May 18, 2012

Check out the iStock Plug-in for CS apps

It’s a free stock photography-browsing panel:

With the iStockphoto Plug-in for Adobe® Creative Suite®, you can browse, download and edit photos and illustrations without ever leaving Photoshop®, Illustrator® or InDesign®. Crop them, resize them and make them your own, directly from the Creative Suite.

[Via Lucas Bombardier]

What do you think of the CS6 icons & splash screens?

In 6 years of daily blogging, I’ve never gotten deluged more than I did when revealing the CS3 icons.  After 500+ comments, I even got turned into icons myself. Suffice it to say, people have strong opinions.

These designs don’t happen by accident–quite the opposite.  Adobe XD (Experience Design) manager Shawn Cheris has posted a thorough tour of how CS6 branding evolved & the thinking that went into it.  He talks about how they started with color, moved into shapes, and ultimately created thousands of individual graphics across the entire Suite.

How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2

As the world probably doesn’t need more nail-biting anxiety, I almost hesitate to share this one–but all’s well that ends well:

[Via Dan Mall]

May 17, 2012

Demo: Top 10 Time-Saving Enhancements to Layers in Photoshop CS6

Does anyone convey more useful info in less time than Julieanne Kost? This video just taught me things, and I work here, for crying out loud.

May 16, 2012

A 5-year-old sketches logos

Charming: Adam Ladd showed his 5-year-old daughter logos for 5 seconds apiece, then asked her to draw what she remembered:

[Via Carolina de Bartolo]

Info about Creative Cloud subscriptions for groups

I’ve gotten a bunch of questions about how customers can buy Creative Cloud memberships in bulk.  I could send you to a Web page and a PDF—but frankly I didn’t want to read through those any more than you probably do, so I asked around & distilled the highlights:

• Right now Creative Cloud membership (let’s call it “CCM”) is sold on an individual basis directly from Adobe & a couple of partners like Amazon & Staples. It’s not sold through volume licensing or reseller channel partners (e.g. B&H).
• There will be a way to buy CCM for groups of people, but it won’t be available until later this year.
• Once it’s available, I expect it to include everything that’s currently in CCM, plus added features for managing users, storage, & more.
• In the meantime, teams can buy what’s called “Creative Cloud Team Ready.” Team Ready includes the desktop apps that are part of CCM, as well as Adobe Expert Support, but it doesn’t include cloud features (such as Typekit access). It’s a term-license subscription, meaning that it ends at some point (by which time the CCM Team offering should be available).

Does that make sense? Please let us know you still have questions.

May 15, 2012

Ask A Pro: Adaptive Publishing for Tablets

Live demo/Q&A this Friday, noon Pacific, featuring Colin Fleming:

InDesign CS6 includes exciting new features that will make designing for tablet devices more efficient than ever. You will learn about the new adaptive Design Tools—Adobe Liquid Layout, Alternate Layout, Linked Content, and how to export both horizontal and vertical layouts of a tablet design from a single InDesign file.

The new video workflow in Photoshop CS6

RC Concepcion from NAPP gives a quick tour of new Scene layers & more:

May 14, 2012

Creative Cloud vs. Piracy

Some perspective from The Next Web:

Adobe’s main competitor in this space isn’t competing products, interestingly enough; it’s Bit Torrent. Will $50/month convince the masses that are still pirating the software to go legit? My money’s on yes. A subscription works out to less than $2 a day. That’s less than the cost of a cheap sandwich. And with it you receive full, legal, supported access to all Adobe products with update requests that don’t make you sweat.

Adobe has been listening all along and taken a huge but necessary gamble; it has completely revamped its pricing system…For design and creative professionals it should be a no brainer.

Demo: Selectively Blurring Images in Photoshop CS6

Julieanne Kost demonstrates how to soften select areas using the Tilt-Shift blur, uniformly blur your entire image and then sharpen a single focal point with Iris blur, or select multiple focal points and then let Field blur vary the blurriness between them.

[Via]

May 13, 2012

Animation: Acid Drops

This is “The second in a series of hand-painted studies,” writes Matt Box, “that aim to psychedelically capture the individual styles of influential skateboarders.”

[Via]

May 12, 2012

Recursive drawing

What do you think of this cleverness?

Could people wrap their heads around the idea enough to use it productively? In my experience many people still struggle with things like symbols & Smart Objects–if they even use them at all. [Via Mausoom Sarkar]

May 11, 2012

Photoshop Touch 1.2 supports bigger images, new effects, more

Automatic sync to Creative Cloud, PSD export, and more are now available on iPad and Android tablets:

• You may now increase the resolution to 2048×2048 with 10 layers. The default is 1600×1600 with 16 layers, but you can change it in Preferences. 
• Automatic synchronization with Creative Cloud 
• Available in 6 languages (English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian) 
• Added export to PSD and PNG via Camera Roll or email. 
• Improved rotate and flip image workflow. 
• Added ability to transfer images to desktop via iTunes [iOS only].
• Added two new Tutorials.
• Added four new Effects (Watercolor Paint, HDR Look, Soft Light and Soft Skin).

Jeffrey Veen on Creative Cloud

Jeff developed Typekit, and before that Measure Map (which became the UI for Google Analytics). He’s now helping shape Creative Cloud, which launched today. I like this:

Everything stems from two core beliefs. First, the way in which all of us acquire and manage our software is changing. Waiting a couple of years for updates to our tools is no longer tenable for many users. Our relationship to our software is more like that of a service: continuous improvements through frequent iteration.

Second, it’s clear that devices like the iPad are not just for consuming content, but represent the next wave of tools for the creation of content as well. And these new capabilities need tools that have been completely reconsidered. Simple ports of desktop apps won’t do.

He goes on to explain how Creative Cloud integrates desktop apps, touch apps, and services (Web site building & hosting, tablet publishing, and more). And check out the comments section for some good Q&A with readers.

May 10, 2012

Download the new Adobe Edge preview

Adobe’s new HTML animation tool, Edge, has just released preview 6. Improvements include:

• Built-in lessons:  Six new tutorials are built right into Edge, to help new users get familiar with the basics.
• Coding: A new code panel provides a complete view of the actions code in a composition, and the code editor has a new full code mode.
• Publishing: Projects can be published into DPS or iBooks formats. There’s also a new Static HTML Markup feature for SEO benefits, and Google Chrome Frame support for better fidelity on non-HTML5 browsers.
• Symbols: Users can now copy/paste and import/export symbols from one project to another.
• Languages: Edge is now available in French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish.
• Other cool stuff: The Preview in Browser function is now compatible with Adobe Shadow, auto-keyframe mode has been improved, editable time codes are back, and so much more to make Edge more efficient.

Download it here.