I am addicted to the digital world.

Today is a fantastic day. After work, my world will return to normalcy. The void I have lived with for the last 6 months will finally be filled. My new DirecTV service with HD/DVR will be hooked up when I get home!

In my 26 years on this planet, I have never known life before Cable TV. A proud member of “Generation Y,” I was born with a remote control in my hand. I always had cable: growing up, in my college dorm, in my first apartment, and finally in my first house.

This all changed about 6 months ago. Like many other Americans, Nate and I re-evaluated our budget, trying to find ways to save a few bucks here and there. We canceled the land line (only telemarketers call that anyways), combined cell phone services, and even switched to generic soda. Right around this time our contract with Dish Network was expiring, and we thought, “do we really need to spend $85/mo on television when we can just watch the networks for free?” We bit the bullet. We canceled. The Dark Age began.

It wasn’t so bad at first. I re-discovered PBS. My new favorite shows became American Scientific Frontiers and Cook's Country. If nothing was on, I’d actually turn off the TV and move on to other things - take a bike ride, weed the garden, play PS3, rent a Blu-Ray. A new world had opened up.

Then winter set in. A horrible, awful winter. Over 35 inches of snow in December alone! Now, it’s the cold snap that seems to last forever. For the last 2 months, leaving the house has been unbearable! When you are cooped up inside for so long, there are only so many ways you can pass the time. The Locals just don’t cut it anymore. I don’t think I can ever watch another episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? or Judge Judy.

But what do I miss most about life before the Dark Age? DVR. I’ve wasted far too much time watching commercials. Now that American Idol is back on, I can’t bear to actually waste 2 hours of my valuable evening time watching it. With a DVR, I can watch an entire episode in 35 minutes, not miss any of the action, and get on with my life.

Oh modern technology, how I have missed you. I promise never to leave you again. I’ll just have to find something else to sacrifice...

THE ADOBE CS4 CORNER:
Scaling the modern way in Photoshop CS4

Have you ever had a photo that just wouldn’t fit where you wanted it to? I have. I am always trying to get art to fit properly on a 4 ½” circle. An important part of the photo always seems to be cut off by the circle in the center or the curved outside edges. The fix is usually to include only parts of the image or reduce the size and harm the integrity of the design.

Enter Photoshop CS4. One of the new features is the Content-Aware Scale. This feature Free-Transforms your photo to fit the designated size but does it in a smart way. The function will look for empty areas and compact those before resizing the real objects.

For example, I have a photo I would like to fit on a disc.


I really like the tree on the left but I also want to keep all the boats on the right. Before CS4 I would have had to place the image in a disc template and leave white space around it or attempt to fill it in with whatever struck my fancy at the time. I hate white space. I do not like to try and balance an image on a disc with white space. So I now use the Content-Aware Scale to fit all the objects I want on a disc.

The disc on the left shows how I would need to fit the photo to get all of it to print. The disc on the right fills the whole surface with a modified image. Some of the objects are distorted, but in my opinion not so much that you would be able to tell unless you were familiar with the original photo.

This next photo shows how much of an image can be compressed while leaving the objects virtually untouched. It compacts mostly the blue sky and clouds and leaves the trees alone. The first, again, shows the original image. The second shows my "fixed" image.



While I do love this feature, it cannot be used for every photo. There has to be some empty space in the photo for the feature to compact. I have tried this with very busy photographs and the result is a confusing jumble of pixels. If you would like to try this feature, it can be found in Edit>Content-Aware Scale when you have an editable file open (see below).


If you would like to find other new features in your Adobe CS4 suite go to Windows>Workspace>What's New in CS4. This will highlight all the new features in the pull-down menus.

All this and more I learned at a fantastic seminar at the 2008 Graph Expo in Chicago. The seminar was given by Sandee Cohen, a well-known expert in various Adobe products. Beyond her seminars and speaking engagements, she has written numerous books including her latest, InDesign CS4 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual Quickstart Guide.