Monthly Archives: April 2008

New Photoshop scripting tutorials

April 20, 2008Uncategorizedjnack

If you know some JavaScript and have thought of applying your skills to Photoshop automation, you might check out Trevor Morris’s Intro to Scripting Photoshop and follow-up practical example.

Trevor, who both offers a set of free scripts & does scripting for hire, is right that scripting is a very powerful yet underused part of the Photoshop story. It’s a key part of the moduarlity & customizability I always mention as a key area for us to develop in the future, and we’ll keep working to make it easier & more powerful.

Photoshop team script wrangler Jeff Tranberry reports that he’s posted the class materials from the "Photoshop for Geeks" session he & Tom Ruark presented at Photoshop World. He also reports that the very useful Dr. Brown’s Services set of scripts have been updated to v1.9.4 and are available for download. [Via]

Shocking photography (literally) & more

April 19, 2008Photographyjnack

Adobe TV went live last week. It features a profile of Adobe’s Angela Drury, an accomplished photographer who moonlights as a product manager. Look for the Photographer channel on Adobe TV for tons more.
I’m shocked, shocked to report on The Stunning Camera. Bryan O’Neil Hughes, Photoshop PM and camera store veteran, reports "experimenting" with this kind of thing in his past life: "We even rigged one up to the door knob of the men’s room. Then someone had the bright idea of running the capacitors in parallel and well, it worked but it ‘snake-bit’ him….essentially the current arced right through his thumb leaving two seared holes. Seriously." [Via Joe Ault]
That chintzy look: “When I looked at the wallpaper and the wallpaper looked at me, we instantly fell in love."
On an occasionally related note, Thierry Bouët chronicles people in their beds (click "au lit" in the top nav bar). [Via]
Jan Sochor is a Czech-born freelance photographer who splits his time between Europe and South America.[Via]
You might not guess it from the title, but this NYT photo essay on how manhole covers are made in India is really interesting.

Strange Photochops

April 18, 2008Illustrationjnack

From the "Why Do It To Yourself?" chronicles:
- Why choose when you can have a Hillary/Barack hybrid?
- Freaking News started a Photoshop contest to replace celebrities’ eyes with their own mouths. Bleaugh. [Via]
Photoshop + pro wrestling + the South = "Nipplegate."
People looooove the ~~Hitler~~ History Channel and its endless exploration of WWII. Did the Germans really have an Überschwerer Kampfschreitpanzer (Superheavy Armored Walking Tank)? Scroll down to view the evidence. [Via]
Copyright this: Adobe’s Serge Jespers reports on a Belgian exhibitor looking for 100 Photoshoppers to remove a famous building from all their images. Bizarre. [Via]
I really have no business passing this along, but knowing that our product helped land a giant Mr. T Cabbage Patch doll on SF brings a tear of pride to my eye.

DNG sprouts wheels, gets cinematic

April 16, 2008DNGjnack

Aiming to help drive standards & interoperability in video workflows, Adobe has announced CinemaDNG, a cousin of the DNG (Digital Negative) standard for raw image capture. According to the press release,

Adobe is working with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers
including RED, Panavision, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI along with software vendors including Iridas and The
Foundry to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented CinemaDNG file format that will lend
predictability and consistency to digital production workflows.

As with the established still-image form of DNG, Cinema DNG helps minimize the risk that
proprietary or camera-specific file formats will be unsupported in the future, because CinemaDNG will provide an
open, durable, standard format.

CNET covers the news while noting some of Adobe’s other video-related announcements this week, including a demo of automatic text-to-metadata speech transcription & support for Sony’s XDCAM EX tapeless video format in CS3 tools.

Lasers, Orwell, and Mad Magazine

April 15, 2008Illustrationjnack

New illustrated biz:

The NYT offers a great interactive presentation of Al Jaffee’s Mad Magazine fold-ins.
"Putting the king back in stalking." Big ups to Barska binoculars for breaking some new ground with their ads. "I prefer to think of myself as a ‘stranger enthusiast’…" [Via]
Art nerds who really want wedgies can opt for this laser-etched Moleskine unicorn notebook. I wonder whether you can read it from inside the darkened locker where you’ve been stuffed. [Via]
Shout-outs to the Eastern Bloc:
- Shepard Fairey does George Orwell, via covers for Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm.
- Peep some crisp label designs for Lovejoy Vodka [Via]
Logos:
- Toyota offers Scion users the ability to roll their own logos.
- Apple vs. the Big Apple: Mom, Dad, don’t fight!
- The logo for the Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection is a crafty little ambigram.
- I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: The NYT features a slideshow of the logos of secret US military programs, along with an accompanying article. Trevor Paglen’s book of the logos is here.

Brains, nukes, and beautiful math

April 14, 2008Scientific & Technical Imagingjnack

Mmmm, brains:
- "Check out the big brain on ~~Brett~~ Alexander": Alexander Lervik scanned his own lobes & used a 3D printer to create the MyBrain lamp. [Via]
- Eric Chudler has amassed a great collection of neuroscience stamps. [Via]
That very special glow:
- Taryn Simon produced a beautiful image of nuclear waste. In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, "[h]er 70 color plates transform that which is off-limits or under-the-radar into a visible and intelligible form." See and read more here.
- Researchers are combining images to make "super-resolution" X-rays. [Via Ellis Vener]
Space oddities:
- The universe’s most powerful blast ever seen was witnessed last month.
- The ever-groovy BibliOdyssey shares the Astronomical Handbook of 1718.
Math for visuals:
- Science News reports on visualizations of mathematics create remarkable artwork. (In my own life math has usually produced a different sort of visualization.) [Via]
- For more beauties, see the 2007 Mandelbrot contest winners. [Via]
- Mixing alcohol + high IQs = Photomicrographs of cocktails. [Via]
New Yorkers have been chatting about biology-based art. (Somehow hacking lifeforms for the sake of cool visuals seems destined to end up in a future installment of Bad Idea Jeans.)

New AIF Toolkit on Adobe Labs

April 13, 2008Pixel Benderjnack

Time for an update to The Greatest Technology You Don’t Care About… Yet. 🙂

Engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith has announced that a new version of the Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit Preview Release is available for download from Adobe Labs.

Think of AIF as similar to Apple’s Core Image technology (running really fast filters on your graphics card), but with added goodness. For one thing, in addition to working in desktop tools like After Effects and (maybe, someday, I’m not sayin’) Photoshop and others, AIF will work in the next version of the incredibly ubiquitous Flash Player. So…

AIF = Fast-as-hell filters on every desktop, everywhere

In addition to opening tons of doors for Flash animators, it’ll give the Flash Platform a huge bump in its ability to support apps like Photoshop Express. And it’ll encourage lots of cool cross-pollination, as developers can leverage the imaging code they write for Flash in order to create filters for Adobe desktop apps, and vice versa.

Back to the news at hand: the Toolkit helps developers write and test their imaging code in a scripting language codenamed “Hydra” (real name TBA). If that sounds like your bag, head over to Labs, grab the build, and try out & share examples in the gallery.

Adventures in album artwork

April 12, 2008Illustrationjnack

Back when vinyl was giving way to tapes & CDs, I heard purists bemoan the loss of a large-format way to distribute album artwork. Now with the prevalance of downloads, do you know offhand what artwork is attached to most of your music? iTunes tries to help, but it’s an uphill battle. Anyway…

Nikolay Saveliev’s rad Pop Matters project consists of “Vinyl record sleeves with 2-sided insert featuring
faux-academic material on pop music and the state of the
record industry…
Snuck onto used& new record store shelves.” Personal fave: “Nickelback: The Recursiveness of Professional Mediocrity.”
Pitchfork picks The Worst Album Covers of 2007.
Listropolis has translated the artwork for Rolling Stone’s Top 20 Albums into color palettes. [Via]
Should classic album covers be redesigned every few years? Ben Wardle makes that case, with examples. [Via]

Winners of the $20,000 Adobe design challenge announced

April 11, 2008After Effectsjnack

Congratulations to TJ Sochor of 3 Wagons Deep on winning the grand prize in Adobe’s "See What’s Possible" motion graphics contest:

TJ writes,

The entire animation was done completely with Photoshop and After Effects (with a touch of Illustrator for logo preparation). No 3rd party plug-ins, programs, animation, videos were used; just the tools that ship standard with Adobe software. All photos are original – taken with my Nikon D80 (organized in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom). The music is also original. No 3rd party stuff, well, except for my cheap Yamaha guitar.

Finalists

See What’s Possible — Hello Lava link
Thinking Magical — Animatório/Vinicius Costa
The Amazing Factory — Wondermint
Happy Place — Network Osaka

Participation

More than 348 Submissions from over 31 countries with over 1/3 in the last day before the deadline
More than half the submissions came from outside the U.S.
More than 5,800 registered users who contributed submissions, comments, and votes
More than 120,000 unique visitors from over 156 countries around the world

Then, of course, there were a few that remind you that "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro"

Hip hop ‘shop: Crime Scene by d.inc design ("All the other programs, irrelevant!"–or as ODB might say, "You know my name, now gimme my money")
As with the boat in "Apocalypse Now," Never Leave the Letterbox
Spazzing like the people in "Jacob’s Ladder," it’s One Man Show (known colloquially as "meth guy")
PS goes The Way Of The Stick: Designer Ninjas
And finally, Mr. Hankey would be so proud: Turning Crap to Gold

Thanks to everyone for the great entries! If you see any that strike you as particularly cool, funny, bizarre, etc., please pass ’em along via the comments.

Lightroom 1.4.1 and Camera Raw 4.4.1 now available

April 10, 2008DNG, Lightroomjnack

Lightroom & Camera Raw PM Tom Hogarty reports that revised versions of the two tools have been posted:

The Lightroom 1.4.1 and Camera Raw 4.4.1 updates have been posted to the following locations: Lightroom (Mac, Win), Camera Raw (Mac, Win). The updates provide all of the changes included in the original Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4 releases but also include corrections for issues described below and in previous blog posts. The Camera Raw plug-in will also be available later this evening via the Adobe Update Manager and the Lightroom update can be located by choosing ‘Check for Updates…’ under the Help menu. The Lightroom and Camera Raw team apologize for any inconveniences caused by the issues presented in the initial updates

Check out Tom’s post for full details.

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