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Margaret Tinsley from Ladera Ranch, CA, won the 32 MB USB Memory
Stick filled with images from the Hemera Image Express collection.
Congratulations Margaret, and good luck with your future
graphics projects!
"I'll get it on the Net" - my refrain in my quest to acquire many,
many things. Stuff I always want (and only sometimes need),
accessed through a few clicks, for free or by credit card. Existence
without this power has become anxiety inducing to say the least.
Thanks to the Net, I send eCards, make travel arrangements, do
market research, help with homework and buy great stuff. I am a
premium service subscriber to Dictionary.com for my children's
homework. I use Hotwire.com for business and personal travel,
and Amazon.com and Jcrew.com just because. I have more regular
online destinations but I'll stop at these, before I get
overexcited. And of course, I use our own online Hemera
products for any projects requiring images.
What's most important to me is the quality and reliability
of the products and services I choose. I haven't been
disappointed with my choices and continue to click my
way to working faster and smarter, getting a better deal
and feeling secure in knowing I have the power to find what
I need, when I need it. Oh what a wonderful world!
I hope you experience the same gratification from using our
products and services. I would be very disappointed
if you didn't.
Kim Dixon
President and CEO
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Make someone's Valentine's Day with a free e-card - choose from 15 easy-to-create cards!
Click here
Good news for Hemera Image Express™ subscribers! The company
recently announced that 10,000 new images will be added every
month to the easy-to-use Online collection. Today Hemera Image Express
offers more than 400,000 images in several
image formats, suitable for a wide variety of Web and print
projects.
10,000 new images will be added to Hemera Image Express
on the first of every month.
View February images now!
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Save $50 or more on multiple Hemera Image Express licenses for your
organization - each license just $89.99 when you buy five or more!
Click here
Save more than 66% on The Big Box of Art Holidays & Events collection.
Just in time for Valentine's Day. Now only $9.99 (regular $29.99)
Click here
Save $20 on Photo Album 4 from Jasc - just $29.99 (regularly $49.99).
Bring out the best in all your photos with this fun and easy photo-editing tool!
Click here
Save $50 on OmniPage Pro 14 - just $99.99 (regularly $149.99).
Desktop publishing just got easier with Scansoft's popular scanning technology!
Click here
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Have you ever wondered about the work involved in creating Hemera's
collection of award-winning Photo-Objects® images?
The Hemera Photo-Objects collection offers over 150,000 images that
are pre-masked (pre-cut) with transparent backgrounds so they're ready
to add to your project.
You may however find a need to create your own transparent images. In
this tutorial, I'll describe some common techniques for masking (cutting
out) an image to create your own transparent images similar to a
Photo-Objects image.
Using a bitmap editing application like Adobe Photoshop®, there are 3
common tools or techniques for masking an image.
Using the magic wand tool for images with similar colored backgrounds.
- Open an image in Photoshop. (figure 1)
- Select the magic wand tool and click on the blue
background to automatically mask adjacent areas of similar
colored tones or values. A value of 32 in the tolerance field
of the tool bar will generally yield a good selection range.
By adjusting this tolerance value, you can adjust the amount
of tones picked up by the magic wand. (Note that the blue areas
in between the flower's stems are not currently selected.)
- Choose the Select menu and click the Similar menu item. This
will select similar tones in interior areas of the image which
were not adjacent to the original selection. The blue areas in
between the flower's stem are now selected. At this stage, you've
selected or masked the blue background behind the flower.
- Choose the Select menu and click the Inverse menu item. This
reverses your selection, and masks the flower.
- Choose the Layer menu and click the New menu item, and Layer
via Cut on the fly-out menu. This creates a new layer with just
the flower object.
- Deselecting or deleting the background image now leaves your
flower image on a transparent background.
Using the Lasso tool for images with straight edges.
For images that contain straight lines, the most efficient
masking tool is the Lasso tool.
Holding down the Alt key and clicking point-to-point lets you create
a continuous mask around your image using straight lines. Once the
complete object is masked out, follow steps 5 and 6 above to create
your pre-masked image.
Using the Extract Feature for images with irregularly colored backgrounds.
In some cases, you may have an image with an irregularly
colored background, with blurry or soft edges.
In this case, using the magic wand or lasso tool may not result in the best mask.
Photoshop has a built-in function called the Extract feature. Found under
Image>Extract (Adobe® Photoshop® 7, this command provides an additional set of mask selection tools
to select irregularly shaped areas.
- Invoke the Extract feature by choosing Image>Extract.
- Use the Edge Highlighter tool to cover the edges of the areas you wish to be retained.
- Next, use the Fill Tool to fill in the areas you want to retain.
- Click OK and the Extract feature will automatically keep the purple areas defined by
the Fill tool, and intelligently determine the transition green area defined by the Edge
Highlighter tool to create your masked image.
Bio
Joe Donnelly has been Product Manager at Hemera since 2001. He manages the award-winning
Hemera Photo-Objects 50,000 collections, among others. Joe has extensive experience in the
graphics industry, including nine years as Product Manager for CorelDRAW, and a degree in
Marketing from the University of Ottawa.
Business cards are your personality on paper.
Cards can be your most important marketing tool. You can carry them everywhere, they're
inexpensive, and often the only tangible item your contacts have to remember you by.
So make your cards bold and colorful and they'll stand out in a pile of your competition's
traditional cards. Digital color printing has made full-color cards practical, so it's time
to take advantage of technology and put something exciting in your pocket.
Using photos on cards doesn't have to mean boring "Realtor" style cards with a stiff photo
in a box. Remember - You don't have to put pictures (or text) in boxes. In fact, both are
stronger outside the box. Photos can be big and bold, filling the card, with your type
placed strategically so it becomes part of the image.
Concept
The first step in any successful design is to come up with a concept. If you're not sure
what your concept is, go to Hemera Image Express or AbleStock and search for topics
related to what you do. The images themselves can spark your imagination.
Make sure the images are relevant and show people what you do. For example, if you're a
caterer, a photo of a baby is just going to confuse people (unless you cater parties for
babies). On the other hand, if you're a midwife, a photo of a baby will be perfect, while
a picture of a deli tray is going to send the totally wrong message.
Content
Business cards obviously need more than just pictures - they need your contact information.
Write down all the text you need on the card, then everything you want on the card. Because
of the Web, cards need less text than in the past. Sometimes just your Web site's URL can
be enough. Sometimes a phone number, email address and URL.
Now that two-sided card printing has become inexpensive, you can use one side for a big,
bold graphic and very little text, then the other side for all your necessary contact info.
All talk.jpg (1607m0016)
If you must use a busy image, then you can lighten it to the point where it becomes a
watermark - if it's light enough, you'll still be able to read the type on top of it. Here
one side of the card has a statement, the other the contact info. Typeface: Flood
(fonts from www.myfonts.com unless noted)
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Shoe fetish.gif (1796l0026)
Look for pictures that have nearly blank areas where you can place type without a lot of
competition from the background. Typeface "Satisfaction"
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Blooms1 field (c174h0025)
To make your card more dramatic, choose images that are out of the ordinary. For a florist,
think of different distances and angles that really show flower power. Here a long shot is
used - taking the flowers all the way back to their source, making them seem less commercial
and more natural. Typeface: Woodwinds from
www.Philsfonts.com
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Blooms2 bouquet (0548l0130)
Here the image of a bouquet gives the card a different perspective. Using it in a simple,
small way, with lots of white space, makes it almost jump off the card, yet it remains
restrained and tasteful. Typeface: Chanson d'Amour from
www.FontHaus.com
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Blooms3 Lily (0537h0271)
Sometimes a single object can be more powerful than a group. Here a
single lily makes a strong impression on a green background taken
from one of the colors in the stem. Typeface: ITC Dartangnon.
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Blooms4 rose (c821h0070)
You can almost smell this rose. Typeface: Voluta Script
Card mousetrap (c643t0029)
And sometimes, especially when dealing with metaphors, a picture really is worth a thousand
words. Typeface: Zurich Extra Condensed.
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Q: Hemera is known for its many BIG collections of clip art, like
The Big Box of Art. What are the new The Big Box of Art Minis?
A: The technical definition is "jewel-case collections of themed images".
When you purchase these smaller image collections, you get a single CD,
without a large box or a printed user manual. The modest packaging makes
it possible for us to provide our customers with great collections of high-quality
images at a fantastic price. The CDs are of course compatible with both
Macintosh and Windows.
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Q: You mentioned themes; can you give us some examples?
A: There are ten different themes: Everyday Objects, House and Home, Holidays and
Events, Learning, Food, Animals, People, Religion, Sports and Nature. Each CD is
only $9.99, so you can easily afford to pick up more than one.
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Q: So each collection fits on one CD. How many images do you get on
each CD?
A: Each themed collection includes 5,000 images in several image formats, including
stock photos, vector clip art and Photo-Objects images. Our popular Photo-Objects
images are essentially photographs with the background removed, which makes it easy
to create professional looking Web pages, brochures, presentations and more.
Q: Do the "mini" collections include any new images?
A: While these images are also available in other Hemera collections, it's sometimes
very convenient to have a themed image collection handy. If you plan to create a
nice-looking recipe collection for instance, you don't have to purchase a huge box with
hundreds of thousands of images in every possible category. You can simply pick up the
Food Mini and save yourself some money. Plus, it's often much quicker to search a themed
CD compared to a very large general collection. It's all about offering people a choice.
Q: When are these mini CDs available, and how can people buy them?
A: The Big Box of Art Minis will be available in the first week of February 2004. You can
buy them at the Hemera online store for only $9.99 each. If you buy and register one or
more of these themed CDs, you get a nice bonus gift - a one-week free subscription to
Hemera Image Express, which gives you access to a huge online image collection where
you can download up to 1,000 images per day for seven days. And it's free!
® 2004 Hemera Technologies Inc. All rights reserved.
If you unsubscribe, you will no longer receive information on updates, upgrades, special
offers or technical support notification from Hemera.
Click here to unsubscribe.
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