TechMedia

Colour is an important part of any design, it immediately sets the tone and helps to communicate the mood of your message.

Tones of a colour can be easily matched, but just because a website has the colour red doesn’t mean you add any old red and expect design harmony.

So when a friend, who is creating a slideshow for a class reunioun, asked, “how do I match my school colours?,” I thought that would be a great topic for a post.

There are two easy ways to get the numbers you will need to match your colour to an existing colour. If the colour is online, I would highly recommend using Firefox’s ColorZilla extension.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program.

I use this handy extension frequently, it’s so easy to grab the RGB or hex colour values from a design element for use in Photoshop, or to use in your CSS.

Speaking of, there is an easy way to grab any colour anywhere on your screen using Photoshop.

Simply select the Eye Dropper tool and take a sample from an area by clicking and dragging from your Photosop document to where the colour is. This will load colour into the foreground colour box of the colour picker, for use in your design.

Once you have your colour, time to create a great palette using Adobe Kuler (as outlined in a previous post).

Free online screencasting tool

Note: this demo should really use a low constrast photo for dramatic effect, but I had trouble finding one because the north’s low-angled sun makes for a lot of great lighting!

You can’t always take photos during the magic hours of sunrise and sunset, and sometimes bad lighting makes colours washed out even monochrome.

For these photos, there is an easy fix: Lab colour. The method involves few steps:

• Go to drop down menu: Image>Mode>Lab Color
• Go to drop down menu: Image>Adjustments>Curves (Cmd M on Mac)
• Click Curve Display Options and make sure the grid of 10% increments is selected
• Find a and b channels (along with Brightness) under the Channels drop down – this is where the magic happens
• Adjust the Input levels along the bottom and top, either 10 or 20 per cent depending on how much colour boost needed
• Change your image back to RGB or CMYK once you are happy with the contrast. Lab colour files save as PSD, so’ll you’ll know if you forget this step.

This method can work wonders on washed out scenes for times when you can’t get reshoot and it takes 2 minutes.

Is Creative Suite 5 worth the $899 US (Master Collection) for upgrade?

I think it just may be.

Its top 3 sweet features for me were:

1. Built in CMS support to make themes and templates in WordPress, Drupal, Joolma.
2. Take the pain out of rotoscoping with rotobrush in After Effects.
   
3. And everyone’s been talking about Photoshop’s Content Aware Filter of course.

What new CS5 features do you think you’ll use the most?

Check out Adobe’s CS5 launch video for more info, or just head over to Lynda.com, it was adding CS5 tutorials even before today’s launch.

Flash Catalyst, now in Beta at Adobe Labs, is described as:

A new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating expressive interfaces and interactive content without writing code. Create interactive portfolios, product guides, microsites, site navigation, interfaces for RIAs and more.

You can download Flash Catalyst beta 2 at the Lab’s microsite. The beta 2 release adds support for video, sound effects, motion easing, AIR and more.

Adobe Flash is a fantastic product for video and interactive design, but coding in Action Script can be daunting to the novice user. Catalyst aims to give non-coders the chance to work on some interactive design and prototyping.

This product will be used to create projects for the student design competition at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.

One of the things we’re trying to help them figure out is how to more cost-effectively make more immersive, more interactive content that people will want to pay for or sponsor.

It will be interesting to see what the final projects when they’re presented at Adobe in May.

Reading an article in this month’s Adobe Edge got me thinking again about augmented reality. I blogged about augmented reality back in March, so I was fascinated to see a tutorial on how to customize this technology yourself.

Augmented Business Card from jonas on Vimeo.

Reading this sparked me to research the topic further, which led me to an interesting site for the creation of augmented reality business cards
that can:

• let clients can easily get in touch with you via phone, SMS, E-mail or various social networks directly in the application
• let clients know what you are up to using various social networks (e.g. Twitter)
• show your portfolio
• let users navigate through images/video/3D models using gestures

The site says that a front-end tool for creating the presentation files is still under development, but the potential uses for this technology has got me thinking about how this might be applied to other areas.

For a more advanced tutorial on this augmented-reality technology, watch this 22-minute long Introduction to Augmented Reality video which lets you learn the basics of creating an AR application using the FLARToolKit.

But it comes with the warning: Not recommended for beginners.

Another jaw-dropping technology is Layar, the world’s first mobile augmented reality browser.

Can’t wait till they make a version for Yellowknife, but I guess it could be a while so I will try to be patient.