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Optical disc drives, you know CD-ROM type drives, are pretty much on all computers these days (except maybe netbooks - - where you may need to buy an external optical drive) . While this drive is extremely useful, some very common some questions still arise about them. In this Tech Tip we'll be providing a refresh look at optical drives as well as looking at common failures and replacement strategies.

The BIG Picture

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this cool, ancient-style typography using dry soil texture and floral brushset in Photoshop. I will also share with you the technique I learnt for creating some really cool light strips for your image.

Along the way, we will be using  a lot of layer blending technqiues, musking, image adjustment tools and adjustment layers, plus the gradient tool and blur tool. This is an intermediate tutorial so beginners may find it a bit tricky. Well, never hurt to have a try!

This tutorial shows you a quick and easy way to create a simple 3D logo using the Distort Transformation in Photoshop.

1. Create a new document - 500 pixels by 500 pixels. Click on the Foreground Colour Swatch and pick a dark green colour. (I chose a green with the RGB value #336633).

The Vertical Type tool is used for typing text (surprise!!)vertically on your image. But did you know that you can also rotate the vertical text using the character palette? Here's a short tutorial to show you how to use the tool and also how to change the orientation of the text.

This short tutorial, shows you how to use the Vertical Type Tool in Photoshop and how to rotate the Vertical text using the Character Palette menu.

Using the Spot Healing Brush tool is a great way to quickly get rid of zits, blemishes and other imperfections from photos. It's a new feature in Photoshop CS2 and it works by painting with sampled pixels from an image or pattern and matches the texture, lighting, transparency, and shading of the sampled pixels to the pixels being healed. The Spot Healing Brush doesn't require you to specify a sample spot, you simply click where you want to remove a spot and it automatically samples from around the retouched area. It is absolutely incredible.

In this example I'm using the Spot Healing Brush to remove some orange spots from a butterfly's wing.

In Photoshop you can achieve an excellent red eye reduction by doing the following few easy steps.

Just like an artist's work table, the toolbox - the long, narrow palette on the far left side of the work area in Photoshop - contains the tools you'll use to draw, paint, erase, and do a myriad of other things whilst working on your image. There are several distinct categories of tools in Photoshop's toolbox:

• Selection tools
• Painting and editing tools
• Vector drawing and Text tools
• Foreground and background colour selection boxes
• Viewing tools

When you let your mouse hover over any tool in the toolbox, you will see a tooltip which lets you know the name of the tool and the tool's keyboard shortcut. It's worth making a concious effort to learn the shortcuts as it speeds up your work enormously. Some of the shortcuts are really easy to remember such as Z for the Zoom tool or E for the Eraser.

Whenever you see a little arrow on the bottom right of a tool in Photoshop (or any Adobe application for that matter), it means there are other "hidden" tool choices. Hidden tools are accessed by clicking and holding on any tool that contains a small black triangle, located in the lower-right corner of the tool. It can sometimes be hard to find that one tool you're looking for because it's hidden under a fly-out menu icon.

 By Scott Nesbitt geeks.com

Even with a high-speed Internet connection, you might find that getting to certain Web sites takes a lot longer than you want it to. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the bottlenecks is the DNS server that your Internet service provider runs.

You can get around this bottleneck, though, by using a Web-based service called OpenDNS.

By Bryan Lambert

It's been a mantra forever. Something that you know you should do. It runs the fine line between "it needs to be done today, but I'll do it tomorrow", between bits being there and then being gone forever. It's backing up your hard drive. In this Tech Tip we'll be looking at some different options for backing up your drive and see why it's not only more important than ever to back up but it's also easier than ever as well.

By Eugenia Lolli-Queru

A netbook is a somewhat old laptop paradigm that became very successful in the last year and encompasses a small sized body that's light-weight and usually low-cost.