For nearly 50 years, the Pantone Matching System has enabled designers to accurately specify colour for the commercial print world. This past May, Pantone (now owned by Xrite) released a major update to their basic colour palette with PANTONE PLUS. This update differs from the recently launched Pantone GOE system in that it still contains all the standard Pantone colours that designers and printers are used to working with. Pantone Plus adds 566 new PLUS SERIES colours including a wide range of pastels and metallics.

Adobe Creative Suite users can download a free installer from Pantone to add the latest libraries to InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop.

The Installer includes the following PANTONE PLUS Color Libraries:

PANTONE PLUS Solid Coated
PANTONE PLUS Solid Uncoated
PANTONE PLUS COLOR BRIDGE Coated
PANTONE PLUS COLOR BRIDGE Uncoated
PANTONE PLUS PREMIUM METALLICS Coated
PANTONE PLUS PASTELS & NEONS Coated
PANTONE PLUS PASTELS & NEONS Uncoated
PANTONE PLUS CMYK Coated
PANTONE PLUS CMYK Uncoated

The PANTONE PLUS Libraries will be differentiated from existing PANTONE Libraries by a “PANTONE+” designation in the Library name.

I came across Fontspace.com last week when I was sourcing out fonts for an upcoming project. Any designer will tell you that buying multiple fonts for a speculative project can get expensive very quickly. The Fontspace site has more than 13,000 FREE fonts you can search by style or keyword. All of the fonts offer a license for private use, and many are available for free commercial use as well. You can click here for a breakdown of licenses and what they cover. What I like about Fontspace is that unlike many of the other “free” font websites, these fonts are really quite attractive and usable.

Both Apple and Microsoft have been busy patching their core technologies in recent months.

Snow Leopard Leaps Ahead

Yesterday Apple released a major update to Snow Leopard (10.6.4) as well as a corresponding security update for OS X Leopard 10.5. As with most numerical updates, Apple has¬†bundled a slew of bug fixes, performance enhancements as well as 28 security fixes in 10.6.4. Users can either use the automated updater through the Mac OS or choose to¬†download the full “combo” updater. Keep in mind that the combo updater is a significantly larger download (887 mb) as it contains all the prior updates to 10.6 – you might consider using this updater if you are experiencing any instability or system problems with your Mac.

Goodbye XP SP2…

Wow, it feels like an old friend is being put out to pasture! Microsoft is reminding their deeply XP SP2 entrenched users that official support for Service Pack 2 will cease on July 13, 2010. Beyond that date there will be no more security updates. While this shouldn’t seem a really big deal since SP3 has been out for ages, there are huge numbers of¬†if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it enterprise users who may be holding back because their legacy applications are only certified for SP2.

Windows 7 SP1 in beta soon

While Microsoft hasn’t announced a firm schedule for Windows 7 Service Pack 1, they’ve indicated that the release is imminent. At a recentMicrosoft technical conference, the¬†Windows team announced that a public beta of SP1 would commence in July, 2010. Early reports indicated that no new features will be incorporated into the Service Pack, just a consolidation of all the patches since Win 7′s ¬†release last October.¬†(Ever notice how nobody mentions Vista anymore?)

Now you see it, now you don’t! These two images show the before and after of the new Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5. Click on the picture to see a full size image.

I’ve been fortunate to have been working with a pre-release beta of Adobe Creative Suite 5 for nearly a month now. Overall, the suite is surprisingly stable for a beta and working with 64-bit native Photoshop has been especially pleasurable. One of the great new “killer features” of Photoshop CS5 is the Content Aware Fill. PS CS4 users remember the Content Aware Scaling function that would intelligently resize an image’s background while protecting key elements. PS CS5 takes it a step further by give the user an option to fill a selection using the Content Aware option. Essentially, Photoshop is sampling other parts of the picture to find the best location to clone into the fill spot. If you look closely at the filled in area in the image on the right, you can see where the sampled forest came from. Still, not bad for a 10 second clone job! However, as you can see in the image below, it doesn’t work so well in other environments…

Man made environments don’t work as well as nature when using the content aware fill. Click on the picture for a closer look – you can clearly see where the fill that replaced the skyscraper came from.

So, a couple of tips for getting good results with Content Aware Fill… First – don’t feather your selection. Content Aware Fill seems to work best with hard edge selections – I used the Polygon Lasso Tool to select the building. Second – works best with natural images with consistent, but non repetitive backgrounds such as beach sand, grass and forests (without distinct shapes). So now you can removed all the cows from your “nature” pictures or make the beach from your Cancun holiday look a little less crowded. Next up – Repouss√©!

Fast Tube by Casper

McAra Printing’s Heidelberg XL105 6 colour press features Prinect Inpress Control, a system for measuring colour on-press. Previously, press operators would have to pull a press sheet and manually measure the colour with a Spectrophotometer to ensure accurate reproduction. With Prinect, the measuring process runs in-line as shown in the video, to automatically feed colour adjustment information to the operator – saving time and reducing press spoilage.

At one time Extensis (the makers of Suitcase font management utilities) produced a suite of plug-ins to extend the capabilities of Photoshop‚Ñ¢. Now, former Extensis CEO Craig Keudell heads onOne Software which acquired the rights for a wide variety of Photoshop‚Ñ¢ plug-ins from Extensis as well as¬† a few other developers. I’ve always had a copy of PhotoFrame running on my Mac, right back to the Extensis launch of the product – very handy for adding artistic edges to images. Now onOne software is offering fully functional (and FREE) lite versions of some of their most popular plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop‚Ñ¢ CS2, CS3 and CS4. Click here to give them a try…

In a surprise announcement yesterday, Adobe set April 12, 2010 as the release date for the next version of their Creative Suite, CS5. We’ll post details as soon as we can get our hands on a copy of CS5, but until then users looking for some advance info on this product can look here. In the meantime, click the image to get the Adobe CS5 page and register for the upcoming Adobe TV CS5 Launch Event…

Heidelberg presses with perfecting capabilities can flip a press sheet over and print on the backside in a single pass. Here’s a short video provided by Heidelberg showing how this magical feat is done.

Fast Tube by Casper

Recognizing that the dissemination of information cannot be limited to print alone, Quark been hard at work growing their traditional publishing market into Flash‚Ñ¢, interactive and web-based media. Quark’s had a tough go of it however, competing against Adobe’s Creative Suite and it’s full compliment of cross-media authoring tools isn’t easy. In response to this challenge, Quark Xpress v8 introduced basic Flash and HTML authoring capabilities into the application, allowing print designers to add interactive elements to their work for online publishing.

Quark has now announced a series of free online seminars for Xpress users wishing to learn more about how to implement the cross-media publishing tools in Quark Xpress 8. If you’re a Xpress user, it might be worth your while to take a look at what kind of Flash animation v8 can do. For further information and to register for Quark’s upcoming web seminars, contact Quark.

Creativity on demand is a tough regime day after day! Even the very best designer can sometimes need a little inspiration to get those concepts kick started, or some fresh ideas for that next Photoshop project. Macworld magazine’s website has an excellent little piece highlighting five essential websites for designers. Additionally, both Quark and Adobe have their own online design resources.

Quark’s designer site is called “I Love Design” and caters to Quark users wanting to parade their design chops, trade tips and participate in an active user community. InDesigners have their own magazine, with accompanying website full of tips and tricks.

Personally, I like the CreativePro website as a software-neutral spot to peruse everything from the latest in fonts to hardware, software and techniques for all digital design formats. If you’ve got some favourite online haunts of special interest to designers, we’d love to hear about them… simply post them in the comments box.