Welcome!

[gare]

Hello, All, and welcome to the All-New Application Convergence Forum, formerly The Inside Track.

As you can see, we?re starting fresh here; not to worry?I?ve archived everything from the past two years in Acrobat format (all 600 pages!) and will gladly post anything of interest to anyone for the asking.

Here?s the deal so we can get started eating up bandwidth :

Application Convergence is a bi-platform digital media creation community coffee shop; drop in and share. There will be monthly ?Free for Alls??in fact, I?m in the process of creating the May Challenge even as I write this (I have one of those new AMD dual-processing brains). What we?ll be focusing on is/are the different spokes of the media wheel with Photoshop as the hub?you can draw, paint, retouch, and so on, but we always seem to come back to Photoshop for the finishing touches. Just so I can better moderate this forum, I thought I?d re-introduce myself, and mention a few of the applications I can intelligently discuss:

I?m a moderator on TalkGraphics? 3D forum, and an author of over 20 books on Web graphics, image retouching, and illustration that spans a career that started back in DOS (although I?ve heard of CPM .

I?ve worked with Macromedia, Adobe Systems, Microsoft, and currently with Xara, Ltd., in the capacity of beta-tester, and content provider. I also write infrequently for trade publications when they haven?t heard of me and therefore trust me.

I just got a new bike because my old one was stolen from my own front yard (!) late last fall. It?s a Raleigh, and those in the know say Raleighs aren?t made like they used to, and I should have gotten a Trek mountain bike, but I didn?t listen. Mark the Keeper told me that if I run this new forum well, he?ll buy me a bell and a basket.

I used to play guitar in a rock band, semi-professionally, so you can expect some old band pictures to retouch to pop up here. I currently play a Kurtzweil stage piano in my basement as loudly as a Fender Champ amp will go.

Fair game for discussions, that is, applications that I?m not totally clueless about consist of the following: Photoshop, versions 3 and up, for Mac and Windows. I can intelligently discuss Maya 6, but I?m relatively inexperienced with it. trueSpace I can talk about and teach, however. PageMaker, Quark, InDesign, many of the cooler Adobe-standard plug-ins, Fontlab and Fontographer, Illustrator (although I?m not truly hip on it) and its new Dimensions 3D add-on, Xara, and CorelDraw. Video and audio utilities such as Sound Forge, Ulead?s VEditor, After Effects, Nero, and so on. Certain system utilites for both Mac and Win, such as Res Hacker, StuffIt, and so on. Painter, Vue, Bryce (but I don?t currently own a recent copy), and Poser.

We?ll get started momentarily. Welcome, may the Force Be With You (I heard Star Wars 6 is sort of a box-office dud, although the breakfast cereal and fruit roll-ups are doing brisk business), and let?s share the results of our pixel-pushing right here!


My Best,
Gare

[Raven]

[righton] Oh boy! This is a wonderful idea, Gare, and as I love to use a variety of apps besides PS, of course, I'll be keeping tabs on this forum, and know I will learn a lot and find further inspiring new ideas and ways of approach with my apps. With all my apps I always seem to incorporate PS in some way, it's just the most natural thing to me to use PS with everything, it's so versatile!
---Maya

[gare]

Thanks, Raven, and stay tuned right here.

I'm getting a contest for May together, and will post it this weekend.

My Best,

Gare