Book Description:

The future looks bright for Web developers! With Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, you now have fantastic tools that enable you to create a wide array of content and graphics to deploy on a Web site that is dynamic and easy to maintain.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies is a hands-on, easy-to-understand guide to the main features in all the CS3 Web development products. The no-nonsense approach is designed to help you build Web sites by covering the basics of each program—Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, Flash, Contribute, and Acrobat—as well as the new features in a clear and concise minibook. You get all the expert guidance you need to:

• Choose the right tools for the job
• Create basic HTML Web pages
• Punch up your pages with forms and frames in Dreamweaver
• Save Photoshop images for print and the Web
• Work with text, shapes, and images in Fireworks
• Understand page layout
• Use layers, filters, and effects in Illustrator
• Work with animation, sound, and video in Flash
• Add interactivity to PDF files in Acrobat
• Integrate Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, and Contribute with other Adobe products
• Tackle advanced concepts
• And much, much more!

This friendly guide doesn’t just cover all the new tools in the Suite; it also offers you a primer on Web design as well as insight into how the Suite influences design. Complete with helpful hints on securing your work, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies is your one-stop guide to making the most of the Suite and developing for the Web quickly and easily!

Book Description:

This book guides the reader through the complexities of GTK+, laying the groundwork that allows the reader to make the leap from novice to professional. The book is replete with real-world examples based on the author’s profound expertise and experience in this area.

Book Description:

Dress up office documents the Apple way with iWork ’09 and this friendly guide

If you’re a Mac lover and want to explore life outside of that “other productivity suite,” here’s your chance to dress up your docs with Apple’s iWork ’09 and this easy-to-follow guide from Mac technology expert, Jesse Feiler. He draws on 20 years of experience with Apple software to share his secrets of producing fun and creative files using Apple iWork ’09.

Explore iWork’s word processing software, called Pages, and start cranking out text that not only reads well, it looksgreat. Add style to your spreadsheets with Numbers. And produce dazzling presentations with Keynote–all of it with iWork’s special bells and whistles that will give your everyday documents extra Apple style. Discover how to:

• Use this creative office productivity suite for your Mac
• Harness the creative possibilities of iWork for home or office
• Write text documents that look great, too
• Crunch numbers and build spreadsheets that look great with Numbers
• Easily build presentations that include multimedia and more

Why work when you can iWork with this great guide-and have some fun, too!

Book Description:

Book Description:

Love Manga? The newest features of Manga Studio help you bring your ideas to life! The tools available in the latest version of this powerful program make it easy to turn your computer into your drawing board, and Manga Studio For Dummies makes it easy to get started.

Discover how to use Manga Studio to begin creating comics in manga or Western styles, add color to your creations, and share them with your adoring public. It’s a breeze once you know your way around the program. Manga may have begun in Japan, but Manga Studio For Dummies is written in plain English, and shows you how to:

• Build and use page templates
• Rough in your comic with penciling techniques
• Work 100% digital, or use a combination of digital and traditional tools if you prefer
• Work with layers, rulers, and panels
• Add speech bubbles and sound effects text
• Ink your work and add tones
• Prepare your creations for print or distribution on the Web

Written by a working digital artist, Manga Studio For Dummies covers both Manga Studio Debut and EX versions. As an added bonus, it even gives you a peek into the world of manga and comics in general. With the help of Manga Studio For Dummies, you just might find yourself among the comic artists whose work populates the Web and gathers thousands of fans!

Book Description:

As technology becomes deeply integrated into every aspect of our lives, we’ve begun to expect more emotionally intelligent interactions. But smartphones don’t know if we’re having a bad day, and cars couldn’t care less about compassion. Technology is developing more IQ, but it still lacks EQ.

In this book, Pamela Pavliscak—design researcher and advisor to Fortune 500 companies—explores new research about emotion, new technology that engages emotion, and new emotional design practices. Drawing on her own research and the latest thinking in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, Pamela shows you how design can help promote emotional well-being.

You’ll learn:

• How design has transformed emotion and how tech is transforming it again
• New principles for merging emotional intelligence and design thinking
• How to use a relationship model for framing product interactions and personality
• Methods for blending well-being interventions with design patterns
• How emotional resonance can guide designers toward ethical futures
• Implications of emotionally intelligent technology as it scales from micro- to mega-emotional spheres

Book Description:

Bad design is everywhere, and its cost is much higher than we think. In this thought-provoking book, authors Jonathan Shariat and Cynthia Savard Saucier explain how poorly designed products can anger, sadden, exclude, and even kill people who use them. The designers responsible certainly didn’t intend harm, so what can you do to avoid making similar mistakes?

Tragic Design examines real case studies that show how certain design choices adversely affected users, and includes in-depth interviews with authorities in the design industry. Pick up this book and learn how you can be an agent of change in the design community and at your company.

You’ll explore:

• Designs that can kill, including the bad interface that doomed a young cancer patient
• Designs that anger, through impolite technology and dark patterns
• How design can inadvertently cause emotional pain
• Designs that exclude people through lack of accessibility, diversity, and justice
• How to advocate for ethical design when it isn’t easy to do so
• Tools and techniques that can help you avoid harmful design decisions
• Inspiring professionals who use design to improve our world

Book Description:

Book Description:

Extend FileMaker’s built-in functionality and totally customize your data management environment with specialized functions and menus to super-charge the results and create a truly unique and focused experience. This book includes everything a beginner needs to get started building databases with FileMaker and contains advanced tips and techniques that the most seasoned professionals will appreciate. Written by a long time FileMaker developer, this book contains material for developers of every skill level.

Book Description:

Learn digital image editing without the expense of using subscription-based editors. This book will pave the way for you to leverage Pixlr Editor, a free, web-based image editing solution that works on virtually any computer platform.

You’ll learn image editing first hand by using the practice images with the corresponding tutorials―everything from creating simple graphics to enhancing and retouching photos. Explore all of the features you’d expect in a high end photo editing application; layers, history (multiple undos), and an array of powerful tools for handling almost any editing task.

Powerful image editing used to require purchasing and installing expensive, complicated image editing software on your computer. Beginning Pixlr Editor takes an easy-to-access and convenient look at the alternative from the Pixlr family of tools and utilities and offers you advanced editing techniques so you can enhance, retouch, and edit your digital images like a pro.

Book Description:

Manga Studio is a software application for the digital creation of comics and manga. Manga Studio EX 5 has all the features of Manga Studio 5, professional story creation tools, and other special features that make it the ultimate illustration tool for serious comic, manga, and graphic artists. Made specifically for comic artists and illustrators, it has some of the most powerful digital art creation tools available. From digital perspective rulers to a library of screentones, Manga Studio 5 works for the artist with an intuitive, customizable interface and tools. With Manga Studio EX 5, you can create custom page templates, save commonly used designs, make custom brushes, mimic traditional media, pose 3D objects directly on the art canvas, and export all of your comic pages for print or the Web.

The book starts with everything you need to know to set up custom pages for your comic or Manga project. These recipes will take you all the way through to exporting your illustrations for print or to display them on the Web. You will learn how to create custom brushes that you will use for inking, or for repetitive tasks such as drawing foliage or rubble. Next, you will move on to understanding Layer Modes and Layer Masks. Then, you’ll learn how to finish up your illustrations with color, screentones, special effects, and 3D objects. Finally, you will be taught to export your hard work and share it with the world, either through the Web or in print.

This cookbook will give you just the right recipes to turn on the power of Manga Studio EX 5 and get you creating more illustrations faster and more efficiently.

What You Will Learn

• Create story files and custom pages for any Web or publishing project
• Customize brushes for special ink effects, hatching and cross-hatching, and much more
• Work with vector images in Manga Studio EX 5
• Use the new Symmetry ruler and the new Line tools to create your illustrations faster and more efficiently
• Make and save custom screentones, and add them to your comic pages
• Punch up your illustrations with color palettes and special effects
• Add 3D models to create or accentuate your comic scenes
• Finish a project by exporting it for the Web or for a printed collection

Book Description:

Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials is a detailed, practical primer on the leading rapid prototyping tool. Short on jargon and high on concepts, real-life scenarios and step-by-step guidance through hands-on examples, this book will show you how to integrate Axure into your UX workflow. This book is written for UX practitioners, business analysts, product managers, and anyone else who is involved in UX projects. The book assumes that you have no or very little familiarity with Axure. It will help you if you are evaluating the tool for an upcoming project or are required to quickly get up to speed in a project you just joined. The book assumes some familiarity with the principles of the User Centred Design methodology.

Book Description:

Blender is a powerful tool, stable, with an integral workflow that will allow you to understand your learning of 3D creation with serenity. Today, it is considered to be one of the most complete 3D packages on the market and it is free and open source! It is very efficient for many types of productions, such as 3D animated or live action films, architecture, research, or even game creation with its integrated game engine and its use of the Python language. Moreover, Blender has an active community that contributes to expanding its functionalities. Today, it is used in many professional products and by many companies.

Through this book, you will create many types of concert projects using a step-by-step approach. You will start by getting to know the modeling tools available in Blender as you create a 3D robot toy. Then, you will discover more advanced techniques such as sculpting and re-topology by creating a funny alien character. After that, you will create a full haunted house scene.

For the last project, you will create a short film featuring a rat cowboy shooting cheese in a rat trap! This will be a more complex project in which you learn how to rig, animate, compose advanced material, composite, and edit a full sequence.

Each project in this book will give you more practice and increase your knowledge of the Blender tools. By the end of this book, you will master a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations.

What You Will Learn

• Understand the basics of 3D and how to navigate your way around the Blender interface
• Create a 3D robot toy model from start to finish using the basic modeling tools of Blender
• Make a full alien character using the skin mesh modifier and the sculpting tools with an artistic approach
• Use re-topology techniques to create a clean 3D version of the previously sculpted alien
• Model a full haunted house and its environment using more advanced modeling tools and techniques such as the Array Modifier, Instance duplication, or Curves
• Discover the power of the texture paint tool in order to add color to the haunted house
• Get to know the Cycles render engine by creating different materials for the house and the environment

Book Description:

The latest 3D graphics cards bring us amazing visuals in the latest games, from Indie to AAA titles. This is made possible on Microsoft® platforms including PC, Xbox consoles, and mobile devices thanks to Direct3D– a component of the DirectX API dedicated to exposing 3D graphics hardware to programmers. Microsoft DirectX is the graphics technology powering all of today’s hottest games. The latest version— DirectX 11—features tessellation for film-like geometric detail, compute shaders for custom graphics effects, and improved multithreading for better hardware utilization. With it comes a number of fundamental game changing improvements to the way in which we render 3D graphics.

Direct3D Rendering Cookbook provides detailed .NET examples covering a wide range of advanced 3D rendering techniques available in Direct3D 11.2. With this book, you will learn how to use the new Visual Studio 2012 graphics content pipeline, how to perform character animation, how to use advanced hardware tessellation techniques, how to implement displacement mapping, perform image post-processing, and how to use compute shaders for general-purpose computing on GPUs.

After covering a few introductory topics about Direct3D 11.2 and working with the API using C# and SharpDX, we quickly ramp up to the implementation of a range of advanced rendering techniques, building upon the projects we create and the skills we learn in each subsequent chapter. Topics covered include using the new Visual Studio 2012 graphics content pipeline and graphics debugger, texture sampling, normal mapping, lighting and materials, loading meshes, character animation (vertex skinning), hardware tessellation, displacement mapping, using compute shaders for post-process effects, deferred rendering, and finally bringing all of this to Windows Store Apps for PC and mobile. After completing the recipes within Direct3D Rendering Cookbook, you will have an in-depth understanding of a range of advanced Direct3D rendering topics.

What You Will Learn

• Set up a Direct3D application and perform real-time 3D rendering with C# and SharpDX
• Learn techniques for debugging your Direct3D application
• Render a 3D environment with lights, shapes, and materials
• Explore character animation using bones and vertex skinning
• Create additional surface detail using tessellation with displacement mapping and displacement decals
• Implement image post-processing tasks within compute shaders
• Use real-time deferred rendering techniques to implement improved shading for lighting and shadows
• Learn to Program the graphics pipeline with shaders using HLSL implemented by Shader Model 5

Book Description:

OpenCV, arguably the most widely used computer vision library, includes hundreds of ready-to-use imaging and vision functions used in both academia and industry. It mainly focuses on real-time image processing. As cameras get cheaper and imaging features grow in demand, the range of applications using OpenCV increases significantly, both for desktop and mobile platforms.

The book provides an example-based tour of OpenCV’s main modules and algorithms, including the latest available in version 3.0. Starting with the setup and description of the library, this book teaches you how to add graphical user interface capabilities to OpenCV programs. Further, you will learn about the essential techniques such as image processing, image segmentation, object detection, and motion, which will help you process and analyze images better. You will also learn how to extract 2D features from images and how to take advantage of machine learning. By the end of this book, you will completely understand how to put those computer vision techniques into practice.

What You Will Learn

• Explore advanced image processing techniques such as the retina algorithm, morphing, and color transfer
• Create programs using advanced segmentation tools such as the new connectedComponents and connectedComponentsWithStats functions
• Use flood filling along with the watershed transform to obtain better segmentations
• Explore the new powerful KAZE features
• Use advanced video-based background/foreground segmentation for class BackgroundSubtractor and ECC-based warping
• Leverage the available object detection frameworks and the new scene text detection functionality
• Get a grasp of advanced topics such as machine learning and GPU optimization

Book Description:

With hundreds of thousands of mobile applications available today, your app has to capture users immediately. This book provides practical techniques to help you catch—and keep—their attention. You’ll learn core principles for designing effective user interfaces, along with a set of common patterns for interaction design on all types of mobile devices.

Mobile design specialists Steven Hoober and Eric Berkman have collected and researched 76 best practices for everything from composing pages and displaying information to the use of screens, lights, and sensors. Each pattern includes a discussion of the design problem and solution, along with variations, interaction and presentation details, and antipatterns.

• Compose pages so that information is easy to locate and manipulate
• Provide labels and visual cues appropriate for your app’s users
• Use information control widgets to help users quickly access details
• Take advantage of gestures and other sensors
• Apply specialized methods to prevent errors and the loss of user-entered data
• Enable users to easily make selections, enter text, and manipulate controls
• Use screens, lights, haptics, and sounds to communicate your message and increase user satisfaction

Book Description:

The latest edition of this bestselling game development reference offers proven tips and techniques for the real-time rendering of special effects and visualization data that are useful for beginners and seasoned game and graphics programmers alike.

Exploring recent developments in the rapidly evolving field of real-time rendering, GPU Pro 7: Advanced Rendering Techniques assembles a high-quality collection of cutting-edge techniques for advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. It incorporates contributions from more than 30 experts who cover the latest developments in graphics programming for games and movies.

The book covers advanced rendering techniques that run on the DirectX or OpenGL runtimes, as well as on any other runtime with any language available. It details the specific challenges involved in creating games across the most common consumer software platforms such as PCs, video consoles, and mobile devices.

The book includes coverage of geometry manipulation; rendering techniques, handheld devices programming, effects in image space, lighting, 3D engine design, graphics-related tools, and environmental effects. It also includes a dedicated section on general purpose GPU programming that covers CUDA and DirectCompute examples.

In color throughout, GPU Pro 7 presents ready-to-use ideas and procedures that can help solve many of your daily graphics programming challenges. Example programs with downloadable source code are also provided on the book’s CRC Press web page.

Book Description:

Book Description:

Obtain techniques for adding color to black and white or monochrome photographic images using GIMP. In this book you’ll also learn to create a hand-tinted effect to add an element of antiquity. Pro Photo Colorizing with GIMP also teaches techniques that enable you to selectively colorize images, mixing black and white with color. There are also tips to go the opposite way: converting color images into black and white (there’s more to it than just removing color).

Written with both beginning and experienced GIMP users in mind, Pro Photo Colorizing with GIMP shows you how to colorize black and white images to achieve a high degree of realism.

What You’ll Learn

• Gain a basic overview of the GIMP workspace, tools, color palettes, layers, and layer masks
• Learn how to make the proper tonal adjustments to black and white images before starting the colorizing process
• Complete simple colorizing exercises for beginners and progress to more advanced colorizing techniques
• Colorize skin, teeth, hair, and eyes
• Create a nostalgic hand-tinted look and selectively colorize (mixing color with black and white) to create interesting images
• Use textures and patterns to create artistic colorized images
• Properly convert color images into black and white
• Colorize black and white portraits, and re-colorize old faded color portraits

Book Description:

Since their introduction to Unity, Shaders have been notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games: complex mathematics have always stood in the way of creating your own Shaders and attaining that level of realism you crave. With Shaders, you can transform your game into a highly polished, refined product with Unity’s post-processing effects.

Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook is the first of its kind to bring you the secrets of creating Shaders for Unity3D―guiding you through the process of understanding vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and also how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math.

We’ll start with essential lighting and finishing up by creating stunning screen Effects just like those in high quality 3D and mobile games. You’ll discover techniques including normal mapping, image-based lighting, and how to animate your models inside a Shader. We’ll explore the secrets behind some of the most powerful techniques, such as physically based rendering! With Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.

What You Will Learn

• Understand physically based rendering to fit the aesthetic of your game
• Enter the world of post-processing effects to make your game look visually stunning
• Add life to your materials, complementing Shader programming with interactive scripts
• Design efficient Shaders for mobile platforms without sacrificing their realism
• Use state-of-the-art techniques such as volumetric explosions and fur shading
• Build your knowledge by understanding how Shader models have evolved and how you can create your own
• Discover what goes into the structure of Shaders and why lighting works the way it does
• Master the math and algorithms behind the most used lighting models