Software : Tutorial: Improve your piano skills with GarageBand

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Tutorial: Improve your piano skills with GarageBand Posted: 09 Jan 2011 02:00 AM PST One of the most overlooked components of GarageBand '09 was its set of lessons for budding pianists and guitarists. Apple provided a bunch of high quality video lessons that enabled you to gradually improve your piano and guitar skills, mostly by playing alongside the mildly smug on-screen teacher Tim. Live notation and multiple camera angles meant that even total novices suddenly had the means to improve their talents, with time being the only cost. GarageBand '11 more than doubles the number of basic lessons available, taking the total to 40; and along with generic 'basic' lessons for each instrument, there are also genre-specific ones, such as 'classical piano' and 'blues guitar'. As before, the lessons also happen to be free, assuming you stick to Apple's own ones rather than the 'artist' lessons supplied by the likes of Sting and Norah Jones. But the latest GarageBand isn't only about providing more content — with the new 'How Did I Play?' feature, your prospects of improving are greatly increased. In a sense, Apple has turned this aspect of GarageBand into a kind of serious take on rhythm-action video games such as Guitar Hero and Tap Tap Revenge. You start recording yourself playing along with the Apple teacher, and you get instant visual feedback that shows how well you're doing. Correct notes are highlighted in green, bum notes are marked red, and yellow denotes timing errors. Once you've muddled through to the end, you're awarded a percentage score that will then be added to a progress graph with which you can track your progress over time. This way, you can find out if you're on your way to becoming the next Jools Holland/Eric Clapton, or whether you might as well wear boxing gloves. How to learn to play the piano with GarageBand '11 01. Download some lessons GarageBand doesn't come with many lessons preloaded; instead, you're expected to download the ones you're interested in. Go to Lesson Store, choose Basic Piano and click a couple of the Download links. Lessons are quite weighty, so they may take a while to download. 02. Get started Ensure you've got a USB or MIDI-compatible keyboard connected to your Mac, and then click Learn to Play, select a lesson and click Choose. GarageBand will go to fullscreen mode, and the lesson will automatically start playing. Watch the entire video through. 03. Switch modes Hold your mouse cursor over the main viewing area (where Tim was previously strutting his stuff) and you'll see the learn/play menu. Click play and part of the lesson will be loaded, along with relevant notation, ready for you to begin recording your efforts. 04. Record yourself Initially, it's best to play along with a metronome, since it helps you keep time; therefore, click it so it lights up. Next, click the record button. You'll be counted in and can then start playing notes you learned in the lesson. When you're finished, you'll get a score. 05. Review your efforts Drag the playback head to any point along the recording and press play, or hit [Space], to review your performance alongside the teacher's. Click My Results – the recording area is greyed out and only the teacher's performance is heard; click again to revert. 06. Track your progress Each time you make a new full (not partial) recording, GarageBand will store the data. Click the History button in the bottom right corner and you'll see a graph that, with a little luck and a following wind, will show an upward curve as you improve over time. 07. Hear old performances Click the High Scores button to the right of the Progress header and you'll see your efforts for the lesson, each displaying a bar that shows the portions you got right and wrong. From this screen and the previous one, you can select a lesson and click Review to load it. 08. Fire the band Although it's lovely that Apple has you playing alongside an orchestra, all those string instruments can be distracting. Click Mixer and mute The Band to get rid of the orchestra. You can also use the volume sliders to adjust your instrument or the teacher's.

Tutorial: How to create Photoshop panoramas in Elements 9 Posted: 09 Jan 2011 12:00 AM PST Photoshop Elements 9 comes with enhanced Photomerge tools that make creating high-quality panoramas easier than ever. All you need is a series of overlapping images taken with the same zoom setting and exposure, and Photomerge will do the rest. (Many compact cameras have panoramic modes designed to do this, and display guidelines to help you frame each overlapping shot.) It is possible to line up panoramic images manually using layers, but it's almost impossible to get them to line up perfectly because of differences in brightness values, tilt, perspective and distortion. Fixing this manually using the Transform and Lens/Camera Correction tools can take an age, but Photomerge takes care of all this automatically. But all these corrections produce panoramas with jagged edges, and usually the only solution is to crop these off and lose a significant percentage of the image area in the process. So the new Content-Aware technologies in Elements 9 take a different approach – Photomerge can now fill the gaps, which means you don't lose any of your panorama. The repairs aren't always perfect, but most of the time they'll go unnoticed unless you examine the image closely. And if there are areas that have obviously gone wrong, Elements 9 has another enhanced tool which is perfect for putting them right – the Spot Healing Brush. Its Content-Aware mode can produce perfect repairs with a single stroke, whereas before you might have been faced with some tedious and tricky manual cloning. The other thing you'll notice with Photomerge panoramas in Elements 9 is that they include all the images used to create the panorama as separate layers. You don't need these if the finished image (the top layer) is fine as it is, but they can be useful if you want to see how it's been assembled or make some manual adjustments yourself. Each layer has an editable mask, which is another new feature in Elements 9. Layer masks are one of the key tools for creating complex montages out of several different images, and their inclusion here brings Elements 9 a big step closer to the abilities of Photoshop itself. How to create panoramas in Photoshop Elements 01. Start Photomerge Open your sequence of individual images. Here they are lined up in the Project Bin at the bottom of the window. Now choose File > New > Photomerge Panorama (as you can see, there are a number of different Photomerge technologies on offer now). 02. Choose layout It's possible to create panoramas in a number of different layouts, which will vary according to the subject matter and the type of 'projection' you want to create. We can leave the setting on Auto in this instance, and click the Add Open Files button. 03. Align images Now Photomerge returns to the main window, where it sets about blending the images. First it combines the separate images as layers in a new composition, then enlarges the canvas and adjusts the position and perspective of the frames so that they overlap perfectly. 04. Blend images Here you can see the adjusted frames in the Layers palette. Next, Photomerge blends the individual images together, and it does this by creating layer masks which selectively hide parts of each layer without actually deleting any of the image data. 05. Clean edges The panorama that Photomerge has created has gaps at the edges (sometimes you can get gaps between frames, too). This is normal with merged panoramas; usually you've got no choice but to crop the photo. Elements 9, though, has a new feature – Clean Edges… 06. The 'auto-filled' result This is the result after Photomerge has filled the edges. It's preserved the full image size (previously we'd have had to crop them). You do have to look closely to see where detail has been 'filled', and the repair is good enough that you don't need to do anything else. 07. Spot Healing Brush One area where the auto-fill function has produced a poor result is at the top of this tower, where Photomerge has picked up some of the detail from the grassy hillside. Use the Spot Healing Brush, and its new Content- Aware mode (selected on the options bar). 08. 'Invisible' repairs… And Spot Healing Brush fixes the problem. The Content-Aware mode is excellent at finding matching details in the surrounding areas and blending them in. The detail it has substituted here has been 'invented', but the match is so good that no-one's likely to notice.

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