What are you saving the file as? JPG? If so, it doesn't keep the transparency. You'll have to save as a PNG or a PSD or what have you.

Quote - The point about the SOW is that it has been said that everyone, when they first get their hands on Bryce - immediately they stick a shiny sphere over a water plane and press render.

I have actually never, EVER done that. I must be a freak. :)

This should be at the top of EVERY forum site. :)

Well ... I think it's a way for them to earn their own ad revenue off of Google's popularity and custom search engine and off of people's desire to be more ecologically conservative.

And I think there IS a difference between the CRT and LCD monitors. I hear you save with black pixels on the old CRT monitors and not on the newer flat panel monitors, and since more and more people are using flat panels, this might not save nearly as much as it claims.

Are they serious?

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/macpulenta

It's possible. Unusual, but possible.

Above the B&W image, I create a Color Balance adjustment layer and fiddle with the settings to get a certain color ... like flesh color, for instance, which might be 50 towards red and 50 towards yellow in the midtones, with shadows and highlights to whatever settings to taste. I usually set the highlights to match the ambient light source color, for example.

Then, I invert the alpha mask (which makes the adjusted color balance disappear), and then I "paint" that flesh color on with my white airbrush or paintbrush on the parts I want in that color.

Repeat as needed for other colors.

Or ... you don't have to invert the alpha mask, and you can "erase" the color from parts you don't want in that flesh color tone.

Easy peasy. :)

I use the Adjust Color Balance feature with alpha masks. Really, really handy.

Gaussian blur isn't a layer effect -- at least not on my version of Photoshop.

**1) Do you have any degrees? **

I have a B.A. in literature/writing, which doesn't really pertain to my graphic design work. It looks impressive on a résumé, though. Employers know you're fairly intelligent and can see a project through.

I don't feel a degree is necessary to do my line of work, however. (I'm an art director, cover artist, and freelance graphic designer.) All you need is a good eye for art and design and a good working knowledge of the tools -- i.e., the software. After that, you need the actual working experience, so whatever work you can get, use that as a launching pad to get even more work. The more experience you have, the better you look to potential employers, and pretty soon the lack of the right degree will hardly matter.

2) What did you do to get a client? Did the client just happen to be browsing your gallery and offered the assignment to you? Did you go out looking for clients and if so how?

I didn't do anything in particular to get my first client. After posting my art and writing pretty regularly on my blog, my first client contacted me. He commissioned me to do a cartoon illustration of him. I had a few more occasional clients after that, every one of them initiating the contact and proposing the project. This sort of work is not steady, however, as you are dealing directly with the consumer so are at the whim of their pocketbooks. They only buy when they're flush. The work you do is not a necessity for them, but a luxury.

After a while, I went looking for clients I knew would require my work fairly regularly. I queried at publishers as a potential cover artist and managed to get a contract or two. This is called a B2B connection -- a business to business kind of deal. You can get the same kind of deal at t-shirt shops, poster shops, gift card shops, and the like. If you can find places that will regularly need artwork, you should query there with a portfolio of samples that would match what they normally put out.

Custom shape files end in .csh, I think. Not entirely sure. It's been a while since I've worked with them extensively.

But if you import paths from within Photoshop, you should be able to turn any vector shape you've created in other apps into a Custom Shape. Just go to Edit > Define Custom Shape.

Yep. So if it's too much trouble for you, perhaps the printer will accept a plain old TIFF file for the whole shebang. It will mean the flat is one big graphic (even the text), but at least it will be something you can do with Photoshop alone. :)

Actually, I don't know if there are tutorials out there for something like this -- it gets a little complicated, and people doing this kind of work usually already know the basics.

I assume since you're being asked to use Acrobat, they want you to create the PDF files the old fashioned way -- i.e., from postscript to PDF, rather than simply exporting a PDF file. See, Photoshop can save to PDF file, but oftentimes, it's still not what the printer needs. If they want you to do the whole design using Acrobat, then they really want you to do the whole design using a desktop publishing (DTP) program.

So you need to start with a good DTP. If you already have Photoshop, you could probably get a good deal on an upgrade to the Creative Suite -- heck, you might even already have the suite itself. If you do, you have InDesign, which is a pretty good desktop publishing program for this purpose.

I'm not sure how to tell you how to use InDesign -- you'll have to read the manual and go through it thoroughly as this isn't something I can easily teach online, but essentially, the cover design happens here. Sometimes, the printer may provide a template to use in InDesign -- for instance, Lightning Source (a printer) provides an InDesign file for your cover with all the trim, bleed, and margin lines already laid out for you.

If you already have an illustration ready, one that you created in Photoshop, you would place the image in the InDesign layout. Text should be done in InDesign, too, using OpenType or PostScript fonts. I wouldn't recommend using TrueType fonts. If you want to bold or italicize text, make sure you select the bold and italicized versions of the font, and don't use the bold and italicize feature in InDesign -- i.e., for example, use Times New Roman Bold, instead of simply emboldening the plain old Times New Roman.

There are lots of freaky little tips like this. That's why I recommend seeking a professional and experienced graphic designer local to you so you can learn from them. This is not something that can be taught in a simple tutorial.

Anyway, after you've designed the whole layout, you print to postscript file -- meaning you end up with a .PS file. The postscript settings will depend again on the printer, so you'll have to get those from the printer itself, and then you make sure your settings match theirs before printing to postscript (one of the settings will usually be to embed the fonts, etc.). Sometimes they have Acrobat Distiller settings, too, which you'll have to input into Acrobat Distiller before processing the .PS file to create the press-ready .PDF files.

See? It's complicated. A lot of technical stuff is involved in all this, and if you get a setting wrong or if the file is not up to the technical specifications, the printer will usually charge the publisher extra for pre-flighting the file, fixing it, or having you redo and resend it to them. You really, really have to know what you're doing here.

I wish I could help you more.

That depends on what the printer requires. Most printers do require press-ready PDF files -- these are high resolution files that have all the fonts and images embedded so that everything's in one file, where it used to be, say, a QuarkXPress file, the fonts, and the image files in a folder. But some printers may accept TIF files instead. The key is to ask the printer for their specifications, and then designing the cover to fit those specifications.

That said, if you're serious about getting into doing print book covers regularly, you really should learn how to do it the way that the professionals do it. You should use all the proper tools -- a desktop publishing program like InDesign, QuarkXPress, PageMaker and the like, Photoshop for the images, the full version of Acrobat for distilling postscript files into PDF files, et cetera, et cetera.

This is more in the graphic design territory, which steers a little bit away from the illustration territory, so when in doubt, seek a professional graphic designer out.

:)