Let's face it. We’ve all hit the wall at one time or another trying to come up with something sizzling for a product as new and innovative as the classic mousetrap. Add in a crowded or mature market with established leaders, and you can find yourself wearily fighting the urge to crawl under your desk yelling “Stop it, stop it now!”.

To dream the impossible dream usually lands me at two inspiration destinations. Check out www.lush.com where Bath Bombs work wicked ways, and you can buy an Absolution Massage Bar. Then there’s www.sephora.com, part of the LVMH empire. You can click your way to calm and creative, or go into either company's retail locations to add touch and form factor to the experience, not to mention the scent of it all.

The cosmetics industry fascinates me. Just when you think there is too much of everything, some company launches the latest “it” product wrapped in Über-Marketing paper and tied with a ribbon. The Sephora site has a great section on brands, with stories behind the products. This is a fiercely competitive industry and I never cease to be impressed by the display of relentless creativity and the guts of the entrepreneurs who enter the ring to dance with the heavyweights.

If you enjoy fresh copy and are struggling with a differentiation dilemma, try visiting either of these sites or stores. Both also produce above average catalogs. Lush has a strong community component to its site and Sephora sends email blasts you just can’t ignore. Kudos to the creative professionals who turned soap into a life altering experience (Lush) and made a cosmetics warehouse a hot, new luxury destination (Sephora).

Of course, when time is tight and your ideas are dark or non-existent, I highly recommend a double tall non-fat latte and a date square.

Best regards,
Kim

p.s. Both Sephora and Lush do have products for men and I’ve never seen a woman disappointed with a package from either location.

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A favorite effect these days is to either remove all color from a photo and then selectively restore some of the colors to their original vivid hues, or replace them with slightly de-saturated colors to make the photo appear hand-painted. You may think it is complicated but in truth both techniques are quite simple.

1. With a photo open in either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, choose Layer, New Adjustment layer, Hue/Saturation. Use the default name and click OK to open the Hue Saturation dialog box. Slide the Saturation slider all the way to the left and click OK. All color appears to be removed from the photo. Actually, the colors are still on the photo, but the adjustment layer prevents them from being seen.

Figure 1.
The Hue/Saturation adjustment layer makes the colors in the photo invisible to the viewer.

Select the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer thumbnail in the adjustment layer (Figure 2). Press the X key to make the Foreground color black if needed. Select the Brush tool in the Tools palette and paint the areas on the photo where you want to restore the colors. If you accidentally paint outside of your area, change the color to white and paint over it to change it back. In this example I restored the color to the apple. (Figure 3). That's all there is.

Figure 2.
With the Adjustment Layer thumbnail selected, any areas on the photos painted with black reveal the original colors.

Figure 3.
The color restored only to the apple draws the viewer to the image.

Using the same techniques it is also possible to change a full color image into one that appears as a hand-tinted photo. Figure 4 shows the original AbleStock photo. Applying a hue-saturation adjustment layer removes all of the color as before. The trick is to reduce the Opacity levels after color isolation (Figure 5) until the colors appear only slightly.

Figure 4.
Original photo

Figure 5.
Reducing the opacity gives a hand-tinted appearance

Figure 6.
The finished photo

Bio
Dave Huss has been involved in photography for over 40 years and was an early advocate of digital photography He has authored more than 15 books on digital photo editing including “How to Do Everything with Digital Photography”. His latest book is
“ Photoshop Elements 3: 50 Ways to Create Cool Pictures ” on Adobe Press. Dave has taught workshops in both the US and Europe, been interviewed on both CNN and TechTV and also served as a Photoshop World instructor.

I often recommend Hemera's The Big Box of Art to anyone who needs a graphic collection to get started. It provides an amazing selection of graphic elements at a very realistic price. And it most certainly has the best search interface that I have seen in clip media collections anywhere.

The other day, I needed to create a nice PowerPoint template for a topical presentation on using email effectively — to add coherence to the presentation, I wanted a background that contained email related graphic elements. Here's how I created my background:

I first opened up my copy of The Big Box of Art that allowed me to search email related clip art. On CD 5 of the collection, I located nearly a hundred email graphics, all in the same visual style. Their bold colors and easy-on-the-eye visual style were exactly what I required.
After exporting one of the designs to the "TIFF with Transparency" file format, I created basic backgrounds in Adobe Photoshop, but you could use another image editor like Paint Shop Pro or Corel PhotoPaint.
The backgrounds were kept subtle so that text placed over them in the final presentation could be clearly visible to the audience.

Here are some of my favorite tips for creating easy backgrounds:

a. Use some ready-made textures within The Big Box of Art collection.

b. Use a digital camera image of a flower, leaf or sky and apply Gaussian Blur multiple times until you attain a nice faded look.

c. You might want to follow up the fade with a Motion Blur effect.

d. Apply a gradient on an empty layer/background and then try applying one of the filters - I normally apply a very small amount of Noise to any gradient.

e. Scan some hand-made paper or anything that has a nice texture or color to it. Be aware that you need to choose smoother textures since rough textures won't allow you to see or read any text placed over the background.
Once I had created a suitable background, I opened the exported TIFF file in Photoshop and selected the transparency by Ctrl-clicking on its Alpha within the Channels palette.
Getting this graphic over the background was as easy as dragging it and dropping it over the background composition in Photoshop. Next I resized the email graphic as required.
After applying a drop shadow Layer Style, I changed the blending mode of the email graphic to Soft Light - this provided a subtle look to the graphic and blended it well with the background.
Finally, I exported the background to a JPG file that I inserted within the presentation Slide Master in PowerPoint.

Download the PowerPoint template created in this tutorial here...

Bio
Geetesh Bajaj is a PowerPoint MVP - he also runs the indezine.com and powerpointed.com sites and issues a bi-weekly PowerPoint Ezine. In addition, he is contributing editor for Presentations magazine and has also authored content for the Microsoft, Presentations.com, Presenters University, TechTrax, Infocomm and other Web sites. He undertakes training and consultancy for PowerPoint, creates custom PowerPoint presentations and templates, and is a featured speaker on presentation technologies.

Scott Bowlin, Creative Partner and Co-Founder of Steelcoast Creative, has worked both as a designer and as a director in the creative industry, and he knows what it takes to be successful. When he and Creative Partner and Co-Founder Sean Acierno decided to start their own full-service design agency earlier this year, they knew they had to offer clients not just great looking designs, but also the best possible value. “We create a variety of different pieces, and we often have to find just the right image in a very short period of time. I stumbled upon a sampler CD from AbleStock and was very impressed with what I saw. We decided to sign up for an AbleStock subscription and we couldn’t be happier with how things have turned out,” says Scott.

Steelcoast Creative is a design and motion graphics firm located in Pittsburgh, PA. The company opened its doors earlier this year and focuses on clients with high-end design needs. With unlimited capabilities in print design, Web site development, motion graphics, video, and broadcast, Steelcoast represents clients across a variety of industries.

“Though we are happy to assist clients with single project needs, such as a brochure or a Web site, we prefer to work with clients to ensure that all of their marketing collateral is consistent in design and messaging, helping them build a stronger identity and brand,” says Scott Bowlin.

The young company has executed a variety of broadcast media projects. Recent projects have included opening credits in indie films, some of which are slated to run on several networks in 2005. The AbleStock subscription has been useful in the design and layout of movie posters. For example, the main image on the movie poster for Death-4-told [Figure 1], the face of Margot Kidder, was obviously produced specifically for this project, but Steelcoast used several other stock images to add texture and depth to the background.

“We can never have access to too many high-quality, high-resolution images,” says Scott. “And royalty-free is the way to go, unless you have a very generous budget.”

When you compare what creative professionals might pay for a CD with 100 high-resolution images, or a custom photo shoot with a professional photographer, a 1-year subscription to a high-quality stock photo agency will often pay for itself within a few weeks.

“I’m very pleased with my subscription to AbleStock,” says Scott. “Compared to let’s say Getty Images, it’s an incredibly cost effective solution for us. The files are large enough for what we do, and the quality is top-notch.”

Scott and the others at Steelcoast Creative use both Mac and PCs, but rely mostly on Macs. The software they use is a collection of the usual suspects from Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier and After Effects.

“Like many others in this industry, we moved from QuarkXPress about two years ago because of the delay in making the program available for Mac OS X,” declares Scott.

When Steelcoast was approached by Finn Chiropractic | Inner Fitness, a self-described comprehensive wellness center in Seven Fields, PA, the creative brief included several pieces; a printed brochure [Figure 2], a direct-mail piece [Figure 3], a print ad and a Web site.

“The client had several requirements,” Scott explains. “For their Web site, for instance, they wanted an image of an expectant mother to illustrate their pre-natal wellness program [Figure 4], and they wanted an image of a visibly strong individual to illustrate their fitness programs [Figure 5]. We were able to find exactly what we were looking for at AbleStock.com, simply by searching for certain keywords. Similarly, in developing the print ad for their grand opening, [Figure 6] AbleStock saved us both time and money.”

The Steelcoast team has extreme passion for what they do. While Scott has a definite need for stock photos, he wouldn’t necessarily recommend simply downloading an image, adding some text and calling it a great piece of creative work. The Steelcoast designers always work the images in some way – by cropping, changing the color, layering several images, adding filters and effects to make sure that the stock photo complements the overall design of the piece. As Scott says: “I’d hate for my clients to see the same, easily recognizable image I used in their campaign show up somewhere else.”

The name ‘Steelcoast’ is a bit of an inside Pittsburgh joke. Scott chuckles: “So many design firms seem to gravitate towards either Los Angeles on the West Coast or New York on the East Coast. Co-Founder, Sean, thought our Pittsburgh firm needed a nice little coast of our own. Steelcoast seemed like the obvious choice…. “

Mats Lindeberg is Communications Manager at Hemera, and the Editor of Hemera News.

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