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Best Tutorials For Cinematic Visual Effects
By Vailancio Rodrigues, May 4th, 2009 in Tutorials | 71 Comments
It doesn't matter whether you are a designer, a developer, an artist or an amateur learner – at some point you need to improve the quality of the original picture or video. You may want to retouch and enhance his or her photographs and videos, make it look better, more spectacular and more original. It could be for personal or commercial use. Most of us know how to edit and enhance the digital photographs using our favorite image editing software. But when it comes to videos, the techniques are completely different from that of classic image editing.
In this post we present best tutorial for visual video effects that will (hopefully) teach you how to create impressive videos which can be used for your presentations or websites. Visual effects are used in post production which involves integration of live-action footage and computer generated imagery. You can use it to enhance or manipulate videos, just the way you usually do with image processing tools.
You may be interested in the following related posts:
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Adobe AIR Developer’s Toolbox: Resources And Tutorials
By Paul Andrew, April 7th, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 44 Comments
Originally called Apollo, Adobe Air was released in beta back in 2007 and has gone from strength to strength ever since. You can build an Adobe Air app using HTML, JavaScript, Flash or ActionScript relatively simply. Basically anyone with even a little knowledge of programming and a little patience can create rich Internet applications.
Below, we present the Adobe AIR Developer’s Toolbox: Resources and Tutorials, a round-up of tutorials, links, references, cheat sheets and showcases that will help you create the next popular app. Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application. The runtime bridges the "classic" user experience within Web-applications and rich, highly sophisticated user experience in modern desktop-applications.
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50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Video Tutorials
By Jacob Gube, January 4th, 2009 in Tutorials | 76 Comments
Adobe Illustrator is the industry-standard when it comes to the creation of vector graphics. Though a very robust tool - the learning curve involved in mastering it can be high. Thankfully, there are abundant resources on the web that allows you to "learn by doing". Video tutorials (in general) enable the learner to witness - step-by-step - how a particular technique works. We often learn best by seeing how things are done and following along with the instructor (much like in a classroom environment).
In this article, we present to you 50 excellent Adobe Illustrator video tutorials. We've broken down the video tutorials into several categories that include creating objects, effects, and general tips and techniques.
So fire up Illustrator, watch a few of these videos, and hopefully you will have learned a tip or two by the end of your adventures into these Illustrator video tutorials!
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25 Useful WYSIWYG Editors Reviewed
By Smashing Editorial, May 6th, 2008 in Developer's Toolbox | 243 Comments
When it comes to coding editors, it's damn hard to a get a clear overview of all the benefits and functionalities different editors have to offer. However, in the end everybody needs one, so it's important to know which editor is best tailored to your personal needs.
WYSIWYG-editors are often criticized by real coding ninjas for bloated, dirty and not standards-complaint source code they've been producing over the last years. However, WYSIWYG-editors have become much better recently. Some of them even produce valid and elegant code.
Sometimes you need to provide your clients with some simple tools to edit or update their web-sites. And this is where the utility of WYSIWYG-editors comes in. As a web-professional you need to provide your clients with some sophisticated advice and offer a simple yet effective tool — e.g. a WYSIWYG-editor. In this article we've tried to give you an overview of both useful and deprecated WYSIWYG-editors.
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Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials - Best Of
By Dirk Metzmacher, March 28th, 2008 in Tutorials | 174 Comments
by Dirk Metzmacher
The best thing about Photoshop video-tutorials is that they allow you to observe professionals just as if you were standing nearby and looking over their shoulders. You can see step-by-step how buttons, collages or even paintings are created. Instead of reading through books describing what needs to be selected, activated and clicked, you can simply imitate mouse clicks knowing exactly that you are actually doing the right thing.
The learning curve is easier to climb and the result is easier to compare. More than that: you can observe how it is done from the very beginning to the very end and (sometimes) you can get explained why it is done in exactly this way.
We've searched through dozens of video-sites, forums, articles, blogs, portfolios and communities. And we selected 80 excellent Adobe Photoshop video tutorials which you can use as a starting point to improve your skills or observe how professionals do their job. Among other things, below we present Photoshop video tutorials about speed painting, design of buttons and interfaces, beauty retouching, digital matte painting, photo manipulation, effects and much more.
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Adobe Fireworks Tutorials and Downloads - Best of
By Smashing Editorial, March 18th, 2008 in Tutorials | 165 Comments
Adobe Fireworks is the industry leader for prototyping and rapid site building. Some of you may not be aware of this, as you may be using Photoshop for each phase of web-site production. The articles, tutorials, and resources gathered here will convince you of the power of this application.

For rapid prototyping and site layouts Adobe Fireworks is definitely an option worth considering.Fireworks is an optimal tool for quickly prototyping and building web-sites. It is more intuitive and more light-weight compared to other titans of the industry. It is also included in the Adobe's Creative Suite 3. Below you'll find Fireworks tutorials which will help you to improve your skills and become more efficient when designing web-sites. Hopefully, they'll also help you to produce professional and maintainable results.
You might also want to take a look at the following tutorials round-ups which we've presented in our previous posts:
- Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best of
This article provides professional Adobe Photoshop tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works. - Adobe Illustrator Tutorials: Best Of
A collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials for beginners and advanced designers. - Adobe Flash Tutorials: Best Of
Hand-picked professional Adobe Flash tutorials. - Tutorials Round-Up
Over 200 Ajax, CSS, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, RSS, XML as well as ASP, C++, Perl, Python and Java tutorials.
- Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Best of
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Adobe Illustrator Tutorials - Best Of
By Smashing Editorial, February 5th, 2008 in Tutorials | 232 Comments
Over years Adobe Illustrator has become the standard application when it comes to illustration design. Artists, illustrators and graphic designers use Illustrator to create vector-based graphics which — contrary to raster-based editors such as Adobe Photoshop — can be easily rescaled without the loss of quality. E.g., Illustrator is often used to quickly transform hand-drawn sketches on a sheet of paper into lively and colorful digital images.
However, to master Adobe Illustrator isn't easy; and the creating process of professional illustrations requires both time and patience. Therefore tutorials can turn out to be real life- and time-savers as they show exactly what needs to be done in order to create professional illustrations and how masters of illustration actually manage to do their magic. One year ago we’ve presented a hand-picked collection of Illustrator tutorials. Now it’s time for a fresh portion of healthy and creative Illustrator material.
In this post we present a collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials for beginners and advanced designers. The new selection isn't enormous, but big enough to provide you with some good starting points.
Please notice that
- we've selected only those tutorials which haven't been featured last year or were released after the article was published.
- you might also be interested in Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Best Of we've presented few weeks ago.
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Adobe Illustrator Tutorials
As a vector-based drawing program Adobe Illustrator has nowadays become the standard for illustration design. This tendency can be noticed in the Web as well as in Print Design. Few weeks ago we've selected some of the best Adobe Photoshop tutorials we've found on the Web so far; now it's time for Adobe Illustrator. Below you'll find a list of hand-picked Illustrator tutorials you can use to achieve some special visual effects in your designs.By Smashing Editorial, February 3rd, 2007 in Tutorials | 128 Comments
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