Charity Computer Bootcamp

For almost ten years, Henry N. Ong II worked for local call centers and consultancy firms as a trainer, team leader and quality assurance (QA) manager. He also worked overseas as a junior network administrator of an oil and gas company in Abu Dhabi where he spent his spare time teaching at Informatics, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

There, he taught Adobe Photoshop, Imageready, Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Windows 2000/2003 Server, Hardware and Software PC Assembly and Installation, Upgrade, Troubleshooting, and Computer Network Basics (LAN/WAN).

With Henry's at Informatics, teaching became his passion. When he left his previous job as QA manager in order to takeover the management of their family business from his ailing father, he could not help but feel the itch to teach. After a while, he finally decided to scratch the itch.

Henry decided to teach during weekends computer courses such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator in a make-shift training facility/living room in Barangay Valenzuela, Rizal Village, Makati. He made it his personal mission to offer very affordable courses with registration fees ranging only from P800 to P1500 which he says is only for the purpose of sustaining his project.

If you want to know more, check out his Sulit.com.ph ad entitled Charity Computer Bootcamp Trainings. I bet it is not easy to find these kinds of courses offered at such low fees.

Rounded corners with Photoshop

A month or so ago, I helped a friend set up a website for his debt collection agency at www.gccs.com.ph. As I am not a professional web designer, I had to use a free web template downloaded from the net. The design called for some pictures with rounded corners. Obviously, I didn't know how to make them.

Like in many other instances, I found the answer by searching for it on the net. I followed the steps enumerated at www.paininthetech.com and was satisfied by the result. Now, I can confidently say, I know how to make them rounded corners. The picture at the left is my proof.

Using Photoshop 7, the following are the steps:

(1) Open the image whose corners you want to change;

(2) Select the Rounded Rectangle Tool from the Tools ( note that you will find this tool in the menu which will open when you point your mouse at the lower right corner of the Rectangle Tool);

(3) After selecting the Rounded Rectangle Tool, enter a value in the blank field after Radius on the Options menu (note that the higher the value the more defined are the rounded corners);

(4) Still on the Options menu, to the left, click on the "Shape layers" button;

(5) To get rid of the fill collor, go to the Layers palette and drag the "Fill" slider to 0%;

(6) After, go to the Paths palette and click on the arrow on the top-right corner to generate the drop-down menu;

(7) On the drop-down menu, select "Make Selection";

(8) On the "Make Selection" dialog box, leave the settings as is and click on OK;

(9) Then, click on "Edit" on the main menu and "Copy Merged" on the drop-down menu to copy the rounded rectangle;

(10) Open a new document and paste the copied rounded rectangle; and finally

(11) Extend the canvass size so as to reveal all the corners.

After following these steps, you should now have your picture with rounded corners.

How to reduce the size of digicam pictures

Have you tried uploading pictures to Friendster or Yahoo Photos and ended up with an error message saying the file size exceeded their limit? My guess is that the picture file you are uploading is a picture you took with your high mega-pixel camera which is more than 1 mb in size. You need to resize it first before you can upload them easily to sites on the net.

The question is how. I do it using Photoshop. You open the picture file. On the main menu, click on Image. Then, on the drop-down menu, click on Image Size. A dialog box will then open. First, make sure that the box before "Constrain Proportions" is checked. Then change the width in Pixel Dimensions to 640. Notice that the height also changes in proportion to the new width. Click on OK.

We're not finished yet. On the main menu again, click on file. On the sub-menu, click on "Save for Web". A dialog box will open with a view of your pic. On the right, choose "JPEG High" for Settings and check the box before "Optimized". Then, click on save. My suggestion is that you save the file with a new file name and on a different folder.

You now have a reduced version of your picture that you can upload easily to say Friendster or Yahoo Photos. Clue, if you're not a techie like me, just follow the steps blindly and ignore all the other options you see along the way. The important thing is that you get the task done. :)

By the way, take note that I am using Photoshop 7.0 with settings at default. There may be command variations for other versions of Photoshop.