I came across this tutorial for creating the 2012 text effect from the huge effects film that came out last week.  I always like analyzing text treatments on various things to think about how I could recreate the same style in Photoshop.  There are a few interesting things along those lines in here, maybe the least interesting part being the actual 2012 text part.  A few highlights are:

• Modifying letters in a font that is close to, but not quite the exact shape you want, using paths.  This can be really useful, as many fonts on posters, products, logos, etc. are slightly customized from any typical fonts you can find.
• Applying texture from another image to your font.
• Zooming out your viewport to see the full image (using Ctrl-0).

Enjoy:

http://www.planetphotoshop.com/2012-text-effect.html

As much as I don’t like getting ahead of myself on holidays (like seeing Christmas things in stores before Halloween), I need to bring up the fact that it’s time to start on those holiday cards, as they take a little time to make.  Get your orders in by mid-November so you can send them out to people by Christmas time!  We can do holiday cards in the styles of movie posters, magazine covers and cereal boxes.  These are cards your friends and family won’t want to throw away at the end of the season!

If you’re taking pictures of kids, especially indoors, and have slightly blurry pictures, there could be 2 problems:

1.  You could be shaking the camera a little too much when pressing the shutter button.

2. Your subject could be moving around too much.

Let’s handle them in reverse order.  If your child is moving around on a post-halloween sugar rush, you don’t have much of a chance, unless you can crank up the amount of light and/or get your shutter speed much shorter (which usually comes from having more light or a higher ISO value).  If ISO values, apertures, and shutter speeds make your eyes glaze over, don’t worry too much.  We’ll look at the other issue for a simpler solution.

Use a tripod.  This will make your photos much more crisp.  If your child is moving around, however, a tripod won’t solve your problem completely.  Then it’s back to lens apertures, ISO values, and shutter speeds.

For little photo shoots, I also like to use a tripod because you can get away from the camera slightly, with your finger on the shutter button, and make eye contact with your child, and then press the button when they smile.  Your aiming has pretty much been done beforehand.

If you don’t like the idea of being completely locked down, you can either get a monopod, or just use 1 or 2 of the legs of your tripod, and loosen up the swivel of the camera a bit.  This allows you to swivel and lean your tripod around quite a bit, while still having a relatively stable setup – much better than handheld.