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Adobe Camera Raw 5.2 features a handful of terrific new tools, including Snapshots and the Targeted Adjustment Tool. In this screencast designed to supplement The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers, Derrick shows you how to use these great new components.

The palm-size GT-R1 combines a 24-bit stereo WAV recorder with guitar effects, drum patterns, infinite overdubbing, and even a looper for practicing. "What we have here," says impressed reviewer Mark Nelson, "is a recorder that will make you a better musician."

Like its misanthropic superhero, director Peter Berg created unintended havoc off the set of Hancock, as Sony Pictures Imageworks, the company that created the film's visual effects, scrambled to keep up with his run-and-gun style. Read about how the VFX team augmented the prison scene by creating a CG inmate whose head gets stuck in another inmate's, um, bum, and all about the spectacular SUV chase sequence that was largely practical. And digital effects supervisor, Ken Hahn, talks about the coming revolution in 3D delivery.

Online version of O'Reilly User Group Newsletter from 11/21/2008

Ah, the holiday season, a time of expansion. Great physical expansion. Fatty, high-calories food is everywhere you turn. And so we grow. But not this year. In some distant future, when you review Thanksgiving 2008 in your photo album, you’ll look back on it as the first of many years that you actually lost weight. "Thank you dekePod," you'll say. Because in this episode, Deke teaches you how to transform fat into fit using the Liquify command—and with smooth, stretch mark-free results.

While at PhotoPlus Expo in NY, Derrick Story sat down with Rob Trueman and Cathy Chung to talk about their experiences with the Fall 2008 Aperture Nature Photography Workshop in the Grand Teton National Park. Rob and Cathy were two of the four contest winners who earned a trip to the Grand Tetons where they received one-on-one instruction. During this discussion they talk about what they learned and how they are applying that knowledge now.

In this article, we take a look at how the Heroes VFX team fried Hayden Panettierre to a crisp, shattered a human Popsicle®, and tore Tokyo in two using one of the industry’s best proprietary content management systems.

NI has fused six of its high-end synths and effects into a single "greatest hits" instrument and piled on an elegant hardware control surface. Kore 2 delivers the full sound of the component instruments in a streamlined package at a friendly price. Jochen Wolters dives deep and comes away impressed.

Not only is Adobe Camera Raw terrific for processing individual files, you can batch process with it too. In this screencast, based on Chapter 4 of The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers, Derrick shows you how ACR makes easy work of multiple images.

In less than five years, Guitar Hero has become not only one of the most successful video games of all time but also a pop cultural phenomenon, immortalized on everything from South Park to Gossip Girl (Serena shreds "Free Bird"). Read all about how the game makers create convincing avatars of your favorite rockers, and scrapped a remarkably inaccurate scripting program for musical notation they dubbed "Murder Face."

If you want to try your hand at developing rich Internet applications with Adobe's Flex 3, and already have experience with frameworks such as .NET or Java, this is the ideal book to get you started. Now available in the Digital Media Help Center, an excerpt from Programming Flex 3: Chapter 20, Embedding Flex Applications in a Browser. This chapter examines the options available to you for embedding a Flex application in HTML and how a Flex application can interact with the web browser environment.

If you want to try your hand at developing rich Internet applications with Adobe's Flex 3, and already have experience with frameworks such as .NET or Java, this is the ideal book to get you started. Now available in the Digital Media Help Center, an excerpt from Programming Flex 3: Chapter 18, Application Debugging. In this chapter, learn about runtime errors, debugging applications using FDB, debugging applications using the Flex Builder debugger, remote debugging, and tracing and logging.

Learning ActionScript 3.0 gives you a solid foundation in the Flash language and demonstrates how you can use it for practical, everyday projects. Now available in the Digital Media Help Center, an excerpt from Learning ActionScript 3.0: Chapter 7, Motion. From your very first experiment to the umpteenth time you've performed a familiar task, moving assets with code can be a gratifying experience. In addition to creating more dynamic work by freeing yourself from the permanency of the timeline, there is something very immediate and pleasing about controlling the motion of a symbol instance purely with ActionScript. This chapter examines basic movement, geometry and trigonometry, physics and programmatic tweening.

Learning ActionScript 3.0 gives you a solid foundation in the Flash language and demonstrates how you can use it for practical, everyday projects. Now available in the Digital Media Help Center, an excerpt from Learning ActionScript 3.0: Chapter 4, The Display List. ActionScript 3.0 brings with it an entirely new way of handling visual assets. It's called the display list. It's a hierarchical list of all visual elements in your file. It includes common objects such as movie clips, but also objects such as shapes and sprites that either didn't previously exist or could not be created programmatically.

Learning ActionScript 3.0 gives you a solid foundation in the Flash language and demonstrates how you can use it for practical, everyday projects. Now available in the Digital Media Help Center, an excerpt from Learning ActionScript 3.0: Chapter 1, ActionScript Overview. While you likely know what ActionScript is and are eager to begin working with the new version, a brief overview of its development will give you some insight into its use—particularly related to Flash Player and how it handles different versions of ActionScript. This brief introductory chapter will give you a quick look at where ActionScript 3.0 fits into your workflow.

This highly practical book contains more than 300 proven recipes for developing interactive Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 sites. Now available in the Digital Media Help Center, an excerpt from Flex 3 Cookbook: Chapter 21, Compiling and Debugging. Compiling Flex applications is most often done through Flex Builder or through invoking the MXML compiler (mxmlc) on the command line, but there are many other tools that let you compile an application, move files, or invoke applications. Debugging in Flex is done through the debug version of the Flash Player, which enables you to see the results of trace statements. This chapter examines compiling and debugging in depth.

This highly practical book contains more than 300 proven recipes for developing interactive Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 sites. Now available in the Digital Media Help Center, an excerpt from Flex 3 Cookbook: Chapter 20, Browser Communication. This chapter focuses on the functionality contained within the core Flex Framework, though there are other tools to assist with integration of the browser and the Flash Player—the Adobe Flex Ajax Bridge (FABridge), and Joe Berkovitz's UrlKit among them.

Excerpt from Flex 3 Cookbook: Chapter 8. Images, bitmaps, videos, and sounds is a mouthful and a far wider range of topics than could be adequately covered in a single chapter, so this one concentrates on answering the most common questions. As Flash becomes the primary method of delivering video over the Internet and the use of the Flex Framework in creating photo and MP3 applications increases, understanding how to work with all of these elements becomes more and more important.

Excerpt from ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Chapter 5, Arrays. This chapter discusses working with indexed collections of data called arrays: from adding and removing elements to sorting.

Excerpt from Action Script 3.0 Cookbook: Chapter 2. Classes are absolutely essential to ActionScript 3.0. This is truer in ActionScript 3.0 than in any earlier release of the language. ActionScript 3.0 shifts the core focus of ActionScript so that the basic building block is that of the class. If you are using ActionScript 3.0 with Flex, and the introduction of the minor exception of code being placed within tags, all ActionScript code must appear within a class. This chapter discusses the fundamentals of writing custom classes in ActionScript 3.0.