in proportion. You can use symmetry in character size and boldness. Of course your image needs to be in some small way, a symbol.

If your business charters flight, or provides flight training, or discount tickets, wings would be perfect. Yet wings have an even greater symbolic meaning from timeliness or unbounded to the divine purpose of Hermes, messenger of the Greek gods. Just ask FTP florists. Many symbols transcend their most obvious meaning and this is another powerful element of designing your logo. We love symbols that are rooted in our past and you might wonder if some are embedded in our DNA.

Earth elements are quite powerful. How many logos draw upon sunlight, water, or growth? A leaf changing color speaks of season and rhythm while a butterfly recalls metamorphosis. The very concept of ‘casting light’ conveys bringing this subject into our experience.

With some ideas that connect with the business it’s time to hit the drawing board! I like to develop logos in After Effects but before you animate or add special effects you need to draw, you need to create your logo. In our world of digital imagery, Adobe Illustrator is among the most popular but the drawing techniques here could be applied with any.

Once you decide on a basic shape, a simple way to experiment with symmetry is the reflection tool. Choose your image, in Illustrator, be sure your image is a ‘group’ (control ‘G’), choose reflection, then enter ‘alt click’. Using the ‘alt’ key with your mouse click will produce the reflection options window instead of instantly producing a result. Here choose the orientation of your reflection and be sure to choose ‘copy’, we are creating symmetry. This will immediately produce a reflected image of your first design. It could be flowers or stars but this first step provides the added content and ‘symmetry’ of design.

Now develop contrast. Choose one of your reflected groups and rotate it a bit, or lower it’s opacity and slightly overlay the other group. Sharing the stage in this fashion adds depth and texture to your image. Slightly change the color of part of your design to create a soft contrast or if you seek a bold statement, use bold contrast. Consider images and text we’ve seen that portray the shutter of an explosion. as their multiple overlaid images and bold colors leap from the page. They announce an explosive new idea, an explosive new release, an explosive new recipe!

Finally, share. Share your imagination and ideas for your logo with a variety friends to get some nice objective feedback and different perspective. Colors, contrast, shading, balance, symmetry, and calling upon Earth’s secrets is a great start.

Video Editing - The Top 5 Programs to Use

In this top 5 list I’m going to focus on the best programs based on versatility and how useful it is to an average user or low budget video maker who wants the ability ( or at least the tools) to make professional looking videos.

1 – Final Cut Studio

I chose final cut studio as number 1, despite it being only available on Macintosh computers, there’s a lot of consumer friendly versions and options for Final Cut, as well a lot of power. Final Cut Studio is the name of a whole package that comes with Motion, a special effects editing program, Livetyp, an animated text program and more.

Let’s investigate what the difference is between Final Cut Studio, Pro, Express etc. Final cut express is the cheapest version of Final Cut and is an excellent choice for anyone who just wants to edit videos, with much much more power than the editing software that came with their computer. Final Cut Pro is their best choice and is also useful for more serious video editors and even studio editing facilities.

2. Adobe Creative Suite

Similarly to Final Cut, Adobe should be a winner because it has so many must have programs and different packages, all of which are available on both Mac and Windows. The video editing application we’re going to talk about here is Adobe Premiere. It comes with some of the CS (creative suite) packages or you can also buy it standalone. Adobe premiere has all the tools you will need as a basic video editor and depending on which CS package you get, you have other power tools at your disposal like Photoshop, After Effects and more.

3 – Avid Media Composer

Avid has long been considered one of the main video editing applications in the professional world and is still used in somewhere around 50% of all major production houses. Avid needs to have a place in this list because it is the most accurate video editor when it comes to database managing tools for organizing, frame accuracy control, maintaining color levels and broadcast standards etc.

It’s is perhaps to expensive and too hard for the average user to make videos that can compete with what other average users can do with Final Cut Studio, or with After effects for animation + Premiere. An average user can put together really cool animated stuff with those templates while he would most likely only have basic text with limited styling if he used Avid.

This is why those programs are listed higher in this list, and you can see how hard it can be to rank them. From a professional broadcasting company’s view the #1 combination might be multiple After Effects editors doing special effects editing while an Avid editor puts together all those FX clips with media and readies it for broadcast.

If we compare two solo editors, both with equally limited computer skills, both with pretty equal artistic sense and see who can make the best stuff after half a year of practice – if one of them is given Final Cut Studio and learns all those software,while another one gets the professional Avid and tries to learn After Effects as well – I can guarantee you the Final Final cut guy would learn how to make awesome animations with livetype and Motion. While the other guy could only do basic stuff with Avid + After effects because he hasn’t learned it yet.

Number 4 and 5 on this list are going to be

Cheap alternatives: For the sake of this list being about user friendliness and affordability

4 – iMovie is a Mac only editor and is a basic editing program that usually comes with most Mac packages and is very good compared to Windows Movie maker (although I haven’t seen the very latest versions of Windows Movie Maker) and even some other non-free applications. It should me no surprise since apple makes their own video editing software and other stuff with Final Cut Studio.

5 – Windows movie maker comes with windows and has some basic editing capabilities, You can edit different shots together, shorten the time of each shot and add music. That’s about it. It saves the file as a wmv file with very little options. This program is only available on Windows PCs

After Effects Animation Tutorial - Motion Sketch

Once you have introduced yourself to the stopwatch feature in After Effects, you are ready to begin learning about some of the other related features and ‘assistants’ that are built into this application. The stopwatch is fundamental to everything. Every setting you animate will be set using that attribute’s stop watch, creating keyframes along the timeline. Our first tutorials have been about position because this may be the most basic of all attributes to animate.

If you are animating position a favorite keyframe assistant is the ‘motion sketch’ tool. This is a very simple, clever tool that literally animates one of our earliest artistic expressions … scribbling on a tablet! Who hasn’t been inspired, tapped their thoughts, used a scribbling pad to connect idea and imagery?

The motion sketch tool lets you sketch a path producing keyframes along the way. Like all the assistants, the best way to learn is to get your feet wet working along with me as we describe how to access and define the motion sketch tool.

Create a new project and go with the Web Video preset for your stage dimensions. We’re going to animate a ball moving around your stage as you define it’s ‘flight’ with motion sketch. Create new shape layer, choose ellipse from your drawing tools, and draw a small circle (holding ‘shift’ while defining your ellipse with make it a true circle). Position your circle in the upper left hand area of the stage so you’ll have plenty of room to fly!

Be sure you have the motion sketch panel available (click under Window menu if it is not visible). Now, before we begin flight, note the default settings of motion sketch, ‘Capture speed’ at 100%, ‘Smoothing’ set to 1, ‘Show wireframe’ checkbox selected. Simply click on ‘start capture’ and begin moving your circle on your stage. This is the ‘inner child’ part where your simply draw a sweeping arc or an ‘S’ curve, something easy to define.

As you are moving your circle about on the stage, the motion sketch is recording your positions, creating keyframes just as you would if you clicked each new position yourself clicking on the stopwatch, only this is much faster and much more freeform. When you have completed your ‘sketch’, releasing the mouse will stop ‘Motion Sketch’. Enter ‘Home’ to return to the beginning of your timeline and review your work! Or is it After Effect’s work ?

This is a great technique to produce an animated path by simply drawing it. It does create quite a number of keyframes and there are other parameters that will help you tune your path and apply it to other objects in your composition. Try it out !

Will IPL Survive?

Well it’s a difficult question to answer, isn’t it? The Indian Premiere League (IPL) has come up with a bang. Everyone in the Cricket World, especially in India, is talking about IPL, the Indian Premiere League. How long IPL will survive? Let’s have a look at the top pros and cons of the Indian Premiere League on Indian Cricket, Asian Cricket, and International Cricket:

IPL Pros:

IPL generates money: The IPL is a unique platform where every cricket player, international or local Indian cricket players, can earn billions of dollars for a single season. No other cricket league provides such huge revenues for cricketers like the IPL does.

IPL as platform for Young Indian Cricketers: The IPL is providing a great platform for the local, upcoming Indian Cricket players. These youngsters have the wonderful opportunity to play with stars like Sachin Tendulkar, Adam Gilchrist, Muralitharan, Chaminda Vaas, Kumar Sangakara, Shane Warne, Brett Lee… and the list goes on and on. IPL also provides a huge opportunity for the youngsters to get exposure, get experience to play under pressure and of course, earn a lot of money.

IPL Has Glamour: The Indian Premiere League not only provides money, but it has all the glamour from the Indian Film Industry the Bollywood. Hot Indian Actress like Preity Zinta, Shilpa Shetty, Katrina Kaif, etc. are always present in the ground to support their teams at the IPL. The King Khan, Shahrukh Khan is one of the most active owners of the IPL Franchises. All this adds a lot of glamour to the IPL.

IPL Brings the Cricketing World Closer: Yes, it’s only the IPL where all the Cricket legends display their skills. Graeme Smith South Africa partners with Shane Watson of Australia. The IPL has brought the cricketing nations and players closer.

IPL Cons:

IPL is Not the Real Cricket: Well, the IPL, despite all its hype, glamour, and money, is considered as ‘The Circus In the Garb of the Cricket”. Many Cricket greats do not consider Twenty20 or T20 as Real Cricket. And the Indian Premiere League (IPL) has taken the Twenty20 (T20) to new heights. But critics say Indian Premiere League is more about Fun, Entertainment, Business, Money, Glamour, Bollywood, etc. But it contains too little of Cricket!

IPL Taking the Youth Away From Test/ODI Cricket: Indian Premiere League is presenting the Twenty20 (T20) with so much fun, exposure and involves too much money that the young Indian Cricketers are bound to prepare for the Twent20 (T20) Cricket instead of going for a Test Cricket or ODI Cricketer. After all, Indian Premiere League (IPL) provides them with the short-cut to success, money and fame!

IPL overshadowing other sports: There are many sport events going on in India. However, the Indian Premiere League (IPL) is having negative impact on other sports. One of the top sportswoman in India, P T Usha says “Those who invested money in the IPL look for profits. The players will never feel that they are representing the country. If I invest my money, I will surely look for ways to recover the investment,” Usha said.

“The love for sports gets lost,” she added. Another athlete, Shiny Wilson says, “Almost all kids play cricket. Even volleyball courts are used for playing cricket. IPL will have a negative impact on other sports.”

She said further, “It is very difficult to get crowds to watch even the Santosh Trophy football tournament. IPL is just business and not sport.”

IPL Destroying International Cricket: One view is that Indian Premiere League (IPL) is damaging the International Cricket. The supporters of this view maintain that star cricketers like Adam Gilchrist, Brett Lee, Shane Bond, etc. have quit the International Cricket (Test & ODI) to make them available for Indian Premiere League (IPL). This shows the tendency of international players that they prefer playing in the Indian Premiere League (IPL) than playing for their national teams.

This Debate will continue in the next post.

Your Turn Now: What Do You Have to Say about the Indian Premiere League (IPL)? Do you think its positives are bigger than negatives? Do you think IPL is good for Cricket? Do you think IPL is good for Indian Cricket? SPEAK UP IN YOUR COMMENTS.

Business Plan Pro Review

Business Plan Pro is a software program that helps guide you through the process of creating a business plan. Because a business plan is a pivotal component for any business to have, especially a start-up, ensuring that your plan is up to par is critical. For those who don’t know how to write a plan from scratch, plan writing software can be a life saver.

Business Plan Pro has two different software programs the Standard and the Premier. Both the Standard and the Premier include such features as:

• 9,000 plus industry profiles.

• Over 500 sample plans.

• Two different business planning e-books.

• The ability to import data from Quicken.

The Premier edition also includes:

• The ability to import from Microsoft Excel.

• A business evaluation analysis.

• Cash planning that is visual.

• A program that let you do a plan versus actual financial tools.

Depending on how in depth you want to get with your plan and of course how much you want to spend will determine which version of the software is right for you. Just as with any other piece of software, Business Plan Pro has pros and cons. Before deciding whether or not you want to use the plan writing software it is worth checking out both sides of the story.

Because Business Plan Pro has been around for 15 plus years they have over one million customers who have used their program. Most would agree that the software was easy to use and did a more than adequate job in helping them create their plan. You can read through some of the actual reviews on the company website.

They have also been voted the number one plan software for the past ten years straight by NPD Group and they have been featured in the Wall Street Journal as well as Inc.com. Best of all though, they offer a 60 day money back guarantee so if you get the program and don’t like it you can go through the process of getting your money back.

As far as those who left reviews of Business Plan Pro there were not too many complaints, but the software does come with one big negative selling point, which is its price. The Standard edition is just under $100, which is comparable to many other business software programs in the industry, but the Premier Edition that comes with all the bells and whistles is just under $200. While the software very well may be worth every nickel, it is still one of the higher prices business plan software programs available.

The ultimate decision is yours but whatever you decide you must be sure to write the best possible plan that you can so your business has the most amount of potential and a chance to going on to do great things. Remember, investors and many vendors expect to see a well written and articulated plan so be sure that is what you deliver them.

More Bang for Your Bucks With Enterprise 2015

While you think you’re happy in QuickBooks Pro or Premier, I suggest it’s always worth looking at Enterprise Solutions. You may find that Enterprise could make life simpler in your business because of the extra features. I have a comparison chart that helps to highlight where the differences are. So before you skip this article, do take the time to see what features are new in 15 and whether or not they would be useful for you. Several of the new features in Enterprise have been on the wish lists for many for some time. The new features fall into 4 major areas:

1. More Data controls (a definite strength of Enterprise)

2. More Customization possible (another strength of Enterprise)

3. More Efficient workflow

4. More reporting options – this one is huge!

More Data Controls

Disallow negative inventory – In the past, QuickBooks would let you to sell inventory even if you had none (according to QuickBooks). I can’t tell you the mess this makes with your financial statements and how tedious (and expensive) it can be to fix! Now there’s a preference that will let you prevent that from happening in the future. You can use the item on estimates and purchase orders, but not sales orders, invoices or sales receipts. If you have 1 on hand, you can’t type a number higher than 1.

Disallow Sales to Customers with Overdue Payments – Definitely a good practice not to continue doing work, selling products to someone who hasn’t paid you. However, if you tolerate slow pay with some of your clients, there’s no option to choose who or how many days (perhaps in a future release).

More Ways to Customize Transactions

Total Columns on Forms – This has been on my list for a long time! You can total Quantity, Cost, Price or Amount (or all four) on sales and purchase transactions using the Subtotal item. In the past, you could subtotal only amounts. You can also use this on the Items tab for expense transactions

Print Footer on Last Page Only – Do you ever have an invoice that’s more than one page and you wish you could show the total only on the last page? Now you can! Customize the template and click on the Print tab (not the Footer) and select the option to show the total on the last page only

Show Cost Column on Sales Forms as a Column – Ever want an easy way to be sure your sales price is higher than your cost? With this new feature (found on the columns section of customizing templates), you can see the cost. Note that you while you can see the Cost on your screen, you cannot print the cost column on an invoice. (With the new Total columns feature, you could total your costs!).

Get Your Work Done More Efficiently

Sort on Columns in Transactions – Ever wish you could sort the columns on an estimate or invoice? You can sort on any column (ascending or descending) by clicking on the column header AND the document will print with that sort order as well. This can be a big help when you have a lengthy invoice.

Shade Lines on Printed Forms or Reports – While this may sound minor, if you have a lengthy invoice or report, this can make it much easier to read! When you click on the Print button on the Invoice ribbon bar, you can check the “Shade alternate table rows”

Search within Transactions – Ever need to see if something is on an invoice and having problems finding it? Now you can search!

Shortage Reports for Assemblies About time! If you deal with assemblies, you want to know if you have everything you need to build the assembly or not. While one may not be a big deal, when you have multiple assemblies and nested assemblies, keeping up with what needs ordering can be challenging. Now you can view a report by Vendor or by Item!

Stock Status Report now includes pending builds for subassemblies

Awesome Reporting Options

Get the reports you want with Advanced Reporting – If you’ve been complaining about reports you can’t get in QuickBooks, then Advanced Reporting may be just the solution. This very powerful reporting tool not only gives you more customization capabilities (including graphs), but also access to data you couldn’t pull into reports before! I was also excited to learn that it’s included with your purchase of Enterprise – not an add-on J

For database people used to designing reports, you’ll love having easy access to the QuickBooks tables! If you’ve not designed reports before, then you will want someone to help you with this. I’m hoping in the next release or two that the this module will be more user friendly, but anyone who has designed reports in MS Access or Crystal Reports or some other report program won’t have a problem. If you don’t have someone who can help you, contact our office – if we can’t get the report you want, we can put you in touch with our QuickBooks report consultants.

After Effects - Logo Animation - Part 1

Using After effects text animation is one of the basic tools in logo animation. When it comes to media animation one of the first design decisions and which tool is best for the job depends on if your logo is primarily text and can be represented using a text tool the animations that are available for text.

Let’s first look at how you would go about animating your logo if it is primarily a text logo with some graphic highlights. One of the most powerful set of presets in the Adobe After Effects arsenal is the text animations. Just about everything you can imagine, everything you have seen from text tumbling out of the sky, to sliding in from one side or another, to changing colors and glowing is available as a text preset.

For a simple experiment, use the text tool to create your logo text, choosing your characteristic font. Create a simple backdrop that contrasts with your text. Directly across from the text ‘twirl down’ arrow is the ‘Animate’ feature with it’s twirl down set of animate features. Choose ‘position’ under animate. You will immediately see a new component under your text, ‘Animator 1’ with it’s own position component and a ‘Range Selector’. Twirl open the range selector to see ‘start’, ‘end’, and ‘offset’ options, each with it’s own stopwatch indicating that each property can be animated.

We know about ‘a picture says a thousand words’. For a quick illustration to see how simple it is to set up an animation using these basic settings, set the range selector to it’s default values of 0% for Start, 100% for End, and 0% for Offset. Set the range selector position 0,-200 (0 for x offset, -200 for y offset). This setting for y will position your text above your stage.

Click on the stopwatch at time ‘0’, move your timeline to 3 seconds and move the Start value to 100%. Scrub the timeline then preview your animation. You will see your text falling ‘out of the sky’. For one simple setting that will add another touch of diversity with a single switch, look under the ‘Advanced’ section of your Range Selector for ‘Randomized Order’ and click this from off to on. Now when your characters animate onto the stage, they appear randomly. This is a very popular effect with movie and television introductions, commercials, and of course, web site logos.

A Round Up of Major Video Editing Software

There is a lot of video editing software floating around the web. These all have different features, price points, and some are difficult to use. Whether you’re a novice or a professional you can take advantage of a wealth of good software out there. We’re going to offer a quick overview of Adobe Premiere Elements, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and Magix. This will provide a quick overview of software for both amateurs to novice film editors.

Adobe Premiere Elements is one of the better products in regards to video editing software. Roughly around $100 – $150 this software allows you to capture from various sources, including the.vob format found on DVDs, and exports video for playback in several different formats. It also has easy to use editing tools like trim, cut,join,transitions, and titles. The software also lets you edit, and create DVDs with the proper burner. If you’re looking for entry-level software, this is a great one to get and really offers a lot of things packed into a low cost package.

Final Cut Pro is the super software for those running a Mac. This heavy-duty video editing software costs $999 for a new edition and only $299 to upgrade. You are going to love how great this software runs, and professionals recognize it as the must have software to edit video. The features run through all sorts of professional grade items. It has automatic settings such as, iChat Theater, Easy Export, full DVD support, limited Blu-Ray support, ProRess codecs, Native AVC-Intra Support, Alpha Transitions, New Timecode window, Improved Markers, Automatic Transfer, New Redcode Log and Transfer options. This is one of the best pieces of software to come out for anyone that is serious about video editing, but it has a serious price tag.

There is an entry-level video editing software called iMovie. Apple once again moves forward with something that even teenagers are finding useful to create high quality videos. This product comes to you as low as $79 if you are running an older Mac. It features image stabilization, editing control with precision editing, slow motion, iDVD integration, and green screen capabilities and so many different features that you don’t really see in basic software. Of course, this software comes pre-loaded with new Mac computers, so you might already have this installed and not even know it. If your computer didn’t come with this, then purchasing it alone is not going to cost too much.

The last software we looked in the round up is Magix. This professional level software is only $100. That’s right, a low cost entry with a lot of bang for your buck. You can get 99 tracks of editing, complete HD workflow, 5.1 audio dubbing, unique effects and advanced dvd authoring including Blu-ray disc support that can have you making full menus and more in no time. This software is easy to use and perfect for the consumer that is not ready to jump to more expensive software.

Regardless of your budget, you can edit your home movies, skate videos, or any sports action you can find. You don’t need to be a professional and you don’t necessarily have to own a Mac to do it. You can be creative with lots of great features; at a fraction of what you might have thought was the cost.

After Effects - Logo Animation - Part 2 - Text on a Path

In part 1 of Logo Animation we introduced the animator function built into After Effects text. This function presents several animation options including position, scale, rotation, opacity, just to mention a few.

What’s so special about text? In our fast internet web world, the highlights of your Web page are much like those of a billboard as your client drives by. Catch them with highlights, important keywords that link to your message and the keywords you have placed for search engines.

However, just as importantly, make your text look really cool ! This is important and there’s an interesting balance to strike being being ‘marquee offensive’ where the text activity actually distracts your viewer versus the kind of text treatment that is visually appealing while at the same time, sharing part of your message.

What do I mean by ‘sharing part of the message’?

Everything about your text, from it’s color, size, font, and texture share the personality of your message and share this with your viewers. The text tools in After Effects are nearly identical to those of Photoshop and Illustrator and other applications in the Adobe suite. Several text options are placed directly on the text tool, choosing font, size, color but also adjusting vertical or horizontal size, faux styling, subscript and superscript, stroke and fill settings.

You have a rich variety of options to stylize your text and that’s before we get into the animation possibilities!

A favorite text animation is using text on a path but that path can be anything! We are used to seeing text follow the description of a logo or have text follow a path that visually conveys part of the message, such as the excitement of fireworks or bubbles or steam rising from a warm appealing dish. In this simple way your text participates in your message is an actor in your sixty second play.

Applying text on a path is really easy too. Let’s go!

Create your stage or artboard. Decide what prop and which text your want to use. For the sake of example, I’m going to use steamy soup. From this steamy soup the word ”delicious’ is going to waft into the air with characters rising with a bit of a roller coaster motion.

Create your bowl of soup, create your steam rising then simply create the word ‘delicious’ using the text tool. Using the pen tool, create a mask path on your new text (highlight your text layer so it is chosen then choose pen tool), then describe the tip of your steam rising as you move across the timeline. The trick here is simple but subtle. The mask must be on your text layer to appear as a ‘Path’ option for your text. The path itself that you draw with the pen tool, describe the top of your steam rising. The shape is the steam so to speak, but the must must be on your text layer to appear as a path option for your animated text to follow.Rename this new mask ‘steam’. As this animation unfolds, steam is rising from this yummy bowl of soup! It’s a little too warm to eat just yet.

Now, in your path options for your text, you will see your new mask presented, ‘steam’ is a path option for your text. The simplest animation to get acquainted here is to use the margin settings. Scrub your first margin setting to see that now your text follows the path you defined sketching your rising ‘steam’. As you move back and forth you see your text move with the steam rising. Return to the beginning of your animation. Adjust the first margin setting so your text is aligned to left of your stage and click the stopwatch that initializes your animation.

Now move to end of timeline, scrub your margin setting to move your ‘delicious’ all the way to the right. Click your margin stopwatch setting again to create a second keyframe. Now preview your animation! You can play with distances and time settings but just to get the basic effect here, having your word describe you emotion and rise with the steamy warmth of you bowl of soup, this very basic exercise should do the trick!

Try it out!

Premiere Elements - Applying a Basic Transition

Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 was released some time back and is not the current release, but still has many features that will enable you to create great videos. I’m using this version of the software, but this guide will also work for other versions as well, with only slight differences. In this article I will be explaining how to add a simple transition to your video.

I am assuming you already know how to take the video from your camera and put it onto the computer. This guide explains where to go from here. Your camera information booklet will guide you in getting your video from your camera onto your computer.

So, firstly, open Adobe Premiere Elements and select New Project from the dialogue box that appears while the program is loading. Type in a name for the project, bearing in mind this is not necessarily the name of the DVD, just the name given to the process in creating the DVD. You will name your DVD later. Also, select which folder on your computer you would like to save the creation process in. The default is the Premiere folder, but you can select one of you own. Navigate to your desired folder and hit OK. Check all details and hit OK to begin creating your DVD.

In the top left Media box, it should already be on the Get Media tab. If not, click on the Camera icon to open the Get Media tab. If your video is already on the computer in a folder, select Files and Folders. Navigate to where the video is, then click on it and select Open or OK. Your video should now be in the Media box on the top left of your work area. If you need to get more video files, select the Camera icon again and repeat the process until all files are in Premiere. If you can’t see your files, select the Film Reel icon on the media box, this opens the list for you. Now we want to begin editing.

At the bottom of your work area is the My Project box, with a grey box asking you to drag your video here. So hover the mouse over the video file you want to place first, then click and hold the button down as you drag the file from the Media box to the My Project box at the bottom. Release the mouse button and your video should now be in the My Project box. Next, drag your second video clip onto the new available space after the first clip in the My Project box. You should now see both clips next to one another, with a small box between them. This is where your transition will go.

On the media box, select the Effects and Transitions icon, this will open a list of all available effects and transitions. Scroll down to the Video Transitions list, which should already be opened. If not, click the small white arrow next to Video Transitions, this will expand the list for you. Double click on Dissolve, or click the small white arrow next to Dissolve to open the list. Hover over Cross Dissolve with the mouse, click and hold, then drag the transition down to the My Project panel, and into the small box between your video clips. Release your mouse button, and make sure the transition is now showing in the small box.

To get an idea what the transition will look like, click the first video clip in the My Project panel, then hit Play on the Monitor window in the center. Watch as your first video fades into your second video, very professional. If you are happy with it, click create DVD and burn your creation to disk. Sit back and watch your DVD video on your player at home.

After Effects Tutorial - Blending Modes

When I was first drawn to After Effects, one of the most powerful attractions was, the effects ! The idea of creating your own movies, animations with a message, having colorful explosive tools at your disposal is certainly exciting. However, lIke many of life’s softer lessons, blending modes offer a subtle and perceptual magic that let you ‘sneak behind the scenes’ and speak to your audience in subliminal ways.

Blending modes let you share a morning moment with moisture glistening on a spider web. Blending modes let you highlight a portion of your image for emphasis. Perhaps most of all, blending modes let you discover the image that only exists when two images share their color and light creating yet a third image greater than the sum of it’s parts. Sharing color and light from combined images is exactly what a blending mode does.

For me, blending modes is one of the less scientific, ‘mechanical’ tools in your After Effects tool box. It is not unusual and can produce the best results sometimes to simply, ‘play’, experiment with different blending combinations because they are not completely predictable.

How do we get started ? Choose a couple layers that will be your subject. For this exercise, choose a couple that are likely candidates for sharing color and light. In the lower left hand of your layer panel, the center button will display and remove the matte and mode column displays. The ‘F4’ key does a similar display, toggling between the switches and modes panel.

It’s important getting started to appreciate how the blending modes are categorized for you. The top two and the easiest to grasp are the darken and lighten categories. The darkening modes produce a darker image comparing the pixels of the two images and choosing the darker. The lighting modes do the same for lighting your image. At a pixel, RGB level, this elegant tool is simply comparing every pixel in the two images and choosing one to highlight over another. The varying degree of application are what the subcategory of modes do.

When you apply a blending mode it is applied to the layer you choose and the layer underneath. However, the layer underneath is that layer and any ‘bleed through’ from layers underneath it. Like a stack that is evaluated from the bottom up, each layer is blended and any color or blending effect is applied to the current layer and the one immediately beneath.

A simple exercise to illustrate this blending behavior is to create an ‘adjustment layer’, perhaps a tint or color. Place it at the top of your composition, above all layers and you will see this effect distributed down to all. Next, move this layer down beneath the first. You will see your tint applied to all layers except the first. Move it down once again, and, I think you get the picture. Any blending is applied to the immediate layer and any beneath so you can be selective, and need to be to produce your desired effect. If you have two layers that you want ‘blended’, you might place them at the bottom of the stack to be sure this effect is only shared by those two.

Blending produces special effects of light and shadow, combinations that produce the setting you want but my favorite blend is when two completely different images become one. If animation let’s you breath life into your composition, blending let’s you combine the characters of your choice as if they occurred together.

Simple examples are creating the flash of a blast or gunshot in one composition then combining it with your ‘green screen’ actor shooting the gun. Without any adjustment, when you overlay a composition on another you bring in the outline of the composition, the rectangular card backdrop of the original composition. Using the correct blend mode, only the subject of your overlay appears. This technique lets you blend different subjects from different compositions to produce the complete image and effect you seek.

Windows Movie Maker - Great, Free Video Editing Software

For the past 2 years, I have turned countless students and adults on to the wonderful, free tool inside almost everyone’s Windows based computer. Windows Movie Maker is a marvel and the majority of those I teach had no idea it was living on their hard drive. The next astonishing fact is that it’s easy for almost everyone to use. I have had adults in my classes who were uncomfortable surfing the internet and googling and even they caught on quickly to WMM’s ease of use. The teacher in me loves the instructions right there on the left side, called tools as they should be and completely clear…do this, do this, do this ….wah-lah you have a movie. As a broadcast professional and video editor for 30 years and someone comfortable with most video editing software, this is the best way to learn to edit video. Find some pictures and import them into collections, locate the free music in the music sample folder and begin to edit your first masterpiece. It’s delightful to have students of all ages make a 30 second movie with pictures and sound and want to take it home to show everyone that they edited their very first video! That’s the beauty and simplicity of Windows Movie Maker and it’s exactly as it should be for a free, first experience video editing program.

I have read all of the very technical reviews on each and every version, but there is no need to take apart every little flaw in this software. I’ll talk about the few drawbacks a little later but for now let’s just rave about its positives. This software does what it’s supposed to, edit a simple video and output it to a CD or videotape. I think too often the reviewers are expecting too much from this free gift or expecting with later versions that it should do more and more. It shouldn’t. With more bells and whistles come more complicated instructions and functions, again defeating the purpose of this easy to use software.

Here’s what I like. It’s free. Second and actually more important is that it has many wonderful effects that are actually quite complicated even for professional editors in expensive video editing software. My students often need the wonderful old film look or the “ease in” feature so we edit our larger pieces in Adobe   Premiere   Pro  and then import the finished piece to WMM to easily add those great effects.  Premiere  will do most of them and certainly Adobe After Effects will, but WMM does them effortlessly! I am especially impressed with the titles and title overlay track. To make a newspaper headline with your video inside and then fly it away to reveal new video is very complicated in professional editing software. The WMM squeeze left or right for rolling credits at the end is also brilliantly simple. One special trick I’ve learned while teaching WMM is being able to separate your video and audio and using just the audio on the music or audio track. It’s a much more versatile timeline than it first appears.

Downsides are few but I promised so here goes and there are really only two complaints. Number one is that the output instructions are too vague and complicated. When you output you need to know why you are outputting and what the quality will be and it isn’t explained very well. In the “other” section of “save this video to my computer” there are way too many choices for the inexperienced video user. It should be clearly marked that the best quality saving option is the DV/AVI. But the instructions should also warn that that file will take up a lot of hard drive space. This is a confusing issue for even professionals and it’s a new problem for video on the web, but the software authors should find a way to explain it more clearly. What ends up happening is the editor unknowingly picks a bad quality file. After working so hard on the video they get a bad outcome: a fuzzy video. That makes them blame the Windows Movie Maker software or their computer and they stop trying to edit video. Number two – none of us like the fact that you can’t move video around on the timeline (you can move audio around separately and have it stay where you put it). But when I teach it, I explain that it’s meant to be rigid so the newb editor can’t make a mistake, no matter how hard he or she tries. When you find yourself irritated about that rigidity you have learned all you can learn on WMM and it’s time to upgrade to one of the wonderful and inexpensive new softwares out on the market – Adobe Elements, Pinnacle or Sony Vegas.

Adobe After Effects CS5 - Getting Started

What’s new in After Effects CS5? Let’s get started.

Adobe CS5 is a watershed moment and it travels in great company. With the release of 64 bit versions of   Premiere   Pro , After Effects, and Photoshop, we are getting used to 64 bit versions of Windows operating systems. Windows 7 has been road tested now. The incredible difference in available memory alone makes the previously tedious, long winded tasks a pleasure as you get to zoom down the timeline instead of going for another cup of coffee. Being able to view high def videos such as AVCHD or mts files directly in windows or through Adobe Bridge makes the process of review and selection a similar pleasure.

There is a rich community of support for all of Adobe’s products beginning with their own site and their new CS Live online service. There are several Facebook communities and sites such as Creative Cow which caters to the multimedia community offering free tutorials, project file downloads, and guest appearances from community celebrities.

Using Adobe’s media player you are introduced to a collage of new ideas, platforms, tutorials and projects through Adobe TV. Adobe TV is an eclectic collage of projects, forums, examples with several searchable categories such as digital media, film editing, and special effects.

Where do you start? Create a new project. A great way to create a project using video is to import your video into After Effects and let it do the setup work for you. You can choose File->Import then select your file from a folder on your pc or simply ‘drag and drop’ the file into the project tab. If you right click inside the project tab section, you will see options for ‘new composition’, ‘new folder’, ‘new photoshop file’, ‘import’, and ‘import recent footage’.

‘New composition’ will open the composition window. Here you give your composition a special name, choose from the wide range of presets such as a standard DV NTSC (National Television System Committee), HDTV, Web Video, and widescreen formats. You set your composition frame rate, resolution, and can set your start and duration if you want to ‘clip’ your output.

Often you want to create a folder for your videos where you have different groups and selections being used for your compositions. You can import files directly and select from recently viewed footage. Once you have a video and are ready to create your composition, simply drag the video on top of the ‘new composition’ thumbnail.

This is a great simple way to let After Effects do most of the work for you. Drag your video on top of the new composition thumbnail then right click in the composition window and click on ‘composition settings’. Here you will see the composition settings that After Effects created for you based on the video type, format, length and other values. This is a great way to start a video composition and a great way to become familiar with standard settings such as the frame rate for DV video.

This simple ‘drag and drop’ technique is easy, a great timesaver, and a little media education too.

Adobe CS5, Cuda, Mercury, and What"s in the Kool-Aid?

Adobe Creative Suite 5 is here with promises of lightning speed, real time edits, and drastically reduced render time. With Cuda, Mercury, and Nvidia on board, just what is in the Kool-aid?

Last summer you began to see releases about lightning fast render speeds with Cuda technology offered by Nividia. Nividia is one of the most popular video cards along with ATI Raedon. In a pc climate of high resolution and home gaming machines, headlines like ‘reduce your render time by up to 80%’… is an attention getter.

You can contact a representative at Nivida to get more education about these cards, Cuda technology and exactly how that falls into place with this new release of Creative Suite 5.

‘Cuda’ is Nivida’s technology. Wikipedia will tell you that: CUDA is an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture, a parallel computing architecture developed by Nvidia. CUDA is the computing engine in NVIDIA GPU’s that is accessible to software developers through industry standard programming languages.

GPUs are ‘Graphics Processing Units’, specialized processors first developed by NVIDIA in 1999. Graphics Processing Units is a good way of thinking of this resource. When you think about the dramatic increase in media in our Web resources, movies, high resolution imagery, these graphical processing units handle that part of the processing taking a large load off the main processor and in the simplest terms, make the experience much faster.

GPU’s originally appeared for rendering three-dimensional graphics, in engineering, and CAD (computer aided drafting) applications. However, with the onset of high media content in so many of our Web topics and categories, graphic processing has become a standard component in any new pc.

GPU’s have been around for some time gravitating from research environments to our homes but Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 has been re-written in 64 bit to take full advantage of the addressing capability of Nvidia Cuda GPU’s. Adobe has also introduced the Mercury Playback engine. You will see and hear a lot of claims about Nvidia and Mercury being written to work together but at the heart of this new technology is the ability to address enormous amount of memory, RAM. Offloading main processor tasks that are handled by the graphics card free up the main processor while having graphic related tasks handled much more quickly.

For all the technical talk, perhaps the best way to evaluate these enhancements is to take a test drive. If you have worked with high definition video, AVCHD/MTS formats and have become used to slowly reviewing your scene, try it with Premiere Pro CS5. This is a great promotional video showing just what a difference you can expect: Adobe Genesis Project.

It peaks with the placement of four different hi definition videos on the timeline simultaneously. There is no noticeable delay.

It is exciting to be able to view your hi definition takes in real time, add special effects, apply real time editing and review your work on the fly but ultimately it comes down to that most valuable asset for any of us that is… your time. You’ll have a lot more of it.

Buy Adobe CS5 Or Stay With CS4 - New Adobe CS5 Review

Should I buy CS5 from Adobe or stay with CS4? I am sure a lot of people have asked this question after Adobe Systems release the new product. Well, I hope you will find the right answer in the end of this brief software review.

So, what are new features of the product? Adobe Creative Suite 5 has integration ability with online content, possibilities of digital marketing campaigns optimisation and access to Omniture signature technologies, which allow to receive, store and analyze information published on web sites or taken from other sources. Adobe Flash Catalyst, essentially new component of the package, gives the chance to create design of an interactive content without writing a code and optimizes teamwork of the designer and the projector.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection includes more than 250 new functions in variety of applications. Truer Edge technology, presented in Photoshop CS5, facilitates recognition of image edges and accelerates process of a mask creation. Content-Aware Fill tool allows to delete elements of the image and instantly replace missing pixels in Photoshop. New options of the Stroke tool in Adobe Illustrator CS5 give the chance to create a stroke of different width, which can be corrected precisely in any point.

Adobe Photoshop CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects CS5 now work in a 64-bit mode on Mac and Windows computers. Adobe Mercury Playback Engine with the support of a hardware acceleration on NVIDIA graphic adapters allows to open projects faster in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.

Roto Brush tool released in After Effects, gives the chance to allocate moving elements in the foreground with the minimum expenditures of labour. Dreamweaver CS5 now has a support of popular content control systems like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress that allows designers to receive exact representation of dynamically changeable web content in the end-product.

Using Flash Professional CS5 designers and developers can create, test and publish web content on the different mobile platforms and devices. After release of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 environments, developers can deliver content directly to a browser. New Packager for iPhone, integrated in Flash Professional CS5, allows to create AIR applications for iPhone or iPad and also applications with a support of the not yet presented devices on the basis of Android, BlackBerry and Palm webOS.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 products are integrated with Adobe CS Live system of services. which have five online services, allowing to optimise the key moments of working process. Adobe CS Review service allows to have a look on a design in online mode directly from Creative Suite 5 applications.

Adobe BrowserLab service is intended for web sites content testing with various web browsers and operating systems. SiteCatalyst NetAverages service gives the information about web resources using and allows to reduce quantity of guesses and assumptions at early stages of designing.

Adobe Story service represents the tool for a teamwork over scripts, improving processes of manufacture and postmanufacture in the CS5 Production Premium. Besides, access to Acrobat.com services is provided.

Cheap Photo Editing Software

There are lots of companies now selling cheap photo editing software on the internet, unfortunately with a large number of these is that they are not what they are cracked up to be. In this article we will show you how to spot a scam in order that if you do buy cheap photo editing software it will be the genuine article.

How many times have you received an email offering you software at a price which is really too good to be true. Today the scammers are actually getting more switched on will normally put something like “Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Software at a price that suits your pocket”. But the thing is if it does sound too good to be true then in all likelihood it is.

But if you want to spot a software scam more easily in the future and thus prevent yourself becoming another victim of an internet scam, below we provide you with some signs that you should warn you that the vendor is not legitimate.

1. If the price they are offering is way off line with those that is being offered by authorized sellers of the product such as your local computer store or through a well known online retailer like Amazon. Then this is a seller you need to steer well clear of.

2. If you come across a page on the merchant’s site or they have an answer in their frequently asked questions section of their site explaining about their legality. Again these kinds of websites should be avoided because in fact what they are offering to supply you isn’t legal at all.

3. If when you go and look at their “Terms of Sales and Service” page of their website it has a statement which says “that you give up your right to begin proceedings to get the funds returned to you through your credit card company” then you should be very concerned about this sites legitimacy. In fact what they are probably going to do is take your money and then run, without giving you anything in return.

4. If at any stage when you are actually preparing to download and install the software on to your PC you find that you need to use a special number of procedure in order to activate it then in all likelihood the version you have been provided with is a hacked one. This kind of software program has steps in place which allows the seller to bypass the embedded product activation system that the manufacturer has in place.

5. Finally another way of telling whether you are getting a genuinely cheap photo editing software program rather than being scammed is to take a look at the packaging as it appears on the site. In many cases the packaging on the fraudulent versions will not be consistent with the packaging you will see that reputable dealers and sellers have.

Sunscreen is a UV Blocker

What is UV Light?

Ultraviolet (UV) light is that part of the light spectrum that is not visible to the human eye and falls in the range of 200 to 400 nanometres. A certain and regular amount of exposure to UV light is healthy as it kills harmful bacteria.

But overexposure results in suntan or worse sunburn. The latter condition results from overexposure to UV light and is harmful. It causes the skin to dry, peel, wrinkle, age faster and blister. In extreme cases, it can even cause cancer.

People prone to prolonged exposure to sunlight, like farmers, road construction workers, delivery boys, trekkers, etc should use suntan for protection.

Different people use sunscreens for different reasons. Some use it to protect the sun from damaging their skin so that they can stay in the sun longer and acquire a fashionable suntan!

How Does Sunscreen Work?

Like we said earlier, UV light itself is not harmful. But overexposure in general means prolonged exposure to certain wavelengths in the UV light spectrum. This is what causes sunburn.

In scientific terms, overexposure to Ultraviolet A1 or UVA1 (300 to 400 nm) and UVC (up t 340nm). While UVA1 causes skin to tan, UVC causes it to burn and blister.

Sunscreens or sun block works to reflect, scatter and absorb the UV light and comes in the form of lotions, gels and sprays. It thus acts as a filter between sunlight and the skin.

The measure of a sunscreen is the SPF factor or the Sun Protection Factor. It is a ratio of the time a person using sunscreens can stay in the sun without getting sunburnt Vis a Vis the length of time they can stay in the sun without sunscreen and without getting burnt.

How Strong is Sunscreen?

Therefore if you use a sunscreen with an SPF of 10, it means if you can stay in the sun for 30 minutes without getting burnt, the sunscreen will allow you to stay in the sun for as long as 320 minutes without getting burnt.

Sunscreens can be used as frequently as required and should ideally be applied a short while before actually stepping out into the sun. This gives the skin enough time to absorb the application, especially of you plan to enter water as at the beach.

Sunscreens rarely cause allergic reactions but careful it does not irritate your eyes. This can happen if, for example, you apply it to your forehead and allow the perspiration to trickle down into your eyes.

Sunscreen and Cancer

Sunscreen is known to prevent some cancers like actinic keratosis. These are lesions with warts and manifest themselves on the face or hands. These lesions are known to develop into squamous cell carcinoma, a kind of cancer linked to prolonged exposure to the sun.

Research will; however, tell you that sunscreens have no effect on preventing basal cell carcinoma, or malignant melanoma.

Advantages of The Panorama Stitching Services

Haven’t you always wondered if wide-angle photos are a possibility? Well! There you go.. They certainly are. Image Stitching is a process in which photos of a regular size are stitched together to form a single wide-angle picture. This is often referred to as a panoramic image. Panoramic Images are put together in various ways like a horizontal image, a vertical image, a rectilinear image, a circular image and a full frame image. Although capturing the entire area in a single shot is difficult, it is not impossible. Realtors, Wildlife Photographers take advantage of the panoramic image to make their case.

A panoramic view empowers buyers to basically rotate and check the property providing a real life-like experience without having to visit the house. Nowadays people hardly go out anymore. Numerous e-commerce sites have enabled them to buy or do their shopping sitting at home. E-commerce sites have gone insane with the use panoramic images to display a 360- degree view of their products to convince the customers. With Panoramic images, e-commerce websites have been able to find customers on a large-scale and also have overcome the need to convince people with just one or 2 shots of the product.

Work done while performing the stitching process,

• 
  Modifying and sewing the straight and horizontally images as required


• 
  Adjusting of stages and shapes to create the picture look even and stylish


• 
  Addition of needed detail to the pictures


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  Aligning, placement and covering components normally and correctly


• 
  Removal of repetitive components and objects


• 
  Rotating and cropping


• 
  Image filtering


• 
  Color making and modification

The art of stitching images is a task that cannot be handled by everyone, only professional editors with the knowledge of software that handle images can do the task accurately. The need to incorporate new trends and technologies in the project can make images more appealing and natural. Freelancing firms across the world offer Image Stitching services at affordable prices. Most of the photo editors use Photoshop to do most of the editing and the stitching work. Photoshop provides tools that can help editors manipulate with colors, brightness, and other areas of the images that need correction.

Many Photo related solutions are offered by firms like,

• 
  High Dynamic Range Blending Services


• 
  Photo Restoration Services.


• 
  Photo Retouching Services.


• 
  Image Masking and Clipping Path Services.


• 
  Image Manipulation Services.


• 
  Virtual Staging Services.


• 
  Real Estate Image Enhancement Services.


• 
  Virtual Tours Services.


• 
  Wedding Image Enhancement Services.


• 
  Interactive Floor Plan Services.


• 
  Sky Replacement Services…

How To Start Your Own Photo Retouch Business

Adobe   Photoshop  and other image editing software are a necessary part of any photographers arsenal. Some photographers even supplement their income with a photo retouch business for competitors. Why would they do something like that? Because there is money to be made!

Retouching photos is a very time intensive task for most people. So, a person with talent in that area of expertise can charge a considerable amount of money for doing something they enjoy.

Most photographers are just that… photographers. They want to be in the field as much as possible shooting images and not be stuck behind a desk editing their pictures. A savvy person can capitalize on this by advertising on a few basic sites and providing samples of their work.

The needed resources to start a photo retouch business are:

• A computer with photo editing software


• Software proficiency


• Internet access and email able to receive large files (or use something similar to yousendit.com)


• A good work ethic.

Most of the time, a set fee is paid for certain services. This fee can be negotiated or be simply a flat per-image type of fee. Some common services would include:

• Levels adjustment


• Skin smoothing


• Sharpening and contrast boost


• Scaling for print


• Etc.

Take consideration when quoting time. Figure out how long it takes to adjust certain types of images and make a note of your most common edits, this way you will be able to advertise your specialties.

Once you’ve prepared yourself for the workload, simply post classified ads on free sites such as craigslist.org and photo forums and message boards. All of your work should be able to be done remotely from anywhere in the world via email.

Enjoy!

Why PSD to HTML Is Outdated

Ever since Photoshop was created, PSD to HTML has been a workflow that’s been the standard – and for good reason. It’s been a great way to create great websites and get them done in the most efficient was possible.

The workflow has always gone something like this:

1. Design a website in Photoshop


2. Slice up all of the images needed


3. Write HTML code and bring in images


4. Profit!

Once upon a time, The Web was a bit different – and PSD to HTML was the proper way to do things. Though, that being said – it’s not the best way anyway – but a lot of designers still get the job done this way. That’s okay… possibly..if they want to take forever to create a great design.

There’s a few reasons why PSD to HTML is Outdated for 2014, and I’ll get into those below.

• Top of the line code – HTML5 and CSS3 have given designers a lot of amazing abilities that used to only be possible with Photoshop. This is a huge reason, we no longer have to design so much in Photoshop to make something happen on screen – such as drop shadows or fancy text.



• Responsive – The Web is responsive now. Everyone has a PC, a laptop, a smartphone, and a tablet – or… a combination of those..or just one of them. either way, you get my drift – our websites no longer look the same on each screen, so it would just be silly to design PSD files for ALL screens.



• op of the line apps – there’s so many web apps and software out there that allow us to whip up low fi and high fi wireframes in record time. There’s also frameworks out there such as Bootstrap and Foundation that allow us to code up a website for at least presentation purposes within hours.

So is Photoshop no good?

No, Photoshop is still awesome. It still has a place in Web Design – so don’t get me wrong there. I don’t think that it’s the best tool to use for mocking up websites anymore though. That whole workflow should be dead and gone by now – with all of the tools and resources available to whip up a design on the fly, there’s just no reason to use a bulky, outdated workflow like PSD to HTML to do the job anymore.

Free Photo Editing and Organizing Software

With the rapid growth of digital photography we now often have hundreds if not thousands if digital images stored on our computers. This has created a need for quality free photo software to help with both image editing and organizing our growing collections.

The ‘gold standard’ photo editor is Adobe Photoshop CS2. While Photoshop is an amazing product it is also quite expensive and some of the advanced features can be somewhat difficult to master. Another popular commercial product used to edit photo images is Paintshop Pro, which is less expensive and much easier to master than Photoshop, but is still around $100 US. Photoshop Elements is another commercial product that many find meets their basic photo editing needs and it sells for around $90 US. Fortunately there are many free photo editing software product alternatives that can meet the needs for all but true photo editing professionals (in which case Photoshop has high end features that certainly will be required).

The two most popular photo organizer software products are actually already free. Picasa from Google and Preclick Gold should be able to meet all of your digital photo organizing needs. There are a number of other free image organizers that also perform quite well.

The following are some of the most popular free photo software products available today. We will be adding many more exciting and useful free digital image editing and organizing products to allfreebiesoftware.com in the coming weeks.

Picasa (Google) This photo software is available alone or as part of the amazing free Google Pack and is the only product that we use to organize and share our digital pictures!

Sqirlz Morph Easy to use free photo morphing software! Morph two or more images together, or warp images individually. Images can be morphed together in several different ways. Try multi-morphing all the family’s faces into one unique movie or picture! Save your animation as a Flash movie, AVI video clip, animated GIF file, or bitmap/jpeg files. Version 1.4 is compatible with Windows Vista.

2 Pic Easy to use basic photo and image editor. 2 Pic is designed for ease of use and it has a unique design with the functions clearly arranged on tabs. That’s the big advantage of 2 Pic: with less time and less experience, you can do very creative things.

Snipshot This website provides online photo editing by allowing you to upload images from your computer. You also can enter the Web address of any photo stored online and get a copy with which to work. Snipshot uses nondestructive editing – the original image that is taken from your computer or the Web remains untouched.

cPicture Image presentation application for digital camera pictures in JPEG format.

Preclick Gold Features a very effective red-eye tool, has the ability to add metadata to photos including caption, event and place, ad-hoc album creation and organization, filmstrip display, camera acquisition, batch stamping, CD burning and much more.

paint.net Photo manipulation software that supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. Like Photoshop this photo editing software has many features not found on other free photo editors.

Gimp for Windows A popular open-source photo and image editor.

Serif PhotoPlus 6 Serif PhotoPlus 6 is probably the best free image editor available. Many will find that it works as well as Photoshop for basic photo editing. Serif offers older versions (like this version 6) for free to attract new customers to the newer products. Give it a try!

Enhance Your Photos With Online Photo Editors

If you have a picture that is perfect except for that one little thing, be it red-eye or a prankster in the background, this article will help you find tools to remove those imperfections. To enhance your picture and remove unwanted sections, you will have to use image editing software. Using image editing software is neither as complicated or expensive as it sounds. In fact, it is free. First we will cover the two most common uses for basic image editing.

Cropping

Cropping a photo means that you are taking a selected section of the photo and removing the rest. With cropping you can center and frame your image without stretching the original image.

Red-Eye Removal

Most photo editors have a tool to remove red-eye. You will just select the red-eye tool, select the red-eye in the photo, and the red-eye tool will get rid of the red-eye. Here are some sites where you can edit your photo for free.

Picnik

Picnik is our favorite online image editing tool. Simple, elegant, and easy to use, Picnik is a great tool for first time beginners and experienced editors. Some advanced features are restricted on free accounts, but in most cases you won’t need them. You can find the Picnik editor at Picnik.com.

FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer is perfect if you want to add animations or effects. If you do not have a lot of experience, this is a great place to start. You can visit the site at fotoflexer.com.

Adobe   Photoshop  Online

 Photoshop  online is an online version of the industry standard  Photoshop  desktop image editing program. If you register to create an account, you will be able to use many of the same features the professionals use. If you are serious about image editing, this is the place for you. Adobe  Photoshop  Online can be found at  photoshop .com. Each of these image editors have a free option and can get you on your way to editing photos in no time.

Tenant Reps and Commercial Realtors - What"s the Difference

When you think of a business about to relocate to a new area, or renegotiate a lease for its present location, you might think the proprietors would consider employing a real estate agent or a lawyer to handle the various issues involved. While both are reasonable options, it may be more beneficial to the business owner to consult with a tenant representative instead. While a tenant rep is involved in commercial and industrial real estate, there are subtle differences between reps and Realtors every businessman should know.

Reps Work on Behalf of Tenants, Not Landlords

Many commercial real estate professionals exclusively represent tenants. Such exclusive tenant reps never work on behalf of owners and developers. Other real estate professionals divide their practice between both tenant and landlord representation.

The Society of Industrial and Office Realtors reports that more than half of those who have earned the Society’s coveted professional designation – “Specialist, Industrial and Office Real Estate” – have practices that include tenant representation.

Tenant reps have made a name for themselves during the past 10 to 15 years, since real estate agency laws required real estate brokers to disclose that they are working on behalf of the landlord, not the tenant. Your goal in working with a tenant rep is to obtain true economic savings and secure space on terms that best serve your needs over the life of your lease. While working on your behalf, a good tenant representative should generate savings and benefits that far exceed the cost of his or her professional compensation.

The Benefits of Working With a Tenant Rep

Having a tenant rep on your side can greatly empower your business and save you money in the long run. A tenant rep can:

• Analyze your space needs.
  


• Investigate all available properties and determine which are the most appropriate for your needs.
  


• Create a bidding war among several landlords for your business.
  


• Protect you during lease negotiations so that you come away with terms that meet your present and potential future needs.
  


• Serve as a buffer between you and the landlord.
  


• Identify lease provisions that could cost or save you money during the lease term.
  


• Handle the paperwork and other details of the lease negotiation.
  


• Settle disputes that arise even after the lease is signed.
  


• Spotlight the savings.
  

The goal of the tenant rep is to satisfy the business owner, and determine the perfect location for all companies seeking to do business anywhere they choose.

How To Preserve Your High School Football Jersey

High school football jerseys have become very popular due to the overall popularity of football in general.

The question is, how do you preserve your high school football jersey so you can always remember the season, my teammates, my school?

Here is a great idea, take your jersey and get it professionally framed and matted, exactly how professional athletes frame and mat their jersey. Add a picture of your team, a memorable moment from the season, and a plaque inside the frame and now you have your very own collectible, something you can pass down to your kids.

Otherwise, your high school jersey is just going to get thrown in a closet and get ruined — you might as well memorialize it so you have something to look back on.

Another great idea is to have your high school jersey replicated so your parents can wear it to the games, your fellow students can wear them, and then you can keep the collectible jersey as a piece of your own sports history.

Many high school football fans are doing this with their jerseys now instead of just tossing them after the season. They are also getting them framed instead of doing trophy’s at the end of the year. A good friend of mine gave their coach his son’s framed high school football jersey at the end of the season instead of a trophy and the coach was amazed.

There are a lot of companies out there that can create custom high school football jerseys for you and then frame your jersey after the season is over. With the popularity of sports memorabilia today — and the enormity of high school football, it is becoming the premier way to preserve those high school memories.