John Nack on Adobe

May 08, 2008

Adobe "Hydra" now "Pixel Bender"

No, it's not a low-res portrait of an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler"; rather, "Pixel Bender" is the official name for Adobe's new scripting language for writing fast imaging filters.  Engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith explains,

Hydra is an awesome name for a language like the one we created. At the very beginning, Jonathan Shekter came up with it as a code name for this cool language that could run on different kinds of hardware efficiently. The problem is that it's a great name for any kind of technology that does multiple things, so it is pretty popular. We didn't want to confuse folks, so we worked with the Adobe branding team to come up with a new name that we could use moving forward. That name is Pixel Bender™.

As someone whose mind was blown by the original MacPaint, I was pushing for "Phat Bits"--a fun way to combine a reference to the old-school "Fat bits" display mode with an equally dated bit of 90's slang.  But hey, they don't pay me to come up with the marvels of Adobe branding.

Developers wanting to take Hyd--er, Pixel Bender--for a spin can grab the coding & preview environment from Adobe Labs.

May 07, 2008

All Ansel, all the time

A number of interesting Ansel Adams-related bits have popped up recently:

• The NYT features an interactive gallery in which Adams's former assistant Andrea Stillman discusses the back story on nine of his images.  The story of the naming of "Mt. Ansel Adams" is particularly cool.
• In what he calls "The most amazing 24 hours of my photo career," photographer Marc Silber trekked around Yosemite with Robert Scoble & Adams's son Michael.  Afterward they visited the photographer's darkroom.
• Frederick Johnson from the Lightroom team joined these guys on the visit.  "Michael is amazing," he writes.  "Turns out we were both in the Air Force! Though he was a General, and I was an enlisted man. It was hard to fight the impulse to call him 'sir...'"  Frederick posted some photos and short video clips in his Flickr stream.  And oh yeah: if you've ever wondered why Photoshop has a lollypop-shaped Dodge Tool (you know, this thing), here's why.
  

Chris Cox starts a performance blog

If it's in Photoshop and it goes fast, there's a very good chance that Chris Cox has had something to do with it.  Chris is, among a great many other things, the go-to guy for optimizing many functions in the app.  (At various times we've known there's some kind of crazy-exotic Apple hardware in Chris's office--something that would emerge many months later as the G5, etc.--and that he's busily tuning the app for it but can't tell us any of the details.)  In any case, he has started a blog on C++ performance.  If that's up your alley, I recommend subscribing to the feed.

[Semi-irrelevant personal aside: After so many years of consulting Chris to learn about HDR imaging, color management, GPUs vs. CPUs, and so on, I'm taking some pleasure in sharing my meager (yet superior) knowledge of CSS with him, hipping him to groovy tools like Xyle scope.  I've gotta enjoy the moment while it lasts!]

May 06, 2008

Technology sneak: Photoshop, AE, Flash

Last Thursday Adobe held a day-long event at which the execs briefed members of the financial community.  A couple of us spear carriers (Steve Heintz, Karl Soule, and I) were recruited to help show off some new technology that's baking "in the labs" (i.e. none of this stuff is promised for a future version, your mileage my vary, void where prohibited, professional driver on a closed course, etc.).

Check out the Connect webcast to see the goods in action.  (Scrub ahead to 18 minutes or so--about one third of the way through--to catch the demos.)  I show off some new performance tuning in Photoshop by playing with a 650 megapixel image on a Mac Pro.  It's too bad that the low frame rate of recording hides the fluidity of panning, zooming, and rotating via OpenGL hardware acceleration.  I also demonstrate automated merging of images to extend depth of field, as well as a 360-degree panorama mapped onto an interactive 3D sphere on which I can paint directly.  (Painting directly onto 3D models--mmm, yes.)  Steve demos Adobe's new "Thermo" RIA design tool while Karl shows off inverse kinematics in Flash and more.

You can check out the rest of the executive presentations & their slides here.

Area Man's Bacon Saved by Time Capsule

Hats off to all the Apple folks responsible for Time Machine: I'm pleased to report that restoring my Mac from the data stored on my Time Capsule went off without a hitch. Performing a synch with the drive was easy, and after a couple of hours everything was just where I left it--right down to my Dock icons, desktop picture, and app preferences. (James Duncan Davidson provides more detail on a similar (albeit planned) experience.) I was especially pleased to see that all my NetNewsWire clippings & tabs came back in place.

I've encountered only a little strangeness so far:

• In Adobe Contribute, my local drafts are present, but the app preferences seem to have gotten partially lost. I'll pass my info along to the CT team. I did lose some material I'd worked on over the weekend (as Saturday night's Time Machine backup failed for unspecified reasons), but the rest of the drafts look recoverable.
• Photoshop held onto my serial number, but it asked to be reactivated (which transpired successfully)
  
• Update: iTunes lost my authorization info. Hopefully I haven't now burned another authorization. Also, Ambrosia's iSeek and Snapz Pro have lost their registration info. QuickTime Pro seems unaffected.

Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions below. The Letterbox add-on for Apple Mail seems to do a great job enabling Entourage-style three-pane viewing, but I haven't tried it extensively. I'm really torn about leaving my old friend Entourage, especially as Mail apparently doesn't offer the ability to accept/decline meetings sent through the Exchange server. Efficient incremental backups sound pretty appealing, however.

I'm now going to try using Time Machine with a Drobo. It seems that it'll be possible to store a large photo collection (which wouldn't fit onto the laptop drive) alongside the Time Machine data file. If anything interesting develops, I'll pass along the info.

May 04, 2008

Product testing, the hard way

I hope never to verify the effectiveness of an airbag using my face, or the completeness of my life insurance at the cost of my life. I guess I won't get a pass on testing the promise of my new Time Capsule, however.

Today the hard drive on my inordinately hard-working MacBook Pro bit the dust. I'd had no signs of trouble whatsoever, but I admit the machine did take a spill from several feet up a few months ago. (Let's just say the Slingbox is working out better than the idea of perching a laptop on a music stand.) That jolt didn't cause it to skip a beat, however--not even to disrupt the show that was streaming.

This morning, however, my apps started running really slowly, with the Mac beachballing so hard that I finally had to hold down the power button. After that, no más: just an endless gray startup screen. The guys at the local Mac "genius bar" (not geniuses, but not bad) confirmed that this critter is toast.

Thus far the Time Capsule (acquired in the nick of time, evidently) has been a bit of a mixed bag. For my tastes it's a little off the mark from "As simple as possible, but no simpler"--omitting the second half of that phrase. I haven't found a way to set backups to be nightly, not hourly, so I have to do them manually. (Otherwise the system would presumably be trying to copy my multi-gigabyte Entourage data file over wireless every hour--not a good use of CPU and bandwidth.) I also don't see a way to store a superset of data on the Time Capsule (i.e. keeping a large image collection there but not on my local Mac). Overcoming the latter obstacle may not be that hard, as it seems possible to mount the disk as a normal server, but I haven't had a chance to test it out. And finally, like just about every Apple networking system I've tried (AirTunes, Apple TV, iChat AV, etc.), the Time Capsule doesn't get along with my Cisco VPN connection, meaning I have to shut it down before connecting.

All of these little beefs will melt away, of course, if the TC saves my bacon. I guess we'll see once I get a new HD or a new machine. (This post comes to you from my wife's MacBook.) I'm really curious to see whether it'll be possible to restore things like the list of tabs and clippings I have in NetNewsWire, as that plus my Adobe Contribute drafts constitute all my pending blogfodder. (Without all that stuff, expect a dry period here for a while.)

Crossing fingers,
J.

May 03, 2008

DNG submitted to the ISO

"The DNG format was supposed to be the future, an open standard for RAW files that every manufacturer could use," writes Digital Photo Pro's Dave Willis.  "Here’s a look at how the revolution has panned out."  Dave talks with my boss Kevin Connor about the problem that gave rise to DNG:

"Our philosophy on this from the beginning, sort of my personal belief," continues Connor, "is that eventually the proprietary system is just going to break. When we came out with the first camera RAW plug-in, we were supporting around 25 cameras. We’re now supporting more than 175 cameras—in other words, more than 175 different file formats. And when you’re talking about images, people don’t want to keep those images for just five or 10 years. Professional photographers want to know those images will be fine for 50 years—100 years—from now. If you think about the rate of new-camera introductions, how many new file formats will there be? A hundred thousand? It just seems that it’s going to reach a point when it becomes unmanageable."

It's true that we haven't yet seen big camera vendors like Canon and Nikon adopt DNG, though maybe we'll see more progress now that DNG has been submitted to the ISO as a vendor-independent standard.  In any case, the format is providing real-world benefits today:

• Converting to DNG saves disk space and eliminates the need to use separate sidecar files for raw settings.  (I knocked 1.5GB off the 7GB of photos from our wedding photographer.)
• Because of these benefits, customer feedback indicates that 40% of Lightroom users are converting to DNG on import.  (It's a one-click set-and-forget option that's also available in Adobe Bridge CS3.)
• DNG lets Adobe support new cameras in older versions of Camera Raw without having to constantly revise and test those versions.  Photographers and use the free DNG Converter (Win | Mac) to process their proprietary raw images to DNG.  The upshot is that we can spend our time building good new functionality instead of updating old software.

[Via]

SF Photoshop User Group kicks off this week

I'm pleased to see that this Tuesday marks the first San Francisco meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area Photoshop Users Group.  According to the Evite, here's what's planned:

Photoshop Power Users with Kelly McCathran: In this session we will wow you with some new hot features and double wow you with some little known and under utilized tools... Adobe Bridge: Batch renaming multiple files; The Image Processor to batch convert to different file formats; Photomerge for building Panoramics. Creating and Batching Actions; Vanishing Point Filter; Placing Smart Objects; Image Warping; Patch & Spot Healing Brush Tools; Red Eye Removal Tool; History palette and painting with snapshots; Layer Masks; Setting the best Preferences Tips & Tricks as well as Keyboard Shortcuts.

Kelly McCathran is the Service Provider Evangelist for Adobe.  Her mission is to maintain relationships with the top print shops in North America. To fulfill that roll, she is the primary contact for printers to get the support, training and information they need to successfully work with Adobe's line of products. In addition Kelly is a Certified Technical Trainer and an Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, GoLive and PageMaker. Kelly has traveled North America and abroad teaching applications to the largest print shops in the world.

The meeting starts at 5:30pm at the Adobe SF office (601 Townsend St.).  If you plan to attend, please RSVP to info@photoshopusers.org so that they can get the right amount of pizza and drinks.

May 02, 2008

Lightroom Podcast #52: Martin Evening

Adobe evangelist George Jardine recently filmed photographer Martin Evening walking through the results of a photo shoot for his upcoming Lightroom book.  George writes,

This podcast was recorded on Wednesday March 12, 2008 at Martin’s home in London. It gives us a rare glimpse into the inner thinking of this talented fashion and beauty photographer, as he gives us a shot-by-shot evaluation of a recent session. This video footage was taken during a photo session to create assets both for an upcoming Lightroom book, as well as for demo purposes for Adobe Systems. In it Martin describes his approach to every element of the shoot, from the model selection, the hair, the makeup, the lighting and camera angles, all the way through to the final edit.

This video podcast can be downloaded from my iDisk. It can also be viewed by downloading it directly into iTunes (if you are accessing it by subscribing via the Music Store), or by copying it into iTunes on either a Mac or a PC (if you’ve downloaded the iPod version from my iDisk). Once copied into iTunes, the small version can be transferred to a Video iPod or iPhone, and viewed that way as well.

The podcast (labeled "20080310 Video Podcast - Martin Evening Fashion Shoot") is in the Public directory of George's iDisk. [Via]

April 30, 2008

Earth from on high

Photographer Michael Poliza* has produced a stunning collection of aerial photos, Eyes Over Africa.  He says, "The images came mostly from an 8-week helicopter expedition from Hamburg to Cape Town.  Lots of zickzacking over this amazing continent.  The Lightroom beta & LR 1.0 was the tool to work my way thru the 30,000 images."  You can browse more than 200 of the images on his site via Flash (also available in smaller HTML form, both uploaded from LR).  Beautiful zickzacking indeed.

A few months ago Michael dropped by Adobe to visit with Tom Hogarty and me.  He brought with him his "newest baby," Eyes Over Africa XXL.  He's not kidding about that suffix:  "It will be the largest coffee table book ever that was purely shot digitally. Almost 50 (!) lbs and definitely huge."  Just for fun, he used his iPhone to call up a satellite image of the same coordinates displayed on one of the pages, then laid the phone on the book.  For further weirdness points, I then snapped a couple of shots of the layout using my iPhone.  (At this point there was a great disturbance in the Force.)

For more Earth from above:

• National Geographic rounds up some great stuff in Through the Eyes of the Condor.
• In honor of Earth Day, NASA offered their Top 10 Views of Earth.

* Coincidentally the elder brother of GoLive founder Andreas Poliza

April 29, 2008

So long, and thanks for all the pixels

By now you may have heard that Mark Hamburg, one of the big brains behind the evolution of Photoshop, is departing the friendly confines & is heading off to work at--gasp--Microsoft.  We're all sorry to see him go, but everyone at Adobe wishes him well in his new adventures.  I'll miss our sparring matches (a process that sharpened everyone's thinking).

Mark is not going to go work on other digital imaging tools.  After 17+ years of driving Photoshop & subsequently Lightroom, he's looking for a complete change of pace & wants to work on operating system technologies related to user experience.  Given that Mark has always been a huge Mac guy (developing Lightroom first on the Mac, etc.), it's kind of a Nixon-goes-to-China moment. He says,

Now, given that I find the current Windows experience really annoying and yet I keep having to deal with it, this opportunity was a little too interesting to turn down. I can’t imagine doing serious imaging anywhere other than Adobe, but, I needed to do something other than imaging for a while.

The cool thing is that having recently launched the Lightroom 2.0 beta, Mark leaves the product in excellent shape & excellent hands.  We're really just getting warmed up.

PS--I probably shouldn't swing at a pitch in the dirt, but I was disappointed by ZDNet's inaccurate, typo-strewn coverage of the news.  When did major news outlets decide that labeling something a "blog" means that fact-checking no longer applies?  How sloppy do you have to be to fail to copy and paste Martin (not "Mark") Evening's name correctly, or to notice that there's no capital R in Lightroom or capital S in Photoshop (errors the article doesn't even make consistently)?  At least it's a good reminder not to believe everything you read.

April 28, 2008

Air cannons & soda fountains

Okay, so their connection to this blog is tenuous at best, but these semi-science-y vids are too fun not to share:

• A while back I mentioned the 150-T-shirt Human Flipbook that Colle+McVoy created for sandwich chain Erbert & Gerbert.  Now they've returned with CandleCannon.com.  Gotta love the insane whooping of geeks celebrating. [Via Dustin Black]
• Some 1,500 Belgian kids did their best Blue Man impression, launching sticky geysers of foam as they attempted to create the world's largest Diet Coke/Mentos explosion.  I can't find a video of this stunt, but these guys were apparently trying to outdo these folks in Cincinnati.
  

April 26, 2008

The guys behind You Suck At Photoshop, revealed

So... Dane Cook, or not Dane Cook?  Final wagers, please.

Time Online's got the answer, along with plenty of other background on the the guys behind You Suck At Photoshop.  Says series co-creator Matt Bledsoe,

"We had both been in the agency business so long that after a while we'd seen every kind of person in the advertising world." One of those stereotypes, he said, was the "insane designer, basically. He has horrible social skills and horrible things going on in his life and the only thing he has going for him is he can out-Photoshop the guy in the cube next to him."

Matt & Troy Hitch are now back in action with Snatchbuckler's Second Chance, picking up with Donnie's tastefully named WoW comrade. [Via Scott Valentine]

Tangentially related, as it's Photoshop-based humor: depending on political leanings you might get a kick out of this. [Via Adolfo Rozenfeld]

April 25, 2008

Old Glory, pourable meat, & more

• Dewbacks in the car park; I think it's serious...  Cedric Delsaux makes extremely nice images of Star Wars characters in the real world.  (Click the "Series" link in the top navigation bar.) [Via]
• Slate features an interesting history on Stanley Forman's The Soiling of Old Glory, a wrenching and iconic image from the civil rights struggle in Boston. (Why they use a blurry low-res JPEG, I don't know, but here's a somewhat crisper version.)
• "It should never, ever be possible to pour meat..."  This sage wisdom came to me from a fellow high schooler who'd gone to work at the Dubuque meat packing plant for the summer.  I thought of it upon seeing this photo series of food that takes the shape of its container. [Via]
• Andri Pol makes contrails erupt from a man's head.  (Can't buy into it being more fun than Photoshop, though.)
• Peep Wayne Levin's underwater B&W. [Via]
  

April 24, 2008

Tips on using the Lightroom 2 beta

• Image sharpness is a good thing... except when it isn't.  Martin Evening shows how to achieve a "'pseudo' diffusion printing technique" using the Lightroom 2.0 beta's ability to go negative on the Clarity slider.
• To even out exposures across multiple images, Lightroom features a "Match Total Exposures" command. Sean McCormack explains it in this brief video. (I'd listen just for the soothing brogue. ;-))
• Lightroom lets you create virtual copies of a single image, applying different settings to each.  New in the LR2 beta is the ability to stack virtual copies as layers of a PSD file, letting you composite and blend them in Photoshop. Mucho groovio!
• Lightroom marketing manager Frederick V. Johnson toted his camera to the Golden Gate Bridge in order to demonstrate handing off a panorama from Lightroom to Photoshop.
• Ken Milburn touches on the improved Auto adjustment algorithms in LR2.
  

Notes on tuning Photoshop performance

At the Photoshop World show a couple of weeks ago, PS co-architect Russell Williams & performance testing lead Adam Jerugim presented a session on tuning application performance to a packed house (see photo).  Adam has now passed along their presentation slides (6.5MB PDF), including notes.

Related topics:

• Russell contributed a guest entry about What's the story with Photoshop & multi-core?
• Russell's co-architect Scott Byer posted his notes after giving a similar presentation at last fall's Photoshop World
• Scott's post from late '06, 64 bits...when?, remains a useful overview of that subject