Welcome to our Killer Feature Guide for the all new Creative Suite 3, during the Adobe Live 2007 Amsterdam edition we’ve picked up some great features and tips for you. If you use any of the following applications make sure you get your productivity & creativity boost: Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, Light Room, Dreamweaver and Flash.

Photoshop CS3

The most used and well known product in the Creative Suite, has been updated with some incredible features. Before we get to these great features, there is something much more important to highlight! Photoshop now launches in just a few seconds, that is as long as you’ve launched it once before, otherwise it I’ll take slightly longer. Great new features in Photoshop are auto aligning pictures to get rid of (for example) tourists and 3D layers to import your 3d files into Photoshop, 3d layers support input from 3D Studio, Alias | Wavefront, Google Earth files and more. Of course Photoshop files can now be opened in Flash and Dreamweaver. The absolute and brand new Killer Feature we highlight today is the 3D Layer functionality.

Killer Feature: 3D Layers
open a Photoshop document
go to Layer > 3D Layers > New Layer from 3D file
locate and select your 3D file
go to Layer > 3D Layers > Transform 3D Layer
use the options in the toolbar to change the rotation, position, scale and material

The 3D layer is very useful when you want to do low-quality 3D product presentations, the quick and dirty kind, for high quality and detailed textures and materials you’ll still have to use your 3D application. (more…)

Hello Creatives! Usually we only write about the good stuff after it has happened, well this time we’re going to tip you of. As we’ve covered Adobe Live 2006 last year, we’re also going to be covering Adobe Live 2007. This event is the one event you can’t miss, if you’re a graphic artist, multi-media guy, web developer, vector illustrator or anyone else for that matter that uses the Adobe Creative Suite. This two day event will feed your imagination, check out the Adobe-Live website and register for either 30th or 31th of May and join us in Amsterdam.

If you can’t make it, we’ll be featuring all the good stuff in our Adobe 2007 Live Report!

Studio469 - Feeding your imagination

Again this year a creative team from Studio469 went out to spot the highlights at Cebit2007, the annual biggest digital event of the world. We’ll present you some of the most interesting products and technologies we’ve spotted this year. To start of with we checked out the Samsung USB SyncMaster 940UX, which allows you to connect up to 5 displays to your PC by using USB. The performance with even five screens was not bad at all, so this proves to be a interesting direction for display technologies in the future, and a space saver for portable devices, like laptops when they can do without those big connectors.

Samsung has been doing pretty good on their different product lines, combining technology and design into solid slick products. Their latest product shows off their power with the combination of the two sided Ultra Music Phone, a combination of their K3 MP3 model with a spanking new phone. This visual shows both sides of the phone, on the left, the phone with a small display and full keypad, and on the right the back side with the K3 like music player with a bright and colourful nice proportioned display.

That’s all we’re going to say about Samsung, let go on to something popular among the internet civilization, the ArtLebedev Optimus keyboard. The Art Lebedev Studio had announced to show their first working prototype of their famous OLED keyboard, however they explained to us that it wasn’t ready yet, they did have examples of the mini-three. We played around with the mini-three for a while and we must say it’s a cool extension of your keyboard & display, however three buttons is a bit limited in functionality, we’re looking forward to the release of the optimus keyboard, which according to Artemy Lebedev should be ready in the last quarter of this year.

There is one more topic we would like to highlight, from this years Cebit, which is the presence of famous German designer, Luigi Colani. He’s been the leading designer for centuries when it comes to organic shaped and inspired designs. With great examples of automotive design as well as many consumer appliances. There is a short saying which describes his mindset perfectly:

The earth is round, all the heavenly bodies are round; they all move on round or elliptical orbits. This same image of circular globe-shaped mini worlds orbiting around each other follows us right down to the microcosmos. We are even aroused by round forms in species propagation related eroticism. Why should I join the straying mass who want to make everything angular? I am going to pursue Galileo Galilei’s philosophy: my world is also round. — Luigi Colani

We’ve had a talk with this great artist, and looked at his Anyfix universal adapter which works with almost any phone automatically. The design is just like one would expect from Colani, inspired by a Dytiscus Marginalis insect - which is in fact an underwater swimming beetle - very organic and natural shaped. This concludes our Cebit Live Report for this year, we’ve brought you some of the great inspiring highlights, feel free to give us your thoughts.

Studio469 - Bringing you news from the world of design

Europe Design Capital of 2006, Eindhoven, presents Dutch Design Week. From the 21st till the 29th of October Eindhoven gets overloaded with the best Dutch designs from ’06. The DDW was visited by Studio469 on 23rd and 24th of October.

The mission of the Dutch Design Week is to build a strong, active and everlasting bridge between students, designers, studios, education, knowledge institutes and the operating business. There is a broad stage that represents all design processes, this makes it an interesting event with a lot of different and fascinating designs on the floor.

This years graduates from the Design Academy Eindhoven where represented at the “Witte Dame” with the Graduation Galleries ’06, while the Industrial Design students from the Technical University Eindhoven teamed up as Design United, with colleague-students from Enschede and Delft. Main difference between the two exhibitions is the usability of the products. While the academy students are represented with a lot of art, the students from the universities show their skills in designing very useful products.

Furthermore there are lots of interesting and fascinating events and exhibitions throughout Eindhoven this week. So check out the brand new Dutch Designs.
Studio469 - Your global design vision

As regular visitors of Engadget and fervent listeners to the Engadget Podcast, we couldn’t possibly miss the Engadget meetup.

Engadget is a popular technology weblog and podcast about consumer electronics. The weblog has won several awards. Engadget currently has four different sites, all operating simultaneously with each having its own staff, which cover technology news in different parts of the world in their respective languages. With a good 5 milion visitors every month, the website has grown superfast since it was founded two years ago.

Peter the co-founder of Engadget gave a Question and Answer session, which was really interesting.

After the Q&A session we had a more informal chat with the man behind Engadget.

Peter was so kind to bring along some interesting Gadgets:

The New Samsung Widescreen HD-TV phone, with a turning screen:

This phone is currently only available in Germany and Asia, it should be available in 2007 in the Netherlands.

The impressive thing with this mobile phone is that you can watch HD-TV on it, this is not sent over phone network, but works like your home TV, using Radio Frequency. Therefore the number of users don’t influence the quality of your content. Nice Gadget! To find out more, check the samsung site.

The Next interesting gadget is the new Motorola Razr known as Canary:

This slick new phone isn’t on the market yet, and the fully working model I’m holding in the picture above is in fact a prototype.
This new phone from motorola should see the market quite soon.

We also played around with a Garmin Nuvi handheld navigation device. Which you can also take into the city when going for a tour. The fact that it’s touch screen and light as well as compact makes this a handy travel companion.

If you would like to read more about this GPS product have a look at the Garmin site.

Peter brought T-shirts with him, as he promised on the podcast, their hot collector items, and guess what studio469 has got them!

We would like to thank Peter for the great meeting, and bringing the gadgets. If you’re not a Engadget reader or listener yet, your missing out. We’re looking forward for more interesting meetups soon, make sure you’ll be there next time.

Studio469 - Bringing you creativity & resources

Wednesday 21^st June 2006, NBC Nieuwegein

Today we visited the Adobe Live event, previously in Cologne – London – Paris – Stockholm – Milan and Barcelona.

10.00 – 12.30 Session I: The Creative Revolution

An introduction of the adobe live event, focusing on the merge of Macromedia and Adobe. Some figures about the spread of Flash Player (98% on pc’s), the future of flash content, about a billion people will have a flash enabled connection in 2007, from their mobile phone, computer or tablet pc. What was nice to see was the fact that flash is getting into consumer electronics, examples of flash interfaces in a Jaguar Car, on lots of mobile phones in Japan, but also unexpected applications like a internet connection and flash interface enabled display on a household freezer.

13.00 – 14.30 Session II: Digital Video, Animation and Web

Three interesting sessions by Phill Miller, Ralph Hauwert and Greg Rewis.

- Flash platform: power of Flash Lite, Flex and Flash Media Server. When developing Flash 8, the focus was on expressiveness, this means with flash 8 it is easier to use a set of new visual tools, like blend modes, filters, advanced text controls and the use of video. Also the development of Flex has taken a leap forward, the release of Flex 2 is on it’s way and the innovative note is that Flex 2 uses AS3 (action script 3) while Flash 8 is still using AS1&2 at the moment. People with a Flash 8 license do get a free update to a AS3 enabled version. Flex builder uses a the MXML file type in combination with SWF to make dynamic applications. Very suitable for interface design, charts and statistics.

Check out Adobe Labs to see the Flash 9 player and lots of other software.

-Flex 2 for designers. Design and Development of Rich Internet Applications using Flex 2.0 Ralph Hauwert gave a lecture about the use of Flex 2 for creating RIA. The new version of the program that will soon be available is easy to use for creating applications. It has very advanced scalability tools that allow you to run applications full screen, but also add motion tweening to page transitions. It’s also a suitable application to create online shops, allowing the user to drag an drop products, compare products. The flex 2 software can also be integrated with AJAX created web content.

For examples check out http://labs.adobe.com/showcase/

-Flash, Future of Interface Design, Adobe is revolutionizing interfaces. The third and last lecture was by an inspiring World Wide Evangelist Greg Rewis. Not only did he put up a nice presentation he also entertained the audience. A nice story which starts with the “skip intro design” that made flash famous, but also a short talk about the human evolution from orang-utan, to sophisticated human, to computer addicts. A revolution in flash content on mobile phones is FlashCast, a kind of podcast like information push to your mobile phone that finds your mobile instead of you finding the information.

A great inspiring links from Greg Rewis: Leo Burnett & Leapster World

15.00 – 16.30 Session III: Web and Motion, interactive Flash Video & Vector Animation by Greg Rewis, Jason Levine and Mordy Golding

- Power of Flash Video, the second lecture from Greg was mostly about the new features of FLV (flash video), allowing to play video using masks. Using opacity in video layers. Making interactive FLV’s using layers and opacity. Making a rendering or filming a piece of video in front of a green screen, keying out the background using after effects. Then exporting it as a FLV gives you all these advantages, and you can also use the new flash effect on your artwork, like motion blur, drop shadow, and other filters and blendmodes.

Inspiring example: Sony Underworld Evolution Video Seamless integration of flash content and interaction and video.

-Next level of Web and DV Integration, lecture by Jason Levine a crazy Adobe evangelist. The lecture focused on sound and soundquality in online video content. A good minute of stereo sound is about a megabyte of information, whereas one minute of good video is about ten times that. These days many companies tend to take down the quality of sound for faster streaming. With the use of adobe audition you can do two wonderful things, first use your Photoshop tools to find and delete noise from your music, second you can normalize the audio, and boost the frequencies that are most important, for example with a voice over this would be the mid frequency of 1 to 5 kHz. When you crank that volume up a bit, before encoding it at no lower rate then 96kbits you’ll have crisp and clear sound with your video content.

If you don’t believe all this, then check out this 29mb music video, and really listen.

John Gold – Cactus Flower

-Vectorgraphics for motion by Mordy Golding, illustrator specialist. This guy can draw anything in illustrator, but what’s his opinion about drawing by hand:

‘If you put an apple in front of me I’m going to eat it, not draw it’

Interesting approach to using illustrator for motion graphics in vector. He presented a couple of cool tricks with 3d bevel & extrude tool. Short tutorial to make a simple 3d die animation:

Step1 – Create the illustrator object, from 2d vector lines
Step2 – Object, 3D Bevel & Extrude option
Step3 – Create 2d symbols to put on the sides of your object
Step4 – Add symbols to the different sides using Artwork Mapping
Step5 – Copy the object to different location on your canvas, rotate it
Step6 – Apply the blend object, with 10 steps, (illustrator now calculates the frames)
Step7 – Use a very handy tool, called release to layers, (in flash distribute to layers)
Step8 – Save-for-web as SWF (check the animate blends option)

That’s how you create simple 3d animations, in vector, with illustrator. You could also add hotspots, for html links.

We hope you enjoy reading this event report as much as we enjoyed being there, feel free to comment, or ask questions of any kind. Studio469