July 16, 2007

Great Star Wars-related art

Something about the Star Wars franchise continues to inspire all kinds of creativity:

• Ryan Church has created amazing concept art for Star Wars Episodes II & III.  Corel profiles Ryan on their Painter site, and on his site he discusses some details of how he uses Painter and Photoshop together.
• On Wicked Crispy Jeff Vector creates ridiculously cute versions of famous characters (among other things).  Dig that Jabba! [Via]
• If those are up your alley, check out Matt Dawson’s simian droids.
• ILM artist Matt Busch has created a print & video series of Star Wars drawing tips for kids. [Via]
• CNET features a collection of pimped Darth helmets.  (How about this face welcoming newcomers to the NY harbor?) On a related note, how about a Vader-head hot air balloon? [Via Ellis Vener]
• Okay, I’m cheating a little with this inclusion, but I marvel that someone can make an entire blog devoted to bad Spock drawings (which should be “Sloppy, as if a chimp with metal hooks for hands dipped them in ink”). [Via]  I wonder whether laser-etched Spock matzoh qualifies.

Photoshop: Show us where it hurts

Faster performance is the best possible "feature": you don’t have to learn a thing in order to get the benefits.  Consequently, the Photoshop team is in a never-ending quest to make the application run as fast as possible.  What’s important to one person, however, may be irrelevant to another, and we need to do periodic reality checks to make sure we’re focusing on the right areas.

To that end we’ve created a survey to identify your priorities for improving the speed of Photoshop & Bridge.  Performance expert Adam Jerugim writes, "The survey is an opportunity
for users to give us – the Photoshop engineering team – specific feedback that we
can then use to make PS a better and more productive tool for everyone."  If you’ve got a couple of spare minutes (shouldn’t be more than 5), please let us know your priorities for making things faster.

Thanks in advance,
J.