Ensight – Jeremy Wright

Ever since I became a wee little designer back in 1994 I’ve used Photoshop. I remember my very first Photoshop project. I had to take the school mascot, remove the yellow border and make it a white border so it could go in the yearbook. Of course nobody had the original Corel files, so I had to make due with a large (11 x 17) scan.

It took me 12 hours to trace (pixel by pixel) each amount of yellow and then get rid of it. Immediately following this project I found out, through one of the first ever Photoshop Tutorial sites, about the Magic Wand. For those who don’t know, the magic wand basically selects a given colour so you can do whatever you want with it. It would have saved me 11 hours and 45 minutes of work. Ever since then, I have had a love / hate relationship with Photoshop Tutorial sites.

As I grew in my career I rarely ever needed these sites. Generally I’d only use them if I was looking for a specific effect and couldn’t figure out a quick way to do it myself (glass text, reflective lettering, realistic 3D lighting, etc). In this case, tutorials were great. However they were rarely great for teaching you how Photoshop worked or even WHY certain steps were being taken. It was basically horse meet carrot. Horse follow carrot. Horse get carrot.

So several years ago I wrote a series of 10 “tutorials” which were essentially “applied learning”. They weren’t about the effects, they were about the tools behind the effects. For instance, learn to use the magic wand by changing the background colour of an image. Learn how to work with layers by creating reflective text. Learn how a piece comes together by doing a piece of Grunge artwork. That kind of thing. The series went down well and has been stolen, copied, emulated and published in a thousand places, mostly without my name (which is a good thing, I dont’ want to answer everyone’s questions).

So, tutorials.

The service in question today for our very first Sponsored Post here at Ensight is Good-Tutorials.com. According to the creator it is the largest repository of Photoshop tutorials on the planet. To be honest I don’t know if that’s true or not, but with more than 3,500 it certainly is big. More than 100 tutorials are added every week as well, so this is quite the little hangout if you’re in need of a tutorial.

Throw in a quick search engine (worked well for me last week when I needed one) and an okay categorization system and it isn’t a bad little project. Some popups, no subcategories, but lots of ways to find content if you’re cruising and the search engine is accurate enough that if you know what you’re looking for you can find it quickly.

All in all, a good resource site. If I was into tutorials I’d wish they had an RSS feed so I could watch the new ones, but honestly, I can’t think of very many better places to find tutorials than this one. Again, assuming all you need is a tutorial to achieve a certain effect. If you’re looking to “learn Photoshop” this probably isn’t the easiest way to do it. But then, what is the easiest way?

A good friend of mine, and previous Ensight founder, Mattias has launched a new blog: The Man From Scandinavia. You should find his posts incredibly useful. And you should be subscribed to his feed.

If you aren’t, I’ll send Robert Scoble after you. Twice.

[ cross posted from Lockergnome ]

According to “word on the street” source Microsoft Watch, Microsoft may be trimming key components of the Longhorn Operating System, it’s next generation version of Windows, in order to meet a late 2006 release date.

While the news won’t be official until later today, inside sources are indicating the new OS will be more evolutionary than revolutionary. According to Microsoft Watch, “The resulting Longhorn is expected to consist primarily of incremental, core improvements — better performance, power management and the like.”

Which features are being eyed? Apparently, “it will cut WinFS from Longhorn” and “it looks like most of Avalon is going to get the ax”, said an anonymous developer.

This is after a similar “decoupling” of the Indigo communication subsystem earlier this year.

While this cutting is happening, apparently these features are not being forgotten completely. In fact, they may enjoy an expanded role through availability not only in Longhorn, at a future date, but also in other OS’s.

While this will mean a delay before we see this features, it appears as though some of the most exciting features for users and developers alike will be available on the “modern” OS’s, primarily Windows XP. A tradeoff of reach vs rich perhaps? We should know more this week.