John Nack on Adobe

August 29, 2008

Friday Illustrations: Beer, bathrooms, & The Shining

• Stay frosty:

  • For the Beck's Canvas project, "Four young artists will be selected by a panel of judges from the Royal College of Art to showcase their art on the labels of over 27 million bottles to be distributed nationwide from August 2008." [Via]
  • Bryan Hughes came across a great Photoshop beer-drawing tutorial from Eren Göksel.
• How to draw anything in one step: Draw a dog covering the thing you can't draw.  (You may want to combine this with the drinking.) [Via]
• It's the Waiting for Guffman of puzzle-making: Garson Hampfield, Crossword Inker is a subtle, insanely well observed parody of craftsmen who are just a tad too into their work.
• Love this set of paintings of families from films (the Torrances from The Shining, the Griswolds from Vacation, and more).
• Interesting bathroom decorating idea: pixels to tiles.

A pair of panos: Obama & Olympics

The NY Times has been making more use of interactive panoramas these days, offering a new take on storytelling & dropping the viewer into context in a way that's hard to match with still images alone:

• Gabriel Dance and Raymond McCrea Jones captured the electrified atmosphere preceding Barack Obama's speech last night in Denver.
• A pano taken from the 10-meter platform in Beijing's Water Cube features narration from American diver Thomas Finchum.  (Now you know: the Cube is, technically speaking, "ginormous.")  Photo credits go to Bedel Saget, Mike Schmidt, and Gabriel Dance.
  

August 28, 2008

On-demand skate decks & more

I'm always intrigued by technologies that enable on-the-fly creation of media (print, Web, video)--what Adobe dubbed "network publishing."  Recent examples I've found interesting:

• "MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we'll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more."  (Kind of a step up from my 8th-grade experiences publishing a skate 'zine with a friend's Mac & my dad's office Xerox.)
• On another skating note, Zazzle now enables creation of customized skateboard decks. [Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]
• Faber Finds publishes out-of-print titles, generating a unique cover for each on the fly. [Via]

August 27, 2008

Noise Ninja for Lightroom; LR2 videos and news

Fernando Z.* at Picture Code writes, "I just released version 2.1.2 of the Noise Ninja Standalone application, and this release features support for sending multiple photos at a time from Lightroom 2 to Noise Ninja. I've also just added a new video to our FAQ that shows how to take advantage of this new build and Lightroom 2's enhanced External Editor support." [Via Tom Hogarty]

• "To celebrate the launch of LR2," writes John Arnold, "I'll be doing one tip per day for at least a week - probably 2 weeks."  You can check out John's set of videos to date on PhotoWalkthrough.com.  (I'm looking forward to checking out the entries covering graduated filters.)

• The Adobe Design Center has posted Getting Started with Lightroom 2.  In it Matt Kloskowski of NAPP offers a sequential set of 15 videos that take a brand new LR user through the basics of what Lightroom does and how to get started using it, while Adobe's Julieanne Kost has posted a set of 3 videos that go over all that’s changed in LR2 ("Think of it as a Getting Started for upgrade users," she writes). [Via Luanne Seymour]

• Syl Arena provides detailed info on The Benefits of Shooting Tethered Into Lightroom.

* I suspect I'd be much cooler if named "Fernando Z.," and I just may have to appropriate that handle (sorry, actual Fernando Z).

Recent infographic goodness

• Stefanie Posavec creates beautiful, sometimes abstract images from data in her "On the Map" project.
• The NYT renders Olympic medal counts by country, also enabling the user to navigate through time.  (Tossing it around too freely, I managed to blow up Safari.)
• "UFO sighting convincibility" is on the rise, thanks to Photoshop. [Via Rob Corell]
• xach.com offers a cool way to visualize 2008 box office results. [Via]
• I think I should chart my mood on a line stretching from "Earnest" to "Scurrilous*," as Vanity Fair does with the content of their Blogopticon. [Via Tom Hogarty]  It's similar to New York Mag's Approval Matrix.

*Defined as "grossly or obscenely abusive... characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive."  Hells yeah.

August 25, 2008

iPhone GUI bits

• The guys at teehan+lax have created a slick, well organized iPhone GUI PSD file.  Geoff Teehan writes, "We created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable."  Nicely done! [Via Joel Eby]
• Felix Sockwell offers a detailed walk-through of how he developed icons for the NY Times' iPhone app.
• Vaunted info-design expert Edward Tufte critiques iPhone interfaces in terms of their info-to-overhead ratio. [Via]

Marginally related at best, but too good not to share: the highly unique unboxing video for the Samsung Omnia. [Via Russell Williams]

August 23, 2008

"Dear Adobe..."

Dear Adobe is a site devoted to rants & raves (but mostly rants) directed at the Big Red A.  You can "Submit Your Gripe" and vote others' contributions up or down.  Although much of this stuff is hard to hear (in part because some of it echoes what's said privately at Adobe), the site is a valuable exercise.  It has driven lots of conversation here: I count 30+ emails from yesterday alone, and that was just among Photoshop team members.  We're listening, and in response to a request from Adobe VP Dave Story, site creator Erik Frick quickly created a Top 25 list (thanks, Erik).

Some thoughts, in no meaningful order:

• About the CS3 installers and updater: We know. Painfully. We could blame it on trying to mash together Macromedia & Adobe in one rev while moving to Mac Intel and Vista simultaneously, but at the end of the day things never should have happened as they did.  That's as much as I personally can say about it.

• Just because it would be unprofessional of me or others to rant about this or that aspect of the company in public, don't for a second think it's not happening behind closed doors.  As I remind my teammates, "I swear because I care"--and I care a lot, at high volume.  It is, to borrow a phrase, "an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about."

• Similarly, it may look like all we do it ladle on more features (more coats of paint on a creaking house).  What's not apparent is that we--Photoshop at least--are devoting a large chunk of our resources to architectural work that will yield greater speed, stability, and extensibility.  I'll share some more specifics on that soon.

• Russell Williams wrote, "Of course the top engineering item, 'Stop creating new features and make your software fast, stable and straightforward,' really means 'stop creating new features except for the ones that really help me.'" Everyone likes to complain about "bloat" while asking for just one or two "wafer-thin" features.  Apps will inexorably grow more powerful, and it's extraordinarily difficult to remove features, but we are taking real steps to make things better.

• Re: "Consistent interfaces. Sweat the details. Designers notice how much you fake this crap."  That's nice.  Have you noticed how much more aligned things became in CS3, and how much further that's been taken in the CS4 betas now revealed?  We're actively making things more consistent, and that will necessarily entail change, pain, and thus bitching.  So it goes.

• Re: "Please allow cross-platform upgrades! Thanks to you, I can't switch from PC to Mac :-("  Sure you can.  (How is word not getting out about this?)

• I'm told that the requirement to close your browser during CS3 installation is related to a desire not to overwrite a color settings file that could be in use by Firefox.  I agree that it sucks, but at least you know the rationale.

• In response to "You f___ing f___ers should be in jail just for calling that software," Caleb Belohlavek wrote, "Anyone who uses the f-bomb as an adjective and an noun together is tops in my book."  He also celebrated, "God help me, your the MILF of the software world. And I love you for it."  (I would have thought that some of our apps are GGILFs by now...)

Saturday drawerings, from Tron to rayguns

• I love the Chopping Block's Tron tee.  (Would the dog try to stick its head out the window of a lightcycle, too?)
• Going the other direction, Bibliodyssey points out this ancient tank design--from 1646. (Don't mistake it for a ThinkPad.) [Via]
• Illustrator-fu:
  • Veerle shows some great, simple applications of Illustrator's underused Make with Mesh command.
  • Chad Neuman has a cool idea--splashing real paint, then using Illustrator's Live Trace feature to vectorize it.
• In Little Chicken Growing Up, scientific illustrator Mieke Roth chronicled the growth of a baby chicken through a series of lovely drawings. [Via]
• Vintage:
  • Flickr features a huge mid-century illustration archive, grouped by illustrator. [Via]
  • Apropos of nothing, I stumbled upon a solid raygun illustration. [Via]

August 21, 2008

Photoshop ephemera

• PopPhoto's Debbie Grossman paid a visit to the Adobe Mothership a couple of weeks ago, getting a grand tour from Bryan Hughes & chatting with modest brainiacs like Jeff Chien.  Showing tons of daring, she underwent Kelly Castro's black & white process--the first woman to do so.  ("That’s because it makes men look tough and women look like hell," she writes.)  [Related/previous: Jeff Schewe's Visit to Adobe.]
• At Siggraph last week, Zorana Gee encountered the guys from OnLatte ("You got it right: we make industrial robot machines that do nothing but pretty up tasty beverages") and had them put the Photoshop icon on foam (image two).
• Photoshop: Helping The Ugly Since 1988. [Spied by Tom Hogarty on the Caltrain yesterday]
• Slate presents Politishop.  (Is it finally time for us to introduce Brushy the Talking Airbrush ("Hey, pardner, it looks like you're tryin' to retouch a photo")?  [Via Adam Jerugim]
• This isn't Photoshop-specific, but I noticed that Adobe.com has added a slick new search widget to the site.  Groovy, as previously I'd resorted to using Google (typing "site:http://www.adobe.com" plus a search term into the search field).
  

August 20, 2008

Software & Whiskey

Stephen Colbert's remarks on his job remind me of the process of developing Photoshop:

"We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery," Mr. Colbert continued. "You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren't the point or aren’t the story or aren't the intention. Really it's that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience" as well as "discipline and focus."

 

We'll never, ever lack good suggestions on what to do next, nor is it terribly hard to grab a wad and go work on them.  Given the vast number of customers and workflows Photoshop serves, however, it's critical that the enhancements we make each serve a wide range of needs.  Finding the really transformative stuff--the fundamental architectural changes that'll enable numerous other enhancements while standing the test of time--is the fun, aggravating, and ultimately rewarding part.

August 18, 2008

PS in NYT, crafty imaging tech, & more

• In "I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop," Alex Williams of the NY Times writes about the pervasiveness of image manipulation in our culture.  Regarding the manipulation of family photos, I found this bit interesting:

  In India, she said, it is a tradition to cut-and-paste head shots of absent family members into wedding photographs as a gesture of respect and inclusion. "Everyone understands that it’s not a trick," she said. "That’s the nature of the photograph. It's a Western sense of reality that what is in front of the lens has to be true."

• Seemingly everyone ever is forwarding me this cool demo showing ideas for enhancing video using still images.  I mentioned the work in June, but it's worth noting that the developers have been collaborating with Adobe folks.
• The You Suck At Photoshop crew has been posting new bits, involving the Baldwin brothers, among many other things.
  

August 17, 2008

Photo finish

Normally I don't go for single-serving link posts, but this sequence of Michael Phelps' amazing photo finish is too good not to share. [Via]

And, what the heck, here's some spectacular imagery from the Olympics opening ceremony. (It's as if Julie Taymor got ahold of the Clone Stamp...) Also, what's with creepy Olympic M&M's?

Recent motion graphics action

• It's Imperial Fleet Week SF: The Death Star Over San Francisco.  I love how blasé everyone is, totally ignoring the crazy death-machines around them. [Via]

• Guinness keeps producing terrific spots, now painting with light.  (How much do you want to get a bunch of friends together to try this?)
• Luchador tennis!  Architecture in Helsinki's new video gets animated using embroidery.
• The titles for We're Here to Help play with the visual language of government forms (with results groovier than that description would suggest). 

August 16, 2008

10,000-year prints, vintage rides, & more

• The Big Picture features some terrific images of this month's total solar eclipse.
• Edward Burtynsky, known for chronicling humans' impact on the planet, is experimenting with carbon transfer printing in hopes of making photographic prints that last 10,000 years.
• GM Progress on Parade comes from a time when Detroit design set the pace for the world.
• Alexander Hassenstein captured a cool long-exposure image of women's fencing, part of a larger set.
• More from the big bits/pixels front: peep Peter Carr's 42-foot-wide HDR panorama,
• PhotoCalc is "a utility for iPhone and iPod for photographers to calculate exposure reciprocation, depth of field, and flash exposure." [Via Fergus Hammond]
• Martin Evening provides a helpful write-up on how auto-masking works in Lightroom's local correction brushes.

August 14, 2008

Wednesday Photography: Giant HDR, sea creatures, & more

• National Geographic has posted a beautiful gallery of translucent sea creatures, thoughtfully offering desktop wallpaper-sized images. [Via]
• Tipping the scale at more than 8 gigabytes, Brian Lawler's ginormous HDR photo mural came together in Photoshop, yielding a 19-foot-long printout and a 9-foot-high neon sign.
• Public policy:
  • The NYT headline encapsulates a controversy about Iraq war coverage: 4,000 U.S. Deaths, and Just a Handful of Public Images.
  • The creepy Cameraheads project in Seattle protests the ubiquitous surveillance of public spaces.
• Photojojo has some neat ideas on DIY aerial photography--largely involving one of those telescoping sticks used for paint rolling.
• Now this is some memorable use of motion blur.

August 13, 2008

I can has monster laptop?

Lenovo has just trotted out the ThinkPad W700, a new portable (luggable?) machine geared towards pro photographers and graphic artists.  This warlock features:

• Quad-core processor
• Up to 8GB (!) of RAM
• Up to three internal hard drives
• Integrated screen calibrator
• Mini Wacom tablet (!)
• Both SD and CompactFlash card slots
• 17" monitor with 24-bit Dream Color (2.3 million colors)
• HDMI video output [Thanks to Bob Rose for the correction]
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700

Adobe's Robert McDaniels remarks, "With a 17min battery life and a mere 4" thick and 48lbs case, it also doubles as a space heater, pumping out 52K BTUs per min."  Reminds me of the similarly girthy ThinkPad I named "Battlepig" when I started on the Photoshop team.  I'm pretty fond of the Mac 17-inchers I've been rocking ever since then, but I'd love to see Apple answer the challenge (especially from the integrated tablet).  Engadget features more info and a video demo. [Via Tobias Hoellrich, from whom I snatched the subject line as well]