May 26, 2012

Demo: Making HTML5 animation for iPad apps

What’s new in Edge Preview 6? Check it out:

Here’s a tutorial specifically on putting HTML animation into tablet publications Adobe’s Digital Publishing System.

On a related note, here’s how to convert a multilayer Illustrator document to SVG format for use by Edge:

And if you’re new to all this, see also a demo on getting started with Edge.

May 25, 2012

Creative Cloud subscriptions: Cross-language, cross-platform

Jeff Tranberry notes some differences between Creative Cloud membership & traditional Adobe software licenses:

Cross-Platform License: Access to both the Mac OS and Windows versions of the desktop applications and the ability to install them on your primary computer and one backup computer.

Multi-Language License: Access to any language version in which the CS6 and other desktop applications are available. Unlike owning the traditional licensed version of a Creative Suite product, Creative Cloud membership gives you the freedom and flexibility to choose whichever language works best for you in any given application.

Both of these are changes many of us have wanted to make for a long time, and I’m glad to see that they’ve arrived.

Accessing multi-language support is simple, but the UI isn’t obvious.  In the new Adobe Application Manager (AAM), install whatever apps you want in your primary language, then go into Preferences (upper left corner) and switch to a different language. App links that had said “Installed” will revert back to “Install,” though you may need to restart AAM for that to happen.  You can then install apps in the newly chosen language.

After installing multiple language versions Photoshop, you can go into its preferences, switch the UI language, and apply it via app restart.  (There’s just one copy of the app on disk, plus multiple language packs.)  It appears that not all apps support this switching capability, but at least reinstalling in a different language is fairly painless (and can be done as often as needed).

Touching—sort of—across time & space

In high school I had my first long-distance girlfriend. My dad would roll his eyes at our pre-Net attempts to connect. “Oh, you’re probably eating a cheese sandwich as 6pm, because Jeanne said she’d eat a cheese sandwich at 6pm…”  He was kidding (and wrong), but there’s much to be said for synchronicity across space.

Enter Marco Triverio’s concept “Feel Me.” As Fast Company puts it,

When a friend is typing, you can see where they’re touching on your own screen. And when your fingers match up, from halfway across the world, haptic feedback can allow you to serendipitously touch. In a text-me-later culture, Feel Me enables communication that’s transient and visceral.

I think it’s rather brilliant. And as for Jeanne, sometimes I now see her across space, hobnobbing with Mitt Romney. Funny old world.

May 24, 2012

Configurator arrives for CS6

After more than 125,000 downloads (!) of versions 1 & 2, Configurator 3.0–Adobe’s drag-and-drop tool for creating custom panels–is available for download from Adobe Labs.  Enhancements include:

• Support for the new tools & commands in Photoshop CS6 & InDesign CS6
• Color theme support for Photoshop CS6
• Watermarking and panel personalization
• Ability to target both CS5 and CS6
• Custom panel icons
• Improved welcome screen
• Faster launch time
• Improved text widget
• Sample panels
• DPS panels

What do you think?  Is your team creating and/or using panels made by Configurator?

A Brief History of John Baldessari

I’m a little chagrined to admit that I didn’t know about artist John Baldessari prior to seeing this short film narrated by Tom Waits. Now I’d like to know more:

[Via Sam Potts]

May 23, 2012

Photosmith 2 enhances Lightroom-iPad integration

I’m delighted to see that Photosmith has released version 2, enabling multi-image tagging, bidirectional sync with Lightroom, native Eye-Fi support, and more.

According to their site, new features of the $20 app include:

• Wirelessly sync your unsorted backlog from Lightroom with our free plugin
• Sort and filter your photos
• Organize them into collections
• Apply star ratings and color labels
• Apply keywords and IPTC metadata individually, in groups, or with presets
• Share highlights and rough selections to Facebook, Flickr or by e-mail
• Support for RAW, JPG, or RAW+JPG
• Support for 100% zoom for many cameras
• Native support for Export and Publish Services in Adobe Lightroom
• Directly receive from Eye-Fi cards
• Very powerful sync options, allowing workflow customization

I can’t wait to try it out when I get home. If you’re using the app, what do you think of it?

LEAP Motion promises object-tracking UI breakthroughs

If this thing ($70?!) works even remotely as advertised, we’re in for an exciting future:

[Reader Pierre-Etienne Courtejoie quips, "I just shudder about the possible single-finger gestures to force quit software." (Hmm, seems very John Gruber-positive.)]

This is *not* your father’s Adobe installer

It used to be that Adobe’s installers were… well, to be charitable, not a source of pride.  A bunch of hardworking people have been listening, engaging with customers, and cranking away–and with Creative Cloud you can see the results. To grab any CS6 app,

1. Download & install the App Manager (less than 1MB), then log in with your Adobe ID.
2. Click the links for the apps you want to install.
3. “There’s no step 3!”

Right–no typing/copying/pasting serials (and potentially losing them later), no running installer after installer. Here’s a two-minute demo (though honestly you can probably try it yourself just as fast):

I’m sorry that installers were such a sore point in the past. Hats off to the installer team for buckling down & hugely improving the user experience.

PS–Engineering manager Eric Wilde says, “Please ask people to reach out to us on the forums if they have trouble. There’s lots of engineering folk reading our forums daily.”

May 22, 2012

New HTML5 gallery options for Photoshop & Lightroom

I’ve long admired the work of Felix Turner, and now he’s debuted a new HTML5 gallery called Juicebox:

Juicebox makes it incredibly easy to build beautiful image galleries that work on all devices from IE6 to iOS and Android. We offer a fully functional free version and a pro version which allows advanced customization. Check out sample galleries.

It’s available for download in both free & paid forms. You can create galleries via a free desktop app, or better yet you can export them through Lightroom & Photoshop plug-ins.

View to an eclipse

Photographer Cory Poole captured 700 images from a telescope with “a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it,” then used them to create this video:

Or, as my Photoshop-centric brain saw it, “He’s moving two overlapping paths with a Boolean operation & red stroke/inner shadow layer style applied.” Because, yes, I need to get out a lot more.

Elsewhere, the Atlantic features a gorgeous gallery of images that capture the event from points all around the world.

[Via]

May 21, 2012

How to get Adobe Touch apps for free via Creative Cloud

Subscribing to Creative Cloud entitles you to free copies of the Adobe Touch apps. Here’s what you do:

• Buy the touch apps via the App Store or Android Market.
• Log into Creative Cloud from within each app.
• Once you’ve logged into at least three touch apps, we’ll credit your account with a free month of service, offsetting the price you paid for the touch apps*.
• Result: You get the touch apps for no cost beyond your Creative Cloud membership.

Is it a slightly strange approach? Maybe, but it works. (See terms & conditions if you want the fine print.) Please let us know if anything remains confusing.

* I suppose someone will point out that if one buys 5 touch apps and is paying $30/mo., a free month doesn’t cover the cost of the touch apps. It’s equally true, however, that if one buys 3 touch apps and is paying $50/mo., a free month covers nearly twice the cost of the touch apps.

Adobe CS6 Film & Video Road Show

Adobe’s doing a series of free demo events around the US throughout June, as well as offering in-depth training (paid), all showcasing the new power in Premiere Pro, After Effects, Speed Grade, and the other CS6 video/audio apps:

May 20, 2012

“The 112-Megapixel Camera You’ll Never Get to Shoot With”

Check out this $100,000 bad boy. PopPhoto writes,

They are looking to create a one-off version of the 1110 series, a black and white only camera with a 95x95mm sensor (medium format sensors are typically 48x36mm). That massive sensor is cooled down to -100 degrees Celsius, which means it can take exposures that last for hours without overheating, which can lead to noise. The 112-megapixel CCD has no Bayer mask or AA fliter so the images will come out super sharp.

Yeah, but does it work with Instagram?

May 19, 2012

Adobe MAX moves from fall to spring

The next show will be hosted on May 4-8 in Los Angeles, writes CTO Kevin Lynch. According to Kevin, it’ll focus on

• Design and creativity
• Web sites, including the latest on HTML5, JavaScript and CSS
• Digital publishing, video, and gaming, including the latest on Flash
• Applications, particularly for mobile platforms

More details will come out in the months ahead.

Vinyl-tossing trick shots

Does this have anything to do with this blog’s focus? No, it does not. Will you dig it? If you’re not dead inside, I think so. :-)

I plan to show it to our boys–but first I’ll have to explain what “records” were. [Via]

May 18, 2012

Check out the iStock Plug-in for CS apps

It’s a free stock photography-browsing panel:

With the iStockphoto Plug-in for Adobe® Creative Suite®, you can browse, download and edit photos and illustrations without ever leaving Photoshop®, Illustrator® or InDesign®. Crop them, resize them and make them your own, directly from the Creative Suite.

[Via Lucas Bombardier]

What do you think of the CS6 icons & splash screens?

In 6 years of daily blogging, I’ve never gotten deluged more than I did when revealing the CS3 icons.  After 500+ comments, I even got turned into icons myself. Suffice it to say, people have strong opinions.

These designs don’t happen by accident–quite the opposite.  Adobe XD (Experience Design) manager Shawn Cheris has posted a thorough tour of how CS6 branding evolved & the thinking that went into it.  He talks about how they started with color, moved into shapes, and ultimately created thousands of individual graphics across the entire Suite.

How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2

As the world probably doesn’t need more nail-biting anxiety, I almost hesitate to share this one–but all’s well that ends well:

[Via Dan Mall]

May 17, 2012

Demo: Top 10 Time-Saving Enhancements to Layers in Photoshop CS6

Does anyone convey more useful info in less time than Julieanne Kost? This video just taught me things, and I work here, for crying out loud.

May 16, 2012

A 5-year-old sketches logos

Charming: Adam Ladd showed his 5-year-old daughter logos for 5 seconds apiece, then asked her to draw what she remembered:

[Via Carolina de Bartolo]

Info about Creative Cloud subscriptions for groups

I’ve gotten a bunch of questions about how customers can buy Creative Cloud memberships in bulk.  I could send you to a Web page and a PDF—but frankly I didn’t want to read through those any more than you probably do, so I asked around & distilled the highlights:

• Right now Creative Cloud membership (let’s call it “CCM”) is sold on an individual basis directly from Adobe & a couple of partners like Amazon & Staples. It’s not sold through volume licensing or reseller channel partners (e.g. B&H).
• There will be a way to buy CCM for groups of people, but it won’t be available until later this year.
• Once it’s available, I expect it to include everything that’s currently in CCM, plus added features for managing users, storage, & more.
• In the meantime, teams can buy what’s called “Creative Cloud Team Ready.” Team Ready includes the desktop apps that are part of CCM, as well as Adobe Expert Support, but it doesn’t include cloud features (such as Typekit access). It’s a term-license subscription, meaning that it ends at some point (by which time the CCM Team offering should be available).

Does that make sense? Please let us know you still have questions.

May 15, 2012

Ask A Pro: Adaptive Publishing for Tablets

Live demo/Q&A this Friday, noon Pacific, featuring Colin Fleming:

InDesign CS6 includes exciting new features that will make designing for tablet devices more efficient than ever. You will learn about the new adaptive Design Tools—Adobe Liquid Layout, Alternate Layout, Linked Content, and how to export both horizontal and vertical layouts of a tablet design from a single InDesign file.

The new video workflow in Photoshop CS6

RC Concepcion from NAPP gives a quick tour of new Scene layers & more:

May 14, 2012

Creative Cloud vs. Piracy

Some perspective from The Next Web:

Adobe’s main competitor in this space isn’t competing products, interestingly enough; it’s Bit Torrent. Will $50/month convince the masses that are still pirating the software to go legit? My money’s on yes. A subscription works out to less than $2 a day. That’s less than the cost of a cheap sandwich. And with it you receive full, legal, supported access to all Adobe products with update requests that don’t make you sweat.

Adobe has been listening all along and taken a huge but necessary gamble; it has completely revamped its pricing system…For design and creative professionals it should be a no brainer.

Demo: Selectively Blurring Images in Photoshop CS6

Julieanne Kost demonstrates how to soften select areas using the Tilt-Shift blur, uniformly blur your entire image and then sharpen a single focal point with Iris blur, or select multiple focal points and then let Field blur vary the blurriness between them.

[Via]

May 13, 2012

Animation: Acid Drops

This is “The second in a series of hand-painted studies,” writes Matt Box, “that aim to psychedelically capture the individual styles of influential skateboarders.”

[Via]

May 12, 2012

Recursive drawing

What do you think of this cleverness?

Could people wrap their heads around the idea enough to use it productively? In my experience many people still struggle with things like symbols & Smart Objects–if they even use them at all. [Via Mausoom Sarkar]

May 11, 2012

Photoshop Touch 1.2 supports bigger images, new effects, more

Automatic sync to Creative Cloud, PSD export, and more are now available on iPad and Android tablets:

• You may now increase the resolution to 2048×2048 with 10 layers. The default is 1600×1600 with 16 layers, but you can change it in Preferences. 
• Automatic synchronization with Creative Cloud 
• Available in 6 languages (English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian) 
• Added export to PSD and PNG via Camera Roll or email. 
• Improved rotate and flip image workflow. 
• Added ability to transfer images to desktop via iTunes [iOS only].
• Added two new Tutorials.
• Added four new Effects (Watercolor Paint, HDR Look, Soft Light and Soft Skin).

Jeffrey Veen on Creative Cloud

Jeff developed Typekit, and before that Measure Map (which became the UI for Google Analytics). He’s now helping shape Creative Cloud, which launched today. I like this:

Everything stems from two core beliefs. First, the way in which all of us acquire and manage our software is changing. Waiting a couple of years for updates to our tools is no longer tenable for many users. Our relationship to our software is more like that of a service: continuous improvements through frequent iteration.

Second, it’s clear that devices like the iPad are not just for consuming content, but represent the next wave of tools for the creation of content as well. And these new capabilities need tools that have been completely reconsidered. Simple ports of desktop apps won’t do.

He goes on to explain how Creative Cloud integrates desktop apps, touch apps, and services (Web site building & hosting, tablet publishing, and more). And check out the comments section for some good Q&A with readers.

May 10, 2012

Download the new Adobe Edge preview

Adobe’s new HTML animation tool, Edge, has just released preview 6. Improvements include:

• Built-in lessons:  Six new tutorials are built right into Edge, to help new users get familiar with the basics.
• Coding: A new code panel provides a complete view of the actions code in a composition, and the code editor has a new full code mode.
• Publishing: Projects can be published into DPS or iBooks formats. There’s also a new Static HTML Markup feature for SEO benefits, and Google Chrome Frame support for better fidelity on non-HTML5 browsers.
• Symbols: Users can now copy/paste and import/export symbols from one project to another.
• Languages: Edge is now available in French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish.
• Other cool stuff: The Preview in Browser function is now compatible with Adobe Shadow, auto-keyframe mode has been improved, editable time codes are back, and so much more to make Edge more efficient.

Download it here.

Live Illustrator demo/Q&A tomorrow

 Friday at noon Pacific:

Illustrator CS6 will let you work with work with precision, speed, and rock-solid stability on large, complex files—powered by the new Adobe Mercury Performance System. A modern interface streamlines daily tasks while you take advantage of new pattern tools, image tracing, and gradients on strokes. Attend this online event to see for yourself how Illustrator CS6 will let you spend less time waiting, more time creating.

A classical flash mob in the Copenhagen Metro

Magical.

According to the YouTube caption,

In April 2012 Copenhagen Phil (Sjællands Symfoniorkester) surprised the passengers in the Copenhagen Metro by playing Griegs Peer Gynt. The flash mob was created in collaboration with Radio Klassisk. All music was performed and recorded in the metro.

[Via Margot]

May 09, 2012

CS6 launches on IMAX, June 6 in San Jose

Demos on a massive screen: 

The Creative Suite User Group of San Jose is partnering with Creative Suite Lovers and other Bay Area user groups to present the new features of CS6 in the amazing IMAX Theatre at San Jose Tech Museum… Our keynote speaker is the great Al Mooney, Adobe Product Manager for Professional Video Editing

Registration is $20 per person (as renting the theater isn’t cheap), but event organizer Sally Cox notes that they’re giving away two CS6 Master Collections (worth $2600 apiece) plus 20 3-month subscriptions to Creative Cloud (Master Collection & then some). Should be a fun event.

LayerVault adds new features for Photoshop collaboration

LayerVault is a PSD-savvy service for versioning & collaborating on design work, and it’s just added a swath of cool new features (the “Wormhole” mechanism for inspecting changes being especially neat).  News site BetaKit writes,

Users can now view edits happening in real-time, and open compatible files directly in the browser, meaning less popping in and out of apps just to make a few minor tweaks. Tools added now let them pick colors and create transferable palettes on the fly, for instance, as well as measure design components with a click.

Here’s a 1-minute tour of what’s new: 

Tips for Getting Started with Photoshop CS6

Jeff Tranberry has pulled together some useful pointers for people transitioning from the Photoshop CS6 public beta to the finished version of the app (which is now available for purchase & as a 30-day trial). He talks about:

• Uninstalling the beta (i.e. make sure to use the actual uninstaller)
• Installing & activating the app using an Adobe ID (and why is required)
• Getting the latest camera support with Camera Raw 7.1
• Finding good training resources on what’s new

May 08, 2012

Ikea makes a cardboard camera (?)

Cue up the “How Bizarre” :

 [Via]

Mordy shows Illustrator CS6

Our old friend (and former Illustrator PM) Mordy Golding tours what’s new in CS6: 

An overview of everything that’s new in Illustrator CS6, including 64bit support, a new user interface and underlying framework, pattern creation, image trace, gradient on stroke, and more!

On the Real World Illustrator blog, Mordy talks about details of the new UI, what 64-bit means to you, and more.

May 07, 2012

Camera Raw 7.1 adds HDR tonemapping to CS6

According to the Lightroom Journal,

Camera Raw 7.1 and DNG Converter 7.1 Release Candidates are now available on Adobe Labs.  This release includes bug fixes, new camera support, and new lens profiles.  Camera Raw 7.1 Release Candidate includes new Defringe controls to help address chromatic aberration.  Defringe is available as part of the Lens Correction panel.  7.1 Release Candidate can also now read 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit HDR files.  Supported HDR formats are TIFF and DNG.

• Canon EOS 1D X
• Canon EOS 5D Mk III
• Canon PowerShot G1 X
• Canon PowerShot S100V
• Fuji FinePix F505EXR
• Fuji FinePix F605EXR
• Fuji FinePix F770EXR
• Fuji FinePix F775EXR
• Fuji FinePix HS30EXR
• Fuji FinePix HS33EXR
• Fuji FinePix X-S1
• Nikon D4
• Nikon D800
• Nikon D800E
• Olympus OM-D E-M5
• Pentax K-01
• Samsung NX20
• Samsung NX210
• Samsung NX1000
• Sony Alpha NEX-VG20
• Sony SLT-A57

Related/previous: Lightroom 4.1 adds HDR toning, improved defringing.

Photoshop, Pirates, & The Force

Hmm… What would make for a good list of dark-to-light descriptions?

As he was working on Photoshop CS6′s new dark UI feature, engineer Joe Ault put in bread-based placeholders for the brightness values: Pumpernickel, Dark Rye, Whole Wheat, Sourdough–then solicited suggestions from the team.  Steve Guilhamet from QE explains.

The base ground rules were 4 names that reflected the tonal range of the 4 UI options, with consideration for cultural variance and localization (e.g. Pumpernickel in Scandinavia is not thought of as a dark bread). There was a food theme to start but it opened up a bit. We had beer, coffee, tequila, macaroons, rice, cakes, etc. There were moon phases, seasons, rocks.

Steve suggested clouds (Cirrus, Stratus, Cumulus, Nimbus– “Because you can’t see ‘Cloud’ used enough these days”), pirate flags (Henry Every, Richard Worley, Stede Bonnet, and John Rackam), and more.  My favorite, though, is one he mocked up:

Eventually things died down & the UI ended up with just unnamed color swatches–the right move, I’m sure, but a bit less fun.  (Hard to say, though, what would happen if one held down modifier keys while clicking them in the Prefs dialog…)

May 06, 2012

“It’s a nightmare for old people”

How pitch-perfect is this parody of speeds-and-feeds-based marketing?

[Update: Non-US folks, try this link. (Via Peter Steeper)]

The other day I heard some carrier/handset combo boasting about “wielding the Android 2.2 platform.” It’s so weird: they burned airtime noting a detail that would confuse most people while (I would think) alienating those geeky enough to grok it.

May 05, 2012

A Pixelated History of Cameras

Short & charming.

[Via PetaPixel]

May 04, 2012

The art of the start

Eminent motion graphics pros discuss recent work (e.g. Zombieland) and some classics (Saul Bass & more).

May 03, 2012

Triggertrap: Control your SLR from an iPhone

“Triggertrap Mobile,” write its creators, “is the best way to trigger your camera based on sounds, magnetism, movement, or the number of faces in your image – all from your iPhone! How bloody awesome is that…”

[Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]

Configurator 3.0 demo tomorrow

If you think Adobe apps are too complex, and if you have any motivation to do something about it, Adobe Configurator might be up your alley.  It’s a “box of Legos” tool that lets you remix the UI of Photoshop and InDesign, creating & sharing your own panels without having to code.  The team will be doing a concise demo & Q&A tomorrow at 2pm GMT (7am Pacific–yes, it’ll be recorded & posted for later viewing) Here’s the recording.

• What is Configurator and how you can use it?
• What’s new in Configurator 3? From the key new features to the small but useful new features.
• What is the new Adobe Exchange and how you can use it?
• Question and Answer session with the product team; Duration: 45 minutes

May 02, 2012

One more day to grab the Photoshop CS6 beta

On the off chance you’re not one of the million-plus people (!) who’ve already downloaded the Photoshop CS6 beta, you might want to grab it now: it’ll be available only until 5pm Pacific time tomorrow, May 3. You can also pre-order CS6 today.

ACR 6.7 for CS5 supports D4, 5D Mk III, more

Camera Raw 6.7 [Win|Mac] and DNG Convertor 6.7 [Win|Mac] are now available as a final releases on Adobe.com and through the update mechanisms available in Photoshop CS5.  This release includes bug fixes, new lens profiles, and new camera support:

• Canon EOS 1D X
• Canon EOS 5D Mk III
• Canon PowerShot G1 X
• Canon PowerShot S100V
• Fuji FinePix F505EXR
• Fuji FinePix F605EXR
• Fuji FinePix F770EXR
• Fuji FinePix F775EXR
• Fuji FinePix HS30EXR
• Fuji FinePix HS33EXR
• Fuji FinePix X-S1
• Nikon D4
• Nikon D800
• Nikon D800E
• Olympus OM-D E-M5
• Pentax K-01
• Samsung NX20
• Samsung NX210
• Samsung NX1000
• Sony Alpha NEX-VG20
• Sony SLT-A57

For more details about lens profiles supported & bugs fixed, please see the Lightroom Journal. [Via Dave Howe]

Vintage MoGraph: Wang 1980

Tell me you don’t want to see Panic make an homage in this style.

May 01, 2012

CS6 “Ask A Pro” live sessions, all this week

Hour-long demos and Q&A sessions are happening all week:

Adobe Creative Cloud for Designers
With Terry White
Tuesday at 5pm Pacific

Adobe Creative Cloud and the CS6 Web Tour
With Paul Trani
Wednesday at 10am & 5pm Pacific

What’s New in Adobe Photoshop CS6
With Julieanne Kost
Thursday at 10am & 5pm Pacific

Creative Cloud and CS6 Tour for Video Professionals
With Jason Levine
Thursday at 6pm Pacific and Friday at 10am Pacific

Photography: Forget pixels, gimme glyphs

• Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera captures images, uses real people to describe them, and then prints out only the descriptions they create. “The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete.” [Via]
• Adobe researcher Dan Goldman notes, “This is not just a nutty art project: the same general idea is actually being used to help blind people.” He points out VizWiz, ”an iPhone app that allows blind users to receive quick answers to questions about their surroundings. VizWiz combines automatic image processing, anonymous web workers, and members of the user’s social network in order to collect fast and accurate answers to their questions.”
• Text-Only Instagram is spot on. Hip hip cliché! [Via Mark Kawano]

April 30, 2012

The CS2->CS6 upgrade window remains open, but barely

Photoshop PM Jeff Tranberry addresses upgrade questions on the Photoshop team blog:

Question: Can I upgrade to CS6?

Yes. Owners of a CS5 or CS5.5 qualify for upgrade pricing to CS6.

There is a special offer – good through the end of the year- which allows CS3 & CS4 owners an opportunity to upgrade to CS6.

Owners of CS2 have one last chance if they purchase CS5 from a reseller in the next 30 days (to receive a free upgrade to CS6).

 
Check out the rest of Jeff’s post for other useful Q&A.

Giant pixel-art animation on 5-story LCD glass

“The thing is, I can’t figure if it’s the fish that are cooling me out, or all those uncut diamonds in the bottom of the tank, there.” (Wait, that’s something else.) Check out Patterned by Nature, “a 10 ft. wide by 90 ft. long sculptural ribbon that winds through a five story museum atrium and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.”

[Via]

April 29, 2012

A cute little iPhone diorama

I have no idea what it has to do with anything, but that hardly matters:

Made using Maya, After Effects, & Pftrack. [Via Motionographer]

April 28, 2012

Gorgeous photos from New York’s history

Alan Taylor has selected some terrific images from NYC’s history & shared them at high res on In Focus.  The images are drawn from more than 870,000 pictures recently put online by the city’s Department of Records. [Via]

Waves: A motion & sound installation

The Waves project from Daniel Palacios “is made up of two turbines, supported by a tuning fork structure between which the waves are created.” The strings whip through the air, creating both sound and visuals, and they react to passersby:

[Via]

April 27, 2012

Interesting recent collages

• John Stezaker “appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades,’” producing some disconcerting juxtapositions. (Hit the “Next” button at the top to see more.) [Via Guido Reule]
• Matthew Cusick creates portraits & collages from shredded bits of maps.

April 26, 2012

Lightroom 4.1 adds HDR toning, improved defringing

Check it out:

• Lightroom 4.1 RC2 now includes the ability to process HDR TIFF files.  (16, 24 or 32-bit TIFF files)  This can be quite useful if you have merged multiple exposures into a single 32-bit image using Photoshop’s HDR Pro.  Using the new basic panel controls can be a very effective and straightforward method of achieving an overall balance across the tonal range.
• Additional Color Fringing corrections have been added to Lightroom 4.1 RC2.  Please see this blog post for additional details.

Photoshop CS6: What’s in it for photographers?

A. TONS.

I’m sure you already know about Camera Raw 7, and you’ve probably seen bits about selective blurring & adaptive wide-angle lens correction–but what about Skin-Aware Masking, smarter Auto Curves, 64-bit Bridge, an improved Print dialog, and more?  Check out this comprehensive overview from photographer & Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes.

On a related note, photographer & author Martin Evening has posted a great in-depth piece on DP Review covering extreme contrast edits in Lightroom 4 and ACR 7.  I love being able to get more of the benefits of HDR from a single frame, and without introducing garish haloes.

Generating CSS from shapes in Fireworks

According to the Fireworks CS6 new features page, you can “Save time by cleanly extracting CSS elements and values (such as color, font, gradient, and corner radius) using the new CSS Properties panel.” Check it out:

Would you find this kind of support valuable in Photoshop? How would you rate it compared to, say, improved slicing or sprite generation?  (Speaking of the latter, here’s how Fireworks CS6 does CSS sprites, as well as jQuery mobile theme skinning.)

April 25, 2012

Video: Six favorite features in Illustrator CS6

Terry White gives his tour:

New 3D reflections, draggable shadows in Photoshop CS6

Check out this concise demo from PM Zorana Gee:

April 24, 2012

Illustrator CS6 is now a 64-bit Cocoa app

You can now use all the RAM on your system–great if you’re working with big, complex files. Other highlights include:

Gaussian blur received special attention and has been specifically optimized in CS6. As a result, other effects with operations that depend on Gaussian blur have also been enhanced, so you’ll see performance improvements in both drop shadows and inner glows. […]

You’ll notice a nimble, lively touch when you work with multiple artboards and threaded text. Creative tools such as the Bristle Brush have been optimized for both speed and efficiency so you can work fluidly, even when you generate immensely complex designs composed of hundreds of overlapping transparent paths.

And it’s not just Adobe saying it. Here’s Jean-Claude Tremblay writing for CreativePro.com:

It feels as if Illustrator has been re-energized… Modifying these effects in Preview mode is almost in real time. This speed increase and better reliability might not be the sexiest features, but at the end of a day, I’ll be glad I can do more and faster.

The reworked UI also offers efficiency tweaks, including inline editing of layer names (yeah!) and keyboard navigation of font lists.

Photoshop CS6 Live Webinars all week

The NAPP guys are hosting live demos/Q&A’s all week (all at noon Eastern time):

• Tuesday: Photography
• Wednesday: Design & JDI Features
• Thursday: Video
• Friday: 3D & Performance Features
• Saturday (all day): Week in Review

Check out the site for complete details.

Videos: The Photoshop CS6 playlist

The Photoshop team & friends (Russell Brown, Julieanne Kost, Terry White, and more) have posted some 30 videos covering CS6, many just a minute or two in length plus some deeper dives.  Check ‘em out on YouTube.

April 23, 2012

Adobe subscriptions massively lower the barrier to entry

Yesterday, if you didn’t own Photoshop, the cost of getting started was $700.

Today it’s $20*.

Yesterday if you didn’t own the Master Collection, the cost was $2,600.

Today it’s $50–or if you own a CS3 or later app, just $30 (!).

Yesterday if you wanted to reach tablets via Adobe’s Digital Publishing Solution, the cost was $400 per publication.

Soon it’ll be free, for unlimited publications, once you subscribe to Creative Cloud.

This is a very big deal.

Adobe’s now willing to take a lot less money from you up front.  Why?  Because we think we’ll be able to extend Creative Suite apps to a lot of people who couldn’t afford them previously, and because we think you’ll keep coming back as our offerings get better & better.  That’s good for you & good for Adobe.

We don’t want to sell you something once and say goodbye; we want to earn your business again & again. And with what we have in development, we feel confident we will.

*Details:

• You can subscribe to any CS app for $20/mo. with a one-year commitment, or you can get them all (plus tons of publishing services & storage) for $50/mo. (same commitment).
• If you prefer to go month-to-month (no commitment), the prices are $30 & $75/mo., respectively.
• And through August 31 existing Adobe customers can get in on full Creative Cloud membership for $30/mo (one-year commitment; applies to the first year).

Adobe Creative Cloud, nicely encapsulated

From Time’s Harry McCracken:

With Creative Cloud, your fifty bucks a month gets you everything in every version of Creative Suite, plus Lightroom (the cool photo management/editing program), Edge (HTML5 web editing) and Muse (code-free website building), plus Photoshop Touch and other apps for the iPad and Android. These are still conventional desktop applications, not browser-based services, but you’re entitled to download as many of them as you like at any time. […]

You’re always entitled to the newest version of all the programs, and Adobe says that it’s going to start rolling out features continuously rather than waiting for sweeping upgrades every couple of years.

That last little bit is key.  I’ll say more about it soon.

MBA’s: Come join the Revel team

The Adobe Revel team is hiring a summer intern with a passion for photography to work on this exciting, transformative product. Job responsibilities include:

• Defining the next version of Revel
• Understanding the market and customers
• Structuring experiments and research to forge ahead in uncharted territory
• Driving the definition of features, working with the experience design and engineering teams
• Defining metrics for success to guide further feature development across multiple releases per year

Check out the job listing page for more info: MBA Product Manager Intern for Adobe Revel (14949). [Via Sumner Paine]

April 22, 2012

Adobe’s NAB booth: So busy it was a fire hazard

Dang–that’s about as cool an endorsement as I’ve heard in a while.  (This news comes via After Effects PM Steve Forde.)  Check out tons of new features (SpeedGrade looks, Automatic Speech Alignment, enhanced 3D & Warp Stabilizer, and more) in the CS6 apps.

“The World’s Most Downloaded Man”

Frustrated by a growing lack of respect in the ad world for original work, Brazilian photographer Fernando Martins of the Câmera Clara Photography Studio travels to Copenhagen to meet with the World’s Most Downloaded Man: A handsome, 6’3″ Danish stock photography model named Jesper Bruun who has been seen “in more places than the Olympic torch.” [Via]

It’s more interesting in concept than in execution, maybe, but I love that it actually happened.

[Via Zorana Gee]

April 21, 2012

Adobe Revel 1.2 adds Retina support & more

The latest rev of Adobe’s mobile photo editing & sharing platform makes a number of improvements, including:

• Support for the Retina display on the new iPad
• Ability to tag photos with an event name, and filter your library by events
• Grid View which displays photos from a single day or event
• Ability to share, export and delete multiple photos at once
• Flexible adjustment to photo date and time stamps
• Faster editing on iPad and iPhone

In addition, the team writes,

If you already tried Revel in the past and want try these new features, we have great news for you! Anyone with an expired trial as of April 12 has ANOTHER 30-days to try Revel. To restart your trial, simply get the latest version from the app store, sign-in, and start another complimentary 30 day subscription.

Happy shooting,
J.

April 20, 2012

Beautiful high-speed film from India

Poor form to blog Phantom Flex ultra slow-mo two days in a row? Not when the images are this lovely:

I do kind of wonder whether even my staring into my monitor could look epic & meaningful if captured through one of these fly-bys. [Via]

Controlling a 4-story pipe organ via Kinect

Just think of the horrors Andrew Lloyd Webber could wreak with this thing (ideally with a Beowulf cluster of them).

[Via]

April 19, 2012

Slow-mo mayhem at 2,500fps

I cannot wait to show this to our tiny sons–which probably puts me on a path to being this guy.

[Via]

April 18, 2012

Demo: Speed drawing with realistic pencils in Photoshop CS6

Groovy. I can’t wait to check out John Derry‘s complete set of CS6 painting & drawing vids, due soon. (For details on how the new erodible tips work, see previous.)

Amazing footage from a tiny RC plane

About five seconds into this clip, I have to repeat: There’s no other time in history when I’d rather live.

[Via]

April 17, 2012

Sneak Peek: Gradient strokes in Illustrator CS6

From the simple (e.g. adding a sheen to the edge of an iOS button) to the ambitious (check out that motorcycle!), gradients in paths can be amazingly useful:

I’ve been (im)patiently awaiting this one for years. Combining transparency with gradients, plus reshaping strokes via the Width tool (introduced in CS5) and Pencil is incredibly powerful. You can create some amazingly subtle shaded regions using just vectors.

I think gradient strokes will go a long way to democratizing the power that’s lingered in AI’s potent but often inscrutable Gradient Mesh tool, and I can’t wait to see & show more.

April 16, 2012

Would you go to the “design gym” with me?

I’m a sucker for companionship & social pressure. I used to hit the gym several times a week with a friend, and our friendly competition left me strong & feeling great. Then he moved away and I’ve largely turned into a wad of cookie dough.

Lots of apps & services exist to help to help people stay honest & to support one another’s diet & exercise. (Peer pressure can be a wonderful thing.)  Meanwhile I’ve seen years of advice that designers should commit to making something new every day, I haven’t yet seen one that

• pings you with a daily (or weekly, etc.) challenge
• provides assets or a theme to build upon
• lets you see & comment on others’ work
• provides a rewards system (highest rank, possibly prizes, etc.)

So, hypothetically, let’s say Photoshop Touch said “Today’s 5-minute challenge: Create the most interesting thing you can using just these elements…,” let you upload your work, and then vote on others’ creations. Would you do it?  I think you might–but only if the rewards were enticing enough.  It’s like brushing your teeth, doing sit-ups, etc.: you make things part of your routine if they make you stronger, fitter, richer.  Could we help you practice your skills & become those things?

Demo: Faster retouching via Content-Aware Move in CS6

Retoucher Glyn Dewis calls Photoshop CS6 a “game changer.” Here he compares lengthening a neck in CS5 to a new & much faster method enabled by CS6:

April 15, 2012

Video: Spherikal

Ion Lucin used Cinema 4D + After Effects to create a lovely monochromatic meditation on the idea of “sphere”:

[Via]

April 14, 2012

*Real* airbrushes & pencils, in Photoshop?

What if your airbrush sprayed a real 3D cone of paint, so that tilting your stylus affected the shape you laid down? And what if pencils could actually wear down as you drew, producing interesting effects?

Oh, wait: in the CS6 beta, now they can. Deke McClelland shows how:

April 13, 2012

The iPad GUI PSD: Now ready for Retina, CS6

Hats off to the guys at Teehan+Lax for serving the design/Photoshop community with this great app creation resource. “It’s based on iOS 5.1,” they write, “and includes hundreds of Retina assets available natively on the platform.”

Because Photoshop CS6 is such a big step forward for interface designers, the new file requires use of the CS6 beta:

This time around we executed the file in Adobe’s latest release, Photoshop CS6 (currently still in beta). It’s a free download right now and, in my humble opinion, one of the best releases of Photoshop to date. Its perfect pixel snapping, grouped layer styles and a few other features enabled us to create the assets with more accuracy, yet remain remarkably editable. We highly recommend it, not just so you can use this file, but so that you support great software releases like this.

Check out the iPad GUI PSD (Retina Display) at Teehan+Lax.

Neat: Automatic speech alignment in Audition CS6

The Fremont troll makes a cameo to help demonstrate this new tech:

Adobe Shadow release 2 now available

From the team:

Adobe Shadow Labs Release 2 is now available on Adobe Labs.

We’ve been thrilled and encouraged by the amazing responses we’ve gotten to Shadow! We’ve been busy working on the next version, and believe that Adobe Shadow Labs Release 2 addresses almost all of the issues that you’ve been telling us about.

Read on for details, and don’t forget that they’re doing a live demo/Q&A today at noon Pacific.

April 12, 2012

Look at the great stuff Adobe’s putting into WebKit

Seriously, look at it: Blending modes, better typography, Web inspector improvements, lots of CSS Regions improvements, a WebKit HUD in Dreamweaver, and more–and that’s all in the course of three days.  (Boy, Adobe sure is stuck in a Flash-only mindset…)

What should we talk about?

I’ll be speaking at the RE:DESIGN/UX conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, May 1. It should be a really interesting show, featuring a lot of savvy designers & creative directors. Each session lead speaks for about 10 minutes, followed by 30-40 minutes of group discussion.  Here’s my idea in brief:

TheFuture of Creation

Everyone’s a maker; everyone’s a sharer.  Great design software costs a buck.  When things are common, we value them less. (No one celebrates breathing.) How do we keep creation special?  Let’s talk about what it all means to designers & their tools.

Is that a conversation you’d find interesting? Feedback & ideas are most welcome.

The visual style of The Wire

Erlend Lavik explores the show’s subtle, nuanced photography, making me miss it all the more. Even if you don’t have the full 30 minutes to spend, I think you’ll enjoy the piece:

[Via]

April 11, 2012

Photoshop CS6 in Seattle next Monday

Photoshop PM Stephen Nielson will be presenting CS6 at Adobe Seattle on Tuesday the 17th Monday the 23rd [please note change of date]:

Photoshop CS6 is one of the biggest releases yet, and there is truly something for everyone. The team has been working hard on new features like Blur Gallery, new Content-Aware tools, the Mercury Graphics Engine, new and re-engineered design tools, and so much more!

We’ll have pizza at 6:30, and the meeting will start at 7:00.

Demo: Correcting GoPro video in Photoshop CS6

I’ve always loved seeing the clever & unexpected ways people combine Photoshop features. Using the CS6 public beta, Stéphane Baril corrects fisheye distortion in video from a GoPro camera using Photoshop’s new Adaptive Wide-Angle Correction feature. Check it out:

April 10, 2012

Layer Cake exports PSDs as separate icons

Layer Cake reads your Photoshop layers, using their names to turn them into separate images for app or Web site.  According to the Mac App Store page:

To turn PSD elements into images for the Web and for Apps, simply name your layer groups once and let Layer Cake do its magic. Bye bye, “Save for Web/Devices”. Hello, boost in productivity and creativity!

Designers and Developers, rejoice — exporting is no longer a workflow killer. Name layer groups like the files you want to create, and Layer Cake will extract them individually. Enjoy complete freedom to move, obscure and even hide these named layer groups without affecting the extracted images.

Perfect for Web graphics and App development — Export to PNG, TIFF, JPG or ICNS. Don’t waste your day flattening or separating elements for slightly easier slicing. Design in context, rename your groups and let Layer Cake do the heavy lifting.”

I really haven’t tested the app & can’t vouch for its image quality relative to Save for Web, but its drag-and-drop simplicity is very nice. If you use it I’m curious to hear your thoughts. [Via Keith Lang]

April 09, 2012

Adobe Shadow demo/Q&A this Friday

Noon Pacific:

Come learn about Adobe Shadow, a new preview and inspection tool for web designers and developers who care about how their sites look on devices. See a demo of Shadow in action, and take the opportunity to ask questions of the Shadow team, and hear where the team is headed with future versions of Shadow. Join Archna Panwar, who focuses on Shadow’s testing strategy, for this guide through the present and exciting future of Adobe Shadow.

In case you haven’t yet seen Shadow, check out this very brief demo:

Adobe’s working on blending modes for HTML

“The better the web, the better tools we can build, and the happier our customers.”

Remember how Adobe’s been working to bring ultrafast image filters to HTML? “More like this, please,” wrote John Gruber.

Well, okay then: now Adobe’s helping bring Photoshop-style blending modes to HTML. The work can enable more beautiful, flexible pages & higher fidelity hand-off from design tools like Photoshop & Illustrator.

A couple of years ago we heard that “CSS is the new Photoshop.” It’s a deliberate overstatement, but the underlying point is true: One can make more & more graphically rich, flexible elements using just markup, not bitmaps. We find that exciting for customers & for the future of Adobe tools.

[Via Narciso Jaramillo]

April 08, 2012

A ride on the Space Shuttle’s booster

Boom:

From the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle, a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound. The sound is all from the camera microphones and not fake or replaced with foley artist sound. The Skywalker sound folks just helped bring it out and make it more audible.

April 07, 2012

“Rear Window,” Remixed

“I dissected all of Hitchcock’s Rear Window and stiched it back together in After Effects,” writes Jeff Desom. “I stabilized all the shots with camera movement in them. Since everything was filmed from pretty much the same angle I was able to match them into a single panoramic view of the entire backyard without any greater distortions. The order of events stays true to the movie’s plot.”

[Via Felix Baum]

April 06, 2012

Demo: Adaptive Wide-Angle Correction in CS6

As I’ve said before:

Artificial intelligence: Good.
Your intelligence: Better.
The two together: Best.

Building on the automated lens correction features we introduced in CS5, Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide-Angle Correction makes it easy to specify constraint lines based on your real-world knowledge:

Bay Area Photoshop meetings next week

• PM Stephen Nielson will be showing off the CS6 beta at Adobe San Jose Tuesday evening starting at 7pm. The registration list is already full (200+ signed up), but you can join the wait list.
• PM Zorana Gee will be presenting CS6 at Adobe San Francisco Thursday evening starting at 6:30. Looks like a few spots remain open on the registration list.

April 05, 2012

Animation: Luminaris

Crazy-lovely French Argentine (?) stop-motion:

The Vimeo page claims “Only available for 2 days,” so you might not want to wait to watch. [Via Matthew Connell]

Sneak peek: InDesign CS6

The new Content Collector tools make it easier to reuse content, whether you’re using it in different ways within the same layout, in multiple layouts within a document, or in more than one document. Check out the 1-minute demo:

Ask A Pro Friday: Best practices for tablet publishing

Demo/Q&A at noon Pacific Friday:

How are you going to author your Digital Publishing Suite content so that it looks good on both the new iPad and on earlier versions? Join Colin Fleming, Adobe Digital Publishing Evangelist, for an Ask a CS Pro session on Friday. Adobe has just updated their guidance on authoring Digital Publishing Suite for the new iPad, and Colin will demonstrate many of these techniques in this session. He will cover:

• Layout design for flexible publishing
• Handling interactive content for two resolutions
• Building folios for “renditions”

April 04, 2012

Imaging geniuses: Photoshop wants you

If you’d like to develop amazing tech like Content-Aware Fill & bring it to millions of people, the Photoshop team may have a job for you.  They’re looking for an experienced imaging engineer to fill the role of Senior Computer Scientist (req. #13612).

I love working with brainiacs like this, and we have a great track record or productizing research (off the top of my head in the last couple of revs of Photoshop: Content-Aware Fill, Content-Aware Scale, advanced blurring, improved sharpening, Puppet Warp, Auto-Align/Auto-Blend Layers, adaptive wide-angle lens correction, and more).  I think you’d really enjoy working with the Photoshop team to put cutting-edge ideas into practice.

Photoshop CS6 demo/Q&A tomorrow

Friday’s demo/Q&A (recorded here) was a hit, and more than 400 people have already RSVP’d for this session at noon Pacific on Thursday:

Downloaded Photoshop CS6 beta and got questions? Join Sr. Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes this Thursday, 4/5 for a LIVE demo! He’ll take you on a tour of the new features and share expert tips and tricks. If you have any specific questions for Bryan about the beta, leave a comment below – you may see it answered during the demo session! Sign in as a guest for a special tour of the new features and some expert tips and tricks.

Sneak peek of fluid grid layouts in Dreamweaver CS6

What’s coming in Dreamweaver CS6? Check out a sneak peek of Fluid grid layouts, a tool that makes your web designs more adaptive to different screen sizes. Now designing for multiple screens is easier than ever!

FontShop enables live previews inside Photoshop

Well isn’t this clever:

The FontShop Plugin Beta allows designers and other type enthusiasts to try out FontShop fonts directly inside Adobe® Photoshop® CS5 and CS5.5. You can preview any of the over 150,000 FontShop fonts for free, in the context of your own artwork.

Fonts are previewed as bitmaps rather than live, editable text. Text layers are auto-hidden while the bitmap versions are shown.

It seems the plug-in doesn’t yet work properly inside the Photoshop CS6 beta, so you might need to choose the CS5 version of Extension Manager to install it inside CS5.

[Via]

April 03, 2012

Video: Creating stunning images in Lightroom 4

Julieanne Kost shows how to crop, remove lens distortion, correct perspective, make global and local color and tonal corrections in the Lightroom 4 Develop module. Note that Photoshop CS6 includes the same engine in Camera Raw 7, so these tips apply there as well.

Photoshop CS6 demo/Q&A recording now available

In this Ask A CS Pro session, Photoshop PM Zorana Gee shows every major feature in the new public beta release. She not only provides detailed tips, but also addresses common questions from the large live audience. Dozens more questions are covered in the interactive chat pod. [Via]

A trippy “Shining”

Topi Kauppinen creates a really uncanny effect, turning 2D stills from The Shining into 3D:

He explains the process on Vimeo:

“The overlapping parts must be photoshopped [*Cough* -- Adobe brand cops] so that in the end everything comes together without any seams or texture repetition. The Content Aware Fill feature found in Photoshop CS5 is a godsend for this type of work.”

[Via]

April 02, 2012

New videos cover 3D in CS6

Photoshop team member Daniel Presedo has posted a series of short videos meant to make you productive quickly using Photoshop CS6′s totally revamped 3D tools.  Photoshop PM Zorana Gee writes:

I’m really excited about the overhaul of the 3D features in Photoshop CS6 beta (Extended). The main focus we have is with performance (both interactivity as well as performance) and usability. You’ll notice that we added some great additions like live, re-editable 3D type; easy extrude operations; a single tool (the Move Tool) to adjust the position of all the elements in your scene; and many other great additions. Designers wanting to integrate 3D objects into their composites or create simple 3D geometries from type, paths, etc. will find that 3D in Photoshop is really powerful and fun to use.

Please let us know if you have specific tutorials you’d like to see and myself as well as some folks from the team will be happy to start sharing them.

April 01, 2012

Configurator 3 is coming for CS6

I’m pleased to say that Adobe Configurator, the easy, drag-and-drop tool for creating panels for Photoshop and InDesign, is being revved for CS6 & is due to arrive when CS6 ships for real (i.e. not as a beta).  Among the new features in development:

• Supports Photoshop CS5/5.1 and CS6
• Supports InDesign CS5/5.5 and CS6
• Supports the new dynamic color theme switching (dark backgrounds) in Photoshop CS6
• Lets you migrate existing Configurator 2 panels to create both CS5- & CS6-compatible panels
• Launches much more quickly than Configurator 2
• Renews a focus on tutorials, offering easy leveraging of exiting HTML, video and audio content–great for developers, trainers and general users

The new version of Configurator is required for converting Configurator-made panels for CS4 and CS5 to run in CS6. If you need access to it now, please visit the Configurator forum & drop a note to Jonathan Ferman & team.

Advanced Book Features in Lightroom 4

Julieanne Kost drills into the details of this long-awaited & much-requested feature:

March 31, 2012

Animation: Alternate Mad Men titles

[Contains some profanity & a few risqué bits, so please move on if that offends you]

[Via Chris Peppel]

Design HTML5 visually with Adobe Muse beta 7

Generating lots of excitement, and getting better with each rev:

With this Beta 7 release, you can expect incredible improvements to performance and a significantly more streamlined workflow for previewing and publishing your sites, plus a host of bug fixes and enhancements. Muse will also be part of the upcoming Creative Cloud Membership! For a complete list of updates, visit the Muse Beta 7 blog post.

March 30, 2012

Creating HTML Canvas content with Flash Pro

Let’s get a lot more people making animated HTML5 content. To do that, we need to lower the barriers to entry. Letting the hundreds of thousands of people with Flash skills leverage those skills is a good solid step. Flash PM Tom Barclay shows how the Toolkit for CreateJS can help smooth the transition from ActionScript development to the JavaScript world.

And here Christian Cantrell goes into a bit more depth around things like sprite sheets:

March 29, 2012

Lightroom 4.1 Now Available on Adobe Labs

Lightroom 4.1 is now available as Release Candidates on Adobe Labs.  It adds support for the Canon 5D Mk III and, according to the Lightroom Journal, fixes a number of bugs:

• Point Curve adjustments made in Lightroom 3 and before have been restored.
• Lightroom 4 did not properly open external applications when using the “Edit In” functionality.
• Addressed performance issues in Lightroom 4, particularly when loading GPS track logs, using a secondary monitor, and the controls within the Develop module.
• Ability to update DNG previews and metadata for more than 100 photos has been restored.
• This update allows for improved viewing of subfolders and stacks in folders with a large number of photos.
• It was possible that a layout of a saved book could be lost after quitting Lightroom 4.
• Please provide feedback on your experience with the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate in our feedback portal.

Demo: Lighting Effects in CS6

For years, at the start of every Photoshop cycle, some version of the following conversation repeated itself:

“People really love Lighting Effects, but we haven’t touched it in *years*.”
“Yeah, there’s so much cool stuff we could do there! This should really be a major investment.”
“Ah, but we can’t this time… Could we at least just make the dang preview window bigger?”
“Well, that code was written on punch cards during the Nixon Administration, and the effect should really just work on canvas (no preview window at all), so really we should rewrite everything, but…”

…and so on.

At last, though, the team has had time to deliver something that’s worth the wait. Check out the goodness in action:

Video: Ballet at 1,000fps

Lovely: Marina Kanno & Giacomo Bevilaqua from Staatsballett Berlin fly in ultra slow-mo, captured at 1000 frames per second.

[Via]

March 28, 2012

Photoshop CS6 beta: 500,000+ downloads & counting

I’m delighted to see that the Photoshop CS6 beta has been downloaded more than half a million times in less than a week!  The response I’ve seen so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

Nice press quotes:

• Gizmodo: “Photoshop CS6: The Best Update In Recent Memory“
• PC Magazine:
  • “The future of creative image editing is upon us.
  • “You would think that after a program has been the leader in its field for over 20 years, there wouldn’t be much to add. But quite the opposite is the case with Adobe Photoshop CS6.
  • “The new version will thrill nearly all categories of users, from photographers to designers.
  • “All of this adds up to a superb upgrade that should make anyone serious about image editing salivate over Photoshop CS6.”
• Wired: ”Content-aware brushes, Liquify filter and new Blur tool will amaze. In-app search is a huge time-saver for sifting through giant stacks of layers.”
• USA Today: “We’ve been testing CS6 for the last week, and having lots of fun with the new tools. The new interface is a huge improvement — the images really do look sharper and more pronounced.”

And from some designers I follow on Twitter:

• “I’ll use it for a few days so I can give a better assessment, but so far: ball out of the park.” — Neven Mrgan
• “I’ve been using PS CS6 for a while, and it’s been sweet… The truth is that CS6 has a bunch of changes that make my life a lot better but may piss off some users. Which is great. Adobe did well.” — Sebastiaan de With
• “I think the community at large agrees: PS6 is an incredible update.” — Cameron Moll

Thanks for the kind words, guys!

Sneak Peek: Illustrator CS6 vector pattern creation

I guess I can now reply to those asking: yes, the interface is (optionally) dark. :-)

Photoshop online seminars this week

• On Thursday Photoshop diva Katrin Eismann will be talking photography, color management, and more. She’ll show off Smart Objects, Smart Filters, HDR creation using Nik’s HDR Efex Pro, and black & white conversion with Nik’s Silver Efex Pro. Sessions are at 12pm & 2pm Eastern. Register here.
• On Friday Photoshop PM Zorana Gee will show new features in the Photoshop CS6 beta. She’ll give you an overview of the release as well as some tips and tricks on how to get started. The session is at 12pm Eastern. Register here.

March 27, 2012

Video: The Adobe Digital Imaging Team at Photoshop World 2012

Straight from the show floor. (I can vouch for background saving drawing cheers.)

A new color-picking panel for Photoshop

Check out the latest from Anastasiy Safari:

Did you know that computer-based color schemes do not correspond to fine art ones? Where you expect green to be a complement color to red, the computer gives you cyan. Why is that? Because computers usually use a HSV color model, while classic painters use a completely different color wheel. And it’s available now exclusively to Photoshop in the MagicPicker color wheel panel! Painters, photographers, designers and everyone else can know use their knowledge of classic arts. They can build their unique color schemes based on intuitive, real-world paint behavior.

MagicPicker 2.1 also brings a Photoshop CS6 beta support and a significant speed increase.

The full version costs $14.

Update: Here’s a screenshot:

Hitchcock on happiness

Unfettered creative impact; yep, seems about right.

March 26, 2012

Demo: Filter layers by name, type in Photoshop CS6

Sometimes the best things are the smallest. I’m so weirdly proud of the layer searching shortcuts in PS CS6.

• You can hit Cmd-Opt-Shift-F to put focus on the Layers panel’s new search field. Start typing and Photoshop will start displaying only the layers whose names match.
• Hitting the same command highlights the text in the field, letting you start typing again to filter with a new string.
• Hitting Delete clears the field, making Layers display all layers again.
• Hitting Return/Enter will put keyboard focus back onto PS proper (consistent with how other text fields work in the app). Esc does the same but also cancels whatever change you just made.

Note that clearing the field isn’t the same as toggling filtering on/off with the little red switch to the right. Why? Because toggling the switch is non-destructive: You can set up filtering criteria (e.g. show me all text & adjustment layers), then quickly enable/disable filtering; you don’t have to keep setting up the parameters.

A big deal, used by tons & tons of people? Maybe not. But to me it speaks volumes about quality and craftsmanship, and God help me, I live for this stuff.

Here Grant Friedman of PSDTUTS quickly demos the basics:

March 25, 2012

Demo: How to use type styles in CS6

The #1 feature requested by Web designers has been type styles–the ability to modify one style definition & update multiple text layers at once. Now the feature is ready to use in the Photoshop CS6 beta. Deke McClelland shows you how:

March 24, 2012

PS CS6 drops Vista, 32-bit Mac support

I know it’ll seem odd, but Photoshop CS6 supports Windows XP and not (officially) Windows Vista. It’s all about spending finite resources wisely, and Jeff Tranberry explains the thinking in ”Photoshop CS6 Operating System Support…and beyond.”

Experience human flight

[Filed under "The Farthest Possible Thing From What I'm Doing While Watching Saturday Morning Vids with Kids"]

[Via ]

March 23, 2012

Great places to learn about Photoshop CS6

• Scott Kelby & his crew have created a terrific CS6 learning center, featuring a couple of dozen videos plus a one-page summary of all the new stuff and a summary of “What to Expect if You Skipped CS5 & Now Want CS6.”
• Deke McClelland goes deep with 27 video tutorials Lynda.com.
• Jeff Tranberry is maintaining a list of tutorials, reviews, and other resources.

More great content is going live all the time, so feel free to mention good things we may have missed.

Check out new Content-Aware tech in CS6

Artificial intelligence + your intelligence = good things.

PS Touch, Ideas bundled with new Galaxy Note

Says Engadget:

PS Touch is the Note 10.1′s undisputed S-Pen gem. Creative pros will find comfort in this tablet adaptation of Adobe’s über-popular Photoshop program, as most of the features, though laid out differently, remain intact. While it’s not a complete replacement for a desktop graphics workstation, the app does give pros some flexibility, letting them create on-the-go much the same way they’d do in the office or at home.

[Via Stephen Nielson]

March 22, 2012

CS6 is the biggest Web/screen design upgrade in 12 years

If you design apps, Web pages, or anything else for the screen, you need to check out this terrific overview of Photoshop CS6 improvements from UI design expert Marc Edwards.  A few of my favorites:

• Real strokes (including dashes) on vectors, with a faster (Options Bar) way to edit them
• Type styles (both character & paragraph)
• Better font anti-aliasing
• Path snapping & anti-aliasing improvements (critical for exacting work)
• Layer search/filtering (e.g. show me just the type layers in this doc)
• Multiple strokes per layer (you can apply a new vector stroke + a traditional layer effect stroke, and by applying layer effects at the group level, you can effectively put multiple sets of layer effects on each layer)

…and that’s a truncated list. Check out Marc’s article for more.

We had so many of these improvements in mind for many years, but other work like the Cocoa & 64-bit transitions kept getting in the way. (Type styles & layer searching almost made the cut for CS5.)  It’s not since Photoshop 6.0, which introduced shape layers & which was released back in 2000, that the team has made this much progress for Web/UI folks in one rev. We hope you like it.

[By the way, if you're stuck on CS4 or earlier, you can also check out all the Web/screen enhancements we made in CS5, too.]

March 21, 2012

Come download Photoshop CS6!

I’m delighted to announce that a preview release of Photoshop CS6 is available for download from Adobe Labs.  New awesomeness:

Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop. Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.

New and re-engineered design tools — Create superior designs fast. Get consistent formatting with type styles, create and apply custom strokes and dashed lines to shapes, quickly search layers, and much more.

Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.

Here Russell Brown shows off his six favorite features (Camera Raw enhancements, wide-angle image correction, Blur Gallery, and more):

And here Julieanne Kost shows off her six favorite features, including type styles (!), vector layers with real stroke & fill (!!), video editing, and more:

There’s much more info to come, and I look forward to zeroing in on the Web & app design features especially. In the meantime, go grab yourself a copy, and check out the user forum to ask the team questions & share your feedback.

Adobe Ideas gets new features on iOS, Android

Adobe Ideas 1.6 for iOS is now live in the App Store. New features:

• Easily pick up colors using the new Eyedropper tool
• Choose colors using new HSB and RGB color pickers
• Drag and drop to save your own color themes
• Name your ideas to distinguish them on your device and for easier sharing
• Use up to 10 drawing layers for each sketch at no extra cost

Ideas 1.5.1 for Android is live in Google Play. This version will also be bundled with the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. New features:

• Bug fixes, including a fix for a problem with sign-in to the Creative Cloud on Android 4.0 (ICS)
• Support for Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 S-Pen

Metadata can kill you

How’s that for a salacious, click-baiting title? But this bit from the US Army is eye-opening:

A real-world example from 2007: When a new fleet of helicopters arrived with an aviation unit at a base in Iraq, some soldiers took pictures on the flightline, he said. From the photos that were uploaded to the Internet, the enemy was able to determine the exact location of the helicopters inside the compound and conduct a mortar attack, destroying four of the AH-64 Apaches.

[Via John Dowdell]

March 20, 2012

Video: Base jumping in Singapore

“What could make the view from the infinity pool atop the Marina Bay Sands casino, soaring some 55 stories above Singapore, even more surreal?,” asks Core77. “Human bodies jumping off of the roof behind you.”

March 19, 2012

CSS Regions: One Year In

To make tablet publications lighter weight & more dynamic (offering liquid layout, etc.), publishers need HTML to get smarter.  Otherwise, to get the layout richness their brands require, they’re stuck with things like creating huge piles of PNGs.

That’s why Adobe’s been helping advance proposals for CSS Regions & Exclusions.  To hear about the progress they’re making, check out CSS Regions: One Year In. (For background, see the demo below from a couple of months back.)

Come help us make WebKit more kickass

“The better the web, the better tools we can build, and the happier our customers.” With that in mind, Adobe’s putting more & more muscle into advancing HTML standards & helping rendering engines support them.

Adobe’s WebKit Contributions group is improving the web as a platform for applications by implementing features that enable new classes of applications, new levels of application richness, and by improving the tools web developers use to create, debug, profile, test and maintain applications. Features are developed in the open and contributed to WebKit trunk. This group works closely with web application developers and the web standards community to identify opportunities for improvement.

Currently open positions:

• Engineering Manager – WebKit Development — 11843
• Sr. Computer Scientist – WebKit Development — 11836
• Computer Scientist – WebKit Development — 11835
• WebKit Engineering Intern — 13714
• QE developer for WebPlatform/WebKit — 13989

Just type in the corresponding job number, or simply search for “WebKit.” Hope to meet you soon!

March 18, 2012

A new Lightroom 4 video workshop

Former Adobe evangelist George Jardine is now offering the Adobe Lightroom 4 Video Workshop, 16 new tutorials that focus on the Library workflow & digital asset management:

This all-new set of 16 video tutorials gives you over 6 hours of the very best online education available. It covers the Adobe Lightroom 4 Library and your digital photo library management from top to bottom. We start from the ground up, and guide any serious photographer—professional or passionate amateur—through the process of building an easy-to-use, but incredibly effective digital photo library. The complete series is only $24.95.

A sample video (“Collections & Virtual Copies”) is available to check out.

Jumping rope, from the rope’s point of view

Oddly fascinating (and non-sickness-inducing):

[Via]

March 17, 2012

[OT] Bay Area Lego shindig tomorrow

On Monday at Pixar (where the lobby is adorned with giant Lego Woody & Buzz), I overheard not one but two groups of fellow nerds excitedly discussing Bricks By The Bay, happening this weekend in Santa Clara.  Our boys have been counting the days ever since. Hope to see you there!

March 16, 2012

A kid’s Rube Goldberg monster trap

So great.

[Via]

A sneak of Photoshop.next’s new 3D chops

It’s about usability (think “3D for the rest of us”) and performance:

Motion graphics: A Hunter S. Thompson homage… for a bookstore?

“It is not very often that we have the opportunity to create a graphic equivalent of a drug-fueled rant bringing all of our collective skills to bear,” writes the team at Buck. “And it is almost unfathomable that we could actually do something like this and benefit a good cause.”

The project promotes Good Books, an online bookseller that passes all its profits through to Oxfam. [Via Russell Williams]

March 15, 2012

Conan’s editors have fun with Premiere Pro.next

Remember Conan O’Brien’s editors’ gag “endorsement” of the new Final Cut Pro? Turns out they’ve taken a real shine to Premiere Pro. Check out their demo of “the Freddy Mercury Playback Engine” and more:

Working on my mustache & perm,
John Adobe

Do not taunt Angry Time Machine

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. — Not Jack Handey

If you’ve had trouble backing up your Mac via Time Machine–as I did once I installed Lion–do not, for the love of God, push your luck and try to use Time Machine to migrate data from one Mac to another. Just don’t.

Details if you want ‘em:

Post-10.7, I couldn’t update my backups on my Drobo and Time Capsule, nor could I get one to work on the new USB 3.0 drive I bought for the job. When I tried a fresh FireWire drive, however, everything seemed cool. Thus when my new Mac arrived, I tried transferring apps & data via the Migration Assistant.

And now begins the screamin’ & the wailin’: The apps that made it over were all zero KB, and files never transferred. Not a big deal, I thought: I can just re-install apps & move files manually.  The trouble is, when I tried to install Apple Motion, I got a series of errors about missing files (ProKit). I tried various work arounds, including installing the FCP X trial.  Soon, though, all the Apple apps, as well as iPhoto, were crashing on launch.  It seems that the failed app migration stomped a bunch of critical libraries.

Here’s the excellent part, though: Lion’s airbag works great.  At the advice of my exhausted Apple friend (who’d been supplying would-be fixes), I finally reinstalled the OS. Fearing the worst (bare-metal, nuke-from-orbit, dogs-and-cats-living-together stuff), I backed up my files and blocked off a bunch of time. I still cannot believe how well it went: restarted the machine, held down Cmd-R, okayed a couple of prompts, and half an hour later 10.7.3 was up and running as if nothing had happened.  Everything (open docs, browser history, passwords, etc.) was restored.  I’m still kind of holding my breath, but so far, so amazingly good.  Hats off to the Apple folks behind this capability.

March 14, 2012

Behind the Splash Screen: Bryan O’Neil Hughes

So, how does one become a Photoshop product manager, and what does one actually do? Bryan briefly tells his story:

Brad Bird on morale

Via his Pixar colleague Michael Johnson:

In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

March 13, 2012

Interview: Adobe inside the CSS Working Group

Eng manager Arno Gourdol nails it:

We are in a unique position: we have deep expertise in relevant areas (typography, animation, layout, digital imaging, video and so on) and we have a deep understanding of the needs of creative customers who want to use the web to express themselves. We can represent their point of view and advocate on their behalf. The better the web, the better tools we can build, and the happier our customers.

Check out the rest of his interview with Molly Holzschlag for details (Adobe’s priorities on CSS; Regions & Exclusions; Shaders; and more).

Who do I fear being at work?

This guy.

[I find myself making this joke when I actually do connect people who wouldn't otherwise talk (different teams, engineers with customers, etc.). Still, it's an odd job where one doesn't often *build* anything specific.]

Geotagging in Lightroom 4

Terry White shows how to use the new map module in Lightroom 4 to geotag photos using a .GPX log file, as well as how to do reverse lookup.

March 12, 2012

Photoshop.next to get new video chops

If we didn’t spill the beans in the first frames, I’d ask what app you thought created this clip:

So, why do work like this in Photoshop and not, say, Premiere Pro? Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes shares some thoughts here.

Adobe Edge (HTML5 animation) Preview 5 is available

Sounds like a lot of great stuff in the new build (available free on Adobe Labs):

New Publishing and Optimization Features:

• Publish to web: Preview 5  has an option to specify if jQuery should be packaged with the composition, or downloaded from a CDN to produce lighter code and improve caching.
• Down-level browser support: Define a fallback state of a composition for non-HTML5 browsers like IE8 and below.
• Preloader improvements: Choose what gets shown during the preloader (before the framework, jQuery, or composition is loaded).

Emphasis on animation:

• Timeline: We made several significant improvements to the timeline that make composing animations much easier and faster, such as an easier to use Pin (formerly the Mark) and smarter playback behavior.
• On-stage tools: New clip and transform tools make it easier to manipulate objects and create animation effects.

Many other enhancements:

• Improved symbol functionality, stage editing options, the ability to swap images, more intuitive contextual menus, many bug fixes, and much more have been added to preview 5.

March 11, 2012

Japan’s tsunami zone, now & then

The Big Picture features a striking set of images comparing the tsunami/earthquake/nuclear zone exactly one year after the disaster. Click on each image to see the scene today compared with the moments of chaos. [Via John Dowdell]

Illustration: Toy Shining

I’ve previously mentioned artist Kyle Lambert & his amazing work done in Adobe Ideas. Now he’s created a rather incredible homage to The Shining, all painted using the Brushes app:

March 10, 2012

“What happened to Fill Light and Recovery?”

The Lightroom team has evolved the editing control set in the just-released LR4, replacing a couple of popular but sometimes problematic controls:

Recovery can result in muddy highlights, and Fill Light can lead to visible halos at high-contrast boundaries. Furthermore, it is difficult to transfer the technology behind these controls to local adjustments.

With Process Version 2012 in Lightroom 4, we have introduced a new set of Basic tone controls that overcomes these limitations and results in much higher image quality. For example, the Highlights and Shadows tools are optimized for very high contrast images, produce much smoother highlight and shadow gradations, are available as local adjustments, and minimize halo artifacts.

Check out the Lightroom Journal for more details. [Via Jan Kabili]

Mercedes makes a real-world Content-Aware Fill

Brilliant use of LEDs & cameras:

[Via Rob Cantor]

March 09, 2012

The story of Keep Calm and Carry On

“Did you know,” asks Kottke, “that this British WWII poster was never distributed to the public and was discovered only recently in an English book shop?” It’s adorned my Mac for years, but I had no idea. Three interesting minutes:

I kind of like this variation, and this one.

You’ll never believe this was done in Flash

Or that it’s shown running on an iPad. It was & it is, though. Long live the new Stage 3D:

Get the app here. [Via Tomas Krcha]

March 08, 2012

Hasselblad cameras will ship with Lightroom 4

Badasses unite:

Hasselblad’s Chris Russell-Fish said: “Integrating the Adobe platform with Hasselblad is a ground-breaking step… [N]ow all users can have the excellence of a Hasselblad image file married to the functionality and ease of use of Adobe Lightroom.”

Hasselblad customers who buy new medium format H4D cameras will receive Lightroom 4 software with their new camera equipment at no additional cost.”

Digital Publishing Suite to support the new iPad

Good news:

When the new iPad ships, Digital Publishing Suite customers will have support for these new features in the enterprise-signed Adobe Content Viewer. This means you’ll be able to display stunning, full-bleed, immersive publications using every pixel of the 2048 x 1536 display with richer color saturation using Adobe Content Viewer technology.  When the newest build of Content Viewer is approved in the Apple App Store, these features will be supported in all published new iPad applications.

Learn more about how to start publishing with DPS.

March 07, 2012

Introducing Adobe Shadow for mobile development

Emulators only get you so far, and that’s where the new Adobe Shadow comes in:

Web pros can wirelessly pair multiple smartphones and tablets with their computer and simultaneously view real-time previews of Web content across multiple iOS and Android devices, quickly seeing refreshed website designs with live updates… Adobe Shadow’s synchronized browsing nearly eliminates the need to touch the device, but still provides a real, on-device experience.

Adobe Shadow is available now, in English, worldwide on Adobe Labs. It’s made of several components, including Mac and Windows desktop software, a Google Chrome extension for desktop browser synchronization, and mobile apps for iOS and Android tablets and phones. Free Android and iOS applications for Adobe Shadow are currently available in the Android Market and the iTunes Store.

Check it out and let us know what you think via the forum on Labs.

Russell Brown shows basic retouching in PS Touch

March 06, 2012

Aching for better iOS app integration

[Disclosures: If I had any inside info, I obviously couldn't share it here, and I've been hopeful/disappointed on this subject before.]

Poor integration leads to bloated apps: if jumping among apps/modules is slow, customers gravitate towards all-in-one tools that offer more overall efficiency, even if the individual pieces are lacking.

Today I saw Neven Mrgan writing, of iPad photo apps,

[I]t’s just so much more convenient to stay in the canonical photo store; importing and exporting photos to and from another app is clumsier.

I experienced the pain, over and over, on my trip to Guatemala.  Having taken just my iPad & Camera Connection Kit, I was eager to put a variety of photo tools to the test.  Moving among apps was far & away the crappiest part of the experience.  For example:

• I’d review images in Photos, where I can see them nice and large. But I can’t say “Open in App X,” so…
• I’d leave Photos, launch Snapseed, bring up the tiny, default image browser component, navigate to the same point in my photo library, and then try to pick the same image I’d just been looking at in Photos.
• After editing, I’d hit Save, and images would go into the Camera Roll (not Imports, where I’d been browsing them).  Thus I couldn’t see the edited images alongside the originals.
• After repeating the process many times, I’d go to Flickr Studio, then carefully & laboriously add photos from various albums.  (The app doesn’t let you re-order images, so I had to dive into the albums again & again just to get the sequence right.)
• At last I’d upload.

This really, really sucked.  Far more desirable:

• Browse the images in the browser of my choice (Photos or something else–one that could, say, flag/sort/whittle down images, local or remote).
• Tap one or more images and say “Send to App X” (to build a panorama, composite in PS Touch, apply a tilt shift blur, whatever)–no manual navigating to the other apps, no navigating back to the photos.
• Be able to save, return to my browser, and see the edited image alongside the original.
• Hand off one or more images to the sharing tool of my choice.

Let’s not bloat PS Touch with every damn filter we can think of; rather, let’s have a great way to pass data back and forth, so that apps can function as plug-ins to one another. (PhotoAppLink is a nice start, but we need something universal.)  And let’s not all bloat our apps reinventing the image browser, integrating the same sharing services over & over, etc.  There’s a far more elegant way to proceed.

Tangential: Neven also writes,

The iPad is too big to shoot with; the iPhone is too small to edit on. Bridging the two is fine in theory, but in practice there’s the hairy matter of extremely large file sizes.

But why is it that my phone or tablet can send HD video streams instantly to my TV, yet they can’t send photos or video to each other (or to my Mac)?  To put a phone video onto my Mac, I have to upload the whole thing to something like Dropbox, then download it again; isn’t that kind of bizarre?  I really thought that AirDrop would sort things out; hope springs eternal.

Camera Raw 6.7 available on Adobe Labs

Camera Raw 6.7 (required for full compatibility between Lightroom 4.0 and Photoshop CS5) & the free DNG Converter (which can make your raw files readable by any DNG-capable app, including older versions of Photoshop & Lightroom) are available as release candidates from Adobe Labs. New cameras supported:

• Canon EOS 1D X
• Canon EOS 5D Mk III
• Canon PowerShot G1 X
• Canon PowerShot S100V
• Fuji FinePix F505EXR
• Fuji FinePix F605EXR
• Fuji FinePix HS30EXR
• Fuji FinePix HS33EXR
• Fuji FinePix X-S1
• Nikon D4
• Nikon D800
• Nikon D800E

See the Lightroom Journal for a full list of camera profiles added.

Lightroom 4 arrives (at a great new price, too)

I’m delighted to say that Lightroom 4 is now available!  Tom Hogarty writes,

With over 300,000 downloads of the Lightroom 4 public beta we’ve heard some resounding feedback that photographers would like to start using Lightroom 4 on a daily basis and migrate their previous Lightroom work to this latest version.

We’re also excited to announce new pricing for Lightroom 4: $149 for those new to Lightroom and $79 for the Upgrade and Student/Teacher editions.  (You can upgrade from any version of Lightroom to Lightroom 4)

• Download Lightroom 4.0
• Get Started with Julieanne Kost’s fantastic video tutorial series

Changes since the public beta:

• Reverse geocoding now available in the Map Module
• Revamped and improved auto tone in Develop based on new controls
• Increased range of local white balance controls (temperature and tint)
• Updated Develop presets plus added new presets for video
• Maximum Blurb book size is now 240 pages
• Over 800 bugs found and fixed! (Thank you Lightroom 4 beta customers!)

Check out the rest of Tom’s post for additional details about camera & profiles now supported, etc. And happy shooting!

[PS--Customer feedback I just happened to see on Prodig list: "The new way of organizing the Raw adjustment sliders is to die for… You can fix your histogram with precision like a lepidopterist pinning a butterfly to a board." -- Robert Workman. Nice!]

March 05, 2012

Dual-iPad 3 concept video

Watch it now, before reality intrudes. :-)

(So what if such displays apparently can’t be manufactured right now?)

See how After Effects & Premiere were used to make “Hugo”

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Visual Effects used the Creative Suite on set:

March 04, 2012

Design: Truthful posters, Saul meets Spider-Man, & more

• Mike del Mundo has created a Spider-Man-themed homage to Saul Bass.
• Speed lines! Kang Duck-bong uses PVC pipes to create sculptures that appear to be moving. [Via]
• Posted:
  • Mubi collects some of the best movie posters of 2011. [Via]
  • “Extremely Lame & Incredibly Cloying”: Truthful posters for this year’s Oscar nominees.
• Photography
  • Lightboys worked for two years to create the large-format “Polaboy, an LED-backlit photographic frame that is a direct 10:1 scaling up of a Polaroid snapshot.”
  • Retronaut shows off Shackleton’s 1915 Antartica excursion–in color.

March 03, 2012

Star Wars Rorschach

Oh yes:

Does anyone know what software produces animations like these? [Via ]

March 02, 2012

Collaborative drawing: Is there a “there” there?

The $4 Sketchshare enables realtime collaborative drawing, complete with voice chat among participants. Here’s a quick demo:

Do people actually do collaborative, realtime document editing–and if so, under what circumstances? Painter tried it in the 90′s with NetPainter (which only I & John Derry, who worked at Fractal back then, seem to remember), and I’ve seen tons of tools come & go over the years. Drawing is, for most people, difficult; we feel weird being watched; and we don’t like to watch others draw badly (or maybe even draw well in realtime).

And yet, and yet… I remain kind of fascinated by Layer Tennis, Mixel, and other collaboration efforts. Are there specific, real-world cases where you’d use tools like these–e.g. when brainstorming/moodboarding with teammates? And if so, do you use such tools (and if not, why not?).

In a slightly related vein, Draw Something makes collaborative drawing into a game (sort of mobile Pictionary), and apparently 2 million people are using it every day (!!).

Reflection app displays your iPad/iPhone on your Mac

I’ve lugged too many clumsy, heavy cameras around, then set up crappy video mirroring in order to give ill-lit, high-latency app demos. I’ve been excited at the prospect of using Thunderbolt to connect iPad HDMI into my Mac, but that would require hundreds of dollars worth of external hardware & cables. I think that all just went out the window: for $15 Reflection will mirror your iPad 2 or iPhone 4S onto your Mac desktop. I just installed the trial version and it works beautifully. Done & done. [Via]

Import photos from Android into Adobe Revel

Check it:

Take photos with an Android phone? To easily add them to your Adobe Revel photo library, put the Adobe Revel Importer app on your Android phone (OS2.2 or later) and then choose photos to import or set the app to auto-import all your shots. The app is free with your Adobe Revel subscription—get it today in the Android Marketplace.

March 01, 2012

Q&A tomorrow: Creative Cloud membership

[Update: This session has been postponed until Friday the 16th.]

Noon Pacific on Friday:

Join Evangelist Paul Trani and Product Manager Yashodhan Gokhale for this hour-long session and learn how the Adobe Creative Cloud is going to reinvent the creative process. You’ll see how members can access all Adobe Creative Suite CS6 desktop tools, Adobe Touch Apps, and Adobe services allowing them to take creative ideas from concept to publishing–at breakthrough pricing starting at US$49.99 per month.

[Update: You can log into the Connect room when the session starts (or a bit beforehand).]

The City of Samba

“Just when you think tilt shift may be overdone,” Todd Dominey writes, “this comes along. Glorious.” If nothing else make sure to see the Carnival section that starts around 2:20.

Stop-motion Lego pizza delivery

I really can’t overstate the pleasure our lads have taken in watching these clips. Props & thanks to Michael Hickox.

(It probably shouldn’t have been a “teachable moment” for learning the term coldcock–but c’est la guerre.)

February 29, 2012

“Confessions of a Printmaker” tomorrow eve in SF

Mark Lindsay will be presenting at Adobe San Francisco tomorrow night starting at 6:30. Mark will discuss:

• Ink Gamut: Knowing the limitations of printed color
• Soft-Proofing: How to anticipate print appearance before printing
• Print Options: Photoshop workflows for inkjet, digital, and offset lithography
• Sharpening: Advanced sharpening techniques for fine printmaking
• Paper Profiles: How to make them, where to get them, how to use them
• Color Management: The best color settings for Photoshop
• Color Correction: Solving basic and tricky color problems
• Special Print Problems: A bag of tricks for a world of problems
• CMYK: The other color space
• Paper: Best selection for outstanding prints
• On Press: Effective press checks

Photoshop.next sneak: Iris Blur

Hardware-accelerated selective blurs with direct manipulation? Yes please.

For your convenience I’ve grouped these sneak-peek videos in a single category.

Side note–and I debate whether to mention this: there’s no real need to comment (as someone does on every sneak), “What, that’s all there is…?”–because no, that’s not all there is. A peek is, by definition, “a quick and typically furtive look.” It’s just meant to pique your interest, not to show a whole product release (or even a whole feature).

A Photoshop engineer vs. the exploitation of kids

A few years ago, John Penn was invited to attend the Internet Crimes Against Children Conference and share his knowledge as a Photoshop engineer. The experience changed his life. Now he’s a Senior Solutions Architect helping law enforcement agencies around the world use Photoshop to combat the exploitation of children.

February 28, 2012

16 million Adobe-powered tablet publications

…and that’s in just the past 12 months. The Adobe Digital Publishing Suite is en fuego. According to VentureBeat,

Currently, there are 1,500 iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook, Samsung Galaxy, and other Android tablet publications created with DPS, including 12 out of the 20 top-grossing iPad Newsstand titles.

The first promising stat is that tablet publications keep readers’ attention, with 56 percent of DPS content being read for 25 minutes to 2.5 hours each month. Nine percent of readers spend up to 5 hours a month reading tablet publications.

Check out the team’s press release for more details & customer quotes.

“Act of Valor” made in Adobe tools

Bandito Brothers used Premiere Pro, After Effects, Illustrator, and more to produce Act of Valor. It’s cool to see the new Warp Stabilizer getting used on the big screen. Check out this 3-minute overview:

[Via Bill Roberts]

February 27, 2012

Terry White shows Photoshop Touch

Skala Preview: Send from Photoshop to iOS

This is very cool. Skala Preview says it offers ”The fastest way to send pixel perfect, color-perfect design previews from your Mac to your iPhone or iPad.” Here’s the neat bit:

If you’re using Photoshop CS5 12.0.4 or newer, Skala Preview can preview your canvas as you edit. No saving, no keyboard shortcuts, just lossless previews in realtime. It is the absolute fastest way to preview a design mock up on an iOS device.

I’ve just given it a try, and dang if it doesn’t work like a champ. Nice going, guys!

Live Photoshop Touch demos this week

• The NAPP guys are presenting PS Touch today at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific on Kelby TV, and again tomorrow at noon Eastern/9am Pacific.
• Julieanne Kost will be presenting on Thursday at noon Eastern/9am Pacific and again at 3pm Eastern/noon Pacific.

[Time zone calculator]

February 26, 2012

Photoshop Touch for iPad is here!

I’m delighted to say that Photoshop Touch for iPad 2 is now available in the App Store! You’ve probably already seen my overview of it…

…but better yet is this testimonial from legitimately kickass artist Brian Yap:

The sort of free-range ideation & expression that Brian describes is just what we had in mind when building PS Touch. I’ve also rounded up Russell Brown’s great videos, which are full of quick, useful tips & techniques.

We honestly can’t wait to hear what you think & to see what you can create.  Photoshop Touch is just a v1 app–a first step on what we hope is a long and interesting road–but we think you’ll find it pretty capable. Check out the user forum to let us know your thoughts.

Now, let me anticipate two questions which go hand in hand: Why does the app require an iPad 2, and why is the maximum image size 1600x1600px? The iPad 2 has twice the RAM, twice the processing cores, and ~5x the graphics grunt of the iPad 1. PS Touch brings some seriously powerful algorithms (e.g. Refine Edge) from the desktop to mobile, and we wanted to ensure a good match between hardware & image size. The app is geared more towards remixing photos & sharing them onscreen than towards print work; having said that, note that a 1600×1600 doc could be printed at 10.6×10.6″ at 150dpi.

And with that, you can grab Photoshop Touch today for U.S. $9.99 in the iTunes store or Android Market and start playing!

Photo juxtapositions

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most fun:

• In The Flying Series Rachel Hulin makes kids levitate. [Via]
• Maddie the Coonhound is “a super serious project about dogs and physics.” [Via Jeff Tranberry]

February 25, 2012

(rt) Photography: Space, Battles, & Terrible Stock

• I… I really lack words for these. “60 Completely Unusable Stock Photos.” /via Andrew Kavanagh
• Carnage:
  • The Atlantic features some brilliant photos of the “Tough Guy 2012″ competition. (Well, that plus muddy British guys in thongs.)
  • Nicolai Howalt captured portraits of fighters before and after boxing matches.  (Applies also to PMs after meetings with German dev teams.)
  • *Man*, underwater dogs can look ferocious. (Keep your Nirvana babies away).
  • Behold, Sumptuous Meatscapes (not the name of a band, as far as I know).

• Stellar times:
  • Enjoy “A rare, last look inside Space Shuttle Atlantis“.
  • John Glenn relaxes in “The Coolest Astronaut Photograph Ever” (not sure about that, but I do like it).
  • Aww: Stormtrooper happiness. [Via]

“Browser UI” action for Photoshop

Looks interesting:

Browser UI is an action that creates a browser window around any size Photoshop document you can throw at it. Simply install the action, choose a browser and play it. Check out the quick screencast if you don’t believe me.

February 24, 2012

Typography: Sesame Seed Braille

From Under Consideration:

Wimpy, a fast food restaurant in South Africa, wanted to let blind people know that they have braille menus, so they prepared hamburgers with buns that had the burger’s description set in braille in sesame seeds.

When’s the last time you saw someone take this much pleasure in a burger?

February 23, 2012

Friday demo/Q&A: HTML site design with Muse

Join us tomorrow, February 24th, 2011 at 12 p.m. Pacific for Ask a CS Pro, Planning your website with Adobe Muse (code name). Product Manager Dani Beaumont as she shows you how to start planning your website with easy-to-use sitemaps, master pages and a host of flexible tools that allow you to get your site planned out and ready for design.

The room will open up 15 minutes before the session starts. At this time, please sign in as a guest to join.

Secrets of Lightroom 4′s excellent imaging

“Magic or Local Laplacian Filters?” asks Lightroom PM Tom Hogarty. To which I want to add simply “…ladies.” Tom pulls back the curtains a tad on how Adobe researchers & their colleagues in academia have been able to “recover shadow and highlight detail with a straightforward set of controls, without introducing artifacts or over-the-top, faux-HDR effects.”

A really arcane blogging/tweeting tool request

[Warning: Probably of zero interest to non-nerd bloggers, and even then…]

I like sharing links quickly via Twitter (and thus Facebook), and later–time permitting–I copy, paste, and sort those links into groups that I can share here. Other times I’ll use Instapaper to capture links that I’m not quite ready to share.

Trouble is, it takes a non-trivial amount of time to scan back through either list, then copy/paste/etc. Thus my sharing of links via the blog has dropped dramatically. (Sorry/you’re welcome, depending.)

Would you by chance know of a way to automate converting tweets and/or Instapaper (or similar) links into blog-ready form, making it easy to sort them into piles? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

February 22, 2012

Photoshop.next sneak: Automatic preset migration & sharing

Also, Cmd-J duplicates multiple selected layers & layer groups; woo! (“JDI,” for the uninitiated, stands for “Just Do It.”)

Behind the Splash Screen: Seetharaman Narayanan

Meet the Photoshop hall-of-famer with his own fan club:

[Via Andrew Kavanagh]

February 21, 2012

Scalado Remove promises handheld tourist-zapping

About five years ago we gave Photoshop the ability to stack multiple images together, then eliminate moving or unwanted details. Similar techniques have appeared in other tools, and now it appears you’ll be able to do all the capture & processing with just your phone. Here’s a quick preview:

The Verge has a bit more detail on the user experience. [Via John Dowdell]

Starfield: Kinect-powered swinging

My question: if a Wookiee pushes you, do the stars turn into a bunch of lines?

[Via]

February 20, 2012

Timelapse: Yosemite HD

Well, that’s just not hard on the eyes (or ears), then. More info on the project is here.

[Via]

February 19, 2012

How to manage Lightroom assets across disks

This is one I keep failing to watch, but it sounds extremely useful (as I’m always running short of laptop HD space & am moving to an SSD):

This video (How To: Move & Archive Images and Export A Catalog) shows how to create a folder on an external drive and move your files to that drive from within Lightroom. Note that the first segment answers the question “What are the question marks on my images/folders and how do I relink files?”. If you prefer to skip this section, start the video at 4 minutes 38 seconds.

What’s the point of having an Adobe ID?

I know, I know: you need another username/password combo like you need a hole in the head. There are real benefits to having an Adobe ID, though (e.g. keeping track of your serial numbers). Jeff Tranberry quickly lists details. [Via John Dowdell]

Adobe HTML5 animation survey

The Edge team would like to hear your perspective on the relative importance of supporting older browsers, etc. If the subject is important to you, please fill out this quick survey. Thanks.

February 17, 2012

Reflections on Guatemala (or, What’s In A Pen?)

“I didn’t expect a road-to-Damascus, life-changing snap,” I told a fellow volunteer on my last morning in the country.  ”I didn’t expect it–but I guess one can always hope…”

The phrase “cognitive dissonance” keeps coming to mind: How does one work half days in an orphanage full of kids lacking toilet paper & teeth, then cruise off to swim in waterfalls with 18-year-old girls? None of it makes a great deal of sense. Much in our world doesn’t.

What follows is a lumpy mixture of the life-affirming, the very sad, and mostly the totally banal.

(more…)

VFX: Inception Park

As Colossal puts it, “This is almost too good for words. A wonderfully clever video directed by Fernando Livschitz of Black Sheep Films, in which hovering roller coasters fly through the streets of Buenos Aires, completely untethered to tracks.”

[Via ]

February 16, 2012

Pixelapse: PSD backup & sharing

Pixelapse promises “Visual version control done right”:

Hit save in Photoshop. Your artwork will be on the Web, ready to be shared in seconds.

Share and get feedback from your team members, or anyone you share the design with.

[Previous/similar: LayerVault.]

Turn any rigid surface into a multitouch UI

Ehhh, what? But yes, it’s apparently real. Read more here.

[Via]

February 15, 2012

A camera so fast, it can see photons moving

Oh my:

MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.

[Via]

Friday Demo/Q&A: Mission Mobile

Check it:

Learn how to create mobile apps or websites using Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium software. Join Evangelist Paul Trani and discover the latest tips and tricks on Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Air for going mobile fast. We’ll cover how to customize content for different screens, create galleries, optimize graphics, and more.

Prior to joining Adobe, Paul led a team of interactive designers and developers at Starz Entertainment producing multimillion dollar web and mobile campaigns.

February 14, 2012

Valentine’s Special: Remove Your Ex with Photoshop.next

Artificial intelligence: Good.
Your intelligence: Better.
The two together: Best.

To reduce instances of “Content-Aware Fail,” the Photoshop team has been working on ways to let you guide the Content-Aware Fill algorithm. Check out this two-minute preview:

Brief impressions of the Nikon V1

I’ve recently returned from my Guatemala trip, on which I carried a Nikon V1 borrowed from the Photoshop team.  If you want a long & crazy-detailed overview, check out Rob Galbraith’s review. What follows is explicitly not that. Rather, it’s off-the-cuff impressions from a guy who normally carries a 5D and who didn’t have the new cam’s manual to consult.

On the whole it’s a camera I quite like.  With a few improvements it could be one I love.

Highlights: Quality, silence, size.

• I found image quality to be excellent. (Here’s a totally untouched shot taken from a very bumpy van.) Granted, I was looking at reduced-res images on my iPad (making it harder to judge noise & sharpness), and I was relying on Apple’s built-in raw conversion (making it harder to judge flexibility of dynamic range), but still I was quite pleased. Even photos taken in a dark museums & caves came out well when using Auto ISO (a feature my 5D lacks) and the 10mm f/2.8 lens.
• I loved the cam’s total silence.  People couldn’t tell that it was on or firing, making it great for candid shots. At one point a colleague asked me, “Are you actually going to take any photos?,” as she didn’t realize I’d been snapping away.
• The presence of a dedicated video start/stop button alongside the shutter release is a cool idea, making it easy to unambiguously capture video (i.e. no need to check or switch shooting mode first).  Overall video quality is great.

Lowlights: Battery, lags.

• I found battery life on the whole to be somewhere between mediocre and awful.  Even with the rear display turned off, I’d knock a fully charged battery down to 1 bar in maybe 150 shots.  Unlike an SLR, you can’t just leave the cam on & ready to shoot at a moment’s notice. There’s no way to just leave it on (max setting is 10 min), meaning you can’t just raise the cam to your eye & know it’ll be ready to go. Weirdly, I found that when left on, the body grew quite warm to the touch. Even with access to my recharger every night, I stressed about battery life; without it (e.g. if backpacking), I’d have had to carry at least one or two spares.
• When you raise the cam to your eye, there’s a very slight delay before the digital viewfinder comes to life–nothing outrageous, but annoying for street photography.  One can hack this by taping over the proximity sensor, but presumably that would just exacerbate the battery life issue.
• As noted in the Galbraith review, the camera insists on briefly showing the last-taken photo in the viewfinder. Again, it’s not horrible, but I often want to keep concentrating on what I’m shooting, not chimp at the shot I just took.
• Minor: I found it a bit too easy to turn the shooting mode wheel by accident.  Suddenly I’d find myself in some odd burst mode, having nudged the wheel with my right hand.

For pop-up street photography, I found the Nikon 1 a good camera–just not quite a great one. Cutting out the lags, letting me leave it on, and adding a flip-out screen (so that I could compose & fire from waist height) would make it nearly ideal for the kind of work I was doing.  As it was, I learned to work around the camera’s limitations, and I’m very happy with what it let me capture.

A few galleries, in case you’re interested:

• A trip to waterfalls & caves (many taken on the move or in the dark)
• Street life parts one and two
• Cemetery & vultures

Of all these, I think this is my favorite.

February 13, 2012

Animated lunacy: My Little Pony meets Skrillex

I get an absurdly large kick out of this. (Here’s the backstory.) Stick with it til 1:15 or so–if you can.

RED/Premiere Pro webinar Feb. 23

Join Ted Schilowitz, one of the founders of RED Digital Cinema, and Adobe’s Wes Howell, 10AM PST:

Adobe and RED have collaborated to bring a truly native, color-rich, 4K tapeless workflow to Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. Join this webinar to learn how you can enable a robust workflow for editing, grading, and delivering native R3D footage in real time using Premiere Pro.

February 12, 2012

Video: Future Hipsters

Now I’m kind of tempted to get a QR code tat that links to “un gato vomitando.”

[Via Bruce Bullis]

February 11, 2012

Time & Tide

Canada’s Bay of Fundy features a high tide that can be 50+ feet higher than low tide. Check out this time lapse:

In an old, obscure corner of my career, I was a Navy Midshipman who spent a month on the USS Zephyr. (Would you have guessed?) I sat on a dock in Alaska, sketching the aft 25mm cannon (below), which I’d just unsuccessfully shot at some seagulls (thankfully I missed). I tend to draw each part methodically, and I kept kicking myself as I failed to get the perspective right among the various pieces. Finally I realized that the tide was lowering the ship so fast that the lines were rapidly changing. Not a great place to draw in pen!

[Via]

February 10, 2012

Making iOS vector icons using Photoshop

Matt Gemmell shares his tips on creating extremely small PDF graphics using a combo of Photoshop and Panic’s utility ShrinkIt (reducing the size of his test file by 85%).

A North Korean Photoshop tutorial

“Rotting misery pumpkin”? “Catify” command? Where can I get this version?? [Note: Contains a little off-color humor]