July 31, 2009

“Anatomy of a Feature”

Brent Simmons, developer of the excellent NetNewsWire (my tool for finding all this ephemera), offers his take on the Anatomy of a Feature. If you’re at all curious about the sausage-making process of software development, you might be interested in just how much thought goes into even the most trivial-sounding changes.

I’d kind of shudder to read/write an equivalent essay set inside a big company, where affecting something like one’s own app installer can require petitioning a dozen people–often without success. The phrase “up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about” comes to mind.

Just yesterday I found myself calmly declaring that if getting Future Feature X into PS.next requires slapping down my credit card and building the Web hosting myself*, so be it. (Know this, suckaz: We. Shall. Prevail.)

* Enabling Configurator for CS4 involved my getting a six pack of Negra Modelo and recording each menu item in Photoshop, then copying/pasting/reformatting/commenting the code, one at a time, 800 times over the course of several evenings. Elegant, pleasurable? Not so much. But no one ever said it was gonna be easy.

Friday Photography: Cleared for Weird

• I stumbled across this oddity via a simple Flickr search for the word “peanut.” (Gotta love the inexplicable tiny box of Manischewitz!) See photog snailbooty’s photo stream for other curiosities.
• Vincent Bousserez makes similarly tiny, offbeat compositions in his Plastic Life series.
• As for the Monkeyman photo illustrations, you’ll just have to see for yourself. [Via Keith Johnson]

July 30, 2009

(rt) Photography: Serendipity, chicanery, & more

• Terrific aerial photo of farm combines from Jim Richardson. Check out Jim’s behind-the-scenes post. (And Safari-using photo nerds, note the huge color shift when viewing one version of the image vs. the other. It kills me that Web developers refuse to “get” color mgmt. in any reasonable way.)
• Tips (including a video) on doing complex multi-photo layouts using only Lightroom.
• Chinese pigeons take a cue from Iranian missiles. [Via]
• Long exposures of bugs under a street light. (45 sec)
• Cool photos from Shuttle Endeavour’s visit to the International Space Station. (I especially love this one.)
• MIT researchers create photo-sensitive fabric. (Future: Photog takes pix of clothes taking pix of photog…?)

July 29, 2009

“Flickroom”: Lightroom-style Flickr browsing

Oh, now that’s interesting: Flickroom is an AIR application that uses a Lightroom-style shell to display photos. According to the site, the app:

“provides the rich browsing experience Flickr users have long deserved. The dark theme ensures that your photographs look better than ever before! You can now receive instant notifications for any activity on your photostream, upload photos by just drag-and-drop, add comments, mark faves, add notes, tweet about your photos and also view all info associated with an image from within the app.”

I haven’t gotten to play with it extensively, but so far I’m finding it fun. (By the way, if you’d like to create something similar using Adobe Flex, check out Juan Sanchez’s LR-style Flex theme.) [Via]

(rt) Illustration: AT-ATs, optical illusions, & more

• Here’s an awesome “Oakland AT-AT” t-shirt. I love those things (both kinds). (via @5tu)
• Vandelay Design rounds up 30 Text Effect Tutorials for Illustrator. Lots of neat ideas here, and I especially like the “Vibrant 3D Pixel Type Treatment.”
• The Daily Mail shows a set of garage doors as optical illusions. (I’m a sucker for folding-wing F/A-18′s myself.) Get ‘em here. [Via]
• What’s on Earth Tonight? If extraterrestrials are monitoring our TV broadcasts, here’s what they’re seeing. [Via]
• RT @khoi: Illustrator S. Britt’s homepage violates all rules of good Web navigation-but it’s so good.
• Fast Food Mafia presents mascots as gangsters. (Click for the higher-res version.) [Via]
• What Apple’s web site would have looked like if the Internet existed in 1984. (via @davecross)
• Teehan + Lax have created a new PSD to facilitate designing for Palm Pre. (They’re the same guys who made the iPhone GUI PSD.)

July 28, 2009

New tutorials from Dr. Woohoo

Our friend Dr. Woohoo has posted a new set of tutorials on extending Photoshop & Suite apps using Flash, Flex, and scripting. Check ‘em out and let me know if/when you create some cool extensions.
For links to many more tutorials & resources, see the Suite Development category.

July 27, 2009

Spam-weasels rip my flesh

Damn… Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me, but apparently spammers can defeat Movable Type’s built-in CAPTCHA system. Because I’d set comments to auto-publish after they passed that checkpoint, a few spams (now deleted) snuck past the goalie. Sorry about that.
I’m now experimenting with “trusted commenters” in MT, and I just flagged the last 2000 or so commenters (going back as far as March) as trusted. Hopefully if you’re a regular reader/commenter, your remarks can appear right away. We shall see.
Note that you can subscribe to a comments feed via RSS. As for threaded comments, I’ll tackle the needed mods soon, bambinos permitting.

Stop-motion coolness

• Tom Wrigglesworth and Matthew Robinson take a bunch of HP printers clubbing. [Via]
• In A Wolf Loves Pork, Taijin Takeuchi sends 2D frames scampering all around 3D space. [Via]
• Inspired by that effort, The PEN Story celebrates 50 years of Olympus’s groundbreaking Pen cameras.

July 26, 2009

The photography of conflict

• Tom Junod’s article The Falling Man, about Richard Drew’s famous 9/11 photograph, is long, very difficult, and rewarding.
• Battlespace brings together photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan, 2003-2008. If nothing else see the 5-minute slideshow.
• “As a general rule, people really don’t catapult ten feet into the air whenever an artillery round explodes near them, despite what Hollywood war movies show you.” Bruce Haley shares amazing war photography and insights on his site. (“After weeks of living on the run in the jungle, eating nothing but rice, that goddamn barbecued monkey leg tasted like filet mignon.”)
• Photography Served features beautiful (in one sense) B&W’s of 20th-Century War Machines.
• Design Observer surveys Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs. [Via]

July 25, 2009

(rt) Useful utilities

• Disk Doctors Photo Recovery promises to recover lost/deleted PSD files.
• Brush Pilot (Mac) offers fast preview of Photoshop brushes. See also Preset Viewer for Windows.
• Cool color utility ColourGrab shows hex values for dominant colors in Web images. [Via Mark Coleran]
• ColoRotate presents color harmonies via a 3D widget. They’re planning to release a Flash panel for CS4 apps.

July 24, 2009

Mark Hamburg returns to Adobe

Well, that didn’t take so long, did it? :-)

After 17 years on the Photoshop & Lightroom teams, Mark Hamburg left Adobe last year to join Microsoft and work on improving the Windows user experience (as he found it “really annoying”). I’m happy to say that after that brief sojourn, he’s returning to the Adobe Digital Imaging team. Welcome back, Mark! [Via]

Oh, and to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, who wrote at the time of Mark’s departure:

Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Lightroom gets another champion… My bet is Hamburg will be instrumental in helping Microsoft bring to market its Photoshop Lightroom competitor.

Er, not so much.

(rt) Type: Awesome lettering, awful acronyms, and more

• Lettercult has assembled an awesome collection of hand-lettered type. (Here’s my fave.)
• The taste of what? Oh boy–Deeply unfortunate can re-design from Tango. (via @Coleran)
• Geekery to go: Typography manual for iPhone. (via @kottkedotorg)
• “It’s a medium, not a grande.” Fun coffee-related type from Brooklyn. (via @daringfireball)
• Helveticons: Vector icons intended to complement Helvetica Bold. About a buck per icon. (via @jcroft/@tdominey)
• Artists & technicians used a Toyota to draw each letter of a font, then made it freely downloadable. (via @therealmikewong)

July 23, 2009

Blog commenting

Housekeeping note: This blog’s commenting system remains a work in progress. As you may have noticed, we’ve moved to a new CAPTCHA system, and valid comments now publish immediately after you submit them. I’m hoping that the latter, taken together with threaded commenting (still working on that one), will make it easier for people to talk back and forth without waiting on me.
If you encounter any problems posting comments, please let me know.
Update: Dammit, something is apparently busted, and if you’ve submitted a comment in the last ~24 hours (and don’t see it published), it hasn’t reached me. I’ve asked the admins for an update ASAP.
Okay, it seems things are working again, Please do let me know if you experience problems commenting.

(rt) Illustration: Amazing light paintings & more

• Jan Wöllert and Jörg Miedza create amazing long-exposure light paintings.
• Creative Suite icons done via human pixels from Italy. (via @jdowdell)
• Free 3D models from NASA; can be loaded into Photoshop Extended. (via Pete Falco)
• Finally an Illustrator tutorial that takes advantage of warping tools + blending modes, not just c1990-era stuff: Creating an MRE package.
• “404 Humor Not Found”: fun error pages. More here. (via @gridirondaniel & @inspiredm)
• A personal ad in infographic form: My kind of girl!
• Nicknames for famous corporate logos. (My fave: “Two and a Half Hotdogs”)
• Simple, powerful book cover design for “Busted.”

Using DNG profiles: A video demo

Last summer I wrote,

When we look back at how things changed with the arrival of Lightroom 2, I think the new DNG Profile Editor (presently kind of a sleeper technology) will stand out as transformative.

I still believe that’s true, but I think photographers need an assist in learning how to make profiles practical. The inclusion of camera profiles in recent updates to Lightroom & Camera Raw greatly simplifies their use, and now Julieanne Kost has posted a 15-minute walkthrough showing their use & benefits:

(For higher-res viewing, I recommend clicking the full screen option above, or watching the video on the Adobe TV site.)

July 22, 2009

A JDI update & more from Bryan Hughes

My friend & fellow PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes has contributed a great guest post on Scott Kelby’s blog today. In it he talks about how the Photoshop team’s new JDI process* came to be, and he shares some details about what improvements the team picked off last month. So as not to steal his thunder, I’ll let you check out the post for more details.

*New to us, but we borrowed it from the After Effects guys

(rt) Photography: Mesmerizing HD video, B-Boys, & more

• HD video of the Kuroshio Sea aquarium, shot with Canon 5D MkII 5DMKII (via @mikegee)
• Awesome (if you’re an old Beastie Boys fan): a photographic history of the Paul’s Boutique corner. (via @khoi)
• Yucks:
  • What would happen If Celebrities Moved to Oklahoma, via Photoshop? (My wife is an OK escapee.)
  • The Onion: “17-Year-Old Thinks She’s Getting Into Photography“.
  • Regarding Nikon ads: “I don’t get this whole ‘I’m Ashton Kutcher and you should care what my goofy ass is doing’ thing.” — my wife.
• Use Google Images without violating copyright. CreativePro.com features tips on using it to find royalty-free imagery.
• Ugh: NY Times was burned by digital photo manipulation. See also their comments.
• Chipmunks vs. Star Wars? (You were a good smuggler once; now you’re just ‘munk fodder…)
• Tips (including a video) on creating complex multi-photo layouts using only Lightroom.

July 21, 2009

CS4 eSeminar Series for Pro Photographers

If you’re a pro photographer, check out the CS4: Shortcut to Brilliant eSeminar Series for Professional Photographers, starting this Thursday. Titles & times at a glance:

• Discover the Timesaving Benefits of Adobe® Photoshop® CS4
  • Thursday, July 23, 2009 10:00 A.M. PDT
• Accelerate your Workflow with the Combined Power of Adobe®Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 and Adobe® Photoshop® CS4
  • Thursday, July 30, 2009 10:00 A.M. PDT
• Expand Your Creative Possibilities with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
  • Thursday, August 13, 2009 10:00 A.M. PDT
• Spend More Time Shooting and Less Time Computing with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
  • Thursday, August 20, 2009 10:00 A.M. PDT

See the events page for more details.

The progress of Configurator

Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost has worked with Kelby Training to create a video tutorial showing how to assemble custom UI panels using Adobe Configurator. Note that you need to be a KT member to watch more than the intro segments.

Elsewhere, I see that photographer & author Vincent Versace is using Configurator-made panels to enhance his writings on black & white conversion and selective blur/focus. Way to go, Vincent. I love seeing experts embrace a new way to download their brains right into Photoshop.

Normally I don’t talk about unannounced products, but I’m happy to report that development of the Configurator authoring tool is proceeding nicely. (Didn’t want you to think it was a “one-and-out” kind of endeavor.) Besides addressing key requests from users of v1.0, we’re focusing heavily on plumbing like object containers, auto-layout, and localizability. That’ll let us eat our own proverbial dog food, using Configurator to create Photoshop enhancements that ship in the box. (I expect our ideas here to generate much discussion and maybe even some controversy, but no one ever said that progress was easy. I’ll be asking for your input soon.)

If you’re using Configurator today, I’d love to hear from you & see examples of your work. Let us know how you use the tool and/or how you’d like to use it.

July 20, 2009

Moon reunion

Happy 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing!

• The Daily Mail features what’s billed as a never-before-seen photo showing Neil Armstrong’s face as he first walks across the moon.
• Over on Kottke.org, you can watch Apollo 11 live coverage, “40 years to the second after it originally happened.”
• Check out Kottke’s giant Apollo 11 post for more perspective and links, including ones to Google’s LIFE Magazine Apollo archive & NYT readers’ moon memories.

Monday Photography: Cities in Dust

• Slate features a slideshow discussing Detroit’s Beautiful Ruins. “It’s like Berlin or Warsaw in 1945. Just as in post-World War II photos of those ruined cities, the most shocking thing is to see people carrying on their everyday lives in the midst of so much physical destruction.” [Via]
• More such photos appear in Time’s piece on Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline.
• See also this panoramic photo of a ghost street in Detroit [Via]
• Finally getting away from Motor City, WebUrbanist features a collection of abandoned hotels, hospitals, and churches. [Via]

July 19, 2009

Adobe Updater improvements planned

The Adobe Update Manager has been a source of grief & ridicule for too long. The good news is that a bunch of folks are working hard to fix it. Check out the details if you’re interested, and feel free to send the team feedback on their plans.

Quick Illustrator tips: Create a ribbon; batch convert

A few Adobe technical folks bounced around some ideas last week, responding to a question about how one would create a pink ribbon-style illustration. Stéphane Baril made some great suggestions in this very brief, five-step tutorial (PDF). (Live Paint is your friend!)

Elsewhere, developer Richard Bates has created a free utility & notes on Batch SWF Conversion with AIR and Illustrator CS4. [Via David Macy]

July 18, 2009

Saturday Illustrations: Paper madness, Grassfitti, & more

• Interesting surfaces:
  • Frank Chimero makes nifty laser-etched wood panels featuring his work.
  • “[Screw] Round-Up. Grassfitti can’t be stopped.” [Via]
• Insane paper contraptions:
  • Wataru Itou’s paper castle took four years to construct & features electrical lights and a moving train.
  • Far less involved, but OCD in its own way, is this lined paper created using red & blue thread.
  • Sipho Mabona creates amazingly intricate origami pieces.

July 17, 2009

Blog server updating; commenting offline

The blogging infrastructure folks are pushing another big update live this weekend, so my ability to post & your ability to comment are likely to be restricted for a while (up to 72 hours). I’ll post a note when things are supposed to be working properly.
I’m looking forward to using the new platform, and in particular to enabling threaded commenting (should be good for those spirited back-and-forth debates). We shall see.

Buy CS4, save $400 on Adobe MAX

If you’re thinking of attending Adobe MAX this fall, know that you can save $400 off the price of admission by buying software through the Adobe.com online store. Check out the details.
[ Note: This discount applies only to purchases made in the US. I know that sucks for folks based elsewhere. From recent experience I can tell you that cross-border pricing, promotions, etc. have a way of becoming nightmarishly complex. ]

(rt) Type: Clever logos, tiny letterpress, & more

• Hope & Fear, nicely typeset
• TypeInspire: Typographical inspiration o’ the day (via @motionographer)
• Super cool tiny letterpress books
• Logo Inspiration With Clever Typography (via @bbb_999)

For those about to walk…

…WE SALUTE YOU!
To all the 30,000+ (!) photographers signed up to go photowalking today, good luck, have fun, and happy shooting. I look forward to seeing all sorts of great imagery & hearing fun stories.
[Er, rats--I set this one to auto-publish a day early, and the walk is tomorrow. But have fun just the same!]

July 16, 2009

Where Eagles Dare

Today, as you’re probably reading elsewhere, marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, humanity’s first landing on the moon. Follow along with the mission on the beautiful We Choose The Moon. Related links of interest:

• As is their M.O., The Big Picture presents a gloriously high-res gallery showing images from the mission & its lead-up–very few of which I’d ever seen. The gallery includes text from Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts. (See photo 35 for an interesting bit.)
• Elsewhere, a crew is using Photoshop to help restore & analyze data from the unmanned lunar probes that preceded the Apollo landings.
• Mentioned previously, but worth a revisit: Here’s a map of the area covered by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their Apollo 11 moon walks, superimposed on a soccer field and on a baseball diamond. (I suppose if I were carrying a 400lb suit, I wouldn’t get too far, either.) [Via]

[For many more space-/imaging-related links, see this blog's scientific & technical imaging category.]

July 15, 2009

Vive la différence

Interesting observation from Daring Fireball the other day:

“So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the ‘Uncanny Valley.’ By establishing a conceptual framework that mimics Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different.”

It’s kind of a drag to see other image-editing apps just imitate Photoshop. I certainly understand the rationale for doing so, but their creators are tying their own hands. Why not break some really new ground? That’s what Mark Hamburg & the Lightroom team did, rethinking a lot of problems from the bottom up.

(rt) Photography: Masses of humanity, Star Wars, and more

• Portrait of an eye made from human figures [Via Mark Coleran]
• NY Times gallery: Michael Wolf photos of impersonal Chicago skyscrapers & inhabitants. [Via Stephen Shankland]
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sucks at Photoshop. [Via @rufusd]
• Fashion mags try going makeup- and Photoshop-free. [Via Tom Hogarty]
• Star Wars-flavored:
  • A Stormtrooper tribute to the King of Pop
  • Star Wars-upon-chipmunks

July 14, 2009

Adobe doc team launches blog

The Adobe Learning Resources (documentation) team has created Phosphors, a new blog focused on help & tutorial content for Photoshop, Camera Raw, Lightroom, and Bridge. They’ve just posted some tips on backing up a Lightroom catalog.

(rt) Illustration: Man vs. tank, Pixar vs. Dreamworks, & more

• Can one commission Chinese artists to batch-paint the Tiananmen “tank man”? One man tries.
• The iPhone GUI PSD has been updated for iPhone 3.0. Way to go, guys! [Via Mark Coleran]
• I like the idea of a Lego Remote: The cartoon is similar in spirit to Adobe Configurator.
• “There is bad taste and then there is this“–the new MSFT Bing logo. [Via Mark Coleran]
• Oof–a probably unfair but funny Pixar vs. Dreamworks smackdown. (via @5tu)
• I had a little weekend fun with Illustrator’s Live Trace feature.

July 13, 2009

Illustrations: Creepshows

• Winkler & Noah’s The Puppet Show is a collection of photos of real children modified to look like puppets. So, um, they’ve got that going for them. [Via]
• RetroComedy has picked out the “15 Creepiest Vintage Ads of All Time.” [Via]

Upcoming Bay Area design events: Tomorrow & Saturday

• Reminder: The San Jose Photoshop User Group is meeting this Tuesday, July 14, at Adobe HQ. Please see the event page for agenda details & other info.

• The Society of News Design is holding a free event at Adobe SF next Saturday, July 18. Stamen Design, IDEO, Story4 and others will be presenting. Here’s the 411. [Via Terry Hemphill]

July 12, 2009

(rt) Illustration: PS Playboy, World War III, and more

• Photoshop named Playboy’s “Employee of the Month.” [Via Michael Ninness]
• Optical illusion pavement art: giant hole in bike path. [Via Stephen Shankland]
• Killer hair-based illustration o’ the day [Via Mordy Golding]
• “Someone Tweeted!” Check out these WWIII Propaganda Posters.
• Would you trust this man to draw on your face? If so, that makes one of us. (And yes, the girl turned out to be lying.)
• What’s the difference between a bug and a feature?

July 11, 2009

(rt) Tips: Useful bits for PS, AI, etc.

The majority of my blog readers don’t follow me on Twitter, and I’m not sure how many folks look at the tweet-feed embedded at right. Therefore it seems worth wrapping up some previously tweeted (but unblogged) links. I’m thinking I’ll flag these posts with “(rt)” in the subject line, so that you can ignore them if you already follow the Twitter feed. If you have any other suggestions, I’m all ears.

• Layers Magazine offers 100 Wicked Tips for Lightroom & CS4 apps. I learned a bunch of good stuff.
• Photoshop nuggets:
  • Photoshop tip: Cmd-click the New Layer button to create layer behind current one. [Via Cristen Gillespie.]
  • Photoshop CS4 tip: While zoomed in, hold down H while clicking anywhere. Move the square elsewhere & release. Kapow! [Via @gpenston]
  • “Does CS4 strip lens metadata like CS3?” No. Save for Web now gives you choices. Select “All” to preserve lens data.

July 10, 2009

Oh Boy, Oh Henry!

I couldn’t be happier to announce that (not-so-)little Henry Seamus Nack–marvel of creation, California King, Little Brother to the Stars, & general delight to behold–sprang into the world at 2:47pm yesterday afternoon.

Mom & baby are doing great after a crazy-fast labor (end-to-end 20 minutes in the hospital!*), and big brother Finn is suitably intrigued** with baby “Goonie” (short for “El Segundo”). The big-little man bested his whopping bro’s marks, coming in at 9lb 12oz (what’s that, about 4 hectacres in Metric***?) and 21″. He and mom are chilling at the hospital while dad squires Finny around and runs sandwich-fetching missions.

Here’s a little gallery of the goings-on, and of course we’ll be updating the soon-to-be-renamed Finnegan Wakes as we bring our buddy home and learn to niño-juggle. Wish us luck!

I expect to be taking a little break from work-blogging, though I have a bunch of links set to publish on an automated schedule.

* “No epidural for you!”
** “Pop! Egg!” he says, a la Very Hungry Caterpillar
*** Can you tell I’m American?

Wide-angle image correction tech

Adobe researcher Aseem Agarwala, working with Maneesh Agrawala & Robert Carroll at Berkeley, has demonstrated techniques to enable “Content-Preserving Projections for Wide-Angle Images.” That may sound a little dry, but check out the demo video (10MB QT) to see how the work enables extremely wide-angle photography. [Via Dan Goldman]
Aseem contributed the depth-of-field extension feature to Photoshop CS4. For previous entries showing advanced imaging work, check out this blog’s Image Science category.

July 09, 2009

Unique photography workshop in September

Reader Erin English let me know about a cool photography workshop being held this fall in Crested Butte, Colorado, for individuals with cognitive disabilities. She writes,

Individuals with cognitive disabilities are invited to take part in this nature photography workshop held during prime “leaf-peeping” time in the Elk Mountains. The camp will cover all of the basic skills needed to take great photos: lighting, composition and subject. Photographers will find plenty of adventure along the way as they search for their perfect shot. A slide show presentation wraps things up on the final day, and will be sure to please. Families are encouraged to participate; all ages welcome.

Check out the Adaptive Sports Center site for more info.

On a tangentially related note, I see that the InDesign team has just posted a document on how to create accessible PDFs using ID–documents that are screen-reader-friendly, for example.

Classic type, new and old

• Inspired by WPA posters, Jeff Knowles and Neville Brody created the typeface New Deal for the new film Public Enemies.
• BibliOdyssey pulls some highlights from the Pratt Institute Libraries’ collection of more than 1200 Ex Libris (bookplate) images. (The F. Ranis piece is among my faves.)
• Check out the excellent (and excellently-named) Phaeton, from Kevin Cornell & type designer Randy Jones. See also Randy’s similarly cool Olduvai. [Via]

July 08, 2009

Wednesday Illustrations: Geekery, skating, & more

• Browser-related:
  • One seriously excellent error message: Hatin’ on IE6.
  • Sub Pop celebrates horrible, horrible 1996-era Web design with a new promo page. [Via]
• Skate & create:
  • Smashing Magazine rounds up 40 Beautiful Skateboard Designs.
  • Adobe & Nike folks talk about the behind-the-scenes process of creating & streaming the Nike Skateboarding Debacle HD video. [Via]
  • I spied this Joel Tudor board in Santa Cruz the other day, chuckled, and had to snap a pic.
  • Core77 reviews New Skateboard Graphics.
• I’m not sure what’s up with John MacConnell’s head, but he might want to have it looked into.

July 07, 2009

A note about batch printing in CS4

Photoshop CS4 unfortunately contains a bug that interferes with running batch printing via actions. Fortunately it’s easy to work around the problem via a script, downloadable from Adobe.com. See this tech note for the script & instructions.

Tuesday Infographics

• White Glove Tracking “asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean,” producing all sorts of creative visualizations of the resulting data. [Via]
• “A love of baseball plus a love of infographics equals Flip Flop Fly Ball.” Fascinating & beautifully executed stuff. [Via]
• Narcissism + Stalking + ADHD = Twitter! It’s the Social Media Venn Diagram Tee.
• Ben Fry’s All Streets is an image of the US comprised of “26 million individual road segments.” [Via]

July 06, 2009

Handy new Lightroom, ACR utilities

• John Beardsworth has created Open Directly, an LR plug-in for sending raw files from LR to another app (e.g. another raw converter) of your choice. It’s free until tomorrow Aug. 7.
• Mike Wiacek’s Flickr Lightroom Preset Extractor can suck processing info out of JPEGs, then turn the results into LR presets. Here are some sample images with which it works.
• The LR2ACR converter can turn all those great Lightroom presets into Camera Raw presets. [Via Glenn Mitchell]
• Timothy Armes has posted version 2 of his LR/Mogrify plug-in, useful for adding watermarks, borders, and other post-processing embellishments. [Via]

Monday Illustrations: Snacks + Chroma

• Chow:
  • I love Louise Fili’s intricate, stamp-themed design for the Bedford Post cafe.
  • Lunch gets a whole lot weirder through Ginou Choueiri’s Potato Portraits.
• Color:
  • ColourLovers hosts a collection of beautiful vintage circus posters. (A Ringling Bros. poster hung over my childhood bed for years, and I’d endlessly pour over the details of trains receding into infinity.)
  • Dig Comex paint’s cartoon-themed ad for their color-matching prowess.
  • This Cube’s for you, print geeks: Ignacio Pilotto’s Pantone-themed Rubitone Rubik’s Cube.

July 05, 2009

Candy Fireworks

Enjoy!

For more stop-motion goodness from PES, see previous. [Via]

The beautiful world

• Gary Greenberg reveals some amazing structures with his microscopic photos of grains of sand [Via]
• Bubbles:
  • Bogdan Chesaru captures amazing “natural iridescent colors you see when light catches a clear soap bubble,” creating images that make Yes album covers look tame in comparison. [Via]
  • A friend tells me to check out a great gallery of bursting soap bubbles, but I’m having trouble getting it to load. I’m posting the link in hopes the problem gets fixed. [Via]
• Canon’s site features the amazing wildlife photography of Stephen Dalton. [Via]
• Webphemera rounds up marvelous pix of insect eggs, while Environmental Graffiti shows off the beauty of morning dew.

July 04, 2009

Set the Controls for the Art of the Son

A little housekeeping note: I’ve been taking advantage of vacation + the wait for baby “El Segundo,” using the time to queue up lots of links & scheduling them to auto-publish. So, if

1. you happen to see me publish big news in what looks like quick succession with the usual doses of ephemera, and/or
2. it appears I’m blogging instead of caring for a newborn,

please don’t think it makes me a terrible dad! (I’ve got that latter part covered through things like indulging play with a rusty, severed car antenna. ;-))
Autopilot, engage,
J.

Saturday Illustrations: From subways to space

• Happy Fourth:
  • Crackerpacks.com wraps an enormous set of fireworks packaging art in some eye-wateringly ghetto “vintage” Web design.
  • Rosemarie Fiore creates drawings by containing and controlling firework explosions.
• These Tokyo “subway manner posters”, designed by Bunpei Yorifuji, manage to inform & entertain without condescension. [Via]
• Brushes & patterns:
  • If you think Illustrator can do only crisp vectors, look again. Think Design has shared 15 paintstroke Illustrator paint brushes. I’ve taken them for a spin & found them quite nice.
  • Handy when the moment arises: Susan Libertiny has created a free set of passport stamp & postmark Photoshop brushes. [Via]
  • YouWorkForThem is selling sets of intricate line patterns of the sort that appear on currency.
• Wipe your feet on this great, nerdy doormat. [Via]
• Mischa McLachlan has created a slick 2001: A Space Odyssey icon set. [Via]

July 03, 2009

PS User Group San Jose to meet July 14

The next meeting of the San Jose Photoshop User Group is scheduled for July 14. Group organizer Dan Clark writes,

Photoshop questions? Samples of your Photoshop work? Bring either to our next meeting. We’ll have an evening of Photoshop show and tell, as well as answers to your questions. Let’s see some tough questions and nice work! Please send questions and sample files ahead of time to: dan at weinberg-clark.com

For complete info & directions, check out the event page.

Notes about PS printing performance

Recently an iMac user asked about ways to speed up large scan & print jobs in Photoshop:

In your opinion, would a Mac Pro significantly accelerate the processing [while printing]? Is the printing engine in Photoshop multiprocessor aware?

I put the question to Photoshop printing engineer Dave Polaschek, and here’s his reply:

While Photoshop’s printing code isn’t multi-threaded & is mostly disk-bound*, another core may be used by the OS for color management if you’re printing in “Printer Manages Color” mode. More cores won’t hurt.
That said, the disk (or better, disks) in a Mac Pro are significantly faster than the disk in an iMac, which will help since every printed job is spooled to disk. Plus you can put more RAM in a Mac Pro, which will help in preparing the image for printing.
As with most things in Photoshop, the two biggest gains you can get in speed are:
1 – Put in as much RAM as you can afford and the machine can hold. When friends are buying new Macs, I tell them they should have an absolute minimum of 1G of RAM per core, and 2G per core will still be a noticeable improvement over that. For running Photoshop with big images, I’ve found some operations which run over 10x faster since I moved from 4GB to 8GB of RAM in my quad-core Mac Pro just because it keeps all the images and intermediate data in memory.
2 – Put in the fastest disk (or RAID array – four 500GB disks in a RAID array are cheaper and faster than a 2TB disk, and the default controller in my Mac Pro could do RAID with no new hardware) you can afford after you’re done buying RAM. When we do have to read or save a file, or spool something to disk, that fast disk will mean less time spent looking at progress bars.

[Question via Colin Smith]
* In other words, the speed of printing depends on how quickly data can be moved to/from your hard drive.

July 02, 2009

Feedback, please: Copying hex values

Designer/Twitter crazy person Sam Potts made what I thought was a good suggestion earlier today:

The Copy Color as HTML in the color panel is awesome. Everyone uses it all the time. However, times have changed and my guess is that most of the people who use this are writing their colors in CSS. So you always have to delete the color=”" part after you paste it into a style sheet.

It would be awesome to simply have a “Copy Color Hex Code” option and get #CCFF00 instead of the full color=”#CCFF00″ tag.

Or, to cover both bases, add to the panel menu:

Copy Color as HTML —> color=”#CCFF00″ as it is now

AND

Copy Color as CSS —> color:#CCFF00

I know it’s a tweaky query, but if you have a preference, please chime in.

Thursday Photography: CBGB to crazy cheesy

• Fish hover in space in Michael Itkoff’s Perch on Ice.
• The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year set features some lovely images, all freely shared. [Via]
• NYC:
  • Martin Sobey’s colorful on-street photographic installations punch up the street in front of my old office.
  • A bit further down that street lie the ghosts of CBGB, living on through a panoramic virtual tour.
  • If your camera doesn’t make city cops nervous enough, try a riflestock camera mount.
• Extreme cheese-rolling: Guaranteed to end in tears. (And cheese.)

July 01, 2009

Super cool video stabilization technology

Adobe researchers Hailin Jin and Aseem Agarwala*, collaborating with U.Wisconsin prof. Michael Gleicher & Feng Liu, have unveiled their work on “Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization.” In other words, their tech can give your (and my) crappy hand-held footage the look of a Steadicam shot.

Check out the demonstration video, shot at & around Adobe’s Seattle office. (Hello, Fremont Lenin!) It compares the new technique to what’s available in iMovie ’09 and other commercial tools.

As with all research papers/demos, I should point out making technology ready for real-world use can require plenty of additional work & tuning. Still, these developments are encouraging. [Via]

[Previously: Healing Brush & Content-Aware Scaling on (really good) drugs.]

* If you’ve created a panorama using Photoshop, you’ve used Hailin’s (image alignment) and Aseem’s (image blending) work.