1. You can make any kind of collage you want in Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 as long as you digitize everything first. You can make it with just photos or add other elements such as drawings or even objects that may appear to be three- dimensional. Because of the way Elements 6 works, you can make some images larger than others and even add drop shadows to some while leaving others flat.
   Start by organizing your images with Adobe Bridge. This program comes with Elements 6 and installs at the same time. It is a good way to keep track of images, add keywords and any other data you want to incorporate with your images. When you start Elements 6, the “Welcome” window will give you the option of using the “Browse With Bridge” button. You can create a new folder in Bridge by going to the “File” menu and then selecting “New Folder.” Then shift-click to select multiple contiguous images (or command-click, Mac, control-click, Windows, to select non-contiguous images), then drag them into your new folder. That way, you can get all the images you need for your collage into one place.
2. Step 2

   Go to the “File” menu and select “New” and “Blank File.” This will bring a pop-up dialogue box, where you can specify the dimensions and image quality of your collage. To print it on standard letter-size photo paper for a vertical image, set the “Width” to 8.5 inches, the “Height” to 11 inches and the “Resolution” to a minimum of 300 pixels per inch. Set all the images you plan to use in the collage to the same “Resolution” as you set for the blank collage file.

3. Step 3

   Open the first image from your folder for the collage and move it to the right of the blank file. Then, using the mouse, click, hold and drag the image onto the blank file. This will create a new “Layer” and the image will have “handles” on it, so you can resize or rotate it. When you have it where you want it and the correct size, click the checkmark at the bottom. This “commits” the image size and shape.

4. Step 4

   Add a “Drop Shadow” to the first image you added to the collage by clicking the “Edit” tab in the upper right. Under “Effects,” the second button is called “Layer Styles.” Click that, then use the tool selector bar at the right to choose “Drop Shadows.” There are several different styles to choose from. Double-click the one you want, and it will appear on just that image’s layer.

5. Step 5

   Manipulate the images as you drag them in one by one to be where you want them. Add different effects to them such as “”Bevels” or “Photo Effects” in the “Effects” palette. You can go back to a previous layer by using the “Layers” palette below “Effects” and clicking on the layer for that particular image. When you have the collage set, go to “File” and “Save As” to save it as a Photoshop file that retains the layers. This way, you can make changes later if you need to. Once that’s done, go to “Layer” and select “Flatten Image” at the bottom. Then use “Save As” again to save the collage as a TIFF (better quality) or JPEG (less room on the hard drive) before printing.

I am a motion designer and design and animate graphics on television. Over the years I have seen a lot of work that inspires me. I continue to collect the work I find for reference and inspiration on future projects. These are some tips I’ve used to stay current on industry trends.

1. Via one of the following portals – http://www.mographwiki.net, http://www.motionographer.com, http://www.mograph.net – you can find companies or individuals with online portfolios. Some movies will inspire you, while others will provide a valuable reference for a particular style in the future. Download the movies you want.
2. Step 2

   Create a folder structure by naming each folder to categorize your movies. For example – you can name one folder commercials, another promos, another show packages, etc. Place the movies in the corresponding folders.

3. Step 3

   Use Adobe Bridge and add meta data to each Quicktime file so you can search for it later by those terms/keywords.

   Tips & Warnings

   • If the movie is on Youtube – you can paste the movie link in to a site like http://www.vixy.net and encode it to a Quicktime, Avi, or Mpeg file and save it.
   • If you’re working on a particular project – you can create a looping playlist from your archive in Itunes for inspiration and reference.
   • Be aware of your image cache preferences in Adobe Bridge when opening your folders. If you have a lot of movies and Bridge has to reload the thumbnails every time you open that folder – you could be waiting awhile.

The Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom uses camera profiles based on only one or two cameras of a given model. You can assume that your camera has the same color characteristics as the camera used to set the ACR profile. Or you can profile your own camera for outdoor and studio conditions and potentially see noticeable improvement in colors. New software tools make this a straightforward task.

1. Install the current Adobe Camera Raw for your version of Photoshop. (The directions here are for use with Photoshop CS3 or CS4. If you use CS2, refer to the Chromoholics calibration system noted in Step 7.) For Photoshop CS3, you should have ACR 4.5/6; for Photoshop CS4, get ACR 5.x. Both can be downloaded at the Adobe site (http://www.adobe.com). Also download and install the Digital Negative (DNG) Profile Editor, available at the Adobe site. This is the program you’ll use to make the profile for your camera.

   Get a Gretag Macbeth Colorchecker Color Rendition Chart: $59 at B&H; $58 at Amazon. To make a calibration profile for your camera, you’ll make a RAW photograph of the Colorchecker chart and then use the DNG Profile Editor to create your new profile. You may be able to borrow a Colorchecker chart from a local photographer or print shop.

2. Step 2

   Photograph the Colorchecker chart as a RAW file. For outdoor lighting, choose a sunny day, and position the chart with the sun approximately 45 degrees to the surface of the chart. A black background surrounding the chart will help reduce flare. For studio lighting, set up a standard copy shot (i.e., light heads on either side of the chart at a 45-degree angle). Bracket your exposures to get an image with all chart color patches well exposed.

3. Step 3

   Transfer your RAW file from your camera to your computer. You’ll need to convert the image of the Colorchecker chart to DNG before you can use it with the Profile Editor. Open the Colorchecker chart in Adobe Bridge, use “Save Image” in the lower left-hand corner to save it as a DNG file. Or download the Adobe DNG Converter at http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/. Install the converter, then convert your Colorchecker chart to DNG.

4. Step 4

   Launch the DNG Profile Editor and choose File>Open DNG Image, then open your Colorchecker.DNG file. On the Profile Editor tabs, choose Chart (the far-right tab). Four small circles will appear on the image of your Colorchecker chart. Move each to the center of the four corner squares in the Colorchecker image: brown, teal, black and white.

5. Step 5

   Leave the pull-down menu in the center of the Chart tab at “Both color tables.” Click the Create Color Table button at the bottom of the screen. You will receive a message indicating the color table was successfully created. Click “OK.” This saves what Adobe refers to as a “Recipe.” You can tweak your color table to accentuate various colors before you create your new camera profile.

6. Step 6

   Choose File>Export><camera profile> and save it to your hard drive in the Camera Raw>CameraProfiles folder. Close and then re-open Bridge and Photoshop. You’ll find the new calibration profile listed on the “Camera Profile” drop-down when you click the “Camera Calibration” tab under the histogram. Choosing your new profile will cause ACR to use your new color table when importing RAW images.

Adobe’s Creative Suite of products includes many popular design programs, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, InDesign, Dreamweaver and After Effects. These applications provide tools to help designers across a wide range of disciplines, including graphics, illustrations, motion graphics, desktop publishing, websites, video and audio. InDesign is the Creative Suite program best suited for print design project—and thanks to its pre-installed collection of templates, creating brochures in Adobe InDesign is a straightforward task.

1. Open Adobe InDesign.
2. Step 2

   Click “File” in the top menu bar, select “New,” and then click the “Document from Template” option from the resulting sub-menu. The folder containing the available templates will load within a few moments, using the Adobe Bridge application.

3. Step 3

   Double-click the “Brochures” folder in Adobe Bridge to view the available templates.

4. Step 4

   Double-click the name of the template you want to use. It will open in InDesign within seconds.

5. Step 5

   Modify the template content to suit your design needs. Click and drag images and text boxes to move them; double-click text boxes to change their content; single-click images to bring up the menu that allows you to adjust their properties; use the corresponding toolbar commands to add new text boxes, create shapes and change colors; select “Place” from the “File” menu to add new images.

6. Step 6

   Click “File” in the top menu bar and then select “Save.” Select a folder, give your file a name, and then click “Save” to save your newly-created brochure document.

If you are passionate about the game of bridge, you may want to consider investing in computer software that will allow you to practice your skills outside your bridge club. There are currently many different bridge computer games on the market, many of which may include tutorials and game improvement strategies. Using this software to its greatest ability will help you get more out of your game, both online and off.

1. Look for bridge software products online at retail stores like Amazon.com (see Resources below). Here you will find software compatible with many different operating systems. It is essential that you select software that is compatible with your computer before purchasing and installing it.
2. Step 2

   Download free bridge computer software from many organizations’ websites. Look for free downloads at the American Contract Bridge League website as well as the Great Bridge Links website (see Resources below).

3. Step 3

   Join an online bridge club to download and use its bridge software on your computer. Depending on the club, you may need to pay a fee for the download and use of the product. You may also be able to score Masterpoints towards your ranking within the American Contract Bridge League if you are a member of this organization and play on a participating website.

4. Step 4

   Be prepared to supply a user name and password to participate in many online bridge games or to use licensed bridge software on your computer. Remember that your password and user name should never use any sensitive information such as phone numbers or identification numbers, as this may make you vulnerable to identity theft.

5. Step 5

   Compare different bridge computer software packages by reading user reviews either on the vendor’s website or at a neutral site, such as Jim Loy’s Bridge Page (see Resources below). Here you will find reviews that rate the various merits and drawbacks of bridge computer software currently available.

Adobe Bridge CS2 improves the way you manage and share files during the publishing workflow. It is a separate application within the Creative Suite that can be launched independently. The main purpose of Bridge is to locate, organize and preview thumbnails of your images and documents.

1. Choose “Edit” from the Bridge toolbar, and then select “Creative Suite Color Settings.” A window opens allowing you to select a color scheme. Highlight one of the four color scheme options, and then click “Apply”. This synchronizes the color in all of the Adobe Creative Suite applications.
2. Step 2

   Choose “Tools” from the toolbar, select “Photoshop” and then navigate to “PDF Presentations.” In the PDF Presentations dialog box, click the “Browse” button under the “Source Files” section, and then select the desired files. Under the “Output Options” section, select “Multi-Page Document” or “Presentation”. Click “Save” to create.

3. Step 3

   In the Save Adobe PDF dialog box, choose the “High Quality Print” setting from the “Adobe PDF Preset” section. Click “Save PDF”.

4. Step 4

   To print the file in its original format, navigate to the thumbnail preview that you would like to print, and double-click on the file. This will open the file in the suitable Creative Suite application. Alternatively, right-click on the thumbnail file, select “Open With” and then select the appropriate software program.

5. Step 5

   Choose “File” from the Creative Suite application’s toolbar, and then select “Print.” This will open your printer allowing you to print your file.

If you are passionate about the game of bridge, you may want to consider investing in computer software that will allow you to practice your skills outside your bridge club. There are currently many different bridge computer games on the market, many of which may include tutorials and game improvement strategies. Using this software to its greatest ability will help you get more out of your game, both online and off.

1. Look for bridge software products online at retail stores like Amazon.com (see Resources below). Here you will find software compatible with many different operating systems. It is essential that you select software that is compatible with your computer before purchasing and installing it.
2. Step 2

   Download free bridge computer software from many organizations’ websites. Look for free downloads at the American Contract Bridge League website as well as the Great Bridge Links website (see Resources below).

3. Step 3

   Join an online bridge club to download and use its bridge software on your computer. Depending on the club, you may need to pay a fee for the download and use of the product. You may also be able to score Masterpoints towards your ranking within the American Contract Bridge League if you are a member of this organization and play on a participating website.

4. Step 4

   Be prepared to supply a user name and password to participate in many online bridge games or to use licensed bridge software on your computer. Remember that your password and user name should never use any sensitive information such as phone numbers or identification numbers, as this may make you vulnerable to identity theft.

5. Step 5

   Compare different bridge computer software packages by reading user reviews either on the vendor’s website or at a neutral site, such as Jim Loy’s Bridge Page (see Resources below). Here you will find reviews that rate the various merits and drawbacks of bridge computer software currently available.

Adobe designers provided photographers the ability to use a virtual light box in order to catalog, view, sort and rate their images through the release of Photoshop CS2. They essentially took the Browser from CS (Creative Suite) and turned it into a more powerful and separate program called Bridge. While it did offer users more options for viewing and working with images, it also slowed the process slightly.

Basics

1. The Browser in Photoshop CS already presented thumbnails of your images, the ability to change metadata and add keywords. You also could rename files by clicking on their names. Bridge expanded this ability and added things like the ability to rotate images and to use a back button to more easily go through folders.

Metadata

2. The Metadata section of Bridge CS2, which is in its own window at the lower left, collects all the data gathered when the image was shot. This includes what type camera you used, what the shutter speed was, what file format the image is saved in and other information. You can get this same information in a bigger window by going to File Info (click “File” then “File Info”).

Captions

3. You can change the caption information—who shot the image, who’s in the image, where it was and other information—by clicking on the IPTC Core items in Bridge. Here you can add or correct any information that is editable by the user including copyright notices and image rights.

Selective Display

4. Bridge CS2 also allows you to selectively display your images. If you rate your images with stars or label them with colors (click “Label” then the number of stars or color) as you work with them, you can tell Bridge to display just five-star rated images (click the arrow in the upper-right corner labeled “Unfiltered”) or those with Red labels. If you use five stars for your best images, you can use this to view, compare and open just those images.

Move or Trash

5. You also can move or trash images directly in Bridge CS2. You can create a new folder within a folder by clicking “New Folder” in the upper right. You can move images to another folder displayed in the upper left. To grab contiguous images, use shift-click and to grab noncontiguous images; use command-click (Mac) or control-click (Windows). To trash images from Bridge CS2, select them and drag them to the trash can in the upper right.

Adobe Bridge has been part of Adobe’s Creative Suite since the release of the CS2 version. This organizational program allows you to categorize, review and label files, and is accessible from all Creative Suite programs except for Acrobat. Strictly speaking, the program has only one “Labels” feature, though users often also refer to the lines of file metadata displayed below thumbnails as “labels.” Re-enabling either feature is quick and easy in Adobe Bridge.

1. Select the folder in which you want to work by clicking the “Folders” tab in the panel near the top-left corner of the screen. Click the arrow next to a folder icon to expand its list of sub-folders.
2. Step 2

   Add labels to a file by right-clicking the file, selecting “Label,” and then clicking the appropriate option. In addition to the default “No Label” option, you can label a file in one of five ways: “Select,” “Second,” “Approved,” “Review,” or “To Do.” If this solution meets your needs, skip the remaining step.

3. Step 3

   Restore the metadata to file listings. Click “Edit” in the top menu bar, and then select “Preferences.” Click “Thumbnails” in the left-hand menu of the following screen, and then locate the section labeled “Details.” Recent versions of Bridge provide at least 20 metadata elements to choose from, such as “Date Created,” “Color Profile,” or “Author.” You can display up to four of these at a time by checking the boxes labeled “Show” and selecting your desired metadata field from the corresponding drop-down menus. Click “OK” to confirm your choices.

Adobe Photoshop Portable is an image editing application for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. It is a version of the standard application which has been stripped of non-essential files to allow for the quickest possible peer-to-peer sharing and specifically with portable use in mind. It is not officially sanctioned by Adobe Systems, Inc., but rather user-engineered and generally shared free of cost via the Internet.

Photoshop

1. Photoshop, created by Adobe Systems, Inc., is arguably the most popular digital image editing application in the world. It is so popular and its capabilities so widely renowned that “Photoshop” has become a verb used to refer to digital image manipulation. Specifically, Photoshop is famous for its ability to allow users to take parts of one digital image, (for example, a person’s face), and paste them believably into another image (such as on another person’ body).

Portable

2. Adobe Photoshop Portable refers to a version of the program that has been stripped of its extraneous files. Applications generally contain many files are not necessary for the actual operation of the program. An example of these files would be help files. There are hundreds, sometimes thousands of text files in a given application’s help file system. Stripping these out makes an application smaller in physical size, which makes it easier to share via the Internet and easier to store on portable storage devices.

Practical Application

3. Since the advent of netbooks, small, portable computers with smaller (often solid-state) hard drives, there is a demand for software with a smaller footprint. The smaller an application’s install is, the more room a user can keep free for other files. This is one reason a “portable” application is often desirable.

Peer-to-peer sharing

4. Peer-to-peer (also P2P) sharing refers to users sharing files via the Internet. Users often transfer programs, music, videos, and other files to other users. To this end, a smaller application is more desirable as it will take less time to share. This is another reason “portable” applications are currently in demand. P2P sharing is made possible by specialized programs and indexing sites on the Internet.

Thumb drives

5. The true appeal of a “portable” application is that it is engineered such that one can store it on a portable storage device such as a thumb drive and use it on multiple computers. It is built so that no additional system files are necessary; a user can simply plug a thumb drive into a computer at home or at work and run the “portable” application from the thumb drive.

Legalities

6. As previously mentioned, Photoshop Portable is not officially sanctioned by Adobe Systems, Inc. Because it is user-engineered, and because it is distributed via P2P methods on the Internet, the legalities of owning or using such a program are dubious at best.

Other apps

7. While Photoshop Portable is not officially supported, there is a host of other software manufacturers that offer legitimate portable versions of their applications. Among them are Firefox web browser, Open Office, the open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite, and GIMP, the open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.