Although technically these tips apply to any graphics software, this particular tutorial over at Spoon Graphics focuses on the exact steps to set up bleeds for print design in your document within Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. The method to do so in other graphics application might be slightly different, but these walkthroughs should give you enough info to apply it to non-Adobe software.
Continue reading 'Setting Up Bleeds For Print Design In Creative Suite'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
While I had no idea that Photoshop had a 3GB RAM limit, a clever user over at MacOSXHints.com has figured out a hack/solution/workaround using a RAM disk as a virtual scratch disk. Clever.
Continue reading 'Photoshop’s 3GB RAM Limit - A Workaround For OS X Users'OS X Users’
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
I thought global colors in Illustrator were something everybody knew about, but perhaps not. Doesn’t anyone read the manuals for their software?
James Dempsey over at The Graphic Mac just posted a brief overview of the global process color swatches in Adobe Illustrator.
Continue reading 'That Little White Triangle In The Corner: Global Process Color Swatches In Adobe Illustrator'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
I just came across a serious bug in Photoshop CS3 under Mac OS X 10.5.3 (the newest version as of this post).
Seems saving a file to a networked drive will result in a corrupt file. I found this out the hard way, unfortunately.
Adobe and Apple are aware of this bug, and John Nack over at his Adobe blog is under the impression that this will be fixed in the next Mac OS X update. This seems to imply that the issue is with 10.5, but not necessarily I suppose. Adobe has posted a TechNote on the issue as well.
Continue reading 'Photoshop Bug: Corrupt Files When Saving To Network Volume On Mac OS X 10.5.3'OS X 10.5.3′
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
A while back I was ranting about the myriad issues I had been reading about concerning Adobe InDesign CS3 and Apple’s (then) new operating system Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”.  I am happy to report that upon upgrading to 10.5, and using InDesign CS3, everything has been working (for the most part) just great.
Continue reading 'InDesign CS3 & Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”: The Good, The Bad & The Not-Too-Shabby'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Adobe Illustrator plugin Phantasm CS offers in-line embedded image editing, color checking and separations, duotones and vector halftones, filters and live effects color adjustment. Looks like a pretty great plugin for Illustrator users who do a lot of bitmap image placing.
Personally I do any layout work in InDesign, and not much of my work requires having bitmap images in the Illustrator file outside of placing a template for tracing. However, the halftone and separation features look like they might be really handy.Â
Continue reading 'Adobe Illustrator plugin Phantasm CS Studio Offers Duotones,Vector Halftones, Filters, Live Effects Color Adjustment & More'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
I recently signed up for the new illustration & photography networking site Pixish. What is Pixish? I’ll let the site’s creator’s tell you in their own words: “Pixish is a place where people who want images and people who make images can easily find each other and collaborate on creative projects together.”. Sounds kinda cool. But also sounds like a way for people to get free work out of artists.
Continue reading 'Pixish: Illustration & Photography Social Networking, Or Stealth Spec Work?'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
If you are like me and you are wondering why in the world Adobe decided to eliminate the previous functionality of the Paint Bucket tool in Illustrator CS3 with the introduction of the new ‘Live Paint Bucket’ tool, fear not – a solution is at hand.
Continue reading 'Fill Vector Paths Old-School Paint Bucket Style in Illustrator CS3'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Adobe just released an incremental update to InDesign CS3 (5.02), and it’s so new it seems to not be in the auto-update as of yet. Per the Read Me file:
 This update fixes known issues with Anchored Objects, Character Alignment, Step and Repeat, Indexing and Table of Contents, Text and Fonts, Dictionaries, Color, Scripting, Graphics Import/Export, InDesign Interchange files (INX), XML, Library files, and Printing, as well as other miscellaneous issues.Â
Continue reading 'Adobe InDesign CS3 5.02 Update Released - 10.5 Fixes On Apple’s Shoulders'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio • Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.