The problem with seeing artifacts on someone else's system but not on yours probably means that they're using a lower color depth than you. When preparing graphics for the web or other computer-based viewing, it's a good idea to change your own settings to see what it will look like at other color depths.

The confusion over Aldus / Adobe probably comes from Adobe's buyout of Aldus Pagemaker. And yes, I had Photostyler too, and it really was a stinker.

Just wanted to note that whether to call it 4 X 5 or 5 X 4 seems to be a right- or left-pondian thing. In the US, the smaller dimension is generally stated first; the opposite is true in Britain & Europe. I was surprised once when a British client kept referring to shooting in the studio with a 5 X 4 view camera, and making 10 X 8 glossy prints.

I agree... I've been using the small Artpad II for as long as I can remember, and it makes a huge difference. There's no way I could justify the price of a larger one; the 4 X 5 area is sufficient for everything I need to do. I'm sure there are people who wouldn't want to bother with anything smaller than 6 X 8, but for the money the smaller pad is a great value.

The file format filters are located in the plugins folder... on my system, gif and png are in "Plugins - Adobe Photoshop Only - File Formats", and "Plugins - File Formats" holds bmp, pcx, photo cd, targa, and others.

If anything will make me go out and upgrade, it's the bigger filter preview windows! I really don't care about the image browser, and the healing brush isn't that big a deal, but being able to really SEE what effect filters are having would be a godsend.

You might try combining the textures into one... do the whole effect in the texture. Without knowing exactly what you're trying to do, that's the best I can come up with.

I'll add one more possibility... if you've moved your character away from the zero point, you may not be able to see the clothing when you load it. It's over at zero, out of your viewport. It should show up when you conform it to the figure, though.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=149014&Start=1&Sectionid=7&WhatsNew=Yes

If you use Thumbs Plus as a thumbnail maker/viewer/image database, it will do thumbnails of fonts as well, both True Type and Postscript. The thumbnail will show the name of the font, written in that font, and double-clicking on the thumbnail will bring up a full-page whole-alphabet preview. Evaluation copies are available at www.cerious.com; if you haven't ried it, you should. I should mention that I have no connection to the company; I just like the program!

There's some sort of texture on the bottle in the original photo, but it's a bit fuzzy and I can't tell exactly what it is. Besides, I had this texture map around already... Tequila? I thought it was gin or vodka; there's something in the glasses, and I assumed they were olives. There's not much to describe. I made the tablecloth texture first in Photoshop, then modelled the individual elements using splines and loft nurbs. The toughest part was the lighting. The original has really flat light; I decided not to go quite that extreme. I used 2 lights: One area light with soft shadows above and slightly in front of the bottle (I had it fall off quickly so as to put only a little light on the background), and a spot to give a bit of a halo on the background. I also placed panels with a lot of luminance on either side of the bottle to give some reflections in the glass. After that, it was just a matter of playing with reflection and refraction until I got what I wanted. I didn't really want to spend a lot of time on it or I would have worked on the texture a bit more and placed some black strips along the back of the bottle to create a little more contrast. Total time was about 2 1/2 hours.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=141915&Start=1&Sectionid=7&WhatsNew=Yes

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=131579&Start=1&Sectionid=7&WhatsNew=Yes