July 30, 2010

The “Make My Photo Good” button draws closer (?)

Andrew Kupresanin’s Nadia project claims that ”The camera that thinks, so you don’t have to.”  Instead of showing an image on its viewfinder, the camera leverages ACQUINE, the “Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine,” in order to display an aesthetic rating

As I’ve said previously, developments like this makes think of the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society excoriating a textbook that rated poetry along two axes:

Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? “I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!”

Or, as The Online Photographer put it, “If You Think You Need This, Kill Yourself.”

I start wondering whether the art project here is a bit more “meta” than it appears: The point is to make photographers flip out–a sea of (largely) angry old white guys as the medium, unknowingly engaged in mass performance art. If so, touché! [Via Tobias Hoellrich]

Previously: “A computational model of aesthetics”

Painting in Photoshop? Check this out.

Digital painting pioneer John Derry has just released a Lynda.com title, Photoshop CS5: Painting with the Mixer Brush, going into depth on how to wring the most out of this new tool.  And building on the success of his Artists’ Brushes set for CS5, he’s previewing a set of Dry Media Brushes.  Should be some powerful, interesting stuff.  For more on John’s work and his take on CS5, check out this interview.

July 29, 2010

GUI elements library for Illustrator

If you do interface design work in Illustrator, check out this User Interface Design Framework, including 290 free vector icons. [Via]

As I’ve mentioned previously, pixel rendering in Illustrator CS5 is much, much improved, so I highly recommend it to Web & screen designers (and not as an Adobe employee, but rather as someone who sweated over such details & who regularly cursed Illustrator’s old behavior).

Previously:

• Illustrator-friendly iPhone UI elements
• New iOS 4-ready PSD templates available

Video: Giant Army

Ultimately kind of a drag, but beautifully rendered:

[Via]

July 28, 2010

“Computational Rephotography” helps marry new & old

Remember the Historypin project I mentioned recently? Creating that kind of historical overlay is about to get easier.

“Computational rephotography,” says Wired, “is a fancy name for photos taken from the exact same viewpoint as an old photograph. Actually, that’s just rephotography. The ‘computational’ part is when software helps out.”

Adobe researcher Aseem Agarwala, together with MIT’s Frédo Durand and Soonmin Bae, are developing some interesting tech here:

According to New Scientist,

The team’s software runs on a laptop linked to a digital camera. The software compares the camera’s view to a preloaded historical scene and provides instructions to adjust the camera’s position and zoom to best match the scene.

The laptop is a temporary measure, however: “We envision the tool running directly on the camera,” the team says.

For more info, check out the project site and papers (including a 135 MB PDF!).  [Via Thorsten Wulff]

Video: Lightning in ultra slow-mo

Neat: two seconds of lightning slowed down to a minute and a half.

[Via]

July 27, 2010

Zooming in Adobe Ideas = Interesting note-taking

Kevin Burg has posted an interesting article on How To Take Notes Like a Champ using the free Adobe Ideas iPad app.  In a nutshell,

Adobe Ideas allows fractalesque zooming. You are able to use vast scale differences to communicate importance as well as benefit from a very flexible canvas, so you almost never run out of space taking notes.

Via David Macy, Ideas PM. For David’s perspective on what Ideas is all about, see previous.

Photoshop Automator Actions enhanced, revised for CS5

Author, photographer, and scripter Ben Long has revised his popular set of Automator Actions for Photoshop:

Version 5 brings compatibility with Photoshop CS5, as well as the final release of the CS4 actions… The new Diptych and Triptych actions automate the process of creating two-up, and three-up layouts. With full control over margins and spacing, diptych and triptych creation has never been easier.

The new Contact Sheet action replicates most of the functionality of the Contact Sheet script that is available as an optional install from Adobe. Of course, the advantage of having such power within Automator is that you can now automate the production of your contact sheets. Contact Sheet produces a PSD (either flat or layered) and gives you the option of displaying up to two lines of metadata beneath each thumbnail.

The free bundle includes 41 actions for day-to-day automation needs, and a $20 Pro bundle that includes 95 actions. The two packages are available for Photoshop CS4 and CS5.  Check out Ben’s site for download links & details. [Via]

Video: Stop-motion excellence from Levi’s

I love the flavor of this cross-country roadtrip video from Levi’s:

It gets cooler when you check out the behind-the-scenes video (featuring things like a “MacGyver-style” protractor made in Photoshop):

[Via]

[Tangential, inside-baseball note: A big, wet, sloppy kiss to the folks at YouTube for now allowing one to specify the dimensions for embedded video. I can't tell you how many times I used a blank document in Photoshop to calculate how to scale object height to match a certain width. Adios to all that!]

July 26, 2010

Blistering benchmarks for CS5 video apps

From Tom’s Hardware:

After Effects: “ What took more than 44 minutes to finish in CS4 drops to a little more than one minute in CS5.”

Premiere Pro: “A combination of shifting to a 64-bit environment and utilizing Nvidia’s Quadro FX 3800 drops a 3:40 render (in CS4) down to 19 seconds (in CS5).”

Nice.  Read on for details. [Via]

Lightroom 3 “like switching to a new camera,” says DPReview

In giving Lightroom 3 a Gold award, Digital Photography Review says:

The difference between high ISO images converted using the new 2010 process compared to the older 2003 algorithm is remarkable, both in terms of detail and noise reduction. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that at high ISO settings, switching to the new RAW processing engine is like switching to a new camera.

Elsewhere, Bright Hub gives the software a perfect 5 out of 5 “Excellent” rating and concludes, “This product stands head and shoulders above the competition in an increasingly crowded sector.”

Excellent; thanks, guys.

In other news, the LR/Enfuse multi-exposure blending plug-in has been revved to version 4. The concept is similar to HDR imaging, but the plug-in authors say their approach produces more natural-looking images.

(rt) Photography: Summer storms, giant Russians, & awkward stock

• History:
  • The Very Last Roll of Kodachrome Film Ever Made Was Used to Capture NYC, at the hands of the renowned Steve McCurry. [Via] (“If I ever become CEO of Kodak,” says Mark Rosenberg, “I’ll manufacture one more roll of Kodachrome, just to drive Steve McCurry nuts.”)
  • We got your Woodpecker right here, da: Photography of giant Cold War Russian radio tech. [Via]
• Jeffrey Friedl’s cool rollover shows the visual effects of Lightroom’s JPEG export settings.
• Stock:
  • Just what’s promised: AwkwardStockPhotos.com [Via]
  • Similarly great: StockDBags.tumblr.com (Love the Kuato/abs reference!) [Via]
• Man, having grown up in Illinois, I love this photo–”Summer Storm, Chicago” by Ken Tanaka.

July 25, 2010

Info on Creative Suite extensibility

CS5 is the most consistently, easily extensible Creative Suite yet.  If customizing & connecting Photoshop, InDesign, and other apps is up your alley, check out the Creative Suite SDK Team blog for demos, links, and more info.

July 24, 2010

Mortal Kombat fatalities on paper

Heh–fun with papercraft:

[Via]

July 23, 2010

Video: “Seaweed”

As Linda Richman might say, “Discuss.”

[Via]