Photoshop cafe Newsletter

Tell your friends and get them to sign up on the list, they may just win a prize. Prizes awarded weekly! As always this list will never be shared or sold to slimy spammers. Write to me and let me know what you would like to see in the Newsletter.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THIS WEEKS WINNERS WHO ARE:

Simon Isherwood - Down and Dirty Tricks DVD by Scott Kelby
Richard Astin - Down and Dirty Tricks DVD by Scott Kelby
Arturo Perez - Down and Dirty Tricks DVD or book by Scott Kelby
Elizabeth Sanders - Down and Dirty Tricks DVD or book by Scott Kelby

Prizes Kindly Provided by NAPP and ScottKelbyBooks.com
(If you are a winner you will be contacted my myself and Bruce from NAPP)

Kiosk Orbs

Glassy Orbs to display your futuristic warez
This is a guest Tutorial this month by our own George (Omen George) from the forums.

If you must read a new Tutorial by Colin, check out Clipping Groups at Graphics.com

This month, I decided to answer a common question. What are all the different file format I see in Photoshop and whicj ones should i use? Here they are(in a nutshell) in Categories...

PRINT AND ARCHIVE (Except for EPS)

Tiff: (Tagged Image Format) - This is the most common file type for print and saving a flattened image without any loss of Quality. Photoshop Tiffs can now contain layers and channels.
Eps: (Encapsulated Postscript) - This is the language designed by Adobe for print. Use this file format if you want to include a clipping path on your image or you are printing to a postscript printer.
PSD: (Photoshop Document) - This is the native working format for Photoshop. Use this for all your working files; it will save all the layers, channels, notes and color profiles. You can also use this format for printing through Adobe InDesign. (Be sure to convert to CMYK mode for commercial printing)
PSB: (Photoshop large format) - Use this format to save an image with unlimited size. Use this option for images over 4GB.

WEB and MULTI-MEDIA

GIF: (Graphical Interchange Format) - This was invented by CompuServe for saving images for the web, Limited to 256 colors. This is the best format for images that have repeating patterns or are cartoonish. Also supports transparency and animation. Gifs compress images by throwing away colors and repeating simple patterns, as such this is known as a lossy format.
JPG: (Joint Photographic Experts Group) - This is the most popular format for images on the web. This format reduces the quality of the image (Often undetectable to the human eye) this lossy compression can greatly reduce the file size of an image.
PNG: (Portable Network Graphics) - Lossless format for the web that support up to 16 million colors and 256 levels of Transparency. This was supposed to be the miracle file format, but it hasn’t taken off too much yet because the file sizes are larger than jpg or gif and older browsers do not support it. (I recommend this format for exporting to Flash - perform all your compression in Flash)

PHOTOGRAPHY

Most cameras support Tiff and Jpg. A third format is RAW, this is the unprocessed raw infromation from the CCD or CMOS on your camera. Think of it as the Digital cameras, film. Please check the newsletter archives because I have featured this format in a previous discussion.

Can Stock Photo provides professional royalty free stock photography at very affordable prices. We also have an advanced 'Photo Zoom' feature, an active discussion board, and free weekly downloads. Sign up today and get a free download credit!

If you are familiar with the hugely popular Super Tutorial on building a web site with Photoshop and Dreamweaver, or my book "From Photoshop to Dreamweaver", you will LOVE this book. This is not an update, this is a COMPLETELY NEW BOOK! This is all the stuff I wish I had put in the previous book such as Expanded explanation of slices and tables, frames and iframes, liquid sites, e-commerce, drop down menus and more. This is a FULL COLOR simple to follow guide that will take you through concept to upload of the DreamweaverCAFE site. It is also flexible enough that you can apply the lessons to any site! I wrote this as the book I wish I had when I started designing web sites.

See more here