Certain feature requests come up over and over, and customers wonder why Adobe doesn’t address them.  In many cases it’s a matter of time, resources, and priorities
(i.e. good idea, we just haven’t gotten there yet).  In other cases, however, there are conceptual issues that make addressing the request impractical or impossible.

One of those cases concerns something that seems simple: letting Photoshop users apply copyright & other info, then lock it so that it can’t be removed.  Photographers in particular request this capability year in and year out.  Unfortunately there are good reasons why things don’t work as desired.  If you’re interested in the details, read on for an explanation from Photoshop architect Russell Williams.

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As I’ve noted a few times, I really dig PicLens, the free browser utility that enables cinematic slideshows for Flickr, Google Images, and other popular image sources.  The great thing is that the capability is totally unobtrusive, appearing only when you roll over images that can be viewed as a slideshow.

I’m therefore happy to pass along a bit of great news: PicLens has been updated to v1.5, and for the first time it’s available on Windows, via Firefox.  Bust a move on over to their site and grab a copy of the new goods.

(And, for the record, I don’t know these guys personally, nor do I get any kickbacks.  It’s hard to do revenue-sharing on "free." ;-))

• "Dusasa I" shines with the light of a thousand discarded soda cans.  It was crafted by Ghanan El Anatsui.
• Suellen Parker builds clay sculptures, then uses Photoshop to project her digital photos onto their surfaces. The NYT hosts a video showing her process, and you can find more pieces on her site. [Via Erma Noxley]
• Nathan Sawaya is a master Lego sculptor.  CNN tells his story (via print and video) & features a gallery of his pieces. [Via]  (Speaking of Lego art, peep Lego Starry Night. [Via Maria Brenny])
• The Underwater Sculpture Garden is Jason Taylor’s project to "create a unique space which highlights environmental processes and celebrates local culture."  Some of the forms remind me of the crazy heads I recently encountered in my rural Illinois hometown. [Via]
• Joe Pogan builds metal sculptures from found objects.  [Via]
• Martin Klimas captures sculptures as they shatter. [Via]  (This is the kind of thing we’re often tempted to re-create with truck stop schlock purchased en route to Death Valley.)  [In a semi-related vein, see the previous previously Burning Bulbs.]
• Oliver Herring turns photos into sculptures. [Via] 
• Damien Hirst has sculpted a $100mm diamond skull. [Via] "’That’s when you stop laughing,’ Hirst says. ‘You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.’"  If only there were a pomposity assassin, this dude would be the one needing high security.

Wow–I’ve known a few people to shave/dye an Adobe "A" into their hair, but this is really something else: an Adobe tattoo (not a Photoshop job, I think!).  I must officially throw the Adobe gang sign out of respect. 😉

Photo GPS nerds might enjoy learning that Angelina Jolie has tattooed the coordinates of her childrens’ births onto her arm.  Is that better or worse than adorning oneself with a Decepticon head? [Via]  In any case, it’s gotta beat getting the Zune logo, no?

Hello, my name is John, and I’m a recovering color management hater… (“Hello, John…”)

Coming from a background in Web design, I spent many years regarding color management–that is, the process of changing an image’s colors on the fly so that the appearance will match across systems (monitors, printers, etc.)–as a royal pain.  I mean, until 1998 things were good–or at least pretty simple.  You’d design on a Mac and make things look a little bit light, or design on Windows and make things look a little bit dark, then check on the other platform (ideally on a bunch of different systems) and call it a day.  Split the difference & everyone seemed happy.  (And printing? Who needed that?)

But then in ’98 Adobe had to get all clever, adding color management in Photoshop 5.0.  Suddenly every image started complaining about not having a color profile, or having the wrong profile, or… something… and it kept asking me (!) to make the right call.  Worse, images no longer looked the same in Photoshop as they did in Web browsers (or even apps like Illustrator, which for various reasons had different default settings).

Things have improved a bit (fewer cryptic messages, consistent defaults in at least some Suite apps), but big problems remain.  Apple’s Safari Web browser respects color management profiles, but others don’t.  Here’s a screenshot of the same image open in Safari & Firefox.  If you spend time in Photoshop or Lightroom massaging an image to look just so, it’s pretty irritating that the colors go all over the map when viewed online.  The lack of reliable color also leads to bad prints, according to Smugmug.

Now, though, there’s an interesting development: Photographer Rob Galbraith reports that Apple’s newly released Safari 3 beta for Windows is color managed–bringing color management to Windows browsers for the first time.  I never thought I’d say it*, but this is great news.  Now there’s a cross-platform way to present accurate color images on the Web.  Check “ICC Profile” in Photoshop’s Save for Web dialog to include the info needed for color management to do its thing.

CNET follows up with more details and reports that Firefox may follow suit in version 3.0, due later this year.  Why Microsoft hasn’t taken the opportunity to lead here, I don’t know, but hopefully they’ll get in the game as well with Internet Explorer.

As for Adobe, I’m not sure what will happen with the Flash Player.  Right now it’s not color-managed, and most Web designers wouldn’t know an ICC profile if it bit them on the calibration puck–hence they’re not asking.  They do know, however, how much it sucks that colors shift when going between Photoshop and Flash, and they’d like a solution.  I’m hopeful that we can make the right thing happen.

* Coincidence that this is blog entry #666 for me?  With JN cheering for color management, the End must be near… >;-)

[Update: In response to requests for a tutorial on the subject, Adobe forum-wrangler John Cornicello recommends this set from Gary Ballard.]

• San Francisco radio station KFOG is raising money for area food banks with their "Live from the Archives" CD compilation.  They need a cover design, and the grand prize winner gets $1000 and the Creative Suite 3 Design Premium.  There’s also a Suite up for grabs for whoever displays the best use of Adobe software in his or her entry.  If you’re game, check out the contest details.
  
• The Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament pits designers against one another in live, on-stage showdowns around the country. "Over the course of several fast-paced, single-elimination rounds," they write, "eight designers using the latest tools will be whittled down to one champion. now accepting entries for its 2007 series."  All contestants receive CS3 Design Premium (!).  Other loot includes a Wacom Cintiq tablet/monitor and the CS3 Master Collection (truck for hauling it not included). [Via Terry Hemphill]

One of the sleeper features making its debut in Photoshop CS3 Extended is its ability to interface with MATLAB, the number-crunching toolkit from Mathworks.  The capability was added for developers & technical users, but now it’s been turned to art.  Dr. Woohoo (aka Drew Trujillo) has created Color Combinatorics, integrating the two apps in pursuit of beautiful color harmonies.  He writes,

For me, it simply means that we can now ‘drive’ Photoshop by writing code in MATLAB while taking advantage of a *very* powerful engine with a superior supporting set of libraries (called ToolBoxes). Think of MATLAB as giving you the ability to write your own plug-ins for Photoshop.

You can check out a finished piece (9,261 sets of 3 colors) on Flickr, along with other interesting pieces.  Drew has written up a whole pile of notes on integrating Photoshop & MATLAB, so stop by his site to learn more.

Elsewhere in the world of interesting generative graphics:

• Drew’s In The Mod project analyzes the works of famous painters, and it now lets you download color swatches in the Adobe Swatch Exchange format (compatible with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). [Via]
• Robert Hodgin and the Barbarian Group, creators of the beautiful Magnetosphere, have turned it into a visualizer for iTunes.  It’s freely downloadable from their site.
• Leon Hong has made some groovy bits using Processing.

I recently came to the sad realization that fully two thirds of my blog traffic is drawn not by my incisive wit or fascinating Web finds (is any? ;-)), but by geniuses looking for free CS3 serial numbers.  Somehow I became Google’s top hit for "cs3 serial," and my stats reflect it.  Lame.

Now I see that attempts to steal Photoshop can result in machines turned into spam-spraying zombies.  So, not only are people sticking it to software inventors; they’re sticking it to everyone else (and themselves) by coughing more pollution into the Net.  How’s that for a crummy little cherry on top? Additional info. [Via John Dowdell]

A new issue of Adobe Magazine, the company’s quarterly PDF for designers, photographers, and other creative folks, is available for download.  Designed by London-based Precursor, this issue includes:

• Reverie & Technology: Artistic dreaming and digital imaging
• The New Collaborators: The audience speaks—and creates
• The Games People Play: Addictive, sticky online fun
• Shades of Green: Print gets eco-friendly and eco-mean

Featured artists and contributors include Jean-Francois Rauzier, Maggie Taylor, Brad Johnson of Second Story, and many others.  You can sign up to receive future updates via email, and editions translated into French and German will be available soon.

The blogging admin folks report that a new CAPTCHA plug-in is causing some havoc, making it impossible to submit comments.
Okay, things now seem to be working correctly.  If you run into problems commenting, please drop me a line (jnack at adobe).

Hang around the Photoshop booth at a trade show for 20 minutes and you’ll get a very clear message: the task of simply printing a photo to a desktop printer, getting just the results you saw on screen, is much harder than it should be.  After you’ve heard the hundredth question about setting up color management, then getting Photoshop and one’s printer driver to play well together, you’ll really want to get this situation sorted out.

The good news is that we’ve been thinking about these problems for quite a while; the less-good news is that solving them takes time and coordination.  Adobe has been working with the printer vendors, as well as the Apple & Microsoft operating system teams, on plans to improve the printing experience.  [Update: Please see this follow-up post.]

For the CS3 cycle we brought on a new printing expert, Dave Polaschek, to buff up Photoshop’s printing code.  He’s been able to make some visible improvements (e.g. a print preview that’s color managed), and to do quite a bit more behind the scenes.  In response to some questions about how PSCS3 prints (especially on Windows), I’ve asked Dave to contribute a guest blog post. Read on to hear his thoughts.

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Well, it was probably bound to happen: after getting irradiated with 500+ comments on the CS3 icons late last year, I have now turned into a series of Adobe icons myself!

This portrait was created by the talented and innovative Greek illustrator Charis Tsevis (profile, portfolio).  I mentioned his work in January & was delighted to receive this image in return.  It’s now hanging on the Photoshop floor and is being creatively desecrated by passersby (devil horns, soul patch, and probably more added by now).  Charis creates photomosaics using Photoshop (tutorial in Greek, but worth scrolling through) and Synthetik Studio Artist.

Speaking of the CS3 icons, at least they didn’t cause epileptic seizures (so far as I know) or draw the kind of scorn reserved for the new London 2012 Olympic logo: "[V]ariously derided as an uninspiring emblem, a puerile mess, an artistic flop…
the emblem was likened to a ‘broken swastika’ and a ‘toileting monkey.’" Jeez–maybe they should have gone with a two-letter mnemonic ("LO?" "OG?") and drawn less of a beating. [Via Thorsten Wulff]

Sometimes finding the right words for a feature is a bit of a challenge.  "Unsharp Mask," for instance, is a perfect example: a classically trained photographer may immediately get the reference, while other users are left saying, "Sooo… To sharpen something, I choose ‘Unsharp…?’"  Working vocabularies vary by user.

We ran into a one of these cases with the local contrast enhancement control added to the just-released Camera Raw 4.1.  Figuring that "local contrast enhancement control" was a tad wordy, the team went looking for alternatives.  One candidate was "Acutance"–a term familiar to some photographers, but far from universally understood.  The candidate I really favored was "Punch": the slider tends to make an image look punchier.  Unfortunately, the prospect of translating this idiosyncratic term into French, German, Japanese, etc. made it lose ground.  The simpler "Clarity" ultimately prevailed.

In the course of the conversation, Camera Raw engineer Zalman Stern offered some good quips. "We could always translate "punch" to "Umami" in Japanese…," he wrote.  And later: "I was mostly joking in suggesting ‘Punch.’ But to take it to the next
level of impossible-to-translate, we obviously need two sliders, ‘l337’ and ‘Teh Suck.’ The latter only has negative values of course. The
documentation can link to urbandictionary.com." 🙂

Bonus, unrelated Zalman quote, apropos of something totally different: "Writing a compiler in Visual Basic seems more the sort of thing one does to impress Jodie Foster than a sound technical decision…"

The peeps at RogueSheep have unveiled Magma Effects, a $50 InDesign plug-in that leverages Apple’s Core Image technology.  The result is that you can stack up fast, non-destructive image effects (blurs, glass, etc.); here’s a screenshot. [Via]  They’re also developing a version for Illustrator, downloadable now in beta form.  It would be cool to see these guys package up the filters for Photoshop (something we’ve wanted to do, but which hasn’t yet fit into a release cycle).    [Previous/related: Use Photoshop effects inside InDesign CS3.]

If you like the colorful packaging of the Creative Suite 3 applications but find the desktop wallpaper versions a little too static, check out the new CS3 screensavers, ready for download from Terry White’s blog.  I found the preview display a little jerky on my Mac, but the problem disappeared once I enabled Flash inside QuickTime (via System Preferences). [Via Jane Brady]

Adobe Bridge CS3 has been updated to version 2.1 (download for Mac | Win) .  In addition to squashing late-breaking bugs, this release includes a number of enhancements (quoting from the Read Me):

Multilevel Keywords

Organized your keywords into groups and subgroups as deep a hierarchy as you want by using the multilevel support in the keywords panel. Bridge now includes keyboard shortcuts for applying single keywords or parent keywords. Advanced options allow for storing hierarchy into the file metadata. Easily import and export keywords using tab-delimited file formats.

Improved Cache Management

Control the size of the Bridge cache of thumbnail and metadata information to better improve responsiveness. The cache can also be compacted to improve performance.

General Improvements

• Preference control over video and audio file previews
• Improved scrolling and renaming performance
• Usability improvements to custom workspaces
• Improved overall stability

These updates can be found via the Help > Updates menu from within Photoshop and other CS3 apps.  The automatic update system has been serving up a record load (seven different updates this week), so you may want to try using the Web links above if you hit any snags.