Begin with an empty Photoshop document. Create a new layer and create a text on the document using the Text tool. In your background layer create the text by clicking on the Text Tool of Photoshop then click and drag it in your background layer to your desired size. You can also select the font, size, and colour of the text that you want to use.

After creating your text, duplicate the layer that you have created. You can do his by selecting your type layer the press CTRL+J or right click on your type layer and select duplicate layer.

Duplicate the layer again so we can use it for a “gloss” effect later. Let us call this the “gloss” layer.

Next, hide the duplicate layer by clicking the eye icon beside the text layer. Click on the original layer then create a stroke on the text object. To do this, open the Effects menu then select Stroke. This will create a red stroke on your text; change the color to white then click ok.

Click on the Drop Shadow option then increase the size to 10 pixels then reduce the opacity to 60% then click OK. It will create a somehow bigger text size at the background giving the text an embossed or lifted effect.

Turn your gloss layer back on then double click the gloss type layer then change the color to white.

Right click the duplicated “gloss” layer then select Rasterize Type.

After that click on the elliptical marquee tool then draw a selection across the text then drop down the selection to the bottom of the text.

After making the selection hit the delete key to delete the selection. Press CTRL+D to deselect the selection then reduce the opacity of your gloss layer to 30 %. You will see the gloss effect on the TEXT LOGO.

With the techniques above, you can make really good looking logos and text effects! Experiment with different parameters, colors and fonts.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Create your own logo using Photoshop

Firstly, there are a bunch of them! If you simply want to upload a file and share it with your friends, family, book club, college organization, company team, etc, it’s a piece of cake nowadays.

However, online document sharing sites are also really useful for those who want to read original works created by millions of people. Thinking Wikipedia? Basically, these sites are mini versions of Wikipedia, but are sometimes better because they contain book excerpts, slideshows, recipes, puzzles, magazines, sheet music and a lot more.

Here is my list of the top 3 sites for sharing and finding documents online:

Scribd

Scribd is the titan in the document sharing business. They have over 60 million readers a month and almost 50,000 documents uploaded every day! That’s a huge user base. Not only that, they have documents in over 90 languages.

Their iPaper document readers supports a huge array of document file types, including pdf, doc, ppt, tiff, png, jpg, OpenDocument, and StarOffice documents.

Other nice feature of Scribd include the ability to upload multiple files at once, upload from a URL, categories, groups, tags, and folders.

Finally, it also includes traffic analytics for free, so you can keep track of how many views, downloads, etc occurred with your document.

Docstoc

Docstoc is another decent online document storage site, but not as good as Scribd. However, it has several million documents, so there’s still a lot of stuff you can read online for free.

Docstoc does not support as many file types as Scribd, but it has more sharing/embedding options, such as posting to social network and social bookmarking sites.

It also has better document viewing features, such as fullscreen, fit width, fit page, rotate, related docs, and other docs by user.

SlideShare

SlideShare is one of the largest sites for sharing presentations only. The presentations are nicely organized into categories and uploading is quick and easy. You can also import your Google Docs presentations into SlideShare.

SlideShare also has some nice social networking features like the ability to Follow others (like twitter), start discussions, and create groups, etc.

You can embed the slideshows onto your own blog or website or share the slideshows with others privately. You can also sync audio to your slides and market your own events on SlideShare.

I’m sure others will feel that these are not the best document sharing sites, so feel free to post what you think is best. Other good sites include DocShare, Yudu Freedom, and Calameo.  Enjoy!

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It basically consists of a few extra buttons on the search result pages, including a green up arrow, an “x” to remove a result, an “Add a result” button and a comment icon, if you want to add your own comments.

You will see these buttons when you are signed into your Google account. The changes that you make will stick as long as you are logged into Google. Next time you perform that search, the results will be the customized version you created.

This was a cool idea, but frankly I never use it. The whole point of using Google for me is that they give me the best results. If I knew what was supposed to be there or what should be ranked higher, I would have created my own search engine.

It definitely helps to remove some spammy sites, but that’s about it. For me, it’s just annoying and distracting. Here’s how you can turn off the SearchWiki feature in Google:

Step 1: First, go to the Google Preferences page. You can also go to it by going to Google.com and clicking on Preferences to the right of the search box:

Step 2: Now scroll down to the SearchWiki section and check the “Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment or add your own results” box.

Step 3: Now click on the Save Preferences button!

Now when you perform a search, you’ll get the results without all the controls. One major thing to note, though, is that disabling SearchWiki does NOT delete your previous changes.

So any results you moved to the top or deleted will still exist. If you want search results without any modifications, you have to sign out of your Google account before searching. Enjoy!

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Turn off SeachWiki customized search results in Google

Unfortunately, this functionality is not available in Outlook by default, however, since it’s one of the most used email clients in the world, it would be nice to have the option!

Outlook Attachment Reminder is a new free application that will remind you if you planned on attaching a file to your email, but forgot to.

The program will basically search for words like attachment, attached, etc and if they exist, will then check to see if any files are attached. The cool thing about the program is that it lets you manage the words to look for.

So if you don’t use the words attachment or attached, you can add those into the program and it will check for them.

The program works with Office 2007 and Office 2010. It currently does not work with any version earlier than 2007, but may support them in the future.

The only requirement for the program is that you have .NET 3.5 installed since it was written in Visual Studio 2008.

If you like the program, make sure to write a review of it on the authors website because he is making lots of changes and adding many new features. Since it’s still in beta, you may come across some bugs too, so report those.

Also, check out some of my other articles about Outlook, such as how to set an away message in Outlook, how to export contacts from Outlook, how to create a secured Outlook data file, and how to fix Outlook errors. Enjoy! [via Life Rocks]

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Don’t forget attachments in Outlook 2007 anymore

Of course, you could always purchase OCR software, but here at OTT, we always try to find ways to do everything for free! That’s where a free online OCR service comes in handy.

Free OCR is a nitfy little web service that everyone should bookmark because you never know when you’ll need it.

Basically, you upload a PDF or image file (JPG, TIFF, BMP) from your computer and Free OCR will process the document/image within a few seconds and spit it back out in plain text format.

The max file size is currently 2 MB. You don’t have to do any pre-processing to your images except for making sure it is not skewed right or left. If it is, go ahead and deskew it before uploading.

Also, if there is more than one column in your image, it will convert it all to one column. However, they are creating a layout engine that will recognize more complex documents in the future.

The recommended DPI for the images is 150, but if you have a file that is a lower DPI, go ahead and try it anyway to see if it works.

The only major limitation right now is that it can convert only the first page of a PDF document and that’s it! So if you have more than one page, you’ll only get the first page. In the future, you will be able to process up to 10 pages.

The cool feature, though, is that it also support six languages including German, French, Italian, Dutch and Spanish.

Overall, the OCR results were very good on cleanly printed PDF and image files. Obviously, if I tried a lower resolution scanned document, it didn’t catch everything, but still the results were impressive for a free online service!

Give it a shot and see how it works for you. Overall, it’s a really useful tool if you ever need a free online OCR service for something simple. Enjoy! {via gHacks}

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Convert image to text using free online OCR software

Who knows! It usually takes Google a long time to move from their Labs to standard feature, even if people have used those features for years. Anyway, here is my list of ten cool and useful features in Gmail Labs that you should enable.

You can get to Gmail Labs by clicking on the green flask icon at the top right of your Gmail window:

You can also click on Settings and then click on the Labs tab. Either way, you’ll then see a long list of experimental features that you can try out. Here are the 10 I like best:

Offline – Using Google Gears, you can access Gmail while you are offline. Click on the previous link to read my post on how to enable offline access to your Gmail account. You can then read and write emails even if you are not connected to the Internet.

Tasks – Another really useful feature is the to-do task list. You’ll see a new item called Tasks on the left menu and when clicked, a small box will appear in the bottom right.

Canned Responses – If you have a business, you probably write a lot of the same stuff to different clients. You may even do this with your friends and family! Either way, canned responses save time and energy.

Forgotten Attachment Detector – Ever sent an application for a job online and forgot to attach your resume! Happens all the time! If you mention attaching a file and don’t, Gmail will prompt you.

Google Search – Ever need to search for something on Google when you were reading an email? Maybe to look up something or get some more information about a topic? You can do it directly in Gmail now!

Multiple Inboxes – Want to see more emails in one view rather than just the Inbox? You can add starred messages, drafts, or any type of email search as another Inbox in the same window! Very cool!

Undo Send – A perfect option for those who click the Send button too fast. Forgot to write something in the email or wrote too much? Just click Undo Send after sending an email to get it back.

Inserting Images – One thing I had always hated about Gmail was that you could not insert images directly into an email. If you enable this option, you now can! Finally!Just click the Insert Image button.

Gmail Superstars – If you like to categorize your emails with something more than a single yellow star, superstars is for you! You get a bunch more star icons to choose from for marking emails.

Overall, those are my favorites out of the many lab features. You can also try out the rest, such as YouTube previews in mail, Picasa and Flickr previews, Yelp preview, custom label colors and lots more. Enjoy!

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Why is this and how can it cause problems? For the most part, it’s not a big deal and doesn’t bother most Excel users. However, it is a real pain when working with many spreadsheets and they are treated as a group.

For example, let’s say you decide to calculate everything on one spreadsheet. Well, if you have others open, Excel will recalculate all of them too as if they are somehow related. If this is what you want, great, but if not, there’s no way to stop it!

That is until now! Luckily, there’s a nice registry hack for Excel 2007 that will let you open each workbook in a new instance. This is also really great if you have multiple monitors and want to have multiple Excel workbooks open on different monitors. Right now, all of them show up in one Excel application like below:

However, it’s much easier to work with when you have separate instances for each workbook:

Finally, if one Excel spreadsheet crashes and burns, none of the others will be affected since it’s running in its own instance. You can easily get this functionality using registry editing files already created that will add a context menu to your right-click menu.

You can download this ZIP file that includes five different files: one to add the option and make it default, one to just add the option, one to just make it default, one to remove the option, and one to remove making it default. Note that these files only work for Excel 2007 running on a 32-bit Windows platform.

All of the files are TXT files and in order to use them, you have to just rename them to .reg files. After that, just double-click on the one you want to use and click OK when the prompt appears.

Also, you can run the files in any order you like, so you can add the option to the context menu, then make it default, etc.

The other thing to note is that you might have some issue with copy and paste because advanced formatting can only be done between workbooks in the same instance. So if you need to copy and paste something between two workbooks that has advanced formatting, open them in the same instance using the normal Open command.

If you have any problems, etc, post a comment here and I will try to help! Enjoy your new freedom! [via ExpertsExchange]

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Note that Yahoo! Mail Plus also has additional benefits other than POP3 access, which Gmail might not have, such as a 20MB limit for attachments, Email Forwarding, no ads on your mail interface, and no promotional taglines on outgoing messages.

YPOPs! is a nifty little program that provides POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! Mail for free! This is cool because it means you can use Outlook XP, Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc to connect to your Yahoo! Mail account and download your email.

Using this program, you can also send emails from your local client without ever having to log into Yahoo! Mail. So how does it work actually? Basically, it fakes out Yahoo by being a middleman of sorts.

One the local side, it provides a POP3 server interface to talk to Outlook, etc and on the other side it talks to Yahoo! Mail by using normal HTTP protocol. The program is not a violation of Yahoo! Mail TOS and is not illegal.

Once you download and install the program, you’ll see a small icon in your taskbar with a mail icon. You can double-click on it to bring up the options.

Before we get into the options, here’s how to setup your email client to start downloading emails from Yahoo! Mail using POP3 in Outlook 2003.

Step 1: Go to Tools, Email Accounts and choose Add a new email account.

Step 2: Select POP3 as the Server Type and click Next.

Step 3: Next type in your name and entire Yahoo! email address under the User Information section. Enter your Yahoo! login ID and password under Logon Information.

Step 4: For both Incoming mail server and Outgoing mail server, enter 127.0.0.1 as shown above.

Step 5: Next click on More Settings and choose the Advanced tab. Increase the Server Timeout value to Long.

Step 6: Now click on the Outgoing Server tab and choose My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication. Also, select Use same settings as my incoming mail server.

That’s it, now you should be able to download your email. If you have any issues or use a different client, check out the full FAQ section here that shows you how to configure up to seventeen different email clients, including Eudora, Pegasus, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and more.

In the Settings mentioned above, you can configure options like marking messages as unread on the Yahoo! Mail server, which folders to download emails from, saving sent email in the Yahoo! Mail Sent Items folder, and more.

Overall, it’ll save you a bit of money and it’s useful if you simply want to backup all your Yahoo! email to your local computer. Enjoy!

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Note that there are other free and more powerful image editing and photo retouching software packages out there like PhotoFiltre and Paint.net. However, both require a decent amount of hard drive space and use up a good amount of RAM.

However, if you need the features, they are definitely worth it. If you want a really small photo editor that doesn’t even require an installation, you might want to check out Fotographix.

Fotographix is really tiny (only 347 KB in size) image editor and photo enhancement program that has most of the common photo editing functionality you use on an everyday basis.

Here are some of the major features of the software:

• Quickly edit photos or correct photos of many different file types
• Ability to open and edit Photoshop PSD and RAW format files
• Supports layers, which allows users to digitally compose art
• Ability to create scripts to automate repetitive tasks

It comes loaded with several default scripts for creating a vignette, a cutout, etc.

Under the Adjustments menu, you can alter the Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance, Saturation, make the image black and white, invert it, and lots more.

Overall, it’s simplistic, but has enough to complete most tasks with editing images, such as resizing, cropping, brightening, etc. The best part is that you can drop the 347 KB EXE file onto your USB drive and run it directly from there! Enjoy!

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Mikogo is a free screen-sharing and remote control program for both Mac and PC’s that I recently came across and found to be fairly mature in terms of the GUI interface and feature set.

Overall, it’s a very simple to use program. In order to share your screen, you need to first download the software and register for a free account. Note that the people you invite to view your screen do not have register for accounts.

Before I show you how to use it, here are some of the main features of the Mikogo remote PC access and control software:

• Share your desktop screen with multiple people at the same time
• Immediately switch presenters and allow them to share their screen
• Remote control of another PC
• File transfer between participants
• Recoding of session with playback
• Whiteboard for all participants to collaborate
• 256-bit AES encryption for security
• Video conferencing service

Once the program is installed, you’ll see a new “m” icon in your taskbar. To start a new meeting, click on the icon and choose Start Meeting.

After that, a Meeting Info dialog will appear, which contains all the necessary information for people to join your meeting, namely the Meeting ID.

For someone to join, they have to go to Mikogo.com and click on the Join Meeting link at the upper right corner of the website. They will download the EXE file and a login screen will appear asking for their name and the Meeting ID.

While in a meeting, the menu for the icon in your system tray will change so that you can use all the other features of Mikogo like the Whiteboard, switching presenters, remote control, sending files, and more.

One cool feature of Mikogo that I like a lot is the Pause Transmission option. Let’s say you are in the middle of a meeting and all of a sudden you get a very important email that you must respond to. Well, instead of close the whole session down so that no one can see what you are doing, pausing the transmission will suspend transmission of your screen to others.

Another nifty feature is the Application Selection option. This lets you choose which applications you want to share with others and which ones to keep hidden. Again, most screen sharing apps will simply share your entire desktop and everyone can see all programs you have open, etc.

With application selection, you can only share the application that is relevant to the other viewers and everything else will appear blank to the viewers.

You can also schedule meetings and send the info to all participants via email. People will join the meeting in the same way by going to the main homepage.

Overall, it’s got a lot of cool features and it works with Macs and with external programs like Skype, if you need high quality audio also. So definitely check out Mikogo if you are researching screen-sharing and remote control apps! Enjoy!

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In the technical preview of the incoming MS Office 2010, there is built-in capability to remove the background of an image so that the subject of the portrait will be the only thing remaining.

First open your favorite Office application like word or PowerPoint.  In PowerPoint or Word you can use the Insert menu to insert  a picture to your document.

Click the image inside the document to select it.

Click the Picture Tools button on the top right part of the window.

Click the background removal button:

Wait for a few seconds.  The picture will appear with the background highlighted with a saturated color.

Click anything outside the picture. The image  is now without a background!

The feature is not that perfect, the end result came out with some parts of the penguins omitted (maybe considered as part of the background image by the program).

It wasn’t able to distinguish the back of the neck of the penguin on the left from the background clouds.

This new capability from Office 2010 is great for quick and dirty background removal tasks.  Maybe the accuracy will improve as it nears the release date, but for now, it seems ok enough for casual Office users.  I’m sure for images with a distinctive background and subject contrast, the program will not have a hard time distinguishing the background from the subject.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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The quickest way to make a DVD is to add pictures and videos in Windows DVD Maker, and then burn to a blank DVD. If you want to get creative, you can customize the DVD menu style and text before you burn the DVD.

To open DVD Maker, click the Start button and choose Windows DVD Maker:

The interface is Wizard-based and targets novice home users.  Advanced users might prefer a more complete software like Nero, but for simple DVD making needs, this one will do just fine.

You can add WMV movies to it (no support for AVI or MP4 which sucks!) and also pictures.  If you add a bunch of pictures they will appear as a slideshow folder.

You can see the amount of time remaining on your DVD project so you know how much space is still left.  You can also enter your own DVD title which by default contains the date when you open the program.

You can change the order of the media files that you enter using the up and down arrows.

You can also change the drive where you have a DVD burner.  It automatically detects the right drive even if you have more than one DVD drive.

The next window will let you preview your work before burning it.  You can change the menu styles and menu text.

After finalizing the menu text and previewing the DVD movie, click the Burn button to start burning the disc.

The software only provides basic DVD making capabilities.  If you want to do more advanced tasks like cropping or color correction, you may want to look for more higher end tools like Adobe Premier or Nero (which unfortunately is not yet working on Windows 7 as of this writing).

It also is poor when it comes to supported formats so you may need to convert your video files to WMV first before you can burn them.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Your subscribed RSS pages are listed on the left side while the right side contains the content of each RSS feed.

To start using Google Reader, go to http://reader.google.com then login using your Google account.  Click the Add a subscription button to add an RSS feed: