Google Docs turns into a Universal File Viewer

Designers, for both web and print media, mostly use tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for doing the creatives of a project. They'll do the prototypes in PSD format but, for approval, the designs are delivered as PDFs since their clients may not have the software (Photoshop in this case) that is required to view PSD files.



 
Read Photoshop (PSD), Fonts (TTF) and other files in the browser.

That said, if you have any Photoshop (PSD) files on your desktop that you want to view but without having to install Photoshop, here’s a tip for you – just go to your Google Docs account and upload the file.
Google has recently added support for new file formats in Google Docs that are commonly used to exchange design prototypes between clients and designers. That mean you can open and quickly read Photoshop and other  files in the browser itself without requiring the application.
The file formats that can be natively viewed inside Google Docs, without conversion, include Photoshop (PSD), Illustrator (AI), Fonts (TTF), AutoCAD drawings (DXF) and Office 2010 documents (like DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).
And if the file that you are trying to open is already on the web, you don’t even have to bother uploading it to your Google Docs account. Copy the  public URL of that file and pass it to Google's online viewer at docs.google.com/viewer.

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Facebook is Pretty Bad at Photoshop

What do you do when you need a group photo of your team but some of the team members aren’t around for the shoot? The answer is simple - go ahead with the shoot and add all the missing employees to the photograph later with the help of Photoshop.
I think that’s exactly what Facebook did with this group picture that they recently uploaded to the Facebook India page. Look at the picture closely and you’ll notice that the two women who seem to be standing behind their male colleagues aren’t there for real.
The picture seems to be part of Facebook’s thank you project which is quite a good initiative but I can’t think of a reason why they had to such a clumsy Photoshop job for that.

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Edit Photos on the iPad with Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express, the free version of Adobe Photoshop that lets make minor edits to your photographs, is now available on the iPad and it’s awesome!




Photoshop Express is not only equipped with basic image editing tools like crop and rotate, but you may also apply quite a few impressive effects to your photographs like blur or that warm vintage look. You can also make color adjustments to your photographs by simply dragging your fingers across the screen.
Once you are done editing the photograph, you may either save it your iPad’s photo album or you can directly post it to your Facebook wall through the Photoshop Express app itself.
You can download Photoshop Express for free from itunes.apple.com.
Troubleshooting Photoshop Express
If you have trouble running Photoshop Express on your iPad, simply change the orientation of your iPad from landscape to portrait and re-launch the app. Once the app is running, you may again switch to landscape mode as it’s more suitable for editing photographs.
Thanks @TerryWhite for the tip.

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Designing Book Covers in Photoshop

This time-lapse video captures how a designer created a complete book cover in less than two minutes using tools like Adobe Indesign, Photoshop and Microsoft Word.

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Give Your Photos a Vintage Look without Photoshop

Do you want your modern digital photos to look old as if they were captured with a vintage Polaroid camera?


Then check out rollip.com - it's a new site where you can upload digital photos and apply that classic look of a vintage or Polaroid picture in few clicks.
While there are quite a few online image editing tools that include such photo effects by default, what I like about Rollip is that it makes the whole process pretty easy - upload the photo, choose a template for your Polaroid frame (I used paper with coffee stains), add some text (optional) and you are done.
You can then post your vintage picture to Facebook or download it offline for use elsewhere.

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Who Needs Photoshop When You Have PowerPoint

You probably have a copy of Microsoft PowerPoint on your computer for creating slides but do you that the same software can also be used as an easy alternative to Adobe Photoshop for applying some very impressive effects to your photos and screenshot images.



Apply Photo Effects in PowerPoint
Fire up PowerPoint, insert a blank slide and add a picture into the slide that you want to manipulate. Now select the picture while it's there on the slide and apply any of the effects from the Format menu. Both PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 include a wide range of effects from reflections, photo frames to rounded edges that you may apply with a single click.
Once the effect is applied, right click the edited picture and choose "Save As Picture". PowerPoint will ignore all other objects that may be on the slide and will save just that edited image for you to use it at other places.



Now that was using the default settings but if you are looking for that extra bit, here's a video tutorial from David Anderson that demonstrates how you can quickly create your own photo effects (e.g. Polaroid) in PowerPoint using tools and shapes that are already available inside the application.

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Try Photoshop & other Adobe Software in your Web Browser

Free Reviews of Leading Help and Authoring Tools - Flare, Robo, Doc
If you want to try any of the Adobe software programs on your computer, you can either download the fully-functional 30-day trial from the Adobe Downloads website or, if you don't have the necessary bandwidth (Adobe software are generally huge - Photoshop CS4 installer alone weighs more than 1 GB), you can request Adobe to ship you trial DVDs of the entire Adobe Creative Suite 4 by snail mail for a fee.
There's however another option now that would neither require you to download software installer from the web nor would have you have to wait for the trial DVDs to arrive in your mailbox - all you need is a browser and an Internet connection with some decent speed to test-drive some of the popular Adobe software titles.

Adobe now provides an online demo of all software components that are part of the Adobe Technical Communications suite. These working demos are exactly similar to the actual desktop software but here you get to try the software directly in a web browser without having to install anything on your machine.
The various Adobe programs that you may test within the browser include Photoshop CS4, Adobe Captive (for screencasting and elearning), Adobe Presenter with PowerPoint, RoboHelp (for help systems), Acrobat (for PDF) and Adobe FrameMaker 9 (for technical documentation).
These online software demos from Adobe are powered by Runaware - the same technology that powers the online test-drive for Microsoft Office 2007 as well.
Obviously, there are limitations. For instance, you can create new projects using any of these online Adobe software but you can't save them out of the virtual environment. Similarly, it is not possible to import existing files from the local disk into the online test environment.
To learn more about using the Runaware platform with Adobe software, check this presentation by RJ Jacquez.

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Look Thin & Slim in your Photographs Instantly

Do you want to look thinner in pictures before you upload them on to Facebook or MySpace? Then all you need is a spare minute to shed those extra pounds virtually.

Weight Mirror is a online tool that lets you to lose up to 50 pounds (23kg) in photographs without exercising any fancy Photoshop wizardry.
The picture of the model above was taken from Microsoft Photo Gallery and the results after manipulation were quite impressive. The face and shoulders in the photograph were left untouched while Weight Mirror squeezed everything else.
To use Weight Mirror, simply upload a front-on photo to their website, specify the location of your face in the picture (the tool is pretty good at automatic face recognition) and then select the number of pounds you wish to lose virtually (i.e., only in the picture).

Weight Mirror then creates a series of photographs each of which is 10 pounds lighter (or appears to be lighter) than the previous image.
Other "non natural" ways of losing weight include learning Photoshop, hiring a photo retouching expert or buying a HP digital camera.

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Screen Forensics – New Screen Capture Program for Mac

Screen Forensics is an interesting Mac only utility that captures all open desktop windows in one go and creates a single layered image file that is compatible with Photoshop or any other PSD editor.

The captured file will have one layer per desktop window, including menu and desktop icons, dock and menubar. If you don't have Photoshop, you can still save your capture as a bunch of PNG images.
Screen Forensics has has just launched and you can grab a trial version for free. I guess we can create a similar solution for Windows using SnagIt profiles and AutoHotKey. [via]

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Adobe Photoshop Outside the Computer

This is the interface of Photoshop software ..

.. that inspired someone to create this real-world Photoshop.
 
On a related note, PC Magazine editors have awarded a 5-star rating to Adobe Photoshop CS4 saying "Adobe's latest version of the leading photo-editing application will knock your socks off." You rarely see this kind of admiration from software reviewers. Picture courtesy John Nack.

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Upload Pictures from your Mobile Phone to Photoshop.com

Create free animated slideshows from your travel photos in minutes!
Photoshop.com is a Flickr like service from Adobe. You can use this place to upload photos (the limit is 2GB for free accounts) and there's a built-in image editor for tweaking pictures.
The image editor earlier launched as Photoshop Express but is now integrated into the main Photoshop.com site.

Adobe Photoshop Mobile

Today, Adobe is adding a new member to their expanding Photoshop family called Photoshop Mobile – this is a downloadable app that lets you upload as well view photos on Photoshop.com from a mobile phone. There're no photo editing feature yet.

Video Tour - Adobe Photoshop for Mobile Phones
Photoshop mobile (type m.photoshop.com in your mobile browser) is currently available for only some Windows Mobile phones including Moto Q, Palm Treo and Samsung Blackjak.
If your phone is not supported by the Photoshop mobile app, there's a nice alternative – just download the shozu client as it now works with photoshop.com in addition to other photo sharing sites like Flickr, Facebook, etc.

Skip the Registration Firewall

Bonus Tip: If you like to explore Photoshop.com without registration, try this URL – it won't let you upload new pictures but you may use all the image editing features available inside Photoshop Express using the sample pictures.
All Photoshop.com accounts also get an easy-to-remember URL (e.g., .photoshop.com) where they can share public photos with the world.

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Photoshop Celebrities Spur Demand for Photo Retouching Experts

Tim Lynch, an image retouching expert, says that 99.9% of photos published in magazines are doctored retouched in some way or the other. In fact, celebrities hire professionals who retouch every single photo before releasing it to the press.




Diet experts warn that retouching of photos is causing eating disorders in the society and therefore suggest that magazines should add a warning caption under photos saying that this picture has been retouched.
Here’s another video made with photographs that are retouched using Adobe Photoshop.

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Learn 101 Photoshop Tips & Techniques in a 5 Minute Video

This is simply awesome. Adobe Photoshop guru Deke McClelland has done an entertaining but very helpful video where he shares 101 Photoshop tips and techniques in a five minute video.
You will enjoy watch this video even if you are no Photoshop enthusiast because Deke’s style is impressive and very innovative.
The Photoshop tips video is also available for download (.mov file 52.3Mb) at O’Reilly.

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Photoshop for Web Design – Download This PDF e-Book for Free

Offers Professional Website Design, Development & Maintenance Services.
SitePoint is running a unique promotion this month.
They are giving away free PDF copies of "The Photoshop Anthology" - a cookbook that illustrates 101 web design techniques on how to use Adobe Photoshop for stuff like creating web buttons, applying text effects or designing website layouts from scratch.

You just give them an email address and the links to download this 270 page colored Photoshop ebook will land in your Inbox.
Alternatively, you may directly download the book using the following links:
High-res copy in PDF format - photoshopLG.zip  File Size: 64Mb
For the bandwidth conscious - photoshopSM.zip  File Size: 23Mb

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Send Pictures from Google Picasa Directly to Photoshop for Editing

This is something for Adobe Photoshop fans who also use Google Picasa for managing their collection of photographs offline.
You can quickly add a Photoshop button in Google Picasa that will automatically open the current picture inside Photoshop for advanced editing. That should save some of your time.

Install Photoshop CS3 Button - When you click this link, Picasa launches (if it is not already running) and installs the Photoshop icon.
And not just Photoshop, you can send your Picasa photos to any image editing program like Fireworks, Corel Painter, etc though that would require to learn this Picasa API. The Photoshop button was created by Michael Herf.
Here's a quick video explaining how to create your own Picasa Buttons:





SnagIt has a similar feature that's called Capture Profiles. You take a screenshot and Snagit will directly send that to Photoshop, Outlook, Mindmanager or any other external program.
You can either create your own capture profiles in SnagIt (without learning any complex API) or download ready-to-use outputs from TechSmith.com.
 

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Remove Backgrounds from Photos without Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop contains tools like the background eraser and an extract filter to help you quickly erase complicated background images from digital photographs.
Want to do something similar but without Photoshop ?


Just upload your picture to FotoFlexer, an online photo editor, and open the Geek tab. There you'll find an intelligent tool called "Smart Scissors" that works much like the Magnetic Lasso selection tool of Photoshop.
Draw a rough boundary around the image that you want to separate from the background and you will notice that "Smart Scissors" magically snaps the curves to the nearest edge (see screenshot on the right).
Once satisfied with the selection, click "Create Cutout" and you're done.
You can use this free FotoFlexer service to extract picture of a particular person from some group photograph or you want to merge two photos - cut a portion from the first image using Smart Scissors and place in over the second picture.
The cutouts can be saved as JPGs or a PNG so I guess it maintains the transparency as well. Have fun.

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How to Turn a Photo Into a Pencil Sketch – Colored or Black & White

How to convert any photograph into a pencil drawing ?

This tutorial shows to create the sketch effect in Photoshop using simple commands like desaturation and gaussian blur.
For best results use a high-contrast picture with a distinct background. Link.

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Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture – What Should Photographers Buy?

Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture are two most popular solutions for pro photographers who shoot raw images using DSLR cameras.
A user who has worked with both Lightroom and Aperture compares these software and suggests Lightroom though it was a tough calls. He says - "More than anything though for me it's the speed and response of the application, and Aperture is way too heavy in the system usage/resources area compared to other applications that do similar tasks. If Aperture could run as smoothly as Lightroom I would say the choice of application is a lot harder."
Another user says - "Lightroom is a warmed over iphoto, meaning that it is a jpeg workflow with a database to manage raw files while it is my understanding that Aperture has the computer do all of the heavy lifting in real time. Lightroom slows down if you disable previews."
An Aperture fan calls Lightroom as Camera Raw on steroids, that fails in the workflow department.
Full comment comparing the features of Lightroom and Aperture:

1. Clearly the performance of Lightroom is far beyond that of Aperture on the same machine, 2gb ram core duo blah blah. For some reason Aperture is slow regardless of library size, even the screen refresh can be testing at times (yes I've done my homework and tried all the how to speed up Aperture tweaks).

2. Lightroom is quicker to get around navigation wise, Aperture has done a good job but Lightroom clearly shows the attention to detail that extensive discussions with photographers and beta testers shows in every day usage.
4. The one thing that Aperture appears to have the edge on though is in the area of highlight reclaiming. It may be that I do it wrong in Lightroom, but after extensive trials in both apps I've found that Aperture can recapture things like skies much better than Lightroom (which I assume means Camera RAW), it just seems more natural when done in Aperture.

5. Lightroom's ability to let me move projects/libraries among machines and suck them back into my master library (1.1 update). I could be really unfair here and say that I have PC's and Mac's so that is a huge plus for Lightroom, but for the sake of argument lets assume I'm talking two Mac's and not a multi platform workflow. Link.

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Photoshop Lightroom More Popular Than Aperture Among Photographers

The Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in is most popular among professional photographers in North America followed by Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. The photographers who are using Lightroom or Apertures are still having Photoshop.
While Aperture is Mac only, Lightroom is available on the both Windows and Mac. Lightroom vs Aperture
John - The vast majority of photographers seem to understand pretty clearly the different nature & roles of the apps, and they continue to view Photoshop as a must-have part of any serious arsenal. Link.

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Add Color To Your Old Black and White Photographs

Color your old Black & White pictures with Photoshop. Surprise your grandparents by coloring their old wedding photographs.

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