Photo Slideshows: PulpMotion and BannerZest

Posted on April 24th, 2008 by HuthPhoto.
Categories: Apple, Skills, Photo, Teaching, Blogging, OSX, PhotoJava.

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I use Boinx’s FotoMagico for my pro digital image shows. It has wonderfully smooth transitions and lots of features, but I just bumped into PulpMotion from Aquafadas software.

Aquafadas has a slick little Flash program that’s part of the current MacUpdate Bundle Deal (check that out too!) and I bumped into PulpMotion from that.

It uses the ‘theme’ idea that’s ruined many such products, but these guys are like Apple… their design sense rocks. And on top of that, some of the themes just seem to be simple transition and text settings.

I’ll demo it and let you know if it’s as cool as it looks. Check out their site for videos of the shows created with PulpMotion.


(BannerZest Example with a theme)

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Mac Leopard Quick Look Plugins

Posted on March 26th, 2008 by HuthPhoto.
Categories: Apple, OSX.

You know on the Mac when you want to preview something quickly, you hit the space bar and zoom, it comes up…
Well, that doesn’t work for some things (zipped files, folders, etc)… so MacWorld did an article and here’s a site to add plug ins easily to view things like that: QL Plugins.com

Not critical, but if you are ever bugged by not being able to do something, go there and download the free plugin.

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Mac Leopard Font Trick

Posted on March 17th, 2008 by HuthPhoto.
Categories: Skills, OSX.

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I just accidentally grabbed the wrong part of a font palette and found this out.

If you pull the little dimple at the top of the palette (which usually means something like a ‘drawer’ is hidden there), it exposes a font preview, so you can see how the font renders, not just it’s name.

The screenshot above is after it’s pulled and you see the preview. The ‘dimple’ is above the ’shadow text’ T.

To get the font palette in most applications, you go to something like an ‘edit’ or ‘format’ menu, and see if ’show fonts’ is an option. Then you get this floating palette. I play with fonts so much, I have it open most of the time in Keynote, Pages, etc.

Enjoy being a font geek!

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Photoshop and Leopard

Posted on November 5th, 2007 by HuthPhoto.
Categories: Apple, Photo, Teaching, OSX, Photoshop.

Having a great time with Leopard… Quicklook is amazing (you can see a full-screen look at any document/photo/etc without opening any application…look at a Word doc without opening Word, see a photo preview instantly by clicking the space bar!).

Anyway, I still use Photoshop CS1, since Aperture, I’m more about workflow than the newer gadgets in Photoshop… anyway, if it helps anyone else:
After doing a clean install of CS1 I wanted to get my work spaces back and couldn’t find them in the Photoshop folder with the other settings… They turn out to be in your User folder, then Library, then Preferences and you’ll see a number of those prefs starting with ‘Adobe’ near the top of your list.

Moving those from my previous folder (you did back up, didn’t you??!) to the new folder brought back my beloved Work Spaces.

Everything is running much faster under Leopard and there are only a very few minor bugs (and OKI hasn’t put out new drivers for my office printer yet).

I’m really enjoying it!

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Instant Alpha Rocks

Posted on September 14th, 2007 by HuthPhoto.
Categories: Apple, Teaching, OSX.


Apple introduced a super easy way to do knockouts for your Keynote presentations… you just click once or twice on the background color you want to remove and it knocks it out to transparent… sweet, fast, elegant… very Apple.

Keynote is Apple’s presentation software, like PowerPoint (insert your snotty pro-Mac comment here).

In the photo above, the white boxed image is how all of the photos started.. note the top photo being layed over text. And you can then add beautiful drop shadows from the object or reflections.

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