May 01, 2013

CNET: “Adobe to bring Lightroom-style photo editing to tablets”

Stephen Shankland covers today’s sneak peek (emphasis added):

[Hogarty] wouldn’t promise when it would ship or what exactly it would do, but he did demonstrate some features on prototype software running on an iPad 2, and he did offer several details about its features:

• The ability to edit photos taken in raw photo formats, including Lightroom develop-module parameters like exposure, clarity, shadows, highlights, and white balance.
• Cloud-synchronized editing so that changes made on a tablet arrive on the same photo on the PC.

And without promising anything, he also said he’d like to see some of Lightroom’s library-module features such as sorting them into categories or flagging picks and rejects. […]

Adobe will use technology called Smart Previews in the new Lightroom 5 beta that creates a version of a photo that’s takes up many fewer megabytes than the original. The full gamut of raw editing controls can still be used on Smart Preview images, though, and the editing instructions synchronized back with the original files.

Photographers have been demanding these moves for a long time. I’m glad to say that the wheels are turning.

Stay tuned for more info about Smart Previews. They’re a big (little) deal.

April 26, 2013

Convert Illustrator artwork to Objective C

For my Mac-dev nerds & the artists who love them: Adobe’s vowel-omittin’, code-spittin’ Tom Krcha has put together an article on “How To Convert Illustrator Vector Graphics To Obj-C CoreGraphics On IOS With Drawscript.” Your feedback on how Adobe can improve the app design & production process is always most welcome.

April 22, 2013

FocusTwist brings Lytro-style imaging to iPhone

The new $2 app lets you refocus images after capturing them:

PetaPixel writes,

Unlike Lytro’s light field camera, which uses innovative new technology that actually captures entire scenes sharply in one shot, FocusTwist “fakes it.” The app doesn’t require any additional hardware because it’s simply based around the idea of stacking multiple photographs.

The app snaps multiple photographs of a scene with different focal planes and then merges them together into a single interactive image that can be refocused. One of the “secret sauces” behind the app is the image stabilization algorithm that it uses to cancel any hand shake that might be present when it shoots the multiple exposures.

What do you think—is the effect legitimately useful, or just a gimmick?

March 28, 2013

Learn how to make HTML5 mobile apps, Friday Q&A

Tomorrow at noon Pacific:

Learn how to use Adobe PhoneGap Build to package HTML5 applications built with Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Edge Tools and Services for multiple mobile platforms easily in the cloud.
Presenter bio: Raymond Camden is a developer evangelist for Adobe. By night he fights crime under the pseudonym, “HTML5 Super Dude”.

March 14, 2013

6-second videos? Who’s got that kind of time??

Vine, shmine. How about 1-second videos?

Cesar Kuriyama says, “Like many, I used to take too many photos and videos,” but since turned to capturing a series of 1-second daily impressions. “Now I record less and enjoy the moment more… I’m more mindful of doing something notable every day.”

Now he’s kickstarted an app to enable others to do the same:

The app, currently in development [update: Now available] with the Brooklyn-based studio Alchemy 50, essentially takes the organizational legwork out of the whole endeavor. It provides a calendar, which gets populated with thumbnails for clips as days pass. You can shoot video directly from the app, or snip shorter, second-long clips out of videos from your camera roll, with helpful nudge buttons for zeroing in on just the right bit. You can set the app to give you reminders to shoot video at certain times during the day, and, of course, you can export the full, second-by-second montage whenever you deem it ready.

March 01, 2013

Exciting hints from Wacom

From their Facebook page:

We’ve heard you shouting out loud for a Wacom mobile tablet for creative uses. Well… we’re listening. We’ve read your email and spoken to many about an on-the-go dream device. It will come. This summer. We’re working 24/7 on it. And yes, it has a real pressure-sensitive professional pen, smooth multi-touch, an HD display, and other valuable features that you haven’t seen in other tablets.

Hmm… Truly stylus-savvy tablet hardware that could run in mobile-optimized mode while on the go, then plug into a keyboard & run full Photoshop? That would be kinda epic, no? (Note: I’m out of this particular loop these days, so I’m just saying what I personally would love–which seems in line with many of the comments on the post.)

TechCrunch adds a little more detail.

[Via Jerry Harris & Scott Valentine]

PS–John Gruber made an interesting comment the other day: “How ironic would it be if the iPad becomes the dominant mass market computer and the Surface becomes the one for artists?”

February 26, 2013

Photoshop Touch comes to iPhone & Android!

I’m delighted to see that following up on the very popular tablet version, Photoshop Touch for phone is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play for $4.99. PM Stephen Nielson writes,

Much like the tablet version, Photoshop Touch on the phone has core Photoshop features like layers, advanced selections tools, adjustments and filters. We also packed in features exclusive to Photoshop Touch, like Scribble Selection for high-precision selections using only your finger, and Camera fill for real-time creative blending of your camera feed with layers. This app features the same creative filters as the tablet version, like Color Drops and Acrylic Paint, and also a new Ripple filter.

With Photoshop Touch and the Adobe Creative Cloud, I can start a project on my phone, continue it on my tablet, and polish it off at my desk in Photoshop CS6. Photoshop Touch will automatically keep my projects in sync on each device, at the full resolution and with all the layers intact. This capability is available to every customer with a free Creative Cloud account. There is no paid subscription requirement for syncing.

Give it a whirl & please let us know what you think.

February 20, 2013

HTC debuts simultaneous photo/video capture, more

Interesting developments in mobile photography:

“We invented a way of dual-path encoding where we would shoot still and video simultaneously with no data loss,” Whitehorn says. “We wouldn’t drop data yield down at all. We would bring in full-resolution video and full-resolution stills at the same time… What that means is you have this living asset, that moment will be alive — you can always scrub that moment and get that perfect smile.”

The camera trades away megapixels (coming at 4, vs. a more typical 8+) for quality: “What we realized is that megapixels is just a metric for blue shirts in Best Buy.”

Another neat feature: Zoe mode starts recording video before you even press the record button so you don’t miss a moment. “Think of it as TiVoing your life.”

Video also can be shot in an “always on” HDR mode at full 1080p resolution or in slow motion.

[Via]

February 18, 2013

Foliobook syncs Lightroom, iPad via Dropbox

“Foliobook Is My New Preferred iPad Portfolio App,” writes Adobe evangelist Terry White:

I use Lightroom to publish to folders in Dropbox via the built-in Hard Drive Publish feature. This is also one of the ways I go from Lightroom to my iOS devices.

In this latest update to FolioBook, FolioBook Now “Syncs” with Dropbox. That’s right! Real syncing. Simply choose the folder on your Dropbox.com account that you wish to sync with as a gallery in FolioBook and it will “sync” the new photos to FolioBook and remove the old ones. Hooray!

February 13, 2013

Does Instagram make people better photographers?

This subject came up at lunch as we chatted about whether tools can & should aspire to help people be better illustrators, storytellers, etc.

My initial reaction was that no, Instagram doesn’t make you better, but it makes a great many people feel better (giving photos some flair, paving over flaws like crappy lighting). Making people feel cooler than they are is nothing to sneeze at, but one could argue that a shortcut to “interestingness” detracts from doing harder work around composition, lighting, etc.

On second thought, though, I think Instagram does make me a better photographer—or at least it makes me work harder to make interesting images. People love to put on fancy conferences about gamification & incentives, but the game here’s simple: When my photos draw likes (especially from, say, photographers I respect or some cute girl I knew 20 years ago), I feel good; when they don’t, I feel bad. (Hey, I’m human.) Thus I’m highly motivated to share only my most interesting work.

What do you think?

January 23, 2013

Mixel for iPhone builds Instagram-friendly collages

I’ve been a fan of Mixel for a long time, and now it’s become much more useful to me as it creates square collages that can be sent directly to Instagram.

I find this highly useful after shooting a burst of shots of my kids (as one never knows which one will best capture fast-moving action): I select an arbitrary number of shots, feed them to Mixel, let it auto-create a collage, and then shuffle or manually adjust the results as desired. It’s often a faster, visually richer alternative to apps like Diptic (which I also like). It’s not something I use constantly, but when I do want it, I find the $1.99 well worth the investment.

In semi-related news, Mixel has been acquired by Etsy. Congrats to Khoi & the team.

January 22, 2013

A film scanner for your smart phone

Yes, really. Check out this Kickstarter project from Lomography:

The Smartphone Film Scanner was conceived as a way to offer photographers and enthusiasts a quick, easy and portable way to scan 35mm films. It offers unrivaled speed and convenience when compared to other film scanners. In addition, the scanner will work with a free integrated Lomoscanner App, which allows you to easily edit and share your scans.

[Via]

January 17, 2013

Lee Press-On… Styluses?

Wow—really?

Sri Vellanki of Tech Tips has developed ‘Nano Nails’, a stylus-like tip design that’s placed on the nail or on the nail’s tip.

With Nano Nails, wearers can user their fingernails as fine, precise smartphone or tablet styluses.

Hmm—lovely, but I’ll pass on getting Margot some in favor of Corn Chip Nail Tips (“sodium-enhanced and fortified with fun!“). Those go great with a side of South Korean meat stylus.

[Via]

January 14, 2013

DesignScene app updated to v2.0

“Where do you find all this stuff?,” my blog readers often ask. Frequently the answer is “via DesignScene.” The iPad app has now gotten a comprehensive upgrade to version 2.0, adding collections (making it easier to round up images & links) and more. 

January 11, 2013

Hundreds: Clever visual game design

If Roger Black (or maybe Jack White) designed a game in After Effects, it might look a lot like Hundreds:

Don’t miss the lovely, spare design work & clever HTML/CSS effects on the game’s site.

January 10, 2013

“You talkin’ to *me*?” The Travis Bickle iPhone holder

“Listen, you screwheads,” says the description, “Here is a man who would not take missed calls anymore.” Okay, then:

[Via]

January 09, 2013

Photography: Julieanne Kost’s “Moments Alone”

Every day, Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost shares a set of beautiful captures via Instagram. As she did last year, she’s compiled her favorites into a short video:

I’m sure that the images will mean more to me than they do to you, but I would encourage you to create a collection of your own images and look at them as a complete body of work for the year to see what you can discover about yourself.

January 04, 2013

Notre Dame & Adobe team up

In an attempt to blow my mind, my alma mater & my employer have partnered to create the free Notre Dame Gameday app for iPad, created with Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite:

This multimedia-packed app takes fans inside the locker room and onto the gridiron with the undefeated Fighting Irish during their 125th season of football, replaying the highlights of their climb to No. 1 and previewing their upcoming BCS Championship Game against Alabama. Enjoy articles, slideshows, infographics, interactive rosters, archival images and footage, and even a virtual tailgate party, exclusively on the iPad for fans of the Fighting Irish.

(As I may have neglected to mention, as of a recent update, Creative Cloud members can publish an unlimited number of DPS apps to the Apple App Store.)

Go Irish!

December 27, 2012

Cycloramic app uses vibration to auto-rotate your iPhone

Seriously? Neat! The app captures a 360º panoramic image:

[Via]

December 26, 2012

Demo: Pressure-sensitive stylus + Photoshop Touch

It’s been a long time coming, but you can at last control your brush strokes by varying their pressure—and not just on a Wacom Intuos anymore. Here’s Photoshop Touch’s newly added support in action:

December 18, 2012

Adobe Revel Goes Free, Adds Premium Level

Adobe Revel lets you organize your photo library, sync your photos among devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad), apply non-destructive edits, and share Web galleries. Whereas you previously had to pay a $5.99 monthly subscription, you can now use the app for free—or pay a subscription for premium service.

Everyone can now download the app & import their entire photo libraries for free. You pay only if you use the app enough to import more than 50 photos per month. Details from the team:

Here is a summary of the changes we are making to Revel:

• We are eliminating the 30-day trial and replacing it with a free version of Revel that you can use for as long as you like.
• You can still upgrade to Revel Premium as an in-app purchase in the Revel App.

With the free version of Revel you get:

• The ability to import as many photos as you want in the first 30 days
• After that you can import up to 50 photos every month

With Revel Premium you get:

• Unlimited photo import for US$5.99 per month – import as many photos as you want, anytime you want
• The ability to automatically import new photos added to the Camera Roll on your iPhone and iPad

For more details see the product FAQ. You can download the new version of Revel from iTunes and from the Mac App Store.

[Via]

December 13, 2012

Demo: New features in Adobe Ideas v2.5

As I noted last month, Adobe’s vector-based drawing app for iPhone & iPad recently added speed-sensitive line thickness, a paint bucket, layer merging/flipping/duplications, and an eyedropper tool. Here PM Takashi Morifusa shows off the new tools:

December 02, 2012

We’re hiring a Sr. Product Manager, Consumer Multi-Device Applications

Want to build great mobile apps, bringing great imaging tech to a broad audience? “Most importantly,” says the job description, you’d “act as the product champion and be the passionate voice of the customer.” Read on:

Sr. Product Manager, Consumer Multi-Device Applications (18824):

The Sr. Product Manager, Consumer Multi-Device Applications, plays the critical leadership role for a future core, high-profile app.  Critical to the success of the Product Manager will be their entrepreneurial ethos and focus on the customer and user experience.  This individual should be knowledgeable in the needs of the broad consumer market across domains, including web, desktop, and mobile.

A key success factor for the ideal candidate will be their ability to rapidly iterate and learn from the customer, traditional research, but most importantly, the ongoing and real-time engagement of the user community.  You will be a close partner and advocate for the customer, while balancing the needs of other internal stakeholders in engineering and experience design.  You should be comfortable with interacting with customers in informal settings gathering feedback, and at the same time, scale to internal audiences at all levels.

Click through for more details.

December 01, 2012

Nice props for the new Photoshop Touch

Why thankyaverymuch.

• “The finely crafted interface of the app lends itself extremely well to those who want to go full throttle into creating content on their iPad and conjure up fantastic and vivid works of art.” — Redmond Pie
• “Photoshop Touch has blossomed into a great mobile rendition of the world’s most popular and extensive image editing suite.” — Phandroid
• “For those who haven’t yet used Photoshop Touch, the app serves as a significantly more consumer-friendly counterpart to the popular Photoshop desktop application.” — The Next Web
• “The app’s finger-friendly user interface makes it ideal for tablet users.” — Android Authority

November 29, 2012

Photoshop Touch adds support for pressure-sensitive styluses, 7″ tablets, more

Pressure-sensitive drawing is at last available on iPad, and I’m delighted that Photoshop Touch (available via the Apple App Store, Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore) now supports the Pogo Connect, Jot Touch and JaJa Stylus. The app has also been tuned to support smaller tablets. PM Stephen Nielson writes,

Photoshop Touch 1.4 is now optimized to work on smaller devices, including the iPad mini, Google Nexus 7, and Amazon Kindle Fire 7-inch and 8.9-inch devices. In fact, Photoshop Touch 1.4 will work on any Android 3.1 or later device with at least a 7-inch screen and a resolution of 1024×600.

Other new features:

• Smoother brush strokes
• Two new Effects: Lens Flare (under “&” menu) and Stamp Pattern
• Improved grid layout for projects, tutorials, and images
• New support for sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and other registered apps
• Quick access to last 5 colors with new shortcut (drag down on Color)
• Various bug fixes

November 28, 2012

“The First Ever Music Video Filmed Entirely Using Instagram”

Oh good Lord. Petapixel says, “Director Arturo Perez Jr…. snapped a total of 1905 iPhone photos around San Francisco to capture the story.”

The band writes, “This is the very first music video done entirely on Instagram without any third party alterations. Every single frame of this music video is an actual picture that we ran through Instagram. We never shot any video. We only shot still photography.”

I’m getting a repetitive-stress disorder just thinking about the creation process.

November 27, 2012

Adobe Ideas gains speed-sensitive drawing, paint bucket, more

With version 2.5 Adobe’s vector-based drawing app for iPad & iPhone has just taken some big steps forward. The points below understate the impact, but in early reviews customers seem to be really enjoying the changes.

• Three new drawing tools with unique stroke characteristics.
• Ability to quickly fill areas with color.
• Duplicate, merge and flip layers horizontally or vertically.
• Enhanced eyedropper tool lets you easily compare and match colors in different parts of your artwork.

November 15, 2012

Photoshop Touch comes to the Amazon Kindle

By very popular demand, Photoshop Touch now supports the new Kindle Fire & Kindle Fire HD. The new version of the app is available for purchase in the Amazon Appstore for US$9.99. According to the Photoshop.com team blog,

This means that Photoshop Touch is optimized for both 8.9-inch and 7-inch screens, giving users a great experience on all recent Kindle Fire devices. (This does not include the 1st generation Kindle Fire, but only the newer devices running Android 4.0.)

The Photoshop Touch team is constantly looking at new devices and form factors and is committed to bringing the core Photoshop features to new devices. Please keep an eye out for additional updates coming and make sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

November 10, 2012

Color mixing comes to Paper

The amazing thing isn’t that the folks at FiftyThree poured a year’s worth of work into “just” color mixing in their iPad app Paper. The amazing thing is that they had the guts to ship a drawing app without as basic & obvious a feature as color picking—and that by all accounts the app was a big hit without it.

November 02, 2012

Microsoft’s offbeat Digits hand-gesture sensor bracelet

“Dear society: You got used to seeing people talk into space & learned to figure ‘Bluetooth, not schizophrenia.’ Now let’s see you get used to dead-eyed zombies fidgeting with the air to turn virtual dials as they walk. [Here's more info.]” —Love, the tech industry

I kinda want to get one of these into—or rather, next to—Russell Brown’s hands.

Summly, a polished new newsreader

I just came across Summly, a free, pretty app for reading news on iPhone. It makes extensive use of swiping (left/right to navigate among articles, up/down to drill in deeper or to go up a level), and it’s full of carefully executed little details (parallax, subtle animation, etc.). Check it out:

October 28, 2012

“Cut&Slice me” helps Photoshop target Web, mobile

Cut&Slice me looks like an interesting free add-on to Photoshop CS6. According to the site:

• Create overlapping slices exporting only what you need in the minimal time with the maximum detail: no more cut gradients.
• Export easily your button states
• One Design to rule all resolutions: For iPhone design for Retina, for Android design for xhdpi and then export to ldpi, mdpi and hdpi with only one click.

I haven’t yet gotten to try it out, so feel free to post feedback.

October 23, 2012

Friday Demo/Q&A: New features in Edge Inspect (formerly Shadow)

Friday at noon Pacific, engineer Mark Rausch will show off the latest from Adobe’s tool for previewing & inspecting Web designs on devices:

Recent enhancements include the ability to install a custom local Weinre server, integration with JS Bin, localhost configurations with xip.io. Learn what’s coming down the pipeline and share your feedback with the product team.

Please RSVP here.

Here’s a 2-minute peek at Edge Inspect in action:

October 10, 2012

Maily: Visual email for kids

Being the dad of young boys, and being really eager to encourage their drawing-skill development, I’m intrigued by Maily:

Especially designed for kids from 4 years old, Maily allows your kids to send quirky, personalized emails to mom and dad, their grandparents or close friends easily, rapidly, and securely.

Your kids can now create and send their own emails, using elements like digital pencils, brushes, photos, personalized backgrounds, stickers, and their most commonly used expressions.

[Via]

October 09, 2012

ColoRotate offers 3D color exploration, Photoshop integation

Offering sort of “Kuler on steroids,” the new ColorRotate iPad app enables interesting ways to create & share color palettes. It offers “powerful tools for extracting from images, adjusting with blends, making precise edits, or generating fresh ideas with randomized palettes.”

CreativePro.com writes,

Perhaps best of all, ColoRotate can work seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop CS5 or CS6. The app synchronizes in real-time with Photoshop so when you make changes to the Photoshop foreground and background colors, those changes are simultaneously reflected in the app. The app can also load the image from the current Photoshop window and add the current palette to Photoshop’s Swatches panel.

October 06, 2012

New Adobe Inspire Magazine available

The October issue of Adobe’s Inspire Magazine is now available on the App Store (for iPad) and on the web at inspire.adobe.com. New stories:

• How we created the iPad edition of Inspire Magazine
• Interview with Hydro74 (aka Joshua M. Smith)
• Projects that inspire
• 10 steps: Simple website with Dreamweaver CS6
• Four cool features you can use with HTML5 today
• Putting Adobe Edge Animate to the test for a great cause
• Adobe Touch Apps in the workplace
• Patterns with Adobe Ideas and Illustrator CS6
• Q & A with Ajaz Ahmed of AKQA
• Cover art by Joshua M. Smith
• ADVERTS: Edge Tools and services | Adobe Touch Apps

October 02, 2012

“A Presentation App That Forces You To Tell Better Stories”

Haiku Deck takes an interesting editorial approach—refusing to support bullet-point lists & instead emphasizing imagery that it helps you find. According to Fast Company,

Using [Haiku Deck] is fiendishly simple: You enter a few keywords of text onto a slide, and the app searches a database of over 35 million Creative Commons images that suit your subject… Finding that compelling image for you, Tratt says, is one of Haiku Deck’s key achievements. “People spend a ton of time doing this manually … so we thought we could really delight our users if we made the process just happen automagically, and then embed the Creative Commons attribution right in the deck.”

After you pick your image, your text is automatically formatted nice and big to fill the screen. A handful of themes offer quick ways to customize your fonts and apply photo filters throughout.

September 24, 2012

The iPhone 5 Ultra Widescreen

I know it’s absurd, but… don’t you kind of want to try a 3-ft-long iPhone?

[Via]

[Update: See also the papercraft iFaux 5.]

September 22, 2012

Video: The Instagram Song?

Silly, corny? Sure. But stick with it for the weird little details—and then for the crazy descent into darkness. #prisonwife

[Via Andreas Wurf]

September 21, 2012

Photoshop Touch named PC Magazine’s Editors’ Choice

Thanks, guys!

Adobe has done an excellent job fitting its leading image editor to the tablet form factor… Snapseed may offer more effects and photo fine-tuning, but Photoshop Touch is a different animal, offering a fuller set of image-manipulation tools, which earns it our Editors’ Choice for tablet-based image-editing apps.

Creative Cloud adds publishing to iPad

We weren’t kidding when we said that as a Creative Cloud subscriber you’d get access to more & more benefits.

Adobe added Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition to the Creative Cloud today. Members can now create and deliver single-issue content for the iPad —such as brochures or personal design portfolios— without writing a single line of code.

This used to cost $400 per title published. Now you get unlimited publishing—along with InDesign and the rest of the Master Collection—for $49/mo. (or $29/mo. if you own a previous CS app). #progress

Check it out in action, and see more details here:

September 18, 2012

Demo: Using Brush Effects in Adobe Photoshop Touch

Russell Brown’s back to show off one of PS Touch’s more unique features:

September 11, 2012

Demo: Creating a Watercolor Painting with Adobe Photoshop Touch

We snuck this feature into a recent update of PS Touch. Russell Brown shows how to combine features like layers & blending modes to create a beautiful effect:

September 05, 2012

Photoshop Touch goes high res: Now supports big images, Retina

Addressing the biggest requests from customers, a free update for Photoshop Touch is now available for iPad and Android tablets:

• Retina Display Support: See your images like never before with the Retina display on the new iPad.
• Higher resolution capabilities: Work on high-resolution images while maintaining the highest image quality. Supports images up to 12 megapixels. 
• Two new languages: Russian and Brazilian Portuguese. 
• Two new Effects: Shred and Colorize 
• Smoother animation and scrolling in the organizer, tutorial browser, and file picker 
• New gesture to toggle 100% view and fit screen (three-finger tap) 
• New pixel nudging mode for precise movements 
• Support for Apple Photo Stream 
• Various bug fixes

What do you think? Where should we go from here?

August 30, 2012

“Why Adobe Revel 1.5 Just Became My Favorite Way to Show My Photography”

Photographer/evangelist Terry White talks about how he uses Lightroom’s “publish to Revel” feature to keep an up-to-date set of photos on his iPad & iPhone, ready to display. Check out the full story.

August 25, 2012

“Flam Wenders: The Andy Warhol of Instagram”

“I instaGRAM, I don’t instaF’AROUND!!”

[Via Sharad Mangalick]

August 23, 2012

Adobe Revel 1.5 arrives on Mac, iOS

Adobe’s photo-sharing & -editing tool, Revel, introduces a range of features in the new version 1.5:

• Albums to organize photos:
• Create an album on one device and it is automatically updated and accessible everywhere you have Revel.
• Share albums on AdobeRevel.com as web galleries.
• Captions – Add context to memories with text descriptions.
• Library grid view – Browse photos in track or grid view.
• Sign in with Facebook or Google ID – New Revel users can skip the hassle of remembering a new password by simply signing in with an existing ID.

Check out how Revel is great for families, and browse a sample gallery here.

Get the app from the Mac App Store and the iTunes App store and start your free 30-day trial. (Even if you’ve done a trial in the past, you can start a fresh one today.)

August 19, 2012

LA Mobile Arts Festival happening now

Sounds like a fun event, running now through Aug. 26:

iPhoneArt.com and the Santa Monica Art Studios presents the LA MOBILE ARTS FESTIVAL. Los Angeles celebrates pioneers of iPhoneography and the underground mobile arts movement with nine days of interactive digital art–iPhone imagery, sound- and video-based works, sculptural and performance art installations at the historic Santa Monica airplane hangar turned cutting-edge arts community.

Our friend Dan Marcolina will be speaking Friday evening:

Dan Marcolina, author of the critically acclaimed book/ iPad series “iPhone Obsessed” will be closing our show on Friday night August 24 appearing at the Coloft, 7-10pm 920 Santa Monica Boulevard  Santa Monica, CA 90401. He will be showing you how the combination of picture choice and multiple app processing can turn a simple snapshot into a statement.

August 17, 2012

New Mixel for iPhone promises “the easiest collage tool ever”

I was enthusiastic about the “social collage” tool Mixel when it launched last fall, and I was sad to hear last week of its impending demise. It didn’t stay down long, though, reappearing today as an iPhone app:

The previous incarnation emphasized more open-ended creativity, and in many users’ hands it often produced ugly results. This new version emphasizes more constraint & automation (“It does all the hard work of making your collages for you”), producing more attractive (if less flexible) results.

The notion of visual conversations has changed as well. It seems the team has moved away from the notion of remixing others’ artwork & is instead supporting replies (e.g. you share a collage, & I and others can add on our own–but we don’t start those by messing around with your creation). That’s probably a smart pivot, though some part of me still wants to think that when it comes to collaborative art-making, there’s a “there” there.

All in all it’s great to see Mixel continuing to evolve, and I like what I’ve been able to make so far.

Adobe Shadow (mobile device preview) demo today

Noon Pacific:

Streamline Your Mobile Web Workflows with Adobe Shadow Labs Release 4

See solutions to some of today’s most frustrating and time-consuming problems faced by mobile web developers and designers. In this 45 minute web conference led by Shadow team engineer Mark Rausch, you’ll see an in-depth demo of Adobe Shadow. Mark will show you how you can save time and improve your workflow. The demo will be followed by a Q&A session where you can give feedback and get your questions answered.

[Time zone calculator]

August 16, 2012

Demos: Using Adobe Ideas & Illustrator together

If you like to sketch out ideas while on the go & then refine them further, Adobe Ideas + Illustrator is a great one-two punch. Here’s a short series of quick demos that show the process & offer some best-practice guidance.

1. Starting a sketch in Adobe Ideas
In this video, we’ll go through a brief tour of the features of Adobe Ideas, before creating a sketch and prepping the workspace for our final illustration.

2. Creating a finished illustration in Adobe Ideas
Next, we’ll take our sketch and turn it into a multi-layered colored illustration. We’ll also cover some techniques to facilitate a smooth transition into Illustrator, allowing for maximized editing ability.

3. Modifying an Ideas file in Illustrator
Finally, we’ll use Creative Cloud to bring our Ideas file into Illustrator CS6. From there, we’ll learn some techniques on how to clean up and edit our artwork.

August 13, 2012

Adobe’s Proto wireframing tool gets new features

Adobe Proto lets you create interactive wireframes of websites and apps right on your iPad or Android tablet. Check out what’s new in today’s v1.5 release:

• New Features
  • Email interactive wireframe (html.zip) as attachment
  • Share interactive wireframe via Dropbox and other Apps
  • Copy & Paste objects to different pages
  • Paste and Pin objects across selected pages (i.e. share objects across pages)
  • Pin wireframe objects across all pages
  • Global Menu (By default, Menu bar objects are pinned across all pages)
  • Z-order change via Context Menu
  • Lock and Unlock object for editing
  • Show current page number while previewing a project in the App
  • Rename project name in the action bar (title) of the editor
  • Show undo/redo count
• Enhancements
  • Objects should snap to both CSS Column and Design Grid
  • Better Code Generation
    • Code generated is now ordered according to the appearance in the page and so is now more structured hierarchically
    • All pinned objects generate a separate common CSS file (common.css)

August 07, 2012

New Instagram actions for Photoshop

From photographer Casey Mac:

After the success of my Lightroom Instagram Presets, which led to multiple requests for Photoshop actions, they’re finally here! All 17 of Instagram’s filters are available to simulate the Instagram filters. They’re easily applied and just $5, the price of a latte or an app on your phone. Any money that I make from these sales will fund my travels to photograph beautiful places around the world.

And no sooner did I queue up this post than I saw that Petapixel has created their own set of Instagram presets & templates. Truth be told, I haven’t had a chance to try either set of tools, so I can’t speak to their relative strengths.

August 05, 2012

Video: iPad sleight of hand

Clever fun from Scandinavia:

[Via Dave Helmly]

July 12, 2012

Adobe and NBC Olympics Join Forces to Bring the Olympics to Mobile Devices

Check it out:

See the official blog post for lots more detail.

July 06, 2012

iOS Photoshop Actions & Workflows

Marc Edwards has updated his iOS Photoshop Actions & Workflows, streamlining tasks like creating various-sized icons, toggling pixel snapping, simulating color blindness (forgot PS could do that, right?), and more. 

He also notes, “If you like these actions, you’ll love Skala Preview, the fastest way to send pixel perfect, colour perfect design previews from your Mac to your iPhone or iPad.”

July 04, 2012

Popsicolor app turns photos into watercolors

The $.99 app does what it says & does it nicely, if rather slowly. Check out some example images.

Aside: I continue to wish Apple would make it easy for apps like Instagram to slot in other apps for round-trip filtering (sending them a grid of pixels & then getting one back). It seems that Windows & Android remain well ahead in this regard, but hope springs eternal.

June 29, 2012

Echographs: An easy app for creating cinemagraphs

Looks like fun:

June 27, 2012

Slicy facilitates Retina graphics support

MacRabbit’s $20 Slicy PSD-to-PNG conversion app (see previous) has been updated with greater CS6 support plus 

You design at 1x, but need high-res artwork? One annotation, and Slicy magically enlarges your vectors and layer styles to build a high-quality 2x version. For 2x designs, it fills in missing 1x versions by scaling down.

I haven’t tested the feature myself, and as always I’d welcome hearing others’ thoughts about what’s successful and/or what Adobe apps themselves should change to better support this kind of work.

[Also, to preempt questions about Photoshop & other apps being revved to support Retina screens: sorry, I don't have any new info. I will share more once details are available.]

June 22, 2012

Monkeygram & Jittergram: Animation in your pocket

I’m a fan of the joyful iPad app Toontastic, saying last year:

The other day I said that creation on tablets would be more about fun, about speed, and about the unbridled pleasure of creation than what we know today. Toontastic is the sort of thing I have in mind.

Now its creators have created Monkeygram, a way to create animations (featuring your face, if you’d like) from your phone. It’s “Toontastic for the rest of us”:

Will “the kids” now start sending each other animations instead of texts? I don’t know, but I dig that these guys are trying.

Elsewhere, Jittergram helps you “make a 3D sterogram or a long stop motion animation… Jittergram makes it easy by showing your previous frame on top of the current camera view so you can line everything up perfectly. It then automatically creates a GIF and makes it super easy to share.”

As soon as my lads are old enough to start creating the stop-motion Lego videos they so enjoy, I think we’ll be all over this one.

June 21, 2012

Now available: Adobe Shadow Preview 3

Preview 3 of Shadow, Adobe’s new mobile preview & inspection tool for Web designers & developers, is now available for download from Adobe Labs.  This release includes a cool batch-screenshoting feature, cache management, and SSL support.  Here’s a quick tour from PM Bruce Bowman:

And here evangelist Paul Trani goes into more detail:

June 07, 2012

Reflection app brings iPad mirroring to Windows

Reflection has been a godsend to those of us who demo iPad apps (no more lugging around an overhead cam!), and now it’s available on Windows as well as Mac:

With Reflection, we’ve been able to bring over all the features of the Mac version to Windows, including recording, full audio streaming, support for multiple devices, and full screen display.

[Via]

[Remember that if you're demoing Photoshop Touch, you can go into preferences & invoke the "presentation mode" that displays red circles whenever you touch your fingers down. --J.]

June 04, 2012

Snapseed is free until Thursday

I really enjoyed using Nik Software’s Snapseed while traveling in Guatemala, and now I see that it’s free for iPad & iPhone until Thursday. It’s a great companion to Adobe Revel & Photoshop Touch.

June 01, 2012

Demo: Optimizing your InDesign portfolio for the iPad

I find the whole subject of “liquid layout” intriguing:

Use alternate layouts and liquid layout rules to optimize your portfolio for the vertical and horizontal orientations on the iPad. Learn about the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite workflow and how to prepare your portfolio for the iPad.

May 31, 2012

Check out Adobe Proto: Fast wireframing on iPad

David Hogue shows how design agency Fluid uses Adobe Proto for iPad:

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?

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.

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).

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]

April 26, 2012

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 23, 2012

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 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 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.

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 10, 2012

Slicy exports PSDs as separate icons

Slicy 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 Slicy 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 Slicy 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 Slicy 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:

March 23, 2012

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 21, 2012

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

March 11, 2012

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 09, 2012

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

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.

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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!

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!

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]

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%).

February 07, 2012

Photoshop Touch for Android gets new functionality

Now available on the Android Market:

Export to PNG and PSD functionality
When choosing Save to Camera Roll or Share by E-mail or on uploading to Creative Cloud, you can now save to either JPEG, PSD, or PNG.

Improved image quality of images saved to the local Camera Roll/Gallery
Save to Camera Roll saves out JPEGs which are compressed with max quality now instead of medium quality.

Improved compatibility with Android 4.0
This update addresses some issues related to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) compatibility; including resolving the in-app log-in issues with the Adobe Creative Cloud website.

General bug fixes and performance enhancements
Several performance and memory handling improvements (including Pinch & Zoom and Refine Edge).

Back button improvements
Standard Android Back button is accessible when it wasn’t previously. This button supports returning prior to screens and can be used for easier folder navigation.

As for the iOS release, I still can’t provide a specific release date, but rest assured folks are working hard to get it out ASAP.

Feedback wanted for Adobe Revel (formerly Carousel)

From PM Sumner Paine:

Calling all active and enthusiastic Revel users!

The team at Adobe is looking for people to join our prerelease program. We’re working on new features and we need your feedback and help with testing.

If you are a Revel subscriber and you have it on all three device types (iPad, iPhone, Mac) just send an email to sumner@adobe.com with a brief explanation covering 4 things:

1. Your favorite thing about Revel
2. The most important thing that’s missing from Revel today
3. List of devices where you have Revel installed (e.g., MacBook Air, iPhone 4, etc.)
4. Names of other photo apps you use on your desktop computer, if any

There’s limited space in the prerelease program so we can’t accept everyone who applies, but we look forward to your submissions.

Sumner Paine, product manager

January 29, 2012

New 3D mapping tech for iPad, Android tablets

Looks creamy smooth. Here’s a bit more info.

January 11, 2012

Adobe Carousel renamed “Adobe Revel”

From the Carousel Revel team:

We originally chose the name Adobe Carousel because it was descriptive of core functionality in the product – access to all your photos on any device (i.e., viewing photographs in a circular manner, like a carousel).

Revel means to take great pleasure or delight…and that’s what we hope to do in the future as we continue to add more functionality and fun to the app. In the future, you can expect we will also be able to offer additional photography solutions on the newly named Adobe Revel platform.

The app has also been updated to v1.1, enabling automatic photo import, adding Flickr sharing, and polishing a few other details.

January 06, 2012

Instagram improves Facebook integration

Ah, this sounds nice:

Starting today, when you choose to share Instagram photos to Facebook, your images will automatically be added to an “Instagram Photos” Facebook album visible to your Facebook friends!

The photos will appear full-sized in the News Feed along with the caption that you’ve added to the Instagram photo, and a link to the image’s public URL. This change will also display your Instagram photos beautifully in your timeline.

I’d been pestering my former Lightroom colleague Troy Gaul (whose Instagallery for iPad you should download) to try to hack together some mechanism for making this work. Instead he tipped me off to this enhancement.

Now, if only I could find a solution to keep my Instagram-originated tweets from appearing alongside Instagram-originated FB postings… (My tweets are replicated on FB, but that method doesn’t provide inline photos, so I choose to share via both and thus get duplicates.) It’s hardly a big deal, though.

Video: Nikon D4′s iPad integration

Nikon’s newly announced D4 camera offers what looks to be cool iPad integration:

[Via Mark Kawano]

December 15, 2011

iPen, “The first active stylus for iPad”

Having seen demos like this for the last 18 months, I’m keeping my expectations modest. Still, I love to see that industrious people are trying to help iPads realize their potential, and that customers are responding.

Check out the project’s Kickstarter page for more info. According to the FAQ, the product does not support pressure sensitivity, though they say it’s planned for inclusion in a follow-on version.

December 13, 2011

New tool helps Photoshop users design for Android

The free Android Design Preview Tool makes it easy to design in Photoshop (and other apps), then see a live preview on one’s Android device. Check it out:

[Via Jerry Harris]

December 10, 2011

Lovely Charts for iPad

Looks like a neat app, though with all such tools, I always wonder how enduringly useful shape recognition is relative to simply dropping objects into a design.

December 05, 2011

Love for Photoshop Touch

I’m delighted to see reviews like this continue to roll in. A few recent quotes:

• “Photoshop Touch is a triumph of mobile computing, allowing for deep image manipulation, with very usable touch screen controls.” – Nick Moore, Galaxy Tabs
• “Photoshop Touch, a nearly perfect paring-down of its desktop counterpart… packs in almost all of the things I need for on-the-go photo editing.” – Liam Spradlin, Android Police
• “All in all, Photoshop Touch provides a wide array of useful and easy-to-use tools for manipulating images on the go.” – Michelle Mastin, PCWorld

November 29, 2011

Hands-on time with Photoshop Touch, Sunday in SF

Sally Cox of the Adobe Creative Suite User Group of San Jose passed along the following info:

Dickens Fair Photowalk with Adobe Touch Tools demo

Sally will be demoing the new Adobe Touch tools on an Android tablet (iOS coming in the near future) during the event
We will have an extra tablet on hand so everyone can try them!

Sunday, December 4, 2011
Cow Palace: 2600 Geneva Avenue, Daly City, CA
11 am – We will meet outside the event
Please click here to join our group (it’s free) and get group pricing.

November 23, 2011

Photo-realistic painting in Adobe Ideas

Want to annoy a photographer? Just say, “Great image! What camera did you use?” (“Telling a photographer that his camera takes great pictures is like telling a chef that his oven makes great meals,” notes Terry White.) We do well to focus more on artists than their media.

Kyle Lambert shows how far one can take even very simple tools. Kyle is a fine artist based in the UK and was formally trained as an oil painter. He currently freelances and specializes in painting, illustration and animation. He’s becoming well known for his striking character portraits and was the first artist to create photo-realistic work using Adobe Ideas. Check it out:

November 21, 2011

A man, a plan, a flashlight… Photoshop Touch

If Russell Brown isn’t the MacGyver of creative tools, I don’t know who is. Check out this crazy little hack of his, featuring a flashlight and Photoshop Touch’s unique Camera Fill feature:

November 18, 2011

Adobe Carousel surpasses a million downloads

“On October 27th we launched Adobe Carousel,” writes PM Sumner Paine, “and within a few short weeks we’ve already surpassed 1,000,000 downloads! We’re happy to see such a tremendous response — and want to thank everyone who jumped on board and downloaded the app on their iPhones, iPads and Macs.”

Though the team isn’t yet ready to talk in detail about future plans, check out Sumner’s post to hear about some areas they’re considering.

November 17, 2011

Photoshop Touch: Top-grossing photo app on the Android Market

And that list includes all apps (phone and tablet) in the market, not just those for tablets. Not bad for a tablet-only app that’s been on the market for less than 72 hours, eh? :-)

Top Grossing Photography – Android Market. [Via Ignacio Barrientos]

Photoshop Touch: Create textures using Camera Fill

Russell Brown shows a clever technique, using a live camera feed to create textures on Photoshop Touch layers:

November 15, 2011

Photoshop Touch arrives on Android!

I’m delighted to announced that Adobe Photoshop Touch is available for download from the Android Market. For a quick summary of the app, let’s turn to… me:

PS Touch and the other newly released Adobe touch apps (Proto, Ideas, Kuler, Debut, and Collage) require using an 8.9″ or larger tablet running Android 3.1 or above. As for iPad availability, the plan is to announce more in early 2012.

Check out the user forum to ask questions and provide feedback. And please join us Friday at noon Pacific for a demo/Q&A covering PS Touch and the other newly released Adobe touch apps. I’ll be presenting alongside Ideas PM David Macy.

As I say, we can’t wait to see what you create!

November 07, 2011

Mobile facial recognition promises clever new apps

Check it out:

Petapixel writes,

The video at the top of this post is a Polar Rose demo of an app called “Recognizr”, which recognizes people’s faces and provides you with links to their social media accounts.

Imagine a world where every person on the street can be identified by simply pointing your phone at their face. Curious about a stranger? Point your camera at them to pull up their Facebook profile. People who had concerns over facial recognition in Facebook photos are going to have a fit about this one…

I remain eager to see what developers can do in terms of building photography & design apps. If you see anything cool, give a shout.

November 04, 2011

Props for Photoshop Touch

“Adobe’s Photoshop Touch destroys the claim that tablets are no good for content creation, as well as being the first tablet adaptation of major desktop software that doesn’t suck.” — Tony Sarno, APC

Nice! Check out the rest of the article for more details & perspective (although, being the kind of weirdo who’d read my blog, you’re probably already up to speed here ;-)).

November 03, 2011

Brian Yap on Adobe Ideas

Boxing Clever‘s Brian Yap creates amazing artwork using Adobe Ideas (for example, this portrait of Talib Kweli). Here he talks about what the app means to him:

November 02, 2011

Dave Malouf on Adobe Collage

I had to pleasure of meeting Dave Malouf, design professor at Savannah College of Art & Design, at Adobe MAX and moderating an interesting panel discussion with him. In this brief clip he talks about using Adobe Collage to express & share ideas quickly:

October 31, 2011

A clever iPad-based Halloween costume

“NASA engineer Mark Rober,” writes CNET, “used some red sauce and two iPad 2s in order to pretend, at whatever Halloween convention he might be attending, that he has a vast, open, and bloody wound through the core of his torso.” Nice:

I was just telling our 3-year-old Finn that a kid we know dressed up as an iPod a few years ago. Finn looked at me blankly until I said, “er, iPhone–he dressed as an iPhone.” (“iPod” may as well have been “phonograph” in his little world view.)

October 21, 2011

Skinvaders: Creepy augmented-reality fun

When I heard that Apple was introducing easy access to face detection + GPU compositing in iOS 5, I knew we’d start seeing all kinds of creative imaging mash-ups. Here’s one, Skinvaders, from a longtime colleague of ours:

[Via Dave Helmly]

October 20, 2011

Adobe Reader comes to iOS and Android

Why not just use the OS default reader for PDFs? Security, for one:

Key among the new features in Adobe Reader 10.1 for Mobile is support for accessing files secured by Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management…

Whether you’re working in private industry and reviewing confidential information like price lists on your Android tablet, or you’re a government employee and are viewing sensitive information via your mobile phone, Adobe Reader 10.1 for mobile and LiveCycle Rights Management allow you to securely access these documents.

Adobe Reader is a free download via the Apple App Store and Android Market. [Via]

October 19, 2011

“World’s First Mobile Photography Conference,” this Saturday

Check out the 1197 Conference, happening this Saturday in San Francisco and streaming online:

The first camera phone photo was taken on June 11th, 1997. In honor of that date, 1197 is a one-day conference dedicated to mobile & iPhone photography, presented by Bolt | Peters and Blurb.

The site lists speakers, registration prices, and more.

October 18, 2011

A beautifully simple iPad app for kids

The Micronaxx (ages 3.5 & 2) spent the weekend transfixed by Harold & the Purple Crayon, a narrated version of the classic children’s book. I’ve previously shied away from elaborate, high-concept kids book-apps, figuring they distract instead of encouraging imagination. In this case, though, simplicity is key, and the lovely hidden little treats (e.g. a little crab that pops out of the sand, or–yes–a burping porcupine) are delightful.

[Via]

October 14, 2011

iOS 5 GUI PSD (iPhone 4S) now available

The designers at Teehan + Lax have released their iOS 5 GUI PSD (iPhone 4S), an update to the template/assets they’ve provided in the past. “Now,” they insist, “go make epic sh*t.”

October 10, 2011

Use multitouch gestures to prototype a design

Adobe Proto captures, I think, the real spirit of tablets: be fun, fresh, immediate, and playful. Here’s a demo from PM Devin Fernandez:

Like Photoshop Touch, it’s coming soon for Android & iOS.

October 04, 2011

Video: Camera Fill in Photoshop Touch

In building Photoshop Touch we didn’t want to just rehash Photoshop’s feature set; rather, we wanted to take unique advantage of what tablets can do. Photoshop Touch can feed a live stream from your camera into your layer stack (think “PSD layer from camera”):

This brief demo doesn’t show it, but the camera feed will respect the blending mode & opacity of the target layer, and it’ll be clipped to whatever selection is active (for example, select someone’s face using a soft-edged elliptical marquee, then live-fill it with what the camera sees).

October 03, 2011

Introducing Photoshop Touch

Combine, Edit, Share. I’m delighted to introduce Adobe Photoshop Touch, a new tablet app for creative imaging. With PS Touch we’re bringing Photoshop fun & power not only to new platforms, but to a whole new audience.

Here’s my brief overview:

To see the app in action, check out Russell Brown’s 10-minute feature tour:

So, when can you get it, and what does it cost?

We plan to release Photoshop Touch for Android shortly, after which we plan to bring it to iOS. When we talk about reaching new audiences, we’re not kidding: Photoshop Touch is priced at just $9.99.

So (to anticipate an inevitable question), why Android first? Many Adobe apps (Adobe Carousel, Ideas, Photoshop Express, Eazel, Color Lava, Nav) have already been released on iOS first, and it’s good to support customers across platforms. We’re busily coding for iOS as well, so I wouldn’t make too much of this particular detail. No matter what tablet(s) you use, we can’t wait to get Photoshop Touch into your hands.

One last thought for now: We’re still very, very early in the evolution of mobile devices for creative work, and Photoshop Touch–along with the many other Adobe touch apps announced today–is just a beginning. We’re eager to hear what you think, and I’m looking forward to hearing ideas & questions here and on Twitter (@PhotoshopTouch). (Today I’ll be largely offline, showing the app in person at Adobe MAX, so I apologize in advance if I’m slow to respond.)

September 30, 2011

InfColorPicker: An open-source iOS color picker

While at Adobe Troy Gaul implemented the Lightroom & ImageReady color pickers, including supports for choosing Web-safe colors (a godsend to me when it arrived).  Now that he’s an independent developer, he’s released InfColorPicker, an open-source color picker for iOS.

By the way, if you use Instagram & have an iPad, you should get Troy’s Instagallery app; lots of nice attention to detail.

September 18, 2011

PhotoAppLink improves iOS app communication

To avoid bloated software, I wrote months ago, we need better ways to connect small apps (so that each can focus on just what it does best). Android “intents” enables this (e.g. in Photoshop Express), and it sounds like Windows Metro “contacts” are similar. On iOS this has been more problematic. From iPhoneography:

[G]etting an image from one app to the next is tedious. When switching apps the user must save the edited image to the camera roll, quit the current app, launch the next and then load up the intermediate image before continuing to edit it.

So a group of app developers got together and found a way to solve this problem with PhotoAppLink:

I can’t make any commitments on behalf of Adobe apps, but I certainly find this development interesting & encouraging. [Via Dave Howe]

September 16, 2011

The Adobe Carousel team answers reader questions

How does it work with Lightroom? Who exactly can see my photos? (And where are they, exactly?)

Check out this post from the Adobe Carousel team for good answers to top questions.  You can post comments here, but you’re more likely to get questions addressed via that post’s comments.

Meanwhile, here’s a cute little video they did to capture the zen of the product:

September 13, 2011

“LRPAD”: Control Lightroom via an iPad

You can dial in Develop module adjustments via LRPAD:

[Via]

Previous/related: “Paddy enables hardware UI control of Lightroom.”

September 12, 2011

Watch Adobe Carousel demoed in the PS World keynote

Check out the multi-user/multi-device functionality demoed by Sumner Paine & Julieanne Kost. They show one-step import, direct capture into Carousel, the Develop engine, sharing ratings, and more. Unfortunately the video doesn’t allow embedding, but the link jumps you right to the start of the demo.

September 09, 2011

Adobe Carousel demo/Q&A recording

For a more in-depth demo of Adobe Carousel, check out this recording of yesterday’s presentation/Q&A session. (Just skip past the first 90 seconds or so of dead air.)

September 08, 2011

My fondest hope for iOS5?

Frictionless camera-to-Carousel hand-off.

I really, really want to think that AirDrop will enable truly seamless integration with Eye-Fi and similar wireless networking/storage cards. Pairing a Wi-Fi-enabled camera with a phone or tablet needs to become as trivial as pairing two Bluetooth devices. Once it’s done once, the camera needs to be able to transfer images the nearby devices anytime, regardless of whether they’re in use, running a special app, etc.

Then–and only then–can we lay to rest the current dilemma: good dedicated camera with laborious transfer/editing/sharing experience, or lousy(-ish) phone camera with immediate editing/transfer? And with the proliferation of 4G phones & tablets, camera->-device->-cloud->desktop will become slick as hell.

Reminder: Photosmith for iPad

I’ve heard a few comments to the effect of “Adobe Carousel looks great, but I really want to pull my raw photos into my iPad, apply flags, ratings, and keywords, and they sync everything with Lightroom on my desktop.” Happily, that’s just what Photosmith ($17.99) already offers:

September 07, 2011

Introducing Adobe Carousel

“Lightroom for iPad” has been the clearest customer mandate I’ve heard in 10+ years at Adobe. Photographers are clamoring to transfer photos wirelessly to their tablets, review & tweak them there, and then sync the results with their desktops.

Adobe Carousel (press release) embraces that vision–and takes it further.  This new app–announced today for iOS and Mac OS X (with Android & Windows versions in development)–brings a highly tuned version of the Lightroom/Camera Raw engine to mobile devices, combining it with excellent multi-device syncing. Key coolness:

• You get access to all your images on all your devices.
• All edits are non-destructive: tweak a setting on one device & you’ll see the edit ripple through your other devices.
• It’s easy to collaborate with friends & family: people you invite to share a photo catalog can view photos, add new ones, apply adjustments and preset “looks,” and flag favorites.
• You can easily publish to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

What does it cost, and when can you get it?  The iOS and Mac versions should be available shortly. The iPad, iPhone, and Mac apps are free, and the syncing/storage service costs $9.99 a month (or $99/year), with a special introductory price of $5.99 a month (or $59.99 a year). Storage & number of photos are unlimited.

When you pay for an Adobe Carousel subscription, you’e investing in one complete solution, enabling you to import as many photos as you want, adjust and improve those photos, and then share those photos with family & friends.

This first version of the app is ruthlessly focused on simplicity & on meeting the needs of a very large group of photographers. As it evolves there’s plenty of room to grow, including adding support for raw file formats and integrating with Lightroom & other desktop apps.

When we introduced Lightroom, we likewise started small, listened hard to photographers, and rapidly iterated based on their feedback. I’m extremely excited to see what develops.

PS–You may know that I’ve been working on mobile imaging apps at Adobe, so can I take credit for Carousel? I’m afraid not: I was the PM early on, helping get things rolling, after which I moved to another effort. More on that soon enough.

September 05, 2011

Demo: Acquire for Photoshop + iOS

Acquire for iOS (see previous) has been drawing lots of interest, so here’s a 3-minute demo of how it works:

(Remember, if you’re using Photoshop CS5 (and not 5.5), you’ll need to make sure you’ve updated to 12.0.4.)

September 02, 2011

Connect your iOS camera right to Photoshop

Check out this beautifully simple app:

Acquire is a simple, powerful utility for instantly ingesting images from your camera-equipped iOS device into Adobe Photoshop CS5. Using Adobe’s Remote Connect feature, an image shot with your device’s camera is instantly, wirelessly transmitted into Photoshop so you can work with it without delay.

Two bucks well spent!

August 31, 2011

Video: Three-card Monte with iPhones

Marco Tempest puts on a fascinating little magic show via three synchronized devices:

[Via Michael Wiggin]

August 22, 2011

Hints about Adobe’s future mobile photography tools

Managing your photos across a range of devices (phones, tablets, computers, cameras) really starts to suck. We’re exploring some interesting solutions that go beyond what others have announced:

No matter which device is in your hand, you see your entire photo library. So those hundreds of photos you took while touring through Italy with your smartphone would also appear in the library on your tablet device and at home on your laptop…just like that.

At Adobe, we’re exploring solutions to get you there. And it should come as no surprise that we will also leverage the power of Photoshop editing technology for quick fixes along the way.

A tad vague, maybe, but stay tuned. Good things are on the way.

August 12, 2011

New free 3D sculpting app for iPad

Autodesk’s latest offering looks pretty nifty:

CG Channel writes,

The app, which is currently available for free, offers basic sculpting and detailing tools. The geometry can be textured by importing images or capturing them with the iPad 2 camera and ‘stencilling’ them onto its surface.

123D Sculpt offers 17 base models. Five further packs of four are available from the App Store for $0.99 each.

[Via Jerry Harris]

August 01, 2011

Download Adobe’s new HTML5 animation tool

I joined Adobe specifically to build a Web-standards-based animation & interactivity app. Great thought, but we were a decade off base about when browsers would actually be ready to play ball.

That time has come, and the company is today releasing the first preview version of Adobe Edge, a fast, lightweight way to add life to your sites. Feature highlights in this release:

• Create new compositions with Edge’s drawing and text tools.
• Animate position, size, color, shape, rotation and more at the property level.
• Bring motion to existing HTML files while preserving the integrity of CSS-based HTML layouts. (Edge stores all of its animation in a separate JavaScript file that cleanly distinguishes the original HTML from Edge’s animation code.)
• Copy and paste transitions, invert them, and choose from over 25 built-in easing effects.

Check out Edge in action:

Additionally, Adobe has launched The Expressive Web, a site showing off some of the cool stuff you can make modern browsers do, especially by using Adobe tools like Edge and Dreamweaver CS 5.5. Here’s a demo:

Lastly, I don’t want to get into any tedious “Flash vs. HTML5″ blah-blah here, though I do see that angle still bubbling up on link-baiting sites.  For that reason it’s worth noting that both Dreamweaver & GoLive were pushing Web animation starting in the 90′s, that Adobe championed SVG early on, and that it has been a main contributor helping to improve jQuery and lots of other HTML/JS/CSS tech.  Point is, Adobe’s been driving both rich, animated HTML and Flash for 15 years, and the company will keep evolving both to address different customer needs.

Meanwhile, we hope you like what you see in Edge, and we’d be grateful for your feedback. (Oh, and if you create some cool stuff with it, please show off a link in the comments; thanks.)

Related resource: Devnet on HTML5

July 28, 2011

Using an Android tablet for creative work? Let’s talk.

If you use an Android tablet and use it (or would like to use it) for creative imaging, photography, etc., please drop me a line. We can’t let the iPad kids have all the fun. :-)

News for Suite developers

You can control Photoshop using Flash, Flex, and AIR, much like the various Photoshop Touch apps do. Check out developer Daniel Koestler’s detailed write-up for more info.

On a related note, a CS Extension Builder Trial version will be available soon, and you can sign up for notification via the team blog.  Extension Builder is essentially a custom version of Flash Builder that makes it easy to extend Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and other apps.

July 26, 2011

Come join me for a photo walk on Friday!

First we talk (mobile imaging), then we walk.

Photographers & mobile-imaging experts Dan Marcolina (author of iPhone Obsessed) & Knox Bronson (founder of P1xels, “the site of record for the emergent and global iphoneographic artist community”) will be speaking at the Photoshop store in San Francisco this Friday at 1:30pm. Afterwards (3:30-5pm) we’ll be taking pictures outside:

Join Dan, Knox, and members of the Photoshop team for a photo walk through Union Square. The only caveat is: NO CAMERAS ALLOWED. That’s right, you’ll only take photos with your mobile phone.

For me it’s a chance to see how you work & to hear more about what you want Adobe to do in mobile imaging.

Afterwards Blurb is throwing a little party in the store, showing off books while supplying drinks & appetizers. Not a bad little Friday afternoon/evening, eh?

The store is at 550 Sutter.  See the schedule for details on these events & everything else happening there. Hope to see you there!

July 21, 2011

More Photoshop-as-Instagram

Abduzeedo shares tips on replicating Instagram’s Nashville color effect via Photoshop. (Seems like it’s kind of begging to be turned into an action.) Previously: Instagram filters as PS actions.

Tangentially related: A band called The Vaccines is planning to use Instagram to create a crowd-sourced music video. [Via]

July 14, 2011

dbox: Instagram Filters as Photoshop Actions

If you’re a fan of Instagram-style photo effects & would like to apply them easily in Photoshop, check out Daniel Box’s Instagram Filters as Photoshop Actions.  I stumbled upon these randomly, not as the results of a search, so if you’ve seen other cool ways to apply these or similar effects via PS, please feel free to point them out via comments.

June 23, 2011

Illustration: Music vid hand-animated via iPad

Animator Shawn Harris painstakingly drew some 7,000 strokes using the iPad app Brushes, then combined them into a full-length music video. Check out the making-of:

[Via]

June 21, 2011

Instagallery enhanced

Our friend Troy Gaul has revised his excellent Instagallery iPad app with a host of improvements. For v1.2:

In short: Grid. AirPlay. AirPrint. Liked photos. Twitter. Facebook. Open in Safari. Open in Instagram. Email, save, and copy yours. Video out. Favorite sets. Recent sets. Better comments. Easy tagging. Entire caption. Filter display. Unnamed locations. Tap to advance. TextExpander. Faster. Bugs fixed.

Check out the App Store page for more details.

June 14, 2011

Photoshop CS5 iPad companions get new features

The three companion apps have been enhanced, and for a limited time the price of Adobe Eazel has been reduced to $2.99. Details:

• Adobe Eazel (watercolor painting) – You now have easy access to the paintings you create with the new Eazel image gallery, and you’re able to save and open artwork within the app.
• Adobe Color Lava (color mixing) – Using the iPad 2′s built-in camera, you can now capture images from within Color Lava, then pick color inspiration from captured images to dab, swirl and mix into custom color themes.
• Adobe Nav (tool & document control) – You can now transfer images directly from your iPad photo library into Photoshop CS5 for editing, designing and retouching.

Please let us know what you think.

June 10, 2011

A new Photoshop-driving iPad mag ships

Philip Andrews & co. have again created iPad-based training content that not only describes Photoshop techniques, but that actually performs them:

DI Direct ProSharp contains everything you need to know about sharpening your digital images, from the Unsharp Mask and Smart Sharpen filters to a non-filter-based technique the professionals have been keeping a secret for years.

As usual, you’ll be able to tap the step entry on the iPad and see the technqiue performed instantly in Photoshop – it’s all part of our Read It–Tap It–Do It approach.

June 06, 2011

What I’m hoping for most in iOS 5

Why do apps get bloated & inconsistent*, and what can we do about it?

I asked myself these questions a million times working on Photoshop, often aloud. I’ve proposed choosing dramatically better integration over ever-greater depth, but with established apps the progress is slow, for many reasons**.

Since moving over to building mobile apps, I’ve been thinking more intensely about “small pieces loosely joined,” about the eternal appeal of small, well-crafted bits of functionality being assembled as needed to fit any workflow. Remember the promise of OpenDoc? Despite all its well documented faults, I still love the idea of assembling a dream team of little parts, each the best in its class for doing what I need.

In many ways this is what the app store model encourages.  Photographers in particular often assemble dozens of apps (e.g. several for filtering, one for selective coloring, one for tilt-shift, one for social sharing, etc.), then bounce among them to achieve desired results.

It’s great that we can do this, but the workflow often kind of sucks: Why should I have to keep saving a file, switching apps, navigating back to the same file (or rather, a new derivative copy), opening, adjusting, saving, switching… Plus you can forget about exchanging interesting data like layers & selections: everything’s dumbed down to a flat bitmap.

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.

Here’s an example: Do you use Instagram? If so, would you say it’s the best filtering app on your phone? It’s the simplest, maybe, but certainly not the most powerful, flexible, or expressive. Yet how often do you take the time to jump to other apps, apply filters, save them, then go to Instagram to share the results? Most people would prefer to skip all the jumping around, so there’s inevitable pressure on Instagram to add more features***–wrecking its simplicity & getting into an arms race with thousands of other apps.

What if instead you could jump from the Instagram filters list into any app that registered as a filtering tool? And, rather than this feeling like a jarring app switch, what if it felt like entering a mode of the host app? Upon completing the filter (or canceling), you’d pop right back to where you were in Instagram.

Why did Photoshop 1.0 succeed? It offered excellent (and focused) core functionality, plus a simple extensibility system that enabled efficient flexibility (running a filter brought no need to save, navigate, re-open, etc.). The core app could remain relatively simple while aftermarket tuners tailored it to specific customer needs.

Even such a humble system can still offer a way out of the current impasse. Android offers “intents” by which developers can register & call functionality (e.g. “I’m an image editor; pass me some pixels & I’ll pass you back new ones”).  That’s a solid start, and I’m hoping the OSes one-up each other with their integration hooks.

* Hint: It’s not “Adobe sucks” or “developers suck” or “marketers rule”; it’s that all of us users demand just one more “wafer-thin feature” feature in each app, because having it there beats jumping among apps.
**Taking great care not to blow up customer workflows being key among them.
***I see you there, me-too tilt-shift generator.

May 27, 2011

iObsessed for iPad

Photographer Dan Marcolina used InDesign CS5 to create iObsessed, an interactive compendium of over 30 apps. The book complements his iPhone Obsessed photo book, and he writes:

This interactive format allows you to see video tutorials right in-line with the featured images, along with the ability to pinch and zoom any image to see its full detail. Additional surprise links are found on each chapter page.

Here’s the quick demo:

May 20, 2011

Feedback, please: Photoshop-controlling iPad magazine now available

DI Direct, the publication that can link with Photoshop CS5* and drive it via interactive tutorials, is now available as a free download. In case you missed it previously, here’s a demo:

I find the concept very intriguing, but I’d really like your feedback.

• As a reader, how compelling do you find this sort of interactive training? Would it make you more likely to buy a certain magazine or book? Do you (or would you) use your tablet & your computer together this way?
• If you’re a writer, trainer, etc., how compelling do you find it? If we made it extremely easy to add such links via InDesign, then publish to a tablet, would you take the time to add them?

Thanks,
J.

* If you’re using CS5, don’t forget to update to 12.0.4 (via Help->Updates). If you’ve installed CS 5.5, you’re all set already.

May 18, 2011

Adobe’s enriching CSS, WebKit

HTML is great, but its text-layout limitations have always been a drag for print designers–particularly those now wanting to create tablet-based magazines. That’s why Adobe has been proposing to enhance the CSS spec & contributing to the WebKit browser project.

Now you can download a build & learn more about CSS Regions. According to the project page, key highlights of CSS Regions include:

• Story threading — allows content to flow in multiple disjointed boxes expressed in CSS and HTML, making it possible to express more complex, magazine-style threaded layouts, including pull quotes and sidebars.
• Region styling — allows content to be styled based on the region it flows into. For example, the first few lines that fit into the first region of an article may be displayed with a different color or font, or headers flowing in a particular region may have a different background color or size. Region styling is not currently implemented in the CSS Regions prototype.
• Arbitrary content shapes and exclusions — allows content to fit into arbitrary shapes (not just rectangular boxes) or to flow around complex shapes.

Cool. (And do wake me when the Adobe-scourging Apple fansites pick up this news, won’t you?)

Update: To answer some questions I’ve seen, here’s some clarification I pulled from CNET’s coverage of the news:

“We’ve talked to everyone,” Gourdol said, noting that all the browser makers, though; all of the major ones are active in the CSS working group. They’re all very excited about it.

Next stop is getting the software accepted. Adobe has a team of 12 programmers [emphasis added] in the United States and Romania who work on WebKit, Arno said. Adobe hopes to build its CSS software into the browser engine, making it easy for Google, Apple, and others “downstream” of the central project to incorporate it into their actual browsers.

“Webkit is the most interesting area to focus right now because of its mobile presence,” said Paul Gubbay, vice president of engineering for Adobe’s design and Web group. “We’ll see if the [WebKit] community takes it.”

May 17, 2011

iPhone photo seminar at 5pm Pacific today

Photographer & designer Dan Marcolina is “iPhone Obsessed,” having used his phone + apps to produce a coffee table book (with up-resing courtesy of Photoshop). Now I see that he’s presenting a seminar just over an hour from now (sorry, just saw the invite):

His new book, iPhone Obsessed, covers over 47 apps and the post-processing steps you need to know to achieve works of art right in your iPhone. Dan will cover many of these apps during this live Peachpit Photo Club event.

Having met Dan & discussed the book last summer, I can vouch for him being a really interesting, creative guy; should be a good session.

May 14, 2011

Russell Brown demos Eazel for iPad

Watercolor on a tablet becomes a Photoshop layer as Russell puts the proverbial chocolate in the peanut butter:

Check out the Eazel product page for more info.

May 11, 2011

Deke McClelland talks PS iPad apps

Our friend Deke McClelland has posted half a dozen quick videos that cover setting up & using the new Photoshop CS5 touch apps. The videos are available free of charge from Lynda.com.

May 10, 2011

Photoshop CS5 apps for iPad now available

I’m happy to report that the three recently announced Photoshop companion apps are now available for download:

• Adobe Color Lava for mixing colors & sending them to Photoshop (demo)
• Adobe Eazel for creating watercolor-style paintings, then sending them to Photoshop (demo)
• Adobe Nav for selecting Photoshop tools & managing open documents (demo)

Please note that to use them together with Photoshop, you’ll need to apply the Photoshop 12.0.4 update. We encourage developers to make their own Photoshop-savvy apps by downloading the Photoshop Touch SDK and optionally ActionScript source code.

May 04, 2011

Video: Thoughts on the Photoshop Touch SDK

Photoshop engineer Tom Ruark & PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes talk about how the new Photoshop Touch SDK came to be & some of what it enables:

You can read more about the project & see some real-world examples of its use on the Photoshop.com blog. You’ll need to grab the latest CS5 update to enable connectivity, and the three iPad apps that rely on it should be available for download soon. (If you’d like we can notify you when they’re ready.)

May 02, 2011

Photoshop 12.0.4 update for CS5 arrives

This update (choose Window->Updates from within Photoshop) enables remote connections between Photoshop CS5 and other apps, including the new Adobe Nav, Eazel, and Color Lava for iPad.  According to the release notes,

The 12.0.4 update also fixes Liquify performance, type-related crashes, and other top customer issues. The most significant fixes include the following:

• A number of potential security vulnerabilities have been addressed.
• Liquify save mesh now works as expected.
• An issue with Sharpen crashing has been fixed.
• An issue with Quick Selection crashing has been fixed.
• The Orphea Studio File Info issue has been resolved.

April 27, 2011

Photosmith, the Lightroom iPad companion, is now available

I’m very pleased to see that after much anticipation, Photosmith for iPad has been released. I haven’t yet had a chance to try it, but initial reactions seem enthusiastic. Rob Galbraith writes,

We’ve had the pleasure of using Photosmith during its beta period and it has already joined our list of must-have photography apps for Apple’s tablet. If you use Lightroom and own an iPad, we strongly recommend checking out Photosmith.

Tangent: I’ll kick the tires once I find my tablet’s Camera Connection Kit, which is… somewhere.  Apple must surely recognize the frailty of such a solution, and I’m waiting for them to do to it what the iPad 2′s Smart Cover did to the original’s recycled-mousepad of a cover: enable incredibly easy pairing & transfer between devices (e.g. cameras, phones, and tablets).  Hints about AirDrop in Lion make me hopeful.

April 22, 2011

Photosynth panorama maker for iPhone

I haven’t played with a lot of mobile panorama-creation apps, but I find Microsoft’s free Photosynth app for iPhone pretty amazing. It captures still images as you pan around, automatically stitching (and optionally uploading) the results.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&#038;vid=286219d4-1988-4479-816f-12e36d18b514&#038;src=SLPl:embed:&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Microsoft Photosynth App – April 2011">Video: Microsoft Photosynth App – April 2011</a>

The example of an aviation museum is especially well chosen: I distinctly remember my deep, painful frustration trying to photograph rockets at the Air & Space Museum as a kid. I’d have found something like this unspeakably wonderful.

Aside: How do companies like Microsoft & Adobe profit by developing advanced technology & then simply giving it away? It’s like First CityWide Change Bank: Volume.

April 19, 2011

Watch an iPad-based magazine control Photoshop

Ah, now this is cool: DI Magazine is leveraging the Photoshop Touch SDK, making their tablet-based tutorials capable of driving Photoshop actions. Check it out:

Philip & team have really embraced Configurator, distributing interactive panels with the magazine, and I love to see them taking this next step so quickly. I’m eager to hear what readers think.

April 18, 2011

Brief thoughts on the Photoshop CS5 Touch apps

Thanks for all the feedback regarding the just-announced Adobe Nav, Eazel, and Color Lava. A few quick thoughts:

• Please remember that these efforts are just part of a bigger picture that has yet to be revealed. I’ve seen comments along the lines of “Nice, but I want Lightroom for tablets”; “Why are you doing these apps instead of making improvement X to Photoshop?”; “I’d like to see more support for Android”; etc. The feedback is welcome, and none of these things are mutually exclusive.
• “Nav is one of the most exciting of our three new applications IF you think beyond Nav itself,” writes Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes. “We’re showcasing one of the most powerful pieces of the new Photoshop SDK – the ability to drive Photoshop from a device.” See the rest of his comment for more perspective.
• You can indeed watch these videos via HTML5 on an iPad. Here’s a link to all of them plus a few I haven’t yet gotten to blog. For some reason embedded Adobe TV vids don’t work on iOS devices, but I’m told a fix is in progress.

April 17, 2011

Trimensional: 3D Scanner for iPhone

Nifty, even if I’m not sure how & why it would be practical:

[Via Mike Orr]

April 16, 2011

Demo: Adobe Nav for iPad for Photoshop CS5

Having devised Adobe Configurator, I’m clearly a fan of tailoring large, complex apps to be more “everything you want, nothing you don’t.” The newly announced Adobe Nav fits in that vein, enabling use of a customizable toolbar on a tablet. Designer Geoff Dowd offers a quick tour:

I’m expecting apps like this to work best for people who have a hardware dock (e.g. the little keyboard one can get for an iPad) at their main work areas. A dock lets you can plug in the tablet, then forget about battery drain or propping it up yourself.

April 15, 2011

Watercolor effects in Adobe Eazel for iPad

Here’s a quick look at Adobe’s forthcoming Eazel painting app for iPad, including a peek at its integration with Photoshop CS5:

April 14, 2011

A look at Color Lava for Photoshop CS5

Last year engineer (and DJ) Christoph Moskalonek & I were talking about what viscerally pleasing creation experiences one could bring to tablets. Having just shipped some great paint-mixing technology in Photoshop CS5, we hit on the idea of mixing colors with multitouch input, then sending the results to Photoshop. In this video clip, Christoph shows the outcome of that investigation:

April 13, 2011

Eye-Fi enables direct-to-tablet transfer

As I noted last year, photographers have been incredibly clear in wanting wireless tethering between their cameras & tablets. Forget about using tablets for storage: the big win is using a tablet’s big screen for “chimping” (reviewing & flagging one’s shots).

Thus I’m happy to see that a new 8GB Eye-Fi card enables a direct connection between cameras & tablets.  I’d love to put my iPad in my backpack & transfer to it while hiking around.  Two snags, though:

• The card is SD format, and my SLR uses Compact Flash. Something tells me a solution isn’t imminent.
• Wireless transfer requires one’s tablet to be switched on. Long battery life or no, I’m not going to leave the iPad on constantly while hiking, driving, etc. Solving this problem very likely requires support from Apple, Google, and hardware makers.

Still, the development is very encouraging.

Photography: Shallow depth of field on iPhone

Stanford professor & occasional Photoshop team collaborator Marc Levoy has created SynthCam, an interesting tool for simulating large-aperture photo effects using a tiny-aperture cell phone camera:

For more examples, tutorials, etc., see Marc’s site. [Via]

April 11, 2011

Demo: Painting with Adobe Eazel for iPad

Adobe evangelist Mike McHugh shows off the unique interface, watercolor-style drawing chops, and Photoshop CS5 integration in Adobe’s forthcoming Eazel app:

Photoshop CS5 gets tablet-savvy

I’m pleased to say that the Photoshop team has announced three new iPad apps that work closely with Photoshop CS5:

• Adobe Color Lava allows you to mix colors on the iPad, creating custom color swatches and themes to transfer back into Photoshop.
• Adobe Eazel lets digital artists create rich realistic paintings with their fingertips. These paintings can then be sent directly to Photoshop CS5 for compositing or for taking the artwork further.
• Adobe Nav allows you to select and control Photoshop tools using the iPad as the input surface, customize the toolbar, browse and zoom in on up to 200 open Photoshop files or easily create new files.

Here are some glimpses of the apps in action, plus perspective on what it means:

For more info, check out this post from Maria Yap, director of PS product management, plus details on the new Photoshop Touch SDK.

April 01, 2011

What’s this about “Photoshop for iPad”?

No fooling: A couple of days ago, Adobe exec John Loiacono briefly demonstrated some tablet-based imaging technology from our labs. Here’s an audience member’s recording:

[Update: Video was pulled from YouTube, but it's still live here]

Tons of media outlets have picked up & sometimes embellished the news, calling it “a fully-fledged Photoshop Image Editing software,” even saying (rather breathlessly) that it heralds “the End of the Desktop Computing Era.”

The director of our group, Maria Yap, has posted some clarification on the Photoshop.com blog:

While this likely won’t make it into a product for a while, it served to give Photoshop fans a glimpse of what we’re exploring… It’s equally exciting for us, as we’ve enjoyed playing with these devices and dreaming up new possibilities. What we showed at Photoshop World was an experiment with a visual representation of compositing that allows any user to understand Layers.

Maria goes on to give a peek at the kind of Photoshop companion apps we’ve discussed here.

For my part, I don’t subscribe to the hype about tablets eliminating desktop OSes & tools, any more than I think that TV will replace radio. The technologies & experiences are complementary. As John Gruber notes, “It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.” Neven Mrgan writes, “The iPad attempts to simplify computing not by some stroke of magic, but by doing less.” As I put it earlier this year,

Tablet apps have to be about something else–about a different spirit, a different ethos–to be worth doing. Otherwise it’s just the same stuff dumped onto more feeble hardware.

I feel incredibly fortunate to get a chance to bring Adobe imaging technology to tablets, all while rethinking what an interface can be. Thanks for all the feedback, and stay tuned.

Related of possible interest:
• This blog’s tablets category
• A demo of Content-Aware Fill & paint mixing on tablets
• “Of Lightroom, iPads, and muffins“
• PSD viewing on iPads?

March 21, 2011

A tour of Photosmith for iPad

Photosmith, the “travel-sized companion” for Lightroom, sounds quite interesting, and now the developers (who are independent of Adobe) have posted a detailed preview featuring numerous screenshots.  Regarding Lightroom integration, they say:

Tag, rate, star, keyword, organize, etc, your pictures in the field. When you’re back at your main computer with Lightroom, simply start the Photosmith Plugin for Lightroom. (See this page for download and install instructions. The plugin will remain free after the app launches.)

The plugin will search for Photosmith running on your iPad, contact it for the latest statistics, and then let you choose whether you want to sync everything, or just a particular collection. Everything includes… well, everything. Even your collections and keywords are sent over to the iPad so you don’t have to recreate them if you’re out in the field.

I look forward to checking out the app when it goes on sale (hopefully quite soon).

March 16, 2011

Photoshop Express 2.0: Powerful noise reduction on iOS

After more than 20 million downloads, the free Photoshop Express app has added its first paid features. As PM Jordan Davis explains, Adobe Camera Pack in Photoshop Express 2.0 for iOS* adds three new features:

• Reduce Noise: Even the best phone cameras can introduce small amounts of grain and speckling—called noise—into images. The Reduce Noise feature quickly smooths out those flaws to improve your photos. (See screenshot with aggressive settings applied.)
• Self Timer: Set a camera timer to 3- or 10-second intervals before the photo is snapped. Now you can be in the picture too!
• Auto Review: Use the Auto Review mode to make sure you get a good shot and delete it if you don’t. Auto Review gives you a quick look at your picture before the action passes you by.

The app remains free, and the Camera Pack is a $3.99 in-app purchase.

The noise reduction code is based on the outstanding technology introduced in Lightroom 3/Photoshop CS5.  Squeezing very computationally intensive algorithms to run well on handheld processors was no easy feat, and I think you’ll be pleased with the speed & quality of the results.  We look forward to hearing your feedback.

* Photoshop Express for Android has not yet been updated

Adobe’s hiring in mobile digital imaging

Adobe folks are working on a number of interesting mobile applications (most unannounced to date) and is staffing up.  Here are six current job listings I’ve seen:

• There are a pair of openings for Computer Scientist, Quality Engineering – Mobile Photography Products, both in Seattle.
• There’s another pair for Computer Scientist, Adobe Ideas (Tablet, Android, iOS), both in San Jose/Bay Area.
• Photoshop Camera Raw Quality Engineer.  This position is open to new college grads–those who’ve graduated within the last 12 months, or who will graduate in 2011.  Same goes for Member of Technical Staff, Adobe Ideas (Tablet, Android, iOS).

March 13, 2011

Instagallery for iPad now available

Our friend Troy Gaul (formerly of Lightroom & ImageReady) has created Instagallery, a sleek Instagram client for iPad, offering slideshow support & more. I’ve found it great for following & commenting on friends’ photos from my tablet.

March 04, 2011

LetterMPress: Virtual letterpress for iPad

I dig the old-school-lovin’ idea of LetterMpress “a virtual letterpress environment—released first on the iPad—that will allow anyone to create authentic-looking letterpress designs and prints.” According to the project site,

The design process is the same as the letterpress process—you place and arrange type and cuts on a press bed, lock the type, ink the type, and print. You will be able to create unlimited designs, with multiple colors, using authentic vintage wood type and art cuts. And you can print your design directly from LetterMpress or save it as an image for import it into other applications.

[Via]

March 03, 2011

Photoshop Express: 20 Million Downloads & Counting

Wow–quite a milestone. PM Jordan Davis reports:

Photoshop Express for iOS and Android devices hit 20 million customer installations today. We want to thank all our customers who have downloaded and used the app to shoot, edit, apply fun effects, and share photos from their smartphones and tablets. If you haven’t yet tried it, Photoshop Express is available for free on the Apple iTunes Store and Android Marketplace.

Thanks for your support, and your feedback is always welcome.

February 25, 2011

Interesting 3D Photo app

I can’t readily pronounce it “endlessly useful,” but 3D Photo‘s ability to map a live camera feed onto 3D shapes is rather cool:

[Via]

It can be hard to take tablet hardware, which is largely designed for low-power media consumption & gaming, and make it perform well for general-purpose imaging operations. Lately I’ve taken to joking that, “Well, my year-old iPad can run a beautiful 3D pinball game fullscreen at 30+ FPS, so maybe we should let people draw with friggin’ 3D pinballs, because apparently those can be made to go fast.” Look for Adobe Avian AngerPaint™, coming soon to an app store near you!

February 22, 2011

The Layers feature in Adobe Ideas is on sale

Good news for the many users of Adobe Ideas: the Layers feature (which now brings with it scaling, movement, and rotation; see recent) is on sale for $1.99 (regularly $4.99) for a limited time. The feature is an in-app purchase: tap the layers icon (lower left), then hit the plus button next to “Buy Layers.”

February 18, 2011

New features in Adobe Ideas 1.2

Check out scaling, rotation, a swappable toolbar, VGA output, and more in this quick demo from PM David Macy:

Adobe Ideas remains a free download (with in-app purchase of layers) for iOS devices.

February 16, 2011

Other interesting stylus & screen news

Speaking of styluses & touch screens, I’ve seen a few other developments worth passing along:

• Hardware maker Synaptics promises touchscreens that can detect the head of a pin.
• Noting the influx of stylus-enabled tablets coming to market, Engadget touches on the previously unannounced Adobe Journal prototype, “basically a doodler’s paradise.”
• A Qualcomm pen can transcribe ink on paper right into your phone or tablet.
• Toshiba is working to enable tactile feedback on touchscreens:

An interesting iPad stylus project on Kickstarter

Industrial designer Don Lehman’s MORE/REAL Stylus Cap “turns a Sharpie, a Bic, or a Pilot Fineliner into a touchscreen stylus that works with any capacitive touch screen. You get all the benefits of an marker that can write on paper with a stylus that gives you superior control to sketch and take notes on touchscreens such as the iPad.”

[Via Ellen Huber]

February 13, 2011

Aerial NYC for iPad

Photographer Cameron Davidson is offering Aerial New York City, a 60-image iPad portfolio depicting the city from above, for free for a limited time.  Lovely. [Via Ellis Vener]

[Irrelevant personal side note: I used to look out a window just below the "Y" in "York" on the opening screen. 20 Exchange FTW.]

February 11, 2011

Adobe & jQuery

While highlighting all the great stuff Adobe is doing around HTML5, I mentioned the company’s contributions to the popular jQuery JavaScript library. Now the folks involved have started a new blog to share interesting news:

jQuery Mobile–a touch-optimized UI framework for smartphones and tablets–is currently on its Alpha 3 release. We’re very excited about this project and have had one of our finest–Kin Blas–working closely with the rest of the jQuery mobile team since November. As a side note, Kin will be speaking about jQuery Mobile at a Bay Area Mobile (BAM) meetup in March. Highly recommended if you’re interested in getting an overview of the framework from one of its main contributors.

I’m really happy to see Adobe putting real skin in the game here, working to solve customer problems whether through HTML, Flash, video, or any other combination of technologies. It’s not about one runtime vs. another; it’s about results.

February 01, 2011

100th InDesign-made tablet publication ships

Adobe’s digital publishing team passed along a happy milestone: there are now 100 publications made with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite available in the iTunes App Store. Not bad for a product made available in October, eh?  Congrats to the team and to all the writers, photographers, and publishers using the tools.

DesignScene gathers visual inspiration on iPads

You know, I was just thinking, “I’m so completely caught up on design-related links, and so quiet on Twitter, that I could really use another onslaught of content (the ignoring of which could make be feel vaguely bad)!” Or not. Even so, the $4 DesignScene iPad app could be a keeper:

According to the site, features include:

• Real-time visual inspiration from 50+ sites
• Text feeds from 30+ sites
• In-app web browser
• Share links via email, Facebook and Twitter

The app needs Instapaper integration (for saving links for later use) in the worst way, but no doubt that’s coming.

January 31, 2011

Photosmith promises iPad/Lightroom integration

Earlier today Christopher Phin pointed out the interesting-looking Photosmith, “the iPad to Lightroom bridge.” I haven’t tried the app, but it sounds promising for lightweight, on-the-go triage & sync (y’know, the thing that photographers have been clamoring for):

It’s not a replacement for Lightroom–it’s a travel-sized companion.

The Lightroom integration will work simply as a plugin… By using a File > menu option, you can open the [Photosmith] Sync screen directly from within Lightroom.

No additional software is needed. No tinkering with settings is needed. No iTunes or special configuration. It works on a PC or a Mac… The iPad is detected automatically as long as you’re connected to the same WiFi network and [Photosmith] is running on it – as soon as the Sync screen opens, it automatically looks for your iPad and then shows you the stats (last sync date, number of new images/collections/keywords), and then lets you choose the collection you want to sync (or all of them).

January 27, 2011

Awesome app o’ the day: Toontastic

The other day I said that creation on tablets would be more about fun, about speed, and about the unbridled pleasure of creation than what we know today. Toontastic is the sort of thing I have in mind:

I just spent half an hour creating cartoons with our 2- and 1-year-old sons, quitting only when I had to go to work. We had a pirate-loaded ball.

I’m reminded of my own childhood, when I tried animation with flipbooks and even an Etch-a-Sketch Animator. Apple IIgs apps were similarly promising but frustrating. It wasn’t ’til college that I found Director & Flash, but of course those are complex pro tools. I love seeing the creation experience taken to the next level.

Thanks to reader Hendrik for pointing out the app.

January 25, 2011

A note about Photoshop Express & location services

The newly released Photoshop Express 1.5 for iOS includes a dialog that’s too strongly worded, and it’s causing some confusion and consternation among App Store reviewers.  If you’ve turned off location services, the app says the following:

Location service denied. PS Express will now run with reduced functionality. Photo metadata cannot be added or preserved and browsing through photos in the library will be disabled.

Why does Express need location services enabled in order to support the new photo review mode? Wouldn’t you expect that this switch would simply govern whether location data is added to your photos?

The issue is related to security. iOS 4 gives third-party apps access to the photo library, including the ability to read location data from photos. Apple wanted to ensure that users could control the process, so they required that location services be enabled before apps could read the library. That way apps can (and must) ask permission to use location services. (In case my explanation doesn’t make sense, you can see this one from the makers of Camera Genius.)

The subtleties are of course hard to communicate in a few words, but we should have tried harder to find less threatening wording. I apologize for not having done so, and we’re now talking about ways to rephrase the warning. Thanks for your patience.

Photoshop Express 1.5 arrives for iOS

I’m delighted to report that Photoshop Express, Adobe’s free photo capture & editing tool that’s been downloaded over 15 million times (!), is now available in enhanced version 1.5 form via Apple’s App Store.

This release reworks the photo capture experience, adding support for batch capture of photos plus a highly useful review mode, and it includes full Retina display support. iOS 4.2 compatibility brings benefits like an improved ability to upload images in the background.

After going a bit quiet (publicly, at least) following the previous release, the Express team is now cooking with gas, and we have other cool enhancements queued up for the near future. In the near term, please let us know what you think of the new release, and what you’d like to see us do going forward. Thanks for your interest & support.

January 24, 2011

A few interesting iOS apps (video & utility)

• Video-recording app Precorder takes a cue from the world of reality TV production: rather than recording everything to disk in hopes of getting some good nuggets, it buffers a video stream (a la DVRs).  It’s constantly saving the few seconds of video before you hit record, so if something interesting happens, hit record & capture it.  If not, no worries: there’s nothing to delete.  I tried it with the kids yesterday & it worked nicely.
• 8mm Vintage Camera brings the trendy retro aesthetic to handheld video, “capturing the beauty and magic of old school vintage movies. By mixing and matching films and lenses, you can recreate the atmosphere of those bygone eras with 25 timeless retro looks.” [Via]
• Written by Lightroom team vets Troy Gaul and Dustin & Dylan Bruzenak, Handoff “simplifies sending things from your computer’s web browser to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch” via a combo of app + desktop browser extensions.  Looks clever and useful.

January 17, 2011

Why would you *want* to create on a tablet?

You need to take a picture, and I put in front of you a smartphone containing a camera. Next to it I put an excellent dedicated camera–say, a 5D Mark II.  Which will you use?

At one time that question would have been absurd: of course you’d use the high-end camera. In many cases that remains true, but increasingly I find myself choosing to use my iPhone instead of my SLR–and not just because it’s handy & the SLR isn’t. I choose the phone because of the slickness, the immediacy of creating (including post-processing), sharing, and getting feedback.

I mention this because I remain deeply interested in building creative tools for tablets, and I see a parallel. Today if you put my iPad next to my MacBook Pro & ask me to create something visual, I’m always going to choose to use the laptop. The precision, the horsepower, the screen size–everything makes it a faster, more satisfying option for me. I rarely use the iPad for creative work, instead doing standard consumer stuff (browsing, email, Netflix, etc.).

But can & should that change? All else being equal (i.e. factoring out size & availability), what would make me want to choose the tablet over the laptop?

I’m frankly uninterested in making a “poor-man’s Photoshop” for tablets. Good thing, too, as customers seem uninterested. We already have Photoshop, and the rationale for putting apps on tablets can’t simply be, “The device is smaller than a laptop.” If you just want a small computer, get a MacBook Air or similarly lightweight device & be happy.

Tablet apps have to be about something else–about a different spirit, a different ethos–to be worth doing. Otherwise it’s just the same stuff dumped onto more feeble hardware. I suspect that transformative apps be more about fun, about speed, and about the unbridled pleasure of creation than what we know today. They’ll certainly take advantage of a tablet’s differentiating hardware (accelerometer, location awareness, and of course multitouch).

I haven’t yet seen the app(s) that’ll make me favor a tablet for creative work–but I know they’re coming. And I’m going to try to be part of flipping that proverbial bit.

Your thoughts are, as always, most welcome.

January 13, 2011

Videos: Russell Brown on HDR, iPad portfolios

By very popular demand, Russell Brown has recorded & posted his tutorials on creating tablet-ready portfolios & great-looking (non-cheesy) HDR images. Enjoy.

Mobile portfolios:

• Exporting Adobe Bridge Images to an Apple iPad Portfolio
• Exporting Adobe Lightroom 3 Images to an Apple iPad Portfolio
• Exporting Adobe Bridge PDF Portfolios to an Apple iPad
• Exporting Adobe Lightroom 3 PDF Portfolios to an Apple iPad
• Advanced PDF Portfolio Techniques in Adobe Acrobat Pro X
• Exporting Video from Adobe Lightroom 3 to an iPad

HDR

• Natural HDR Toning Technique
• Detailing Action that goes with the HDR technique

January 12, 2011

App Idea: Photo Defiler

The other day while using Instagram, it occurred to me: To really do proper retro photos, I need a way to obscure half the image with my dad’s finger.  In that vein, how about an app that would fill your images with cliched errors?  A few ideas:

• Head Clipper: Use face detection to identify people in an image, then partly lop off their domes.
• Shadow Caster: Hey, where’s the photographer? Ah, there’s his handy shadow!
• Back Lighter: Fill light/Shadow-Highlight is passé; we need a way to silhouette subjects into oblivion.
• Grass Expander: Auto zoom out, then use Content-Aware Fill to surround one’s subject with even more grass & extraneous details.
• Blink Synthesizer: If society has figured out how to put human eyes onto Muppets, surely we can shut the eyes of at least some people in a group photo.
• Face Blurrer: A bit o’ witness protection.
• Digital Intruder: My dad’s finger on millions of handsets around the world. You’re welcome.

Not quitting my day job,
J.

January 10, 2011

Gimme Pleasure

John Gruber made an interesting remark the other day:

“In hindsight, I think the use cases for the original iPad are simplicity and delight.”

This suggests that delight itself (the beautiful execution) is the feature, rather than merely a characteristic of a feature.  That is, I buy and use the iPad not to do things I couldn’t otherwise do, but for the pleasure involved in doing those things.

I find this point of view intriguing.  It gets at some of what I’ve had in mind for new Adobe mobile apps: that they should be about JOY, about pleasure–more like games, maybe, than very sober, precise desktop tools one associates with Adobe.

In a similar vein, Prerna Gupta, CEO of music startup Khush, writes that Not all Products Need To Be Painkillers:

It’s easy to say today that Twitter solves the problem of dispersed information, or Facebook the problem of dispersed friends. But who thought of these as “pain points” back in 2004? I don’t believe Twitter and Facebook are painkillers. Just ask yourself, Is “acetaminophen” really the drug you feel like you’re on when you’re using Twitter? Or does “methamphetamine” sound more appropriate? [...]

If you focus only on painkillers, you’ll likely miss out on a completely different, and potentially much larger, set of opportunities: those that target pleasure. Pornography, sports and coffee are, for example, three insanely lucrative industries, and each of them sells the promise of pleasure.

Your desktop/laptop already offers pain & pain killers. So, in building new mobile apps, can we focus more on aphrodisiacs? What would you like to see?

January 08, 2011

Nomad Brush promises soft bristles on an iPad

“Nomad Brush is a unique artist paintbrush,” says its product site. “Made with a long handle and soft bristles, it is the first paintbrush stylus for the iPad. Available February 2011.” The video is frustratingly short on details, showing the tool in action for just a moment:

[Via]

January 04, 2011

Eye-Fi enables direct camera-to-iPad transfer

Ah, I’ve been waiting for this one for some time: Eye-Fi is enabling direct photo transfer from cameras to iPads–something I’ve heard photographers request over and over again.  Now, if only I could get a WiFi-enabled card that would work in my 5D. (Eye-Fi strongly discourages the use of an SD-to-CF adapter.) [Via Sean Parent]

December 29, 2010

Learn to make iPad magazines: Recording available

A number of folks asked whether the recent demo/Q&A session on using InDesign to create tablet publications would be recorded for later viewing. The answer: yep, here it is. [Via Jennifer Kremer]

December 19, 2010

Magic Shutter enables light painting with an iPhone

What’s an “epoch-making creative iPhone camera”? One that lets you do long exposure & paint with light, apparently. Magic Shutter looks pretty cool:

[Via Nic Couillard]

December 18, 2010

Clever “Elf Cam” photography app

Of the new app Elf Cam, Mark Frauenfelder writes, “It allows you to set up your camera on Christmas Eve to record Santa coming out of your fireplace (or walking into room if you don’t have a fireplace), so you can show it to your child in order to prove that Santa Claus is real.”

December 03, 2010

Illustrator iPad Sketch Elements

The guys at Teehan+Lax, the creators of the popular iPad GUI PSD, have created a complementary set of vector-based iPad Sketch Elements.  The widgets are deliberately visually rougher, meant to facilitate faster & looser comping.  Cool; thanks, guys.

November 20, 2010

Wi-Fi Direct promises wireless tethering

Not really newsworthy, but encouraging: A few months ago I wrote about the need for wireless tethering, whereby your camera could discover transfer photos right into a tablet or laptop. (Today’s setups–e.g. setting up a portable hotspot while on the go–are too neckbeard-a-riffic to get mass adoption.)  The customer demand is so strong that I’ve assumed that a bunch of hardware manufacturers have been working on solutions. Now I see that the Wi-Fi Direct spec is apparently inching its way towards shipping products.  I’m eager to see what results. [Via Sean Parent]

November 17, 2010

A cool, free Photoshop book comes to iPad

Photographer Dan Marcolina has used InDesign’s new tablet-publishing tools to create the very cool The World Without Photoshop, “A unique interactive iPad book featuring a dozen Photoshop Masters.”

See for yourself what some of the best digital artists’ work looks like without the software. Then with the touch of your finger The World Without Photoshop is transformed and you can see and hear the imaginations of these artists come to life in their work. Pinch and zoom into over 48 works by artists, illustrators, designers, and photographers and get their insights into how twenty years of Photoshop innovation have changed their world.

Bonus content includes an interactive timeline of 20 years of Photoshop features, Russell Preston Brown’s Photoshop ODDyssey presentation, more.

November 08, 2010

Adobe Ideas adds iOS4 support, layers, more

I’m really pleased to say that the Adobe Ideas team has released version 1.1, offering a range of free enhancements plus the app’s first optional paid feature.

Free features:

• Support for iPhone 4 retina display
• Support for iOS4 Multi-tasking
• Support for Redo
• Available in French, German and Japanese
• Sketches save much faster, avoiding loss of data when you close the app or you need to answer a phone call.
• Save drawing to “saved photos” album on iPad and iPhone (no longer a need to create a screenshot)

In-app purchase (optional):

• Layers: Available for in-app purchase. Create up to 10 drawing layers plus a photo layer for each sketch; control order and opacity for each layer.

Here’s a quick (sub-2-minute) demo:

You might also be interested in the Ideas Facebook page, Flickr Gallery, and team blog.  Congrats, guys!

November 04, 2010

Feedback, please: A Photoshop iPad companion

In August I asked for ideas on tablet-based companions for Photoshop, and last week at MAX we demoed a paint-mixing prototype. Now the designers have taken a crack at mocking up some companion features that could run on a phone or tablet.

In a nutshell, you get:

• groups of task-based tools & commands (e.g. all your photography/retouching tools & buttons on one page, or all your painting ones, 3D ones, etc.)
• interactive, task-based tutorials that drive Photoshop, helping you get things done

The idea is to let you work faster–offering more organized access to tools & knowledge. What do you think? What would you pay for this?

Get crisp Web/screen text in Photoshop, FW

“Improved text rendering” was near the top of readers’ wish lists a few weeks back when I requested feedback on potential Web & drawing features for Photoshop, and it’s something the team is investigating.  In the meantime, these links may be of interest:

• Ksenia Chernyavska provides info on creating pixel-perfect text of small size in Photoshop.
• David Hogue has posted tips on how to Simulate ClearType Text in Fireworks CS4. [Via]

Let me agree in advance that one shouldn’t need tips & that these things should Just Work™.

November 02, 2010

Adobe’s enhancing WebKit for better typography

I’m excited to say that Adobe’s working with Google to enable better HTML-based typography, contributing the work to the open-source WebKit project.

Why not just say “Web typography”? Because HTML goes beyond the Web, supporting apps like Adobe’s new tablet publishing solution.  Trouble is, for all its strengths (e.g. separating content from layout), HTML’s type handling has been pretty limited–especially for creating print-quality layouts.

Adobe wants to help solve the problem, making HTML better suited to more demanding applications.  Check out this demo from engineering VP Paul Gubbay:

Paul writes,

The team has taken the approach of extending CSS with a few new elements utilizing the webkit- prefix so that the designer can adequately describe their intent for the content as the page is resized to simulate working across different screens.  We look forward to working with the Webkit Open Source project and of course the W3C to contribute our work back in the most appropriate way.  And, as always your comments are very much appreciated.

October 27, 2010

“Witchcraft”: Content-Aware Fill & paint mixing on tablets

During Monday’s MAX keynote, Kevin Lynch demoed a couple of the tablet explorations we’ve been doing:

As you can see, we’re trying some different design directions, making stand-alone imaging tools for tablets, as well as companions to Creative Suite apps. Props to Iván Cavero Belaunde, Christoph Moskalonek, and the other folks who brought these features to life.

So, what do you think? How would you like to see these technologies evolve?

October 22, 2010

President Obama uses Adobe Ideas

Well, for a moment, anyway: he used it to sign an iPad.  Tablet owner Sylvester Cann even put up a little mini site to capture the moment.  Cool! [Via Ideas engineer Paul George]

October 19, 2010

Better PS Techniques mag comes to iPad

The folks behind Better Photoshop Techniques magazine have put together an interactive iPad version using Adobe’s new Digital Publishing System. Publisher Philip Andrews notes,

It is called DI Magazine and is now available as a free download on the iTunes AppStore store. It’s the first Photoshop magazine of its type in the world and has the great augmented reality ‘back cover’ that we trialled with the print magazine earlier this year.

Stories include photos from Lightroom team member Kelly Castro. The app is a free download from the App Store.

Incidentally, I know people are hungry for more info about when they can get their hands on InDesign-to-tablet publishing tools.  I don’t have any inside scoop to share, but with Adobe MAX coming next week, I’m hoping we’ll see more info soon.

October 13, 2010

What’s your favorite photo-capture app?

I’m pleased to say that I’ve just taken on product management responsibilities for Photoshop Express, Adobe’s photo capture, editing, and sharing app that’s been downloaded some 13 million times for iOS and Android devices. We’re excited about the interesting directions we can go with Express, and I look forward to sharing more details soon.

In the meantime, I thought I’d ask: What app(s) do you use for capturing images with your mobile devices? What’s missing, and what could be improved? (I’ll leave the question open-ended to avoid leading the witnesses.)

Thanks,
J.

Video: Driving a blimp via iPad

RC helicopters shooting high-def video? Yawn; that’s so last week. All the cool kids are now flying blimps with their iPads, using onboard cameras to photograph passersby and print them onto little figurines. (I am not making this up.)

[Via Matthew Richmond]

October 09, 2010

InDesign magazine comes to iPad… via InDesign

This is getting kind of meta: InDesign magazine has used InDesign CS5 to publish the magazine to iPad, making it available in free preview form.  Designed by Monika Wolff and Jennifer Wills of W+W Design, the iPad version features video tutorials on CS5 features and more.  Very nicely done. [Via Terri Stone]

October 05, 2010

New Photoshop 3D book, iPad app

Photoshop 3D PM Zorana Gee & lead engineer Pete Falco, working with expert digital artists, have created new new book 3D in Photoshop, together with a free interactive version for iPad. Zorana writes,

Check out the only book of it’s kind that breaks down everything you need to know about working with 3D in Photoshop. Not only is it written directly by the Photoshop 3D Team themselves but also Photoshop masters, like Bert Monroy, have contributed useful and inspiring tutorials that will benefit any designer wanting to learn 3D.

Further, the team has put together a companion iPad app that takes the first chapter of the book (basic 3D concepts) and added interactive animations to each page to help illustrate the concepts. Scrolling across will read as the first chapter of the book plus interactivity and scrolling down will introduce 15 unique tutorials (only found in the iPad app) that show you how to create all the animations directly in Photoshop CS5 Extended.

October 04, 2010

The New Yorker comes to iPads through InDesign

Adobe & Condé Nast have worked together to launch The New Yorker tablet edition. Here’s Jason Schwartzman’s intro:

I found this bit about the publishing technology’s evolution interesting:

The New Yorker [...] demanded not only design fidelity, but flexibility due to its weekly, text-heavy nature. To solve this design and production challenge, The New Yorker used HTML pages as part of its tablet edition. HTML provided flexibility for The New Yorker to rapidly flow text into the magazine application and meet the requirements of a frequent publishing cycle. In the future, the Digital Magazine Solution will provide the option of using either HTML pages for flexible publishing or rasterized images for publishers that demand pixel-perfect layouts.

My translation: Yes, the team is well aware of file size concerns, and they’re using various technologies (e.g. HTML) to give publishers choices. I expect we’ll be hearing more details soon.

October 03, 2010

Video: SNL iPhone app parody

Rescue Dogs FTW!

September 30, 2010

3D light painting with an iPad

What a fascinating technique & beautiful result:

We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.

For more info, check out the makers’ blog post & the resulting book.

September 29, 2010

New blog, channel for Adobe mobile apps

Six months after the launch of Adobe Ideas, customers continue to file great suggestions via my blog.  Now that team has launched their own Adobe Ideas Blog.  It’s spartan at the moment but it’s sure to grow.

Meanwhile Adobe TV now features a channel devoted to mobile and devices.  Expect to see more good stuff added there, too.

Previously: How Adobe Ideas came to be (and where it’s headed)

September 15, 2010

New PSDs for iPhone 4, Android UIs

• The folks at Teehan+Lax have updated their iPhone GUI PSD, scaling it up to take advantage of the iPhone 4′s high-density Retina Display.
• The staff of Webdesignshock have created a similar PSD for creating Android UIs. [Via Dave Dobish]

September 07, 2010

Waiting for wireless tethering

Could photographers be clearer in wanting their images sent wirelessly & immediately to iPads and similar tablets, turning these devices into extensions of the back of the camera?  I seriously doubt it.

At the moment you can kinda-sorta do some interesting things, as long as you have a traditional Mac/PC in the loop.  Here’s a 3-minute demo from Brent Pearson:

More details about the setup are on Brent’s site. [Via]

Relying a regular computer largely defeats the purpose of using the tablet, of course.  Photogs want to be shooting with a tablet-wielding assistant on the red carpet; checking lighting on set by reviewing raw image data; and just chimping on vacation.  The whole point is to avoid lugging a 5-8lb. laptop & to carry a ~1lb tablet instead.

Here’s hoping that device makers are working on a Bonjour-like solution that’ll let cameras, computers, phones, and other devices in close proximity locate one another, then exchange data (stills, live video streams, etc.).  If nothing else I’d stop wishing that my iPad included a camera for capturing raw materials for sketching, as I’d instead just use my phone as an extension of the tablet.

August 30, 2010

Talking tablets & the future this Wednesday

If you’ll be at Photoshop World, please come join brainstorm with Adobe and Wacom about how tablets (both desktop & iPad-style) can evolve to help capture your artistic vision.  We’ll be meeting Wednesday at 5pm in Wacom’s booth (#403).

August 25, 2010

Photoshop Express online editor gets upgraded

Sync your images with the cloud; organize your Flickr, Facebook, and other images in one spot; and edit them more easily through the new Photoshop.com.

According to a post from project PM Jordan Davis, highlights of the new release include:

Photoshop Express Editor: Redesigned to be faster and easier to use. As an added bonus, you can now edit files directly from your hard drive (no Photoshop.com account needed).

Photoshop Express Organizer: Now a standalone application that serves as an online hub for all of your media on Photoshop.com. It also gives you easy access to your images on Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa.

Photoshop Express Uploader: A lightweight, installable application that enables two-way syncing between files stored on your computer and those stored online on Photoshop.com.

Check out the site to get started (and to get 2GB of online storage free).

August 17, 2010

Tablet companions to Photoshop?

In playing with Photoshop Express for iPad, Jesus Diaz from Gizmodo observed:

I got a craving for something very simple, which I hope Adobe can make (and which will be extremely useful for me and other desktop Photoshop users): Release an application to convert the iPad into a Photoshop control surface. I will love to display this application while I’m working on the image and quickly use it to apply filters and transforms. Or just access many of the Photoshop tool palettes, adopted to touchscreen use.

Photoshop-control apps such as Photokeys, Keypad, and perhaps others already exist & have for some time.  Do you use them?  I haven’t encountered anyone who’s mentioned using them, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.  How widespread is this desire?

Other companion ideas that spring readily to mind:

• Using multitouch input from a tablet to drive Liquify (for pinching, rotating, etc.)
• Using multitouch to mix paints together, a la a real artist’s palette, then send the results to Photoshop (i.e. what gets mixed on the tablet is streamed into your PS brush)
• Using a tool like Configurator to assemble custom layouts of tools, buttons, interactive tutorials, etc. that would run on a tablet and drive desktop Photoshop
• Other?

Your feedback and ideas would be most welcome.

Thanks,
J.

August 14, 2010

Photoshop Express comes to iPad

What do you do after more than 10 million people download your iPhone app? Bring it to the iPad, of course!

Photoshop Express–formerly called Photoshop.com Mobile–has been updated for both iPhone and iPad.  In addition to stability & performance improvements, iPad-specific features include:

• Support for portrait and landscape orientations
• Redesigned Online, Edit, and Upload workflows
• Ability to work on multiple photos in sequence from within a single workflow
• Redesigned Organizer view with simplified album sharing
• Updated icons and visuals that make it easier to navigate and use the Editor
• Ability to upload to Photoshop.com and Facebook simultaneously

The update went live yesterday, but it contained a couple of bugs for which it got justifiably dinged.  The bugs are now fixed; sorry that they got past the team initially. (Thanks, Apple, for pushing out the update quickly.)

Plenty of cool additional enhancements are in the works, and your feedback is more than welcome.

August 12, 2010

Do you care about PNG-8 with transparency?

Fans of Adobe Fireworks have long pointed out that Photoshop’s Save for Web feature doesn’t support the ability to generate an 8-bit PNG file with variable transparency.  That is, Photoshop’s 8-bit PNGs support 1-bit transparency (just like a GIF), whereas Fireworks PNGs support multiple semi-transparent colors. (Here’s a really ugly comparison I threw together.)

Question: Is this still relevant, e.g. in building mobile apps?  Is it important to the point where the Photoshop team should prioritize adding this support ahead of doing other Web-/mobile-oriented changes? [Update: If it's relevant to you, it would be helpful to know specifically how/when you'd use it.]

Thanks,
J.

August 03, 2010

An Adobe Ideas Flickr pool

Check out some cool illustrations made with Adobe’s first iPad app.

Through comments I know that people are eager for info about possible updates to Ideas.  I don’t have anything to share at the moment, but I’m keeping in touch with that team.  In the meantime, the continuing feedback is very encouraging.

July 27, 2010

Zooming in Adobe Ideas = Interesting note-taking

Kevin Burg has posted an interesting article on How To Take Notes Like a Champ using the free Adobe Ideas iPad app.  In a nutshell,

Adobe Ideas allows fractalesque zooming. You are able to use vast scale differences to communicate importance as well as benefit from a very flexible canvas, so you almost never run out of space taking notes.

Via David Macy, Ideas PM. For David’s perspective on what Ideas is all about, see previous.

July 22, 2010

Adobe vets release ColorBlast for iPhone

My old teammates Ralf & Steve, the guys who brought you Vanishing Point in Photoshop (and before that LiveMotion), have released their first iPhone application, ColorBlast.  It’s a tool for selectively painting color onto images:

The core feature of ColorBlast is the ability to separate and color one object in an otherwise black and white photo. To make this possible, and even fun, ColorBlast employs selective color technology which allows you to start brushing on a specified color and then paint only that color.

Here’s the app in action:

You can find ColorBlast on the App Store, and you can follow its developments via its Facebook fan page.

July 02, 2010

SlideShowPro does HTML5, Flash

Todd Dominey & co., the makers of the excellent Flash-based SlideShowPro, have created a visually rich alternative version that uses HTML5 instead of Flash.

This is a good thing.

Why?  Because it’s putting customers ahead of technologies, and it’s using both Flash & HTML to maximize viewers’ ability to see rich content, including on i-devices.  As the site explains:

SlideShowPro Mobile is an entirely new media player built using HTML5 that doesn’t require the Flash Player plugin and can serve as a fallback for users accessing your web sites using these devices. But it’s not just any fallback — it’s specially designed for touch interfaces and smaller screen sizes. So it looks nothing like the SlideShowPro player and more like a native application that’s intuitive, easy to use, and just feels right. [Demo]

I’d love to see this support added to the Lightroom version of SlideShowPro, as I rely on it for all our family shots.  I want to generate two presentation layers (one Flash, one HTML) that both provide a rich, beautiful presentation of the same image files, and I want the gallery to auto-select the correct presentation layer based on viewers’ devices.  Make the whole tedious Flash-vs.-HTML thing a non-issue for customers.

July 01, 2010

Demo: Pressure-sensitive sketching on iPad

The folks at Ten One Design have prototyped a pressure-sensitive stylus for use with iPads:

It’s encouraging to see this progress, but according to the developers’ notes, it sounds like Apple may disallow the inclusion of the needed library. Let’s hope the bottlenecks get removed sooner rather than later. [Via]

June 29, 2010

A film shot & edited entirely on an iPhone

Amazingly, Apple of My Eye is a short movie shot and edited entirely on an iPhone 4:

I’m smitten, especially given that my little brother and I made our own little train video (embarrassingly crude by comparison, but helped immeasurably by Johnny Cash) on our parents’ iMac some years ago. I’m struck by the radical quality difference between a 2002-vintage consumer camera, and what David Lynch might call your effing telephone of today. [Via]

June 24, 2010

Stylus recommendations?

Why is it I can draw more accurately with our 2-year-old’s Magna Doodle than I can with an iPad? Simple: it’s the stylus.

I tried a stubby Pogo stylus a few months back and had an instant aversion to drawing with a big, flat, round disk. I see that other styluses are available, but I’ve yet to find a good set of comparisons. If you’ve successfully used a stylus to draw on an iPad, I’d like to hear your recommendations.

Incidentally, the imprecision of drawing with a finger certainly raises the value of natural media brushes (e.g. a realistic pencil simulation). Crappy input driving a high-precision line looks bad, but crappy input driving a deliberately crappy (sketchy) line looks more like “I meant to do that.”

[Update: Incidentally, just so people know, I'm not completely incompetent when it comes to drawing.]

Illustrator-friendly iPhone UI elements

I find myself mocking up iPad interfaces in Illustrator (<-trendy tongue twister?) this morning, so I’m finding this collection of iPhone UI vector elements from Rusty Mitchell & the folks at Mercury Intermedia quite handy. Thanks, guys! [Update: See also Mordy Golding's vector iPhone and components.

[Previously: iOS elements for Photoshop.]

June 18, 2010

New iOS 4-ready PSD templates available

• Designer Sebastiaan de With has updated his iPhone/iPad icon PSD file, adding support for iOS 4 and 114x114px icons.
• Neven Mrgan leverages that file and offers lots of comments and tips for making clear icons using Photoshop and Illustrator.
• The designers at Teehan+Lax have revved their own iOS4 PSD, saying “Fully redesigned Photoshop template. Now accurate, still free.” [Via] (Not using these templates in production, I’m not in a position to evaluate their relative strengths.)

June 17, 2010

Flash Player & Photoshop.com app updated for Android

• Flash Player 10.1 Public Beta 3 for Android is now live on Google’s Android Market for Nexus One phones running Android 2.2. Flash Player was already the #1 free download on the Android store, and people seem to be digging the new release (“Awesome.” “Epic.” “Live soccer on my phone = win.”).
• An Adobe installer–the Flash Player installer at that–has actually drawn praise from irascible Mac IT guy John C. Welch. (I will now check for the sun becoming as black as sackcloth, etc.)
• Unrelated to Flash, a new release of the Photoshop.com Mobile app for Android is available. The new release adds support for uploading to Facebook and Twitter via TwitPic, along with one-touch borders (soft edges, vignettes, rounded corners) and more.

June 15, 2010

Flash + Android = Gas pedal

Heh–a little hacking fun from Grant Skinner:

Check out Grant’s blog for more details if interested.

June 12, 2010

Interesting device: AirStash wireless flash drive

Hmm–this seems kind of promising: the AirStash lets you plug-in SD memory cards, then broadcast their content to wireless devices (e.g. iPads, iPhones, etc.). Here’s a demo:

Photographers I meet really, really like the idea of shooting freely & having their images immediately, painlessly displayed on a tablet–effectively turning the tablet into an extension of the camera. I haven’t yet seen an example of this working, but I have an Eye-Fi card on order and am motivated to experiment. It’s apparently possible to use an iPhone as an iPad camera, but not having a 3GS, I can’t try that approach.
The AirStash doesn’t offer camera-to-tablet syncing, but it seems like the next best thing, and it might enable more flexible import than Apple’s Camera Connection Kit presently enables. With 16GB memory cards going for as little as a hilariously low $30, it’s easy to imagine taking a card or two on vacation, leaving all photos on it, backing them up to a tablet, and performing reviewing/culling/adjusting/sharing on the tablet.
Unfortunately the AirStash is sold out at the moment, so I haven’t gotten to try it. If anyone has kicked the tires on this or related devices, I’m curious to hear your feedback. [Via Simon Chen]

June 11, 2010

Of Lightroom, iPads, and muffins

When asking customers about possible Adobe tablet apps, I’m reminded of the experience of trying to get our toddler to count bites of dinner en route to a chocolate muffin:

Mom: “Okay, what number comes before six?”

Finn: “Muffin!”

Mom: “Five…then what’s next? Not three but…”

Finn: “Muffin!”

It’s like this:

Me: “So, we’re thinking of building app X…

Everyone: “Lightroom!”

Me: “Yes, cool, we hear you. But back to X…”

Everyone: “Lightroom!”

Me: “Right, I know, but…”

Everyone: “Lightroom!”

I find this kind of charming and encouraging. Building a great iPad app for mobile photo review, editing, and sharing is (presently) tougher than one might think, but customer desire is very clear. (Feedback about non-LR/photography workflow apps is welcome, too.)

June 02, 2010

Brief thoughts (and a question) on tablets & styluses

When did my finger start resembling a giant breadstick? More on that in a moment.

Of tablet computers Steve Jobs recently said, “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”

I think he’s right, insofar as he’s talking about requiring the use of a stylus. There’s a big difference, however, between requiring something and enabling it as an option.

Regarding the former, ten years ago I bought and almost immediately returned a big Kyocera-Palm frankenphone. I loved the promise of a phone/pocket computer, but having to pop out a stylus to perform even the simplest tasks was a deal breaker. In contrast, my simple Nokia offered just two soft keys and a rocker switch, but that simplicity led to an efficient UI. Forcing me to use a stylus forced me to ditch the phone.

When it comes to drawing and painting, however, using a finger really sucks for anything precise. Yes, a talented artist can do impressive work, but there’s a reason people don’t use their fingers to draw and write on paper. Have you tried drawing anything with any precision on an iPad? (Don’t just launch an app and screw around; try to draw something very specific.) Maybe it’s just me, but suddenly my fingertip looks enormous, blotting out the area I’m trying to mark. I find myself tipping my whole hand up and down, trying to see what’s underneath my finger.

I don’t know what can be done with the I/O on iPads and future tablets, but I really hope that a vendor can deliver a pressure-sensitive stylus. I think it would be a watershed moment for sketching on the go.

Question: Would you be willing to pay for such a thing? And if so, how much?

PS–Yesterday Steve acknowledged the imprecision of a finger: “The minute you throw a stylus out, you have the [reduced] precision of a finger, you can’t use a PC OS.”

June 01, 2010

Adobe/Wired digital viewer for iPad coming soon for all publishers

I’ve written previously that Adobe is not in the Flash business, or the Photoshop business, or the PDF or HTML5 business. Rather, it’s in the solving customers’ problems business, and any given technology is just a means to an end. Today you’re getting more proof.
As you may have seen last week, Adobe and Wired Magazine have collaborated to bring a richly interactive version of the magazine to iPads. Here’s a 1-minute demo:

I received quite a few questions about how regular Creative Suite customers can tap into these capabilities. Today Adobe announced that the ability to target the digital viewer technology it created for Wired will be made available soon on Adobe Labs. According to VP Dave Burkett,

“We aim to make our digital viewer software available to all publishers soon and plan to deliver versions that work across multiple hardware platforms. It’s safe to say that if you are already working in InDesign CS5, you’ll be well on your way to producing a beautiful digital version of your publication.”

Check out Adobe’s Digital Publishing Platform pages for more background & details.
InDesign CS5 adds a bunch of simple, powerful tools for adding animation and interactivity to documents, and it can export those documents in a number of formats. That is, you can choose PDF, Flash, AIR, XML, etc. based on the needs of your project. Apple blocked AIR conversion on iPads, so Adobe simply built an alternative way to view the content.
It isn’t about one runtime/format vs. another; never has been. It’s about getting results.
PS–I’m really hoping that my inner cynic is wrong, and that this post doesn’t draw a bunch of counterproductive neener-neener jeering from Apple zealots. It would be so, so refreshing to hear instead that people are focused on what benefits them, and that they actually prefer cooperation & pragmatism to ideological finger-pointing.

May 27, 2010

Feedback, please: PSD viewing on iPads?

As you may have read, I’m switching my focus from Photoshop to the development of tablet apps. I periodically hear requests for the ability to view Photoshop PSD files on devices like the iPad (for example, browsing files that one has synced via Dropbox).

I’d like to hear your thoughts on whether such a capability would be relevant to you. Some questions offhand:

• What would you hope to accomplish? For example:
  • Would you be bringing your portfolio on the road?
  • Would you be taking the files somewhere to print them?
• Would viewing just a flat representation of the files be sufficient, or would you want to interact with layers (for example, to switch among layer comps in order to show design iterations)?
• Would you pay for such a capability? If so, how much?

This is obviously a capability that Adobe could build. The question of course is whether we should build it (as opposed, say, to building something else).

May 09, 2010

Work travel + toddler + iPad paraphernalia…

I swear I didn’t pose this. Our little guy was a little sad that I finally got back in the work-travel saddle this week. His response on the other end of the trip made homecoming pretty sweet.

April 27, 2010

Photoshop.com iPhone app adds Twitter, Facebook uploads

The free Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone app has gotten some new features:

With the new update, users can now take photo creations and upload them to popular social networking sites. In just one step, photos can be sent directly to Facebook along with a news feed update. Twitter users can also easily share photos directly via TwitPic and post an accompanying tweet.

To date the app has been downloaded more than 7 million times.

April 23, 2010

Demo: Making an iBook about iPads, using InDesign CS5

Terry White shows off how to design & export a book that can be viewed in the iPad’s iBooks application as well as Adobe Digital Editions & many other book readers that handle the EPUB format:

I’m anything but an an expert on page layout & publishing, but I still find this very cool. You can grab Terry’s short “25 Tips for the iPad” book here.

April 10, 2010

The iPad dirt pile

“That a big dirt pile back there!,” says our two-year-old in-house photo critic Finn eyeing the iPad’s default background image. “How did that dirt pile get back there??” ArtInfo has the story. (Apologies to photog Richard Misrach; it really is a nice image.) [Via]

Related/previous:

• One of the grosser–yet most universal–iPad wallpapers
• A nice selection of wallpapers from various artists

[Update regarding a couple of the comments: Guys, I was just passing along a (to me cute) thing my kid said about this new device, as I've been doing. I'm not trying to yank anybody's chain, and I find that we can all handle most thing better with a sense of humor. Let's not let the enjoyment of Apple products turn anybody into a scowling Defender of Faith and Morals, eh? :-)]

April 05, 2010

How Adobe Ideas came to be (and where it’s headed)

David Macy, artist & product manager for Adobe Illustrator and the new Adobe Ideas for iPad, shares his thoughts on the goals of the new project. –J.

Its pretty darn hard to beat pencil and paper for jotting visual ideas down quickly. That’s why this great combination travels with many artists everywhere they go.

Adobe has explored, and even prototyped a variety of thoughts related to digital sketching for some time, but we could never believe that they would compete with a pencil and a nice sketchbook. Aside from the precision and tactile feel of a pencil, there was always the problem of needing a computer. Even if we built the most elegant sketching application one could imagine, would our creative customers be convinced to pull out a laptop to sketch on in the park or in a café? OK, sure some would, but I think most would find it just too cumbersome.

And, oh yeah – there’s that issue of using a trackpad or mouse to draw with. I love my Wacom tablet too, but by the time I fish through my bag for the tablet and USB cable and wake my laptop, I could have already done some nice doodling on the nearest napkin.

I love it when technology changes in unexpected ways. When we saw what the latest smart phones could do, and heard the super-un-secret rumors of this year’s crop of tablet devices, we new that something very important had changed. Portable, high resolution, multi-touch devices are destined to be a close companion of many digitally savvy creatives. This simple realization was the birth of Adobe® Ideas.

Simply stated, Adobe Ideas is a digital sketchbook, meant to help you with exploring and realizing your creative ideas.

OK, sounds great, but can it compete with pencil and paper? Nah – at least not for the basics of drawing. A capacitive touch-screen without pressure sensitivity and without a fine-point stylus* isn’t going to win if you just talk about plain and simple drawing.

But if you add a resizable pencil tip, color mixing, transparency, zooming, the ability to drop in photos, automatic color extraction from photos, 50 steps of undo, and a vector file format compatible with Illustrator and Photoshop, then you’re talking about a great start on the concept of a digital sketchbook.

And, yes this is just the start. The small team that’s behind Adobe Ideas is having too much fun now, so we plan on revving the app frequently and adding other functions that relate to creative ideation, probably some of them as “premium” features. What ideas come to your mind?

*Check out the Pogo stylus for one that’ll be better than your fingertip.

April 04, 2010

Draw & share with Adobe Ideas for iPad

Adobe Ideas, the company’s first iPad app, is now live on the Apple App Store. Here’s a set of full-res screenshots.

This free app helps you sketch out ideas, annotate photographs, extract color themes from photographs, and more. Sketches created in Adobe Ideas can be emailed as a PDF for editing in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or viewing with any PDF viewer.

Key features:

• Simple vector-based drawing tools
• Zoom control without jaggies or big pixels
• Variable-size brushes using multitouch control (i.e. you can resize the brush tip on the fly while painting, approximating pressure sensitivity)
• Vector eraser
• Huge virtual canvas
• Automatic creation of harmonized color themes from your photos or images
• Ability to email ideas as PDF files for editing in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or for viewing with any PDF viewer
• Gallery-style organizer to quickly scroll through your ideas and color themes
• Separate drawing and photo layers
• Easy creation of multiple versions of design concepts
• 50-level undo

We’re eager to hear your feedback. It’ll be interesting to rethink what an app should be, especially as Adobe tools are known for being big and feature-rich as opposed to light & tightly focused. Where should the Ideas team take the app from here? What else would you like to see Adobe bring to tablets?

March 05, 2010

Photoshop.com app now embeddable on Android

The latest version of the free Photoshop.com Mobile app for Android adds new Contrast and Brightness editing tools, as well as a number of photo effects (Pop, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, and several more).
Here’s what I find really interesting, though: The app can be freely embedded into other Android apps. In other words, a company like Adobe can write an editing module that other apps can leverage instead of re-inventing the wheel. As a customer that strikes me as very cool, and very much in line with the old promise of OpenDoc and other component architectures.
Before I get an earful of “Wait, you’ve introduced a new feature on a non-Apple OS first; I knew it–you hate the Mac, you lazy scum!!,” please note that this kind of embedding is not currently possible on the iPhone. If and when that changes, I’d love to see the iPhone version of the editor made embeddable.

January 29, 2010

Photoshop.com iPhone app adds features

After being downloaded a whopping 6.5 million times since October, Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone (App Store link) now features a number of new features, including:

• A new sharpen tool
• Support for a variety of photo borders
• Playback of video hosted on Photoshop.com

The update is, as you’d expect, a free download.

December 09, 2009

Photoshop.com Mobile makes Time’s Top 10

The Photoshop.com Mobile app has made the list of Time’s Top Ten iPhone Apps for 2009. Groovy.

According to team lead Geoff Baum, “The app surpassed 4 million downloads this week and has been the #1 app in many App Stores around the globe, including the US, France, Japan, and Italy, among many others.”

November 30, 2009

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone now available worldwide

The Photoshop.com Mobile team is excited to announce their latest news:

The iPhone app is now available in every country with an app store. Now our international users can upload, edit & share photos from their iPhone, too.

After spending three weeks as the “Top Free” app in the iTunes Store following its release in the US & Canada, we are glad to be able to offer Photoshop.com Mobile to our global community, and we thank everyone for their patience as we worked to make this app available worldwide.

November 24, 2009

Photoshop.com Mobile for Android now available worldwide

Nice to see this bit of news:

Adobe Photoshop.com Mobile for Android, recently released on Nov. 6, 2009, is now available globally in all counties with Android Market. [It offers users] quick access to their photos with easy editing and sharing. The application features basic editing tools like crop and rotate, color adjustments and a Photo Browser. In addition, users have the ability to view their entire online collections of photos from Photoshop.com and share photos from their phones via email. The application is initially available in English only.

Now, what about making the very popular iPhone version available everywhere? No news yet, but we know people are eager for it, so stay tuned.

November 06, 2009

Photoshop.com Mobile comes to Android

Building on its great momentum on the iPhone, the Photoshop.com Mobile app is now available for Android phones. The free application offers the same great features as the iPhone version. In addition, says the press release:

Photoshop.com Mobile for Android offers features only available on Android phones. Users can automatically upload pictures to Photoshop.com albums in the background, even when the Photshop.com Mobile application is not running. Photoshop.com accounts provide 2GB of free online photo storage, which equates to over 1,500 photos. Made possible by the Android API, the new tab-based user interface enables users to view local and online content. Also, the Android Photo Browser makes maneuvering through photos fast and convenient, bringing users’ complete photo collections right to their pockets.

At present the app is, like the iPhone version, available only in the US and Canada. I know that’s frustrating, and the team is working hard to make the app available more broadly. Stay tuned. In the meantime, you can connect with the team via Facebook and Twitter.

October 18, 2009

Photoshop.com Mobile downloaded over 1 million times

Wow–on behalf of the team, thanks again for the warm reception! Here’s the official blurb:

Adobe today announced that its Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone application has been downloaded over 1 million times from Apple’s App Store, a milestone reached in less than one week of availability. Additionally, the application has held the No. 1 position for all “Top Free” applications as well as the “Top Free” application in the Photography category for 10 consecutive days. Thousands of iTunes reviews have provided Adobe with positive feedback, insight and suggestions that will be considered for future versions of the application.

The application is currently available in the U.S. and Canada only. I know that’s frustrating to folks in other locations, and the team will keep working to broaden access.

October 14, 2009

Photoshop.com Mobile is the most popular free iPhone app

…at the moment, and it has been just about continuously since launching last Friday. Channeling that team for a second, thanks for the warm reception!