To start off I’m going to apologise for not being around for a while – I’ve been busy leaving school, not in the naughty truant way but in the normal it was my last week of school way and me being the busy person I am was dealing with multiple things, yearbook, a playground project I’m working on (redesigning one of the local playgrounds) and sorting out my last ‘Silver Surfers’ lesson (teaching local OAP’s how to use computers) but that should mean that now I’m able to have a bit more time … oh wait – no, I still have exams, silly me
Onto the blog - Cryptic title, not so cryptic Blog – my question is, how are tutorial books and dvd’s still around when the internet is just full of free tutorials, videos and guides that do a perfectly good job (If not better) of showing people how to do stuff – including the tutorial section of IT Pro!
I’ve recently got into After Effects and Photoshop and I don’t think I’d ever dream of going out and buying a guide book like ‘Photoshop for dummies’ just because of the multiple sites dedicated to the purpose offering step by step tutorials often on more tasks than a book, they also have huge forums of suggestions and help for specific problems. Along with that there are some fantastic videos taking you through every step you need to do – in real time, rather than reading a little book and looking at small black and white pictures.

The website that got me into it was http://www.videocopilot.net - this guy is brilliant and has made loads of tutorials guiding you through the basics of After Effects through to the expert uses of the program as well as plug ins and he has even developed packages of extras that can be bought – which are a much better use of the money that you’d normally spend on tutorial books because they actually give you something in return, along with all that you can download the project files which are used in the tutorials (I know you can sometimes get them with books but come on – these are free!)

Basically – I think that the tutorial book is going to be a dying trend unless something changes and for some reason the internet is turned off or something.

When I first saw this I thought that it wouldn’t be that easy to make or that it would require some parts which I just wouldn’t have but the reality is that I am SO going to be able to make it and hopefully, it will actually work.
It looks cool just from the perspective of being able to do what we’ve seen in those Youtube videos of multitouch screens for ages.
I would highly recommend visiting here and checking out the video below, I will be trying to make it and will hopefully succeed. Wish me luck!

Heres something entertaining to look at whilst perusing the internet. I was just editing a photo in Photoshop for a friend (taking out an ex) when I remembered an article I read a while ago about someone who had used Photoshop to recreate an image of the cartoon – Jessica Rabbit in order to make her look like a real person. The person used source images mainly of Angelina Jolie and just done an amazing job in making it look realistic especially the hair which I find incredible considering I never find it easy to work with.

Anyway, theres also a video of the whole process and a high resolution image too on ‘Pixeloo’:

http://pixeloo.blogspot.com/2008/04/jessica-rabbit-untooned.html

http://pixeloo.blogspot.com/2008/04/jessica-rabbit-process.html