Finishing up with some big web freelance jobs to free time and energy for the new GoodLearning launch. In a few days, those should all be wrapped up.

Launching the Treasure Teams Kickstarter project to try funding our new online / real-world scavenger hunt game. I’m not too confident in it getting funded, but just launching the Kickstarter project was a load off my mind. GoodLearning’s own relaunch was losing energy to thoughts and ideas surrounding Treasure Teams.

I’ve got the membership module, Amazon S3 modules, Mailchimp setup, new fancy microphone headset, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera… Some day this week I’ll actually finish with the new launch videos and we can say GO!

You learn valuable skills in a meaningful context: completing real-world projects.

I’ve written and read lessons that just sit out there like islands, isolated from any real application. The internet is full of these tutorials, and I’m glad they exist. However, I learn better when I’m trying to complete a specific goal.

I’m betting this will help you, too. And, we’ll have a blast doing it, to boot!

I’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign in early January 2012 to get the funding I need for an initial batch of projects, so stay tuned!

Faking  a tilt-shift photography technique can be pretty easy on the right image. Numerous internet tutorials show you how, and there’s even an Adobe Air program that automates most steps for you.

However, all those techniques break down when your photo has large vertical areas throughout, such as buildings in a downtown area. Let me show you how to handle that problem.

First, I’ll run through the typical tilt-shift technique for a couple minutes, and then show you how to improve the process for difficult images.

Tilt-Shift results - Regular

Tilt-Shift results - Improved

Have you ever wanted to save a complex selection of pixels in Paint.net to use later? Many image editing programs let you save and load a selection as its own channel, but as of Paint.net version 3.5.5, this ability is not built-in.

Have a look at this video to see one easy way of saving and loading your selections in Paint.net.

Credits:

Two photos used in this tutorial came from deviantArt.com.

Girl photo found at:

http://fav.me/d1w0sr4
By: “=Pretty-As-A-Picture”
http://pretty-as-a-picture.deviantart.com/

Lightning photo found at:

http://kezz.deviantart.com/art/Lightning-87827056
By: “*kezz”
http://kezz.deviantart.com/

As I’ve shown in the “Power of Basic Selections” tutorial, selecting specific pixels for editing is an important skill. The Magic Wand tool helps select areas of similar color quickly and intelligently, saving lots of time we would otherwise spend painstakingly selecting pixels with other tools. This tutorial shows Paint.net’s Magic Wand tool in action, explaining how it works.

Learn to use the basic selection tools in Paint.net to work on specific areas of your image.

• Rectangle selection tool
• Ellipse selection tool
• Lasso selection tool
• Selection mode
• Selection constraints

This video uses a “Wonder Woman” image produced by Vinnie Tartamella and found at DeviantArt.com. See Vinnie’s work at: http://vinroc.deviantart.com/

Learn to easily export video captions from Camtasia Studio to an SVB file for use with YouTube video captioning.

Benefits

If you make the effort to export your Camtasia Studio video captions, your caption text:

• Can be indexed by web search engines.
• Can be translated into other languages.
• Appears crisper than it would as Camtasia embedded captions.
• Can be turned on and off as your viewers please.

Requirements

To get video captions from your Camtasia Studio project into YouTube, you’ll need the following:

• The Camtasia Studio project file for your video.
• You must have completed the captioning process in Camtasia Studio. See how to add captioning in Camtasia Studio.
• You need the “Camtasia Studio Caption Extractor” program, created by Ron Sijm.
  (Note: I cannot find a reliable download link, so you can get the Camtasia Studio Caption Extractor here.)
  I first learned of this program from a TechSmith forum thread on exporting captions.
• A YouTube account, of course.

We use two distinctly different types of 2D graphics: Bitmap, or Raster graphics, and Vector, or Object graphics. Watch this video, under 8 minutes long, to understand the important differences between these two graphic types.

2D and 3D graphics work very differently, but there’s a place for both in your creative world. Watch this short video – under 3 minutes – to understand the basic differences between 2D and 3D graphics.

Check out Introducing WordPress 3 Custom Taxonomies on NetTuts+.