John Nack on Adobe

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
  

April 23, 2008

Beards, Big B's, and other type bits

• Build fonts right in your browser via the very cool FontStruct. [Via Chris Kantarjiev]
• My friend Bryan sometimes grows what's known as The Beard, a semi-autonomous entity with its own wants and needs (e.g. "I'm not quite ready to go, but The Beard is getting antsy"; "The Beard will speak now...").  This font would be perfect for him--er, them. [Via]
• The Sulzbacher Eszett celebrates forms of what I'll always think of as "that German Big B thing."
• Say it with me, say it with your chest: I {Heart} Transitive Pictographic Verbalizations!
• One of my favorite artists, Jenny Holzer, projects the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska. [Via]
• Receding Hairline features Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes.  (C'mon, you know you're curious.)
• Piranha Bar has fun mixing fun 3D-ish text with illustration in a pair of spots for Failte Ireland.  Background is in this article.

April 21, 2008

Lasers, big hair, & other motion graphics goodness

• The Imaginary Forces kids look like they had a ball putting the aesthetics of children's books into motion for the titles of Nim's Island.
• "Lasers, Boombox, Muscles, Keith Haring, 80s beats"; yep, that's about right.  Bizarre & wonderful. [Via]
• Peliculas Ponder offers a magical view of the world from the Madrid Metro. [Via]
• Things get hairy--really hairy--in for the video for The New Pornographers' Myriad Harbor.  Montreal-based Fluorescent Hill kicked out the illustrated jams. [Via]
• Peep this terrific musical rollercoaster for Zürich Chamber Orchestra. [Via]
• I dig the simple shapes and sound design in the Wallpaper Design Awards animation. [Via]
  

Wiimote Hacks + Photoshop

Photographer* Mike Hill passed along a link to crafty hacker Johnny Lee's hacks to enable, among other things, whiteboarding on the cheap in Photoshop, thanks to a modified Nintendo Wii controller.  PS is shown only in passing, but it's still fun to see.

This of course makes me think of the Flash-based, Wiimote-powered multi-user painting system created by BLITZ Agency for Adobe MAX last year (details).  It may sound frivolous, but I still like to get my little wheels turning about how to cross-pollinate this kind of Web-flavored coolness with our desktop apps.  I still want creation experiences that can feel more like this, and less like poking sliders and knobs.

April 20, 2008

New Photoshop scripting tutorials

If you know some JavaScript and have thought of applying your skills to Photoshop automation, you might check out Trevor Morris's Intro to Scripting Photoshop and follow-up practical example.

Trevor, who both offers a set of free scripts & does scripting for hire, is right that scripting is a very powerful yet underused part of the Photoshop story.  It's a key part of the moduarlity & customizability I always mention as a key area for us to develop in the future, and we'll keep working to make it easier & more powerful.

Photoshop team script wrangler Jeff Tranberry reports that he's posted the class materials from the "Photoshop for Geeks" session he & Tom Ruark presented at Photoshop World.  He also reports that the very useful Dr. Brown's Services set of scripts have been updated to v1.9.4 and are available for download. [Via]

April 19, 2008

Shocking photography (literally) & more

• Adobe TV went live last week.  It features a profile of Adobe's Angela Drury, an accomplished photographer who moonlights as a product manager.  Look for the Photographer channel on Adobe TV for tons more.
• I'm shocked, shocked to report on The Stunning Camera.  Bryan O'Neil Hughes, Photoshop PM and camera store veteran, reports "experimenting" with this kind of thing in his past life: "We even rigged one up to the door knob of the men’s room.  Then someone had the bright idea of running the capacitors in parallel and well, it worked but it 'snake-bit' him....essentially the current arced right through his thumb leaving two seared holes.  Seriously." [Via Joe Ault]
• That chintzy look: “When I looked at the wallpaper and the wallpaper looked at me, we instantly fell in love."
• On an occasionally related note, Thierry Bouët chronicles people in their beds (click "au lit" in the top nav bar). [Via]
• Jan Sochor is a Czech-born freelance photographer who splits his time between Europe and South America.[Via]
• You might not guess it from the title, but this NYT photo essay on how manhole covers are made in India is really interesting.

April 18, 2008

Strange Photochops

• From the "Why Do It To Yourself?" chronicles:
  • Why choose when you can have a Hillary/Barack hybrid?
  • Freaking News started a Photoshop contest to replace celebrities' eyes with their own mouths.  Bleaugh. [Via]
• Photoshop + pro wrestling + the South = "Nipplegate."
• People looooove the Hitler History Channel and its endless exploration of WWII.  Did the Germans really have an Überschwerer Kampfschreitpanzer (Superheavy Armored Walking Tank)?  Scroll down to view the evidence. [Via]
• Copyright this: Adobe's Serge Jespers reports on a Belgian exhibitor looking for 100 Photoshoppers to remove a famous building from all their images. Bizarre. [Via]
• I really have no business passing this along, but knowing that our product helped land a giant Mr. T Cabbage Patch doll on SF brings a tear of pride to my eye.

April 16, 2008

DNG sprouts wheels, gets cinematic

Aiming to help drive standards & interoperability in video workflows, Adobe has announced CinemaDNG, a cousin of the DNG (Digital Negative) standard for raw image capture.  According to the press release,

Adobe is working with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers including RED, Panavision, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI along with software vendors including Iridas and The Foundry to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented CinemaDNG file format that will lend predictability and consistency to digital production workflows.

As with the established still-image form of DNG, Cinema DNG helps minimize the risk that proprietary or camera-specific file formats will be unsupported in the future, because CinemaDNG will provide an open, durable, standard format.

CNET covers the news while noting some of Adobe's other video-related announcements this week, including a demo of automatic text-to-metadata speech transcription & support for Sony's XDCAM EX tapeless video format in CS3 tools.

April 15, 2008

Lasers, Orwell, and Mad Magazine

New illustrated biz:

• The NYT offers a great interactive presentation of Al Jaffee's Mad Magazine fold-ins.
• "Putting the king back in stalking." Big ups to Barska binoculars for breaking some new ground with their ads. "I prefer to think of myself as a 'stranger enthusiast'..." [Via]
• Art nerds who really want wedgies can opt for this laser-etched Moleskine unicorn notebook.  I wonder whether you can read it from inside the darkened locker where you've been stuffed.  [Via]
• Shout-outs to the Eastern Bloc:
  • Shepard Fairey does George Orwell, via covers for Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm.
  • Peep some crisp label designs for Lovejoy Vodka [Via]
• Logos:
  • Toyota offers Scion users the ability to roll their own logos.
  • Apple vs. the Big Apple: Mom, Dad, don't fight!
  • The logo for the Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection is a crafty little ambigram.
  • I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: The NYT features a slideshow of the logos of secret US military programs, along with an accompanying article.  Trevor Paglen's book of the logos is here.

April 14, 2008

Brains, nukes, and beautiful math

• Mmmm, brains:
  • "Check out the big brain on Brett Alexander": Alexander Lervik scanned his own lobes & used a 3D printer to create the MyBrain lamp. [Via]
  • Eric Chudler has amassed a great collection of neuroscience stamps. [Via]
• That very special glow:
  • Taryn Simon produced a beautiful image of nuclear waste. In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, "[h]er 70 color plates transform that which is off-limits or under-the-radar into a visible and intelligible form."  See and read more here.
  • Researchers are combining images to make "super-resolution" X-rays. [Via Ellis Vener]
• Space oddities:
  • The universe's most powerful blast ever seen was witnessed last month.
  • The ever-groovy BibliOdyssey shares the Astronomical Handbook of 1718.
• Math for visuals:
  • Science News reports on visualizations of mathematics create remarkable artwork.  (In my own life math has usually produced a different sort of visualization.) [Via]
  • For more beauties, see the 2007 Mandelbrot contest winners. [Via]
  • Mixing alcohol + high IQs = Photomicrographs of cocktails. [Via]
• New Yorkers have been chatting about biology-based art.  (Somehow hacking lifeforms for the sake of cool visuals seems destined to end up in a future installment of Bad Idea Jeans.)
  

April 13, 2008

New AIF Toolkit on Adobe Labs

Time for an update to The Greatest Technology You Don't Care About... Yet. :-)

Engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith has announced that a new version of the Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit Preview Release is available for download from Adobe Labs.

Think of AIF as similar to Apple's Core Image technology (running really fast filters on your graphics card), but with added goodness.  For one thing, in addition to working in desktop tools like After Effects and (maybe, someday, I'm not sayin') Photoshop and others, AIF will work in the next version of the incredibly ubiquitous Flash Player.  So...

AIF = Fast-as-hell filters on every desktop, everywhere

In addition to opening tons of doors for Flash animators, it'll give the Flash Platform a huge bump in its ability to support apps like Photoshop Express.  And it'll encourage lots of cool cross-pollination, as developers can leverage the imaging code they write for Flash in order to create filters for Adobe desktop apps, and vice versa.

Back to the news at hand: the Toolkit helps developers write and test their imaging code in a scripting language codenamed "Hydra" (real name TBA).  If that sounds like your bag, head over to Labs, grab the build, and try out & share examples in the gallery.

April 12, 2008

Adventures in album artwork

• Nikolay Saveliev's rad Pop Matters project consists of "Vinyl record sleeves with 2-sided insert featuring faux-academic material on pop music and the state of the record industry... Snuck onto used& new record store shelves."  Personal fave: "Nickelback: The Recursiveness of Professional Mediocrity."
• Pitchfork picks The Worst Album Covers of 2007.
• Listropolis has translated the artwork for Rolling Stone’s Top 20 Albums into color palettes. [Via]
• Should classic album covers be redesigned every few years?  Ben Wardle makes that case, with examples. [Via]
  

April 11, 2008

Winners of the $20,000 Adobe design challenge announced

Congratulations to TJ Sochor of 3 Wagons Deep on winning the grand prize in Adobe's "See What's Possible" motion graphics contest: