I know I said that I would give you an eBook, but I need some more time than I currently have to produce something worth blogging about. So instead, I watched a tutorial on Lynda.com called Deke's Techniques to set up layer styles that mimic gold and silver. The text is still editable, which is really nice, although I have to readjust some of the sparkles if I move the text. I think it will be very useful for projects in the future. Deke only showed how to do the gold lettering; I then monkeyed with the style to get the silver coloring (not too hard). Stay tuned for eBooks hopefully next week.
Here once again are my somewhat incomprehensible notes. If you watch the videos on creating eBooks with InDesign on Adobe TV (just search for it), you'll probably have a better grasp of what these digital chicken scratches mean. Next week I'll have the final round of eBook making and include an ePUB file as a practice round that you can open up and see.
To Make an eBook (Part II): Must have separate InDesign files for each part of the book: cover, front matter, each chapter, back matter, etc. Open all these in an InDesign Book file. AdobeTV is most excellent. I watched parts I of II on creating an ePUB file, which causes the content to adapt to different sizes and different eReaders. The following are my slightly incomprehensible notes on the video. I'll do a more thorough job next week of describing what I learned.
Adobe Digital Editions: free eReader Fixed an old photo in Photoshop. Used Color Balance, Levels, Vibrance, Reduce Noise, Despeckle, and fixed my uncle's eye and the scratches above my aunt's head. Before After
Very useful tutorial. I imported our bid list and set it up nicely in preparation for Flag Day. Of course, I can't post it on the internet, so you'll just have to go here to check out the tutorial. InDesign CS5 has some great features that will make any future layout project involving tables much less time consuming. I wish I had known this when I typeset my thesis.
Here is a run-through of all the new Photoshop shortcuts I learned from this site. It will help me memorize them if I can repeat them here (and hopefully be of benefit to you if you ever need to remember them). The majority of these are just for CS5.
All right, I know it's Thursday night, but I had a lot of fun tweaking this tutorial. The grass, the caterpillar, and part of the sky are from my in-law's place (which is very beautiful), the road is from a trail my husband and I like to visit in Virginia, and the other part of the sky (the sunset part) is from Cinque Terre, Italy. The rest are images I found online. The original tutorial can be found here. People have done some other clever things with this concept. I think I am a surrealist at heart.
My goal is to do a tutorial a week. This is hard for me because I can spend hours and hours on just one project trying to make it better. So these shorter tutorials and not-perfect tutorials will be better for me. This is how to do a content-aware fill in CS5. It can save me tons of time. It's just a few clicks to do this: Use the magnetic lasso tool, Edit-->Fill, then clean up with the spot healing brush (J) and the clone tool (which is a million times better in CS5 than in CS3). It's not perfect (I'd fix the bottom of the pillow more), but I learned how to use it and I have a pillow ready for the next display. Pretty neat. I wonder what the algorithm in the programming is for this.
It's so tempting to go into web design, but expanding UB too broadly will, I think, be more of a detriment than a help. For those of you who don't have a favicon for your website, it's not that hard.
I made the favicon in Illustrator and learned how to do an .ico. A good day. The typesetting process for this book was very enjoyable. Call me crazy, but I enjoy fixing word stacks, orphans, and widows. It was very interesting to read and gave me good answers to questions I had earlier this summer.
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Get UpdatesJamie ZvirzdinWhile I still edit science books and help kids create stories, I've moved my focus to writing science-based fiction and non-fiction stories. See more at www.jamiezvirzdin.com.
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