I thought this was hilarious, check it out:

We needed a way for folks to recognize the Digg Crew during our San Francisco meetup. Here’s what we came up with. Enjoy!

read more | digg story

Good evening everyone! I am now on a new PC that I just built so I can finally work on those huge 300 DPI poster images without taking 10 minutes each time I try to do something in Corel Photopaint. Along with my upgraded PC I also went ahead and updated to the latest version of CorelDraw Suite X4. I’ve updated from version 12, so I’ve missed quite a few versions over the last couple of years so I’m getting used to the new changes and features and I am trying to work out some kinks.

First off, I am VERY happy to see that X4 has FIXED the NIB problem! I can now delete and add nibs and the thumbnails aren’t all screwed up! If you’re not sure what I am talking about, you can check out some posts I’ve made on the matter here:

It’s Official - Nib Bug is Unresolved Bug in Photopaint

Corel Photopaint Nib Error Explained… and it’s still a bug in X3!

So now that they’ve got the NIB problem fixed, I should be as happy as a pig in mud right? Nope, Corel has decided to throw a new problem in to the mix. You might remember a tutorial I wrote awhile back on How to import Photoshop ABR brushes in to Corel Photopaint. In one of the steps, we talk about opening up a PNG image, and in Corel Photopaint 12, 32 bit PNGs open up as a mask on a black background. So, all you had to do was click on “Create Nib from Mask” from the Nib toolbar and you were all set. Well now, when you open a PNG in Corel Photopaint X4, the PNG loads as an unmasked object on a blank transparent background.

Now, you can create a mask of the object and add that as a Nib, but it doesn’t work properly, the Nib seems to be inverted. So, the manual process here is to create a mask from the object, change the background color to black, then merge the object with the background and then add the Nib.

Let me first say, at this point I have no idea if there is a setting in X4 so that PNGs open as a masked black background. I’ve looked on Google and found a couple of people reporting the same issue, but no solution has been found. If I find one, I’ll be sure to post it, or if you know how to set this, please click the comment button below and share the knowledge!

In the meantime, I created a quick little Corel Script (.csc) to automate the process of creating the mask and merging it to a background. I have also included a new blank .Nib pack so you can easily have an empty template to create Nib packs.

Click here to download the Script and blank Nib pack.

This script and Nib file is confirmed to work in X4, but I suspect it will work in any of the X versions as well as 11 and 12.

Here’s what the script looks like:

Simple eh? If you’ve never used scripts before, they are extremely handy and a HUGE time saver. Here’s how you load this script:

1. Unzip the file and save the .csc file somewhere handy
2. Open Corel Photopaint
3. Set the background color to black
4. Click on Windows » Dockers » Recorder
5. The Script Recorder will now open… click on the folder icon and browse to where you saved the script file you downloaded.
6. Open the PNG file
7. Press the Play button on the Recorder Docker and you’re done!

PLEASE NOTE that you must have black selected as the background color before running the script!

And this is what you will end up getting… the object on transparent background becomes a black background with a mask of the image:

Once again though, Corel has failed to allow us to create a blank Nib file from the menu, so I went ahead and deleted every Nib from the default one and saved it as a blank template for you. So if you want to create a Nib pack of just leaves for example, you can load the blank template, save it as LEAVES.NIB and start adding your Nibs!

WARNING!!! Remember to first save the blank template as something else BEFORE you start to add Nibs. Remember, when you make changes to a Nib, it’s automatically saved right on the spot, so don’t make the mistake of adding Nibs to your blank template or deleting stuff you shouldn’t. For example, let’s say you load the blank template you downloaded and add a bunch of Nibs to it, then you do a ’save as’ and call it mynibs.nib. Well, not only do you now have Nibs in that mynibs.nib file, but if you go back to the blank Nib template, you’ll notice it now has all those Nibs too! Oops! So remember that changes to the Nibs are saved real-time, make sure you are changing the right file!!!

If you’re reading this and wondering how you’re supposed to load the blank Nib template or how to add the Nibs, please be sure to read the tutorials I wrote on how to do this:

Importing Brushes - How to import Photoshop ABR brushes in to Corel Photopaint! Learn how you can import Adobe Photoshop .ABR brush packs into Corel Photopaint and CorelDraw and use them as nibs on your brushes!

How to Load and Install Corel Photopaint NIB Brush Packs! Learn how to install NIB packs in to Corel Photopaint and learn about why working with the Nibs management is so difficult!

So let’s have a round of applause for Corel for finally fixing the Nib thumbnail problem… Bravo! Now, please fix these other 2 issues:

1. Would be nice to be able to create a new blank Nib template by clicking New in the Nib menu.

2. The 999 pixel limitation for Nibs sucks! I’ve got Photoshop brushes twice that size, but I have to reduce them to 999 pixels so I can work with them in Photopaint. Boooooo!

With that said, I am going to start working on some new packs for you guys to download, it seems the first few I made have been extremely popular. The old ones though are screwed up, they contain all kinds of different brushes, not just what the pack is supposed to be. I’ll work on cleaning those up as well as provide you guys with new pack conversions.

That’s it for now, enjoy!
Dan

UPDATE September 18, 2008

I was browsing the CorelDraw forums and I found this:

Hi,
this (mis-)behavior was intruduced in Photopaint X3 SP2. Corel states this as a new Feature:

GIF/PNG

Transparencies are preserved and displayed correctly when opened with Corel PHOTO-PAINT. Previously, transparencies were viewed as masks.

Image color and alpha channel transparencies are maintained on import into CorelDRAW.

Unfortunately the Second point is wrong! There seams to be no way to get back the color-information in 100% Transparent areas.

Photoshop suffers this same misbehavior since a long time (i think ever), but there is a 3rd party import/export-plugin “superPNG” correcting this and opening PNGs with a mask. Sadly this plugin doesn’t work with Photopaint (”File Format Plugins”,.8be), eaven if photoshop-filter-plugins (.8bf) do work in Photopaint.

@Corel: It would be greatly appreciated, if there would be a way to open PNGs without loosing imageinformation. Just as in all former Corel Versions.

So looks like this was done by Corel on purpose and there is no way to set it back to how it worked before.

Faken turns 32 today apparently !!!

Happy Birthday !!!

Someone get an announcement up and running plz, so we can post some funny pics r something !!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to YOU FAKEN !!

Make it a good one !

Scythar aka TheTeacher

It’s been a long summer, filled with fairly crappy weather, Spongebob Squarepants and several hundred yards of Bounty paper towels. And if there’s anything I learned this summer, it’s that toilet training a puppy when it’s constantly raining is a HUGE pain in the ass! But it seems with back to school coming up next week, summer finally decided to start about a week ago. It’s honestly been the worst summer I have ever seen in this city weather-wise, I can not believe how much rain we’ve had. But now that August and September are here, so is ragweed, so now my sinus ass-kicking has begun.

My stay-at-home summer duties are almost up and Rosebud doesn’t need to pee every 35 minutes, so it finally means I can start catching up and stepping up the efforts on Pixel2life v5 and the community’s overall development. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but P2L was recently awarded a PR7 from Google on the last update. No idea how long that will last, but… GO US! Nick is back in school but still working hard on the site. At this point I would say we are 75% - 80% done, so it’s getting there.

In between work, I am also working with our NAID puppy on training and she has been doing VERY well. Here she is at 5 months old, taken today:

We started obedience training about 3 weeks ago and she has picked up basic commands EXTREMELY well, I am totally impressed. She seems to be able to grasp and accept commands immediately… As an example, she went from never hearing the lie down command to doing it on command anytime while walking (You can literally go Up, Down, Up, Down.. and she will keep standing and laying down) in 3 days. And she does this with minimal praise, I don’t even bother with food anymore. So I am extremely proud of her and I can’t wait for this winter to start Skijoring with her. We’ve been training with the harness too and she LOVES to pull! We haven’t had much training time though, I’ve been busy with P2L plus the crappy weather makes it hard to go out and pull in the muck.

So that’s about it from my end… all is well, just trying to hang in there until we get v5 out the door. I’m also happy to report we are back to the 5 - 7 day tutorial queue time on P2L, rather than the 2 weeks+ we had going all summer long.

That’s it for me guys and gals, take care and good luck to you students in your new school year!

Dan

Hello everyone! Long time no speak… I know I've been a naughty boy by not being around much, but rest assured that I am behind the scenes daily and right now I am making a huge effort to get caught up on the tutorial submissions and get back to the 5 day queue time. The volume is quite high, so there is actually enough tutorials coming through that the front page has a new tutorial every 30 minutes 24 hours a day. So please be sure to keep an eye on the main page and don't forget to rate and comment on tutorials! In fact, you might want to get in the habit of rating and commenting on tutorials for v5, it will be worth your time *hint* *hint*

Speaking of v5, we're slamming away on it as always, and it's slowly taking shape. Right now we're working on the custom profile pages and user settings stuff. Most of the tutorial related stuff is done, so now it's all the extra goodies that need doing. The new forum skins are also being designed now and being worked on by Jamie.

By the way, most of you are probably aware that a huge tropical storm is slamming Florida right now and Jamie's city is right in the path. Jamie is MIA right now and we haven't heard from him in a few days, so we all pray for Jamie and his family to be safe and come back to us soon, as well as our best wished to everyone in Florida getting slammed this week by Fay.

Take care everyone!
Dan