StyleMac.com

Neat idea. When designing something, the search for a fitting color palette is always an obligatory important first step. Sites like Adobe kuler help you here insofar as they offer the ability to share beautiful color palettes between users.

Mondrianum goes one step further in that it allows to access the kuler palettes directly from the Mac OS X system-wide color-picker. Which means that the colors are available from (for example) iLife, iWork, Photoshop, Coda, CSSEdit, and more.

Mondrianum is 10.5 only and can be found over at Lthoglyph Software.

In order to create stunning HDR Pictures, one needs a tool which allows to combine pictures of different exposures into one composition. This is possible with Photoshop or Gimp but way more difficult than achieving the same effect with a dedicated software. The standard tool for this task is Photomatix Pro. However, with Hydra there’s a new contender, and it supports integration in Apple Aperture (although still in beta). So if you’re interested in creating stunning HDR Pictures, you might hop over to www.creaceed.com/hydra and see if it’s the right tool for you. Hydra costs $59.95

If you haven’t seen the linked video yet, you should really do so. On this years SIGRAPH Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan presented a new algorithm titled “Seam Carving”. It allows to stretch or squeeze an image without distorting the overall looks. It’s as if you shrink something, but only in one dimension. A corresponding YouTube-Video can be found here.

Now Adobe announced, that they employed one of the developers of the algorithm. So expect to have this feature in Photoshop rather sooner than later.

Here are even more Photoshop tutorials and brushes for your pleasure; Happy layouting

Free Photoshop Brushes Resources

Tutorials are like cakes; as soon as you tried some you want to have more. So if you, once again, need your daily fix, but lack a page with fresh tutorials, add FOTOFECTS to your linklist. The more, the better eh :)

http://fotofects.com/

Adobe Illustrator is one of those Applications many people use, but hardly really use. People often just use it to do basic vector editing, and some aren’t even capable of doing just that - as Illustrator is quite different compared to Photoshop but the partly similar Interface suggests otherwise

Veerle wrote/recorded a tutorial which explains how to use the pen tool in illustrator and how bezier curves work.

Illustration, from sketch to finish

Flash 8 introduces several new technologies which enhance and optimize it’s runtime speed, especially when dealing with loads of vectors or bitmap data.

Guy Watson, over at macromedia.com (funny, it say’s ‘Adobe (formerly macromedia) now) explains the magic and details behind these techniques, and how one can use them to increase Flash’s speed

Macromedia - Developer Center : Using Bitmap Caching in Flash

At first I wasn’t sure whether to blog this or not, but judging by the lack of time I could invest into this site lately any posting ain’t a bad posting.
So take it as something mainly interesting for those which have little experience in creating templatees

This devlobby.com tutorial explains in detail how to create a simply web layout in photoshop, mind it’s garned with Windows screenshots but hey, there’s little difference between Photoshop on Mac and Windows

A Different Template - Devlobby.com - The Developer Lounge

When creating a layout for a new site, the first step is to define the dimensions. For example 780×460 for 800×600 centric layouts, 990×630 for 1024×1024 centric layouts and so on. The problem is that these dimensional values vary from browser to browser; Firefox leaves more height under Windows than under Mac OS X, Internet Explorer on Windows leaves less height than on Mac OS X. So if you want to create a site which on the one hand tries to use as much space as possible given the screens restrictions, and on the other hand can be displayed without scrollbars in as many browsers as possible, you either have to take a lot of screenshots from different browsers - or you just take these godsend Free Photoshop browser templates from Webdesigners Toolkit

The following prefined templates are available:
Windows:

Mac OS X

Mac Classic

Free Photoshop browser templates for webdesigners and screendesigners

Adobe has been busy adding the Macromedia Products to their portfolio lately:

Those all-in-one packages are a couple hundred bucks cheaper than what you would pay if you’d buy them seperately. Not a bad deal, is it?

Adobe