Ultimately kind of a drag, but beautifully rendered:

[Via]

CS5 is the most consistently, easily extensible Creative Suite yet.  If customizing & connecting Photoshop, InDesign, and other apps is up your alley, check out the Creative Suite SDK Team blog for demos, links, and more info.

Heh–fun with papercraft:
[Via]

As Linda Richman might say, “Discuss.”
[Via]

• BP has caught flak for digitally altering an image of their crisis response HQ.  “‘Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping,’ [a company spokesman] said in an e-mail. ‘In this case they copied and pasted three ROV screen images in the original photo over three screens that were not running video feeds at the time.'” [Via Noah Mittman]
• Meanwhile UFOs over China are being attributed to Photoshop work.  It’s kind of a weird, sloppy article, though: no details are given about how Photoshop (or anything else) could or did produce the video included on the page, and in any event what’s shown is a UFO (that is, an unidentified flying object); it’s just not necessarily an object of extraterrestrial origin. [Via Pete Falco]
• Update: There must be something in the water (no pun intended), as now the controversial action is spreading to golf.

Speaking of InDesign and rich publishing, here’s an example of the sort of interactive content (here displayed through Flash) that can be generated in CS5. (Click the main image to display the document.)
Ten years ago Michael Ninness brought me to Adobe to work on LiveMotion, and he went on to product-manage InDesign CS5. I’ve kidded him that a decade later, he managed to transplant LiveMotion 1.0’s heart into ID. I’m kidding, but it is cool to see a number of the features and concepts that customers liked back then–e.g. preset animation styles, easy button creation/interactivity assignment–brought forward. Now, unlike then, the content can also integrate with the Flash authoring environment, meaning you can get a fast, code-free start without eventually hitting a wall.

The folks working on Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution have posted some additional details on what’s coming:

Late this summer, we’ll post these new publishing technologies on Adobe Labs… Publishers can add interactivity without writing code via InDesign and create monetizable digital magazines for the Apple iPad – with other platforms and devices expected in the future. […]
With layouts in hand, production teams package the assets using the new Digital Content Bundler utility that allows publishers to import vertical and horizontal InDesign CS5 layouts, add metadata, (article title & description, issue number, etc.) and export them into a new “.issue” format. […]
Previously we announced the Digital Content Viewer for Apple iPad; in the future we also expect to develop the Digital Content Viewer on Adobe AIR for desktops and other devices.

Check out the whole post for more info & additional links.

“Chest pumped elegantly elephantine
southern hemisphere by Calvin Klein…”
There really is a song called “Photoshop Handsome”:

See also a review & lyrics. Madness. [Via Claudio Calligaris]

The exact times I want to read magazines on a tablet are the exact times I can’t.

What are the odds we can get the publishing industry to throw some blows at the airline industry (or FAA), finally nixing the prohibition on using electronic devices during taxi, takeoff, and ascent/descent?  I’m typing this on a plane where I’ve got a couple of paper magazines* stashed, ready for landing–this despite also carrying an iPad.  I bought the mags for reading when my laptop is verboten.  Wasting paper sucks, but at least this way I can, y’know, actually read the content during my downtime.

For bonus points, SFO’s anachronistic for-pay WiFi needs to die screaming. Paying eight bucks to access the net to then pay for tablet mags was a non-starter.

*A retronym in the vein of “acoustic guitars.”

On August 5 at Adobe’s San Francisco office, Adobe evangelist Jason Levine will be showing the “Fundamentals of Working With DSLR Video;” please see the sign-up page and the notes below for more info.  If you can’t wait or can’t attend, you might want to check out “Getting Started with Premiere Pro CS5,” a recorded demo/Q&A session with filmmaker Dave Basulto.

For Jason’s session:

Learn the fundamentals of working with DSLR footage natively inside Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop. From basic import, creating sequences, adding effects and transitions, all the way through export. We’ll also cover questions regarding transcoding footage and using DSLR video with green screen.

Prior to Adobe, Jason was a full-time recording and mastering engineer, working in studios coast-to-coast, engineering hundreds of recordings from Classical to Country, Rock to Reggae. In 2008 alone, Jason presented to over 75,000 people from San Francisco to Singapore, Amsterdam to Auckland, and everywhere in between.

The San José Photoshop User Group will be meeting next Tuesday evening at Adobe HQ, featuring photographer Suzette Allen.  According to the RSVP page:

Suzette Allen is always focused on efficiency, but this time, she will be showing some of the fun things you can do with Photoshop (including painting with CS5!) and the design tools (like making brushes and templates) that take a wee bit of time but can turn into profits as you re-use them creatively in templates. Of course she will show you how to save time with the amazing new features of CS5 as well. Be prepared for a fun and creative evening that will get you inspired to pursue your own creative vision.

Pizza & drinks will be served at 6:30, and the presentation begins at 7.  For directions and other details, please check out the Evite.

Or rather, it isn’t just about Web pages.  Responding to my post about CSS as the new Photoshop, Neven Mrgan makes some good points about HTML & CSS as a general purpose graphical system:

That assumption is that Nack is talking about creating web pages. I don’t believe he is… This is not the web Zeldman is interested in. It’s no web at all, in fact. […]

Look at any of Apple’s stores on the iPad – App Store, iTunes Store, iBookstore. Heck, look at the iTunes Store on your computer: it’s all made with HTML and CSS. Why? Because in the year 2010, if you’re going to be describing layouts, it’s not a bad call to describe them using very well adopted, rapidly developing technologies. […]

There’s no pride or glory in tweaking number after number and reloading a page to make sure my drop shadow looks nice.

On this last point, I’m hopeful that if Photoshop made it possible to copy/export styled text and objects as HTML/CSS, developers would accept the generated code.  There are only so many ways to specify box dimensions & borders, right?

More broadly, people are clearly interested in doing demanding, print-quality typesetting using HTML, the better to create things like magazines for tablets.  I’m encouraged to see work that enables better text breaking, kerning pairs & ligatures, proportional leading, and more. Onward and upward.

One other thing: I’ve gotten to know Neven a bit after he (justifiably) needled Photoshop for its admitted hodgepodge of UI elements. I’ve never managed to finish my long and detailed response, but in it I talk about how using Web elements (e.g. embedded WebKit) makes it hard–if not impossible–to match everything with OS-native controls.  I go on to cite numerous examples of Apple’s Web content not matching Aqua, etc.  The point is, the more powerful & ubiquitous Web content becomes, the more we’ll deal with the challenges of making the complete desktop/online experience feel cohesive.

Having logged lots of childhood hours with these toys, I really dug Patrick Boivin’s AT-AT Day Afternoon when it made the rounds a couple of weeks ago:

Now he’s shared some background info in a CNET interview & has posted a behind-the-scenes video, briefly showing Photoshop video layers in action:

The secret must be in his flappy-fingered typing style:

[Via Mordy Golding & John Lin]

The After Effects team has long done “ship trips,” wherein they hang around a design shop, production facility, etc., watching over customers’ shoulders while generally trying to make themselves unobtrusive/useful (e.g. bringing bagels, etc.).  Seeing someone doing real work is different than just talking about what they might like or need.

A number of my colleagues are enjoying some well-deserved R&R this month, so things are a bit quiet at the ranch, and I’m kind of itching to re-connect with the real world of design and production.  If you’re a designer in the Bay Area who wouldn’t mind having some spiky-haired, slightly over-solicitous guy hang around your workspace a bit, please let me know so that we can try to sync schedules.

Heh–good fun with (actual) cut-n’-paste from the folks at Melt Media. (Let’s hear it for flying toasters!)

Photoshop gets its 15 seconds of fame around the 1:40 mark. (For a really deep trip in that vein, see Russell Brown’s Photoshop Space Odyssey.) [Via Marc Pawliger]

I’m glad to hear that people seem pretty happy with the Photoshop CS5 update, but there’s always room to improve. If and when you encounter bugs in Photoshop or other Adobe apps, however, please report them via the online bug form.
Also, in case you’re wondering whether anyone actually looks at crash reports that come in, the answer is emphatically yes. It’s really helpful if you take a second to jot down your email address. That way, if we need more info about what you’re experiencing, we can drop you a line. (I know, this should never be necessary, and I know it’s an extra inconvenience, but we’re grateful for any data you can provide to help make the apps better.)