June 17, 2013

The Adobe CC apps have arrived

I’m delighted to say that the new Adobe CC desktop apps, plus a variety of new publishing & collaboration features, are now available. Log into the new creative.adobe.com to download the new versions.

There’s so much that’s new that I won’t even attempt to list features here (rather, I’ll keep posting individual pieces about things I find especially interesting), but you can get a quick overview on this Creative Cloud team blog post. They talk about what’s available now & what’s just around the corner (e.g. Typekit fonts on the desktop, automated Web graphics export from Photoshop, and more). For Photoshop-specific questions, check out this FAQ.

Epic slow-mo balloon fight

Working on a shoestring budget, Johnny Han has created a captivating video for Irish musician Bressie’s “Silence is Your Saviour”. He used an intensive, all-Adobe workflow, but I’ll save that write-up for another time.

Coincidentally, my Father’s Day looked a ton like this–except that every swarming, pint-size thrower was targeting me alone. My shoes are still drying out…

Demo: Smart Previews in Lightroom 5

Tiny machines like the MacBook Air are great—just not for storing a lot of raw files. Julieanne Kost shows how Smart Previews in Lightroom 5 let you save a huge amount of disk space while continuing to work on your images.

[Adobe TV]

June 16, 2013

“Making a difference. One app at a time.”

This piece from Apple is the best kind of advertising, and damn if it isn’t beautiful, informative, and moving. (Tell me the kid becoming verbal doesn’t grab your heart & I’ll check you for a pulse.)

[Via]

June 15, 2013

Beautiful, steampunk-ish “Heartbeat” pinhole cameras

Korean photographer & metalworker Kwanghun Hyun built a pair of brass pinhole cameras, powering their timing mechanisms with watch parts:

Lovely, though I wish my initial misreading (that it was somehow powered by one’s heartbeat) proved accurate. [YouTube]

June 14, 2013

Time lapse: The birth of a supercell

Check out this work from Mike Olbinski:

He writes,

It took four years but I finally got it.

A rotating supercell. And not just a rotating supercell, but one with insane structure and amazing movement.

I’ve been visiting the Central Plains since 2010. Usually it’s just for a day, or three, or two…but it took until the fourth attempt to actually find what I’d been looking for. And boy did we find it. [...]

We chased this storm from the wrong side (north) and it took us going through hail and torrential rains to burst through on the south side. And when we did…this monster cloud was hanging over Texas and rotating like something out of Close Encounters.

The timelapse was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II with a Rokinon 14mm 2.8 lens. It’s broken up into four parts.

Check out the Vimeo page for more details. [Via Richard Morey]

Quote o’ the day

“If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” — Montesquieu

I meditate on this frequently, especially in our industry where it seems everyone’s chasing the apparent validation that comes from making millions selling some some money-losing POS to a greater fool.

June 13, 2013

Check out the new CSS Designer in Dreamweaver

Tuesday, 10am Pacific (time zone convertor): 

Come join us to learn about the new CSS Designer feature in Dreamweaver CC. The new CSS Designer is an intuitive visual editing tool that helps generate clean web-standard code and let you quickly apply CSS properties such as gradients and box shadows.

Sign up here.

Free new Lynda.com course: B&W in Photoshop & Lightroom

Photohop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes has posted a new 42-minute course that’s free until June 21:

Shoot in color, but think in black and white. In this course, Adobe Photoshop Senior Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes shares his favorite techniques for transforming color photographs into black and white, a technique that provides more creative options than using your camera’s black-and-white mode. Learn how to prepare and fine-tune your photographs in Lightroom, and then move them into Photoshop to take advantage of its nondestructive adjustment layers. The course also introduces techniques for using Photoshop to adjust the color of video clips.

June 12, 2013

The multitouch fish tank, door handle, and more

Touché is a funky interface project from Disney Research, turning everything from liquids (!) to door knobs into multitouch surfaces:

According to the project site, the technology “can not only detect a touch event, but simultaneously recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body during touch interaction.”

We added complex touch and gesture sensitivity not only to computing devices and everyday objects, but also to the human body and liquids. Importantly, instrumenting objects and material with touch sensitivity is easy and straightforward: a single wire is sufficient to make objects and environments touch and gesture sensitive.

Demo: How To Do A Complete Portrait Retouch in Lightroom 5

Terry White shows what’s possible with the upgraded Healing Brush & radial gradients in LR5:

June 11, 2013

“Virtual motion graffiti” in an abandoned monastery

Lovely work from Daniel Silva:

From punk rock to Premiere Pro

This Thursday [update: here's the recording] catch a demo/Q&A session with director Richard Jobson starting at 10am Pacific (convertor):

Wayland’s Song is an independent feature film that was completed entirely with Adobe CC production software. Please join us for a special session with director Richard Jobson where he will describe the whole process from planning through to final delivery, including scriptwriting and production scheduling with Adobe Story, ingest with Prelude, video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro, audio editing in Audition, and final color grading with SpeedGrade. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A.

About Richard Jobson
Richard Jobson is the former lead singer for The Skids, a popular punk band in the 1980s. From there he moved into broadcasting where he became a well-known film critic and television host in the UK. Jobson started writing screenplays in 2002 and moved into directing short films and game cinematics in 2003. His first exposure to Adobe production software was through working with After Effects –in fact one of his feature films was edited entirely in this motion graphics application! Scheduled to open in June, 2013, Wayland’s Song is Jobson’s sixth feature film.

No word on whether he’ll shoot a sequel to Don’ You Go Rounin’ Roun To Re Ro.

June 10, 2013

Quote o’ the day

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” — W.B. Yeats (via Gov. Jerry Brown)

So c’mon, baby, let’s light some fires.

“[Screw] it, we’re building a Corvette”

“Design means making decisions,” we’re told, instead of trying to be everything to everyone. Along those lines I enjoyed this bit of profanity-laced wisdom from Adam Carolla. (Context: He’s talking about cable channels’ decision to make interesting shows for specific audiences, instead of milquetoast “minivans” that fail to please anyone.) [Source]