It’s been a long, grueling two weeks since the last Usergroup meeting and now we’re back at the Collin County Community College for our February session.

AJ Wood, local Adobe Certified Instructor, was on hand as our Guest Speaker for the meeting. He’s involved with the Dallas-Ft Worth Adobe User Group, InDesign Usergroup, Acrobat Usergroup and is the owner of Media Cats – a media training and implementation company www.media-cats.com. Finally though, he came to our Usergroup meeting to showcase the Photoshop CS3 Beta!! There are so many changes and additions to the new release, I wasn’t able to write them all down, but here some of the changes and tips that I did catch:

• You can download a copy of CS3 Beta from Labs.Adobe.com if you have a licensed copy of Photoshop CS2.
• While in a dialog box, hold ALT to change from Cancel to Reset.
• Image, Adjust, Curves is similar to Levels but is much more powerful, adding a histogram, and creating smoother shading.
• All desktop printers print RGB, not CMYK. Well hey, none of us knew this!
• The Sharpen filter should be the last filter or process used on your image. Using it too early will create unwanted artifacts.
• Likewise if you need CMYK for your end product, do that last.
• There is a new selection tool that combines the power of Magnetic Lasso and Magic Wand. There will now also be a function to help “refine the edge” of a selection.
• A current, but nonetheless cool feature is creating history logs thru General Preferences >> Detailed. This allows you to store and review later the steps you used to create an image, including how certain filters were used to create an image.
• The Interface has changed significantly. Toolbars are in a single column. Palettes are collapsible and can flyout as needed.
• The Clone stamp tool received a major upgrade. It now has multiple sources, source overlay, and can be used across all open documents.
• Image adjustment options let you keep your image the size of the available screen without hiding part of the image behind your palettes.
• Color to B&W tools are significantly improved.
• Brightness and contrast are much improved.
• Vanishing point, while available in CS2, was only 90 degrees. Now you can use multiple grids at any angle, offering many new possibilities.

There were sooooo many more tricks and changes he showed us in this new release that this was one of those meetings where you “just had to be there.”

J. Schuh finished up the meeting with the following issues:

• We need help from everyone to get the word and information out there, Dallas is to big for just a few of us to spread the word so please help out.
• GUILD will be putting together and hosting an Adobe Bridge class in March. This will be instruction on what the program does and how to use it and will be a beginner to intermediate class.
• Once Photoshop CS3 releases, we will be hosting various classes for it so keep an ear out for those.
• We will also be having a class for how to design and publish a book, hosted by AJ Wood.
• Continuing with last year, expect to see Zbrush classes taught by Mark Leon.
• In an upcoming GUILD Usergroup meeting we will have Rick and Tony from D7Studios as our Guest Speakers. They will be letting us know what their company has been working on and how they’re able to get shows green lit.
• We are putting together a flyer of Organizations, their meeting dates and other information associated with them. This will be updated each month and provided primarily to high schools and colleges but will be available for anyone that wishes to have them. We will have more in-depth information of the available on our website. Gary Dotson has volunteered to help organize this so please contact him if you have any helpful information! You can reach him at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .
• GUILD’s website – www.mguildonline.com – has a new text editor to make article uploading easier and smoother.
• At the next Adobe Acrobat Users meeting – February 27th – they will have Tim Huff of Adobe on hand to showcase Acrobat 3D!! What’s that? It allows the user to place their 3D models they’ve designed into a PDF and let the reader view and rotate them inside of the PDF! The first 50 people at the meeting will receive a copy of Acrobat 3D! So you’d better be there!!!

Thank you everyone for coming and/or reading these minutes. If you couldn’t make it to our last meeting then I expect to see you at our next one on March 3rd.

~Dana Weitz
Editor