Okay guys, just a few days ago I was tasked by my boss to find a cheaper alternative to Adobe Acrobat. However, his main aim to just to convert all sorts of files to PDF, so I suggested to the brilliant businessman that you can get it for free if you just need to do conversion. His eyes suddenly brightens up when he heard the word “free” and he was hopping around mad like a bunny rabbit. And so I decided to go around the Internet and look for some great software to convert files to PDF. Some of which have quite a number of very useful features included as well. Don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars.

doPDF - I like lightweight software and this is certainly one. Fast and works without problems and doesn’t have any advertisements or adware in it. If you are just looking to convert your files to PDF and don’t need any additional features, this is it. Best it doesn’t require that huge download of a file called GhostScript. From it’s website, it says that it supports 64-bit Windows.

PrimoPDF - Feels a bit sluggish on my low end PC but it should be okay for others. This works very well and I have been using it for sometime now. The latest version supports merging of files so if you have several files with you would like to merge into one, this software does it. There is no advertisements or adware installed. However, Ghostscript is needed for operation.

pdf995 - A very long time friend of mine, this powerful software has tons of feaures which you can add-on through their other upgrades like PdfEdit995. However, the installer takes up a lot of space (for a converter) and it does use up quite an amount of resources. And those irritating advertisements and pop-ups really gets to you after a file, especially if you need to convert a lot of files. Go to their website to see the entire list of features supported by this powerful software.

CutePDF Writer - I don’t understand why everyone likes to call their software “cute”? I mean, I need a lean and mean program, not one that looks cute, unless you are a 10-year old litle girl. Then perhaps cute is important. Okay, now back to the software, this software does it work well but it is just a PDF converter without any other features. I would say both doPDF and CutePDF Writer are in the same league. Lightweight and lean. Cool. Only thing is that it still requires GhostScript, so I would recommend doPDF.

PDF Creator - Open source PDF converter. However, it doesn’t seem to get updated often, the latest version is more than a year old. Anyway, sadly it loads very slow on my system, a bit too slow for frequent use. But then it supports a number of useful features like files merge and encryption. There are no advertisements or adware installed with this software either. And Ghostscript is needed for it to work properly.

Hope this is useful to you. If you have anymore PDF converters that is not shown here, please let us know. Thank you.

I am sure that by now, you have seen what brushes in Photoshop can do for you. It is a pretty handy tool to create good looking backgrounds and wallpaper. But brushes are way more than just clicking here and there, there are a lot of options for brushes. You can scatter your images all over your canvas area or even make them change colour. Here is a slightly more advance brushes tutorial.

I will start by creating a simple leafy kind of background. This is what I have created.

1. Start Photoshop and create a new image. You should choose a area big enough to accomodate a certain number of elements, so choose something bigger in size like 640×480 or more. It will not look that good on a small picture. The things you should also consider is the background color, I have chosen white because it is the easiest to deal with. You can experiment with other colours later if you choose to.

2. Now let’s choose the Brushes option on your left-hand side tools palette. It looks like a small brush. I have shown it below.

It looks nearly the same as the pencil option, so becareful. Alternatively you can use the Shift-B key to toggle the Brushes or the Pencil controls. After you have done that, you will be able to see the Brushes Option Properties on the top or since it is dockable, you can have it anywhere. If you don’t see it, goto Window and tick Options to enable the Option properties.

This is the part we would like to take a closer look at. From here, click on the pull down option next to the Brush type. You can see they have the Master Diameter, Hardness and a little scrolly thing for you to choose the brush type. For this short tutorial, we will take a look at the Leaf brush only. So ahead and choose the Leaf brush type for your brush. Now you can play around with it. See how well it “scatters” and “tilts” when you click on the canvas? You can create a beautiful leafy background with it.

But in order to undestand the brush command, we need to go deeper into the brush option. So stop playing with the brush, we have things to learn. Yes, stop now.

3. We now go more into detail with the brush option. Click on the Brush tab (usually on the right top of your Brush option properties panel) and you will be shown a list of optons for you to choose.

Go ahead and untick all of them for this tutorial. We will go in step by step and see what each of these options do.

4. Now tick on Shape Dynamics and then click on it (the name) again. You will be presented with an array of options and drag/slider bars.

-  Size Jitter is simple. It randomly changes the size of the brush image. So if you set a high value, the brush images will vary a lot in size. Try it by sliding the bar and then clicking on the canvas. You can choose to control how the size jitter will effect your images.  

- Angle Jitter is exactly like Size Jitter, just that now it controls the angle of the image. It really looks cool if your images are all in random rather than looking like a neat stack of cards. But of course, it depends on what you are creating.

- Roundness Jitter is less obvious in our case. It is more to using normal dot(or round) brushes. What it does is control the roundness of your brush image. So if you set your roundness jitter to a high value, you will get more images which look flatten or squashed. It affects only the vertical height.  The below image shows the difference, the top image doesn’t have any roundness jitter while the bottom image has.

5. The next one is Scattering. One of the coolest feature you can find in the Brushes option. It sort of creates a wide area of the image scatter according to your preference. I like it a lot. So tick  the Scattering option and then click to go into it’s options. Again, we find options and slider/drag bars.

- Both Axes option. Well, to make it easy to understand, it scatters a bigger area in all directions if enabled. If not enabled, it only scatters in one direction. You would thought that it would create a wider area but instead it looks sort of clumped together if enabled because the scattering is in more directions. I was a bit confused initially but now I realize that it makes sense.

- Scatter.  Simple, the more scatter you provide, the wider the area of scatter. Depending on your image size, you may need to control the area of scatter.

- Count. The amount of images. So if you set a high value here, you will see that there will be more images being “scattered” all over. For a dense area, I would usually choose a high count value and a low scatter value. You will then get  more images scattered in a smaller area.

- Count Jitter. It controls the amount of images so that each instance will produce a more random number of images. If you set your Count Jitter value high, you will get a more random and varied look for your image. You should play around with all these values in the scatter option as they do a good job so that your images won’t look like a fixed pattern.

What I normally would do is to create a large image size, then set the brush scatter value, count value and count jitter value high to create a beautiful background easily without too much clicking. Sure you get less control, but the “randomness” of the image is good and you can always touch up afterwards. Of course, as I said before, this is dependent on what you are planning to create.

6. I will skip Texture and Dual Brush. This will be covered a later tutorial because doesn’t really affect much in our current tutroial. Now we go to the Colour Dynamics Option. So do the same thing, tick in and click on it to show the options.  This option allows you to control the colour of the brush images (for both background and foreground).

You can adjust the slider according to what you need. The very interesting option is the purity option. It deals with the saturation actually, and if you are looking to create a different variety of”darkness” and “colours” for your brush images,then you should set it high. If you only want minimal changes of tone colour, then you should set it low. Oh, you should also increase the values of the Hue, Saturation and Brightness values too. If you set them too low, the purity slide is of not much use to you anyway.

And you should experiment with all the sliders and try to get a good mix of colours for your image.

7. Okay, now let’s go to the Other Dynamics Option. Tick it and click on the Other Dynamics name to show the options. What will be as usual several sliders and options for you to fiddle around with.

- Opacity Jitter. A very powerful tool to create more randomness for your image. It is to control how opacque your brush images will be. Sort of like whether an image is a “see-through” kind or not. So if you set the Opacity Jitter high, you will get a number of “translucent” images which actually looks quite good.

- Flow Jitter. This controls the flow rate of your movement or stroke. You know like when you brush a stroke, you will usually get a continuous stroke but sometimes you will have missing “areas” on that stroke. So if you set the flow jitter high, you will see gaps in that stroke.

You can view a example here: Simple Sites

Well, that’s end end of this tutorial. Hope you guys know a little more about Photoshop’s brushes. I think you will definitely enjoy toying around with this powerful tool. You can even create paintings from it. But this is best left to another time. Ciao for now!

The best way to improve on something is to practice. And so, in order to improve my photoshop skills, I have done a little poster called Animal Farm. It’s done on Photoshop CS and is mainly with brushes and some text. It’s nothing impressive but I think it highlights the usefulness of brushes in Photoshop to create good and very elegant looking backgrounds. It’s also very simple to do. I think this poster came out okay, considering that I am someone with pathetic skills in Photoshop.

If you would like a simple walkthough on creating this poster, please keep on reading. It involves just simple brushes.

1. Okay, Start your photoshop software and create a new image, I chose 640×480 size, color mode RGB Color and background White. Next I go Layer->New->Layer to create a new layer for my animal prints.

2. The next step is to use brushes to create the paw prints of the animal. I use just 4 “dots” per print. 3 small ones and 1 big one. So I start brushes by going to the Tools Palette and choosing the brush command. It is usually on your left. Or you can just use Shift-B (twice if needed) to toggle to the brush. Make sure you are at the brush command instead of the pencil command. At the brushes properties, you can choose the size of the brush. If you look carefully, you can see that the bottom paw prints are slightly faded than the ones on the top. You can use the Hardness option to change that. if you would like it to be blur, that reduce the Hardness value. You also need to change the color in the color palette (usually on your left as well).

3. So now, go ahead and start doing your 4 dots (3 small and 1 big) per paw print. If you need 5 paw prints, then you need 15 small dots and 4 bigger dots. Remember to choose the Hardness level as needed. I use it to make the appearance that the bottom paw prints are further away than the top paw prints.

4. Now, let’s create the text. You can see that once you choose the text option (that’s also on the left menu) or just Shift-T and click and draw onto the area you want to write the text, you will have created another layer as well. You can type whether you want on the text box. You can choose the options like size and font type from the text properties. The Color Palette (same as the above) is for you to choose the color of your fonts. If would like to add other text boxes, you can do it here as well.

5. Next let’s choose the rectangle marquee tool (or Shift-M) and drag an area covering about 20% of bottom from the left to the right of the entire drawing area. The choose the color from the Colors Palette and the click on Paint Bucket Tool (Shift-G) to fill that area with a certain color. And you are about done. The next few steps are just repeats of what I have done previously.

6. Blood Splatter Brushes. You can see from the finished poster that there are several blood splatter which looks pretty realistic. I use VexingArt’s Blood Splatter which works really well. All you need to do is to download the zip file, uncompress it with some unzipping software and than double click on the .abr file. Next you will have to copy the .abr file to the Photshop directory, the preset and brushes folder. The brushes will then be loaded with you restart Photoshop. Next, you need to goto the Brush tool, choose Brush preset picker, then goto options and choose the new brush. That’s it. And you are done and can start to play with blood splatter.

Hey, good luck and have fun. If you don’t enjoy playing around with Photoshop, you shouldn’t be doing graphic design. For this poster, I think what it needs is to change the colour of the blood to a more reddish (bloody) type. Perhaps add a hand at the bottom so that it looks like it has been ripped apart by some animal.  Yes, I have a lot of ideas but no time and no skill.

If you are “brave” like me and would like to experiment with different colours for the web, one of the safest way to do is to use colours from flowers, fruits, plants or even the landscape. One of the things I discovered is that “natural” colours usually don’t clash and they complement each other very well. For example, if you take a flower (that is the entire plant which includes the flower) and create a theme, you will usually get a good mix. So, the next time you decide to design a website, you should go on the web and start downloading photos from nature like rivers, mountains, gardens, trees and even fruits.

You need just one little software called The Color Picker in order to figure out what colors the pictures or photos have. This software allows you to find out the RGB or the Hex value of the colour of anything on your screen. So all you need to do is to start the software and the move your mouse cursor to whichever you want to find and it will tell you the colour codes. And it’s free. I will do a little review on this software next time. It’s a great software.

Here are some samples (of flowers) colour themes which I have done:

#ECCAE1, #A04438, #C06DAC, #F5C629, #CA5AA2

#A5842D, #BD9674, #3A4F29, #E87B24, #DEB325

#F3EB3B, #0D1C15, #6BBB44, #E4DF4E, #DA59A1

Now let’s try others:

#C38D2B, #1E0A0C, #A44723, #425A28, #E88923

#E9D29D, #CD792C, #E49224, #D8B478, #F69246

#F3AC5A, #D7AF2E, #F9D290, #191512, #C23E26

#F69970, #456A80, #F5918C, #596A73, #B1A281

#EDA54B, #B05C7A, #FAEC9B, #E881AE, #6D6B7F

#F7E68B, #08182D, #E3E2E5, #667AA8, #B0BFCF

I am not a professional, but I hope that this little post will tell you how to easily choose your colours. Think nature. I think they are great for logos and graphics but you should use caution when you are using them for your webpages. This is because although the colours don’t clash, you need to figure out which colours will be for fonts, headers, background and so on. Using the wrong colours for your site will make your webpages look out of place. For me, I will usually go for light background with headers and footers a darker colour and their fonts something very light or even white. But of course, this is my opinion. And it would work well for beginners. Darker backgrounds should be meant for those more experienced with web design, since they do need more effort and care when choosing the colours.

What do you think of the colour blends I have made? Please, I would like to hear your comments.

This one was introduced to me by Scolls, it’s yet another tutorial for creating your very own Wordpress theme. You can find it here on Urban Giraffe. This tutorial is a little more detailed than the previous one I had read and it explains everything from location to style to functions. Everything. Which is of course very good, especially for beginners like me which can’t figure out one end from the other. There isn’t too much tech talk in the articles. And I can see that a lot of effort had been put in into creating this tutorial for us.

I think the main reason why I like this tutorial is that it explains clearly step by step the entire theme creation process. The authour doesn’t think that you know everything and he/she strives to give the reader details and explanations so that it gets less confusing as it goes on. Although I have a little understanding on this Wordpress theme creation, this tutorial does clear up some doubt I have with Wordpress. It even tells you how server-side PHP works! It comes in 4 parts and by the end of the fourth part, you should have nearly everything you need to create your very own theme for Wordpress. It starts with how the theme works, then followed by header and footer, next comes the sidebar and finally the content. This very smooth flow of the process makes understanding and working with Wordpress much easier.

Oh, the tutorial comes in the downloadable pdf format as well. But you need to pay for it. And you can even purchase a “professional” printed copy of the ebook.

And if you keep on browsing on this blog, you will find a lot of other information on Wordpress as well. They have several  articles on  how to make use of Wordpress like how to translate into other languages, how to separate comments and pings and so on. I think you will find it interesting to have a read. You can also download various Wordpress plugins from their site.  Some of these plugins are pretty useful to have.

Yes, now you can and do it easily. I had attempted to create my own wordpress theme previously, but I couldn’t do it successfully. Too many parts and complications and I am not an experienced designer. Worse, my PHP (which Wordpress is based on) skills suck to the core and beyond. So this led to all sort of problems and confusion when I attempted to create my theme. But now I have discovered a tutorial which makes designing your very own blog much easier than ever. You don’t need to go to different sources for information. You can read everything you need in order to create your theme on just one site!

You can view the tutorial here: How to write your own wordpress theme. After reading the simple tutorial and getting the basics of theme design, I feel much more confident to create my own theme rather than rip from others which I have been doing all along. This tutorial deals with the basics and allows you to quickly and easily figure out which parts and code goes where. And it is very well-written so you should be able to follow it with any major problems. However, this is for the beginner and doesn’t include any CSS tutorial (which actually is the main way you will style your wordpress blog). So, you will definitely need some CSS experience. I am still brushing up on my CSS coding skills but I should have at least a little of the basics on CSS.

I will start my next attempt to create my next theme soon. I hope that it will work out fine. I am looking at simple and minimalist kind of theme. Very likely with a few lite colours, very little graphics and simple borders and lines. I find that such themes are much more pleasing to the eye and they usually loads faster due to the lack of bandwidth intensive graphics. What do you think?

Being a generous person, I have created a list of free DNS host on the Internet. Anyone looking for a free DNS host should start looking from this list. This comes from my little research on my email server project which I have to either get DNS hosting from my ISP or use a third party DNS host. I choose to use a third party DNS hosting. Why? Because it is more responsive than the DNS hosting from my ISP. I really don’t trust my ISP, especially from the huge number of downtimes they keep having.

Anyway, most DNS host should be reliable. I have tried using several of them and none has failed me yet. Although I have to admit, I have only been using third party DNS hosting (not my webhost’s DNS) for a few months only. Still, I have seen claims of free DNS host having no downtime on their entire network. Not sure whether it is true or not, but I think it is credible enough, since DNS hosting is not really a resource hungry process. However, I have seen a few free DNS host shuting down but this is most likely a commercial decision than anything else.

Is it surprising that you see domain registrars offering webhosting/email hosting, but not many of them offer DNS hosting. I don’t know why. I think that all domain registrars should offer their customers the option of DNS hosting as this makes change of webhost a faster and smoother process. I know that DNS hosting is not really a big money making thing like webhosting and most people don’t care/know about DNS hosting at all, but hey, basics first baby, basics first.

Yes, I got bored and decided to write an article/guide/walkthrough of how to setup an email server. Well, actually recently I just setup one and I hope to use my experience to help others who are thinking of setting up an email server for their own use or for their company. It’s surprisingly easy to do but there are bits and pieces which need to be resolved first before the server can actually be considered properly setup.

In my opinion, setting up a mail server in your home is not a practical one. Especially if you rely on your emails for communication. It is better to get a “professional” email provider to host your mails for you. But what this is good is for experience. You will learn a lot from actually setting up the mail server then from reading what others do. You can see that there are a lot more than just building a server and installing a few pieces of software. Heck, I learned more in one week on DNS setup than what the learned from about 2 years of being a webmaster. I didn’t even know or cared about PTR or SPF records before, now I know why it is important.

So here it goes, my little article on how to setup an email server.

Please note that this little article is not exhaustive, there may be some holes or errors in it. So please if you find any mistakes or errors, tell me so that I can correct it. And if you have anything to add to this guide, you should also inform me.