Suffice it to say, I can’t say enough good things about the team. 🙂 If this sounds like your kind of jam, check out the listing.
Adobe’s hiring a new Lightroom product manager
Drone rescues drone
“For he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children…”
Photographer Ty Poland tells the story, including this MacGyver-y bit:
Next up, we needed a lasso. Thankfully our good friend Martin Sanchez had an extra pair of shoes in the trunk. On top of that, he had just polished off a fresh iced coffee from Dunkin with a straw. With these two ingredients, we were able to construct an open lasso. By simply putting the straw over the shoelace and adding a small key chain for weight, we were able to center the lasso to the Mavic 2 Pro for the rescue.
The Bernie meme in Lego
BMW turns a bike into rolling Art Deco sculpture
Poet Amanda Gorman reads “The Hill We Climb”
Oh my God…
(I’m not crying, you’re crying. And I’m crying.)
Track.AI helps fight blindness in children
On a day of new hope & new vision, I’m delighted to see Google, Huawei, and the medical community using ML to help spot visual disorders in kids around the world:
This machine learning framework performs classification and regression tasks for early identification of patterns, revealing different types of visual deficiencies in children. This AI-powered solution reduces diagnosis time from months to just days, and trials are available across 5 countries (China, UAE, Spain, Vietnam and Mexico).
Samsung adds one-tap object erasing
If you want to be successful, says Twitter founder Evan Williams, “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
My old Photoshop boss Kevin Connor liked to cite the Healing Brush as an example of how tech kept evolving to offer more specialized, efficient solutions (in this case, from the more general Clone Stamp to something purpose-built). Content-Aware Fill, which we shipped back in 2010, was another such optimization, and now its use is getting even more specialized/direct.
PetaPixel writes,
Samsung added Object Eraser, a tool powered by AI that appears to work by combining object recognition with something like Adobe’s Content-Aware Fill. In any photo captured on an S21 series phone, simply tap the button to tell activate Object Eraser, then just tap on the people you want to remove, and then the phone automatically does all the work.
Night Photo Summit coming soon
I was excited to learn today that Adobe’s Russell Brown, together with a large group of other experts, is set to teach night photography techniques February 12-14:
28 speakers in 6 categories will present 30+ talks over three days. Our goal: “Inspiring night photographers across the galaxy.”
Check out the schedule & site for more. Meanwhile I’m hoping to get out to the desert with Russell in a couple of weeks, and I hope to help produce some really cool stuff. 🤞
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Van as office pod…?
We sure love our Westy and even find ourselves working in her in the driveway (e.g. when the cleaning folks are in the house), but this Nissan office-van concept looks pretty swanky. Roof deck FTW!
Guido Quaroni joins Adobe
Awesome Dad-flex: Telling your tiny, Cars-loving kids that you know Guido the forklift. 😌
Granted, it was a little confusing to explain that I knew the voice of the cartoon forklift & that he was actually a brainy Italian guy who worked at Pixar—but it worked. In any case, now Guido Quaroni—who spent 20 years at Pixar & who was always a fantastic host during Adobe customer visits—has now joined the Big Red A:
“I’ve been a customer of Adobe’s software for a number of years, and I always admired Adobe’s commitment to provide top of the line tools to creatives,” said Quaroni. “When I heard about Adobe’s renewed interest in entering into the 3D market, given how much more pervasive the consumption of 3D content is becoming, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. I’m excited to be joining the Adobe team to help accelerate and grow their 3D offerings for creatives worldwide.”
I remain proud to have delivered, at Guido’s urging, perhaps the most arcane feature request ever: he asked for per-layer timestamps in Photoshop so that Pixar’s rendering pipeline could discern which layers had actually been changed by artists, thereby saving a lot of rendering time. We got this done, and somehow it gives me roughly as much pleasure as having delivered a photo editor that’s used by hundreds of millions of people every month. 😌
Anyway, here’s to great things for Guido, Adobe, and 3D creators everywhere!
