Adobe Bridge Slideshow

By Mike Lavella | Published: June 1, 2011

I’m currently studying to take my Adobe Photoshop CS5 Certification exam later this month and in reading the Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book I learned you can create a pretty slick looking slide show of your photos that can be shown on the web.  To do this, you’ll need to fire up Bridge, select the files you want to include, and then select Web Gallery in the Output panel.  Set the settings and then save gallery.  Bridge exports everything and you’ll get an index.html file with full slide show and gallery controls which can be uploaded to your site.  Check out this video for a deeper explanation.

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Free Fonts for Logo Design

By Mike Lavella | Published: May 24, 2011
When working with design branding (whether that incorporates a new logo or not), it’s important to use a font that helps define and expand the message you are trying to convey.  With fonts, we have the Serif (with decorations) or San Serif (without decoration).  A side by side comparison can be seen here.  An example of a serif font would be Times New Roman which displays more of a classic scripty look that can be seen on a lot of newspapers.  San Serif fonts are typically used for the content of websites due to them being easier to read. An example of a san serif font would be Arial.
You can Google “free fonts” and find a ton of different sites where you can download fonts to incorporate into your designs.  One such site for free fonts is dafont.com and another good resource displaying fonts for logo designers can be seen here.

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Burgatory Logo

By Mike Lavella | Published: May 16, 2011

Burgatory is a new high class burger joint in Pittsburgh located in Fox Chapel’s Water Works.  The place has great food and decent beer.   Not to continue to plug the establishment for it’s food,  I wanted to point out it’s logo.  A designer’s task in logo design is to create something distinctive, original and simple while conveying a certain message.  Following the K.I.S.S. principle of design, (Keep It Simple, Stupid), allows logos to be recognizable and unique without looking over done.  An effective logo essentially boils down to two things: great idea and effective execution.  In the case of Burgatory, this logo is simple, aesthetically pleasing and in my opinion just cool.  Props go to Wall-to-Wall Studio for creating this image.

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Dreamweaver CS5 Local Test Server

By Mike Lavella | Published: May 9, 2011

Dreamweaver is my go to program for creating and editing websites.  Unlike Visual Studio, it doesn’t come with a local web server to test your server side code.  If you are developing a php site, you can use a prepackaged program like XAMPP or WAMP to easily install everything you need (apache, php, mysql) to test your site locally before uploading it to a web server.  At work, I setup XAMPP on a pc so I can test my site before the world sees it.  The firs step was to download XAMPP and then follow the local installation steps.  The one hiccup I ran into was that after installation, Apache wasn’t running when I clicked on Start in the Control Panel.  After doing some searching, I found that I was missing a C++ library and by downloading the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86) got me up and running.  The key is to create your site folders within the htdocs folder.  For example, I installed XAMPP in the default location (c:\xampp) and my site folders are located in c:\xampp\htdogs\(site folder name).  The local address is then http://localhost/(site folder name)/

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HDR in Photoshop CS5

By Mike Lavella | Published: May 2, 2011

The human eye can distinguish shadows and highlights much better than a camera. A digital camera is more limited in the dynamic range (ration beetween dark and bright) that it can reproduce. When using HDR (High Dynamic Range) in Photoshop, it allows you to take multiple photographs captured in different exposures and merge them into a single image giving you a much more detailed picture. For example, you can you can take an image that is underexposed, one that is overepoxed and one with middle exposure, combine all three resulting in am image with a greater dark to bright range. Pretty sweet stuff. Check out this tutorial:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-photoshop-cs5/create-enhanced-hdr-images-with-hdr-pro/

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