How to Delete the Adobe Cache in MacOS X

All the informational posts I found about this are videos, so here are simple, text-based instructions.

1. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files
2. Delete everything in there.
3. Go up one level to the Media Cache folder & delete everything in there, too.
4. Now go to ~/Library/Caches/Adobe.
5. Pick one of the applications and navigate to [Application Name]/[Version No.]/Disk Cache.
6. Delete everything in there.
7. Go back to the list of Adobe applications and repeat steps 5 & 6 until you're satisfied. Some applications may not have a Disk Cache.
8. Empty the trash.

Increasing MIDI Volume in GarageBand

Years ago, I bought an Edirol PCR-50 MIDI keyboard on eBay. Just this week, I got it hooked up and working with my new iMac running OS X El Capitan. But there was still one problem, something that had frustrated me back when I first bought it: the volume of the MIDI tracks in GarageBand was too low.

Even with the track volume turned all the way up, the green bar barely showed, no matter how hard I pounded on the keyboard. Naturally, I turned to Google to solve this problem. I found a lot of old, irrelevant advice. The closest thing to good information I found was this FAQ page (warning: do not click unless you've got a good pop-up blocker), clearly geared toward an old version of GarageBand.

But that old info pointed me in the right direction, and I found the answer. Here's how to get it to work.

1. With your MIDI controller (i.e. keyboard) plugged in, select the MIDI track in GarageBand.
2. Over on the right, select the Edit tab, highlighted here in yellow.
3. From the Visual EQ dropdown list (also highlighted in yellow), select the Manual option.
4. A pop-up window like you see on the left here will appear. Click and drag on the blue line to increase the volume.

The settings you see here aren't necessarily the best - play around with it until you get something you like. It might vary depending on the instrument you're using. For example, I needed to raise the Bass and Low Mid to increase my overall volume, but didn't touch the Treble or High Mid. (My keyboard's all about that bass, no treble.)

I rushed to take a screenshot and post it here so that anyone else out there using an old MIDI keyboard with a new copy of GarageBand would be able to find this information. If you actually know something about MIDI controllers and EQ's and all that jazz, please post in the comments and correct any mistakes I might have made. Thanks, and happy music-making!

Digital Collage: I Dream of Texas

I thought it might be illuminating to describe how I put together the photo illustration I created to go with my previous post.

I started with an idea based on an image of the dream itself: Mary standing behind her grandfather, who was dressed in a suit and laid out on a steel table, with a map of Texas behind them. I thought that might be a little too macabre, not to mention too time-consuming, so instead I skimmed through Morguefile for pictures of women who looked vaguely like Mary as she appeared in my dream.

This is the image I started with:

I chose this picture because the girl looks very neutral: blank wall, neutral expression.
I'll be able to alter her appearance however I need to.

In my dream, Mary was sickly-looking and had bad acne. So instead of using Photoshop to make someone look better, in this case, I was trying to make her look worse. I did that by

• Scaling the photo horizontally, then using the Liquify filter on her face to make her thinner.
• Using the techniques described in this photo retouching tutorial to add shadows on her cheeks and under her eyes.
• Using the stamp tool to take acne from another photo and add it to her face. I set the acne layer to overlay so it blended naturally.
• Changed her hair from red to blonde using Image > Replace Color.

And here's how she looked after that:

Mary's had a rough few months.

Then I used the patch tool, stamp, burn tool, and brush to remove the glare on her glasses. After a little more Liquifying to shorten her chin and enlarge her eyes, I saved the picture as a flat PSD file.

I found a great old map of Texas on Wikimedia Commons that I wanted to use as the background. This tutorial on selecting hair was exactly what I needed to create the composite. 

If you look carefully, you can see I didn't do a perfect job selecting her hair,
but I figured it was close enough for my purposes.

Now the really fun part: changing all the colors to make it look crazy and dreamlike! I used the layer effects palette to add a gradient fill over Texas. Then I created a layer above but below the photo, filled it with green, loaded the photo's layer mask as a selection,  and expanded and feathered it the selection to make a shadow mask. This helped the photo stand out from the background better.

The green shadow layer is set to Multiply.

Mary's face still didn't look nearly as red as it did in my dream, so I again loaded the layer mask as a selection, created a new layer above the photo, and filled the selection with hot pink. I tried several different blending modes for the layer, and liked the way Hard Mix looked (Vivid Light and Color Burn are two other modes I tend to favor).

Girl, that color really brings out the texture in your zits!

The color looked great, but there wasn't enough detail, so I copied the original photo and put it on top with the blending mode set to Screen to capture the higlights.

Almost there...

Then, just one more layer to add the shadows and some of the natural color back in: another copy of the photo set to Multiply. Voila!

Here are the layers palettes from the two files I created.

Distressed and Textured Type Tutorial

If you look at my Deviant Art gallery, you'll see that I enjoy experimenting with Photoshop collages. Recently, I discovered Scottish collage artist Astrid Maclean, whose creations I can only aspire to imitate.

A collage I made in Photoshop. Note the text in the background.

While trying to make something in Astrid's style, I discovered a nifty technique for distressing type. Here are examples using both script and serif fonts. In my example, I'm keeping the text in black and white because step 6 doesn't work well with colors. You can always color the text after you're done messing with it. On the other hand, if you want to stop at step 4, use any color you like.

1. Type your text.
   
2. Copy text layer to create a new layer.
3. Create a white background layer and merge it with the copied text layer. Note: this will rasterize the text and make it non-editable! 
4. Select Filter > Ocean Ripple. Set both Ripple Size and Ripple Magnitude to 1.
   
   You can stop here, or continue:
5. Filter > Gaussian Blur. I used 1.8 for the top text, 2.2 for the bottom. In general, the thinner the ligatures, the less blur you want.
   
6. Image > Adjustments > Levels. Drag the white slider and the black slider both closer to the middle. Adjust the sliders until you're satisfied with the way it looks. You can also use Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen to do this.
   

If you make something using this tutorial, please post a link in the comments. I'd love to see your creations!