Monthly Archives: April 2011

Illustrator Appearance demo/Q&A tomorrow

Illustration

We’re all creatures of habit, and too few people use the powerful, efficient Appearance panel in Illustrator. If you don’t use it, or haven’t looked at it since CS4 (when it went from “meh” to really fulfilling its promise), check out tomorrow’s “Ask a Pro” session with Rufus Deuchler (12-1pm Pacific time):

Learn about what Rufus defines the “coolest feature” in Adobe Illustrator: the Appearance panel. The Appearance panel gives you full control over the appearance of paths, objects, texts, and much more, and lets you easily repurpose appearances you create by saving Graphic Styles.

Here’s the Adobe Connect room address, and you can RSVP here.

Photosmith, the Lightroom iPad companion, is now available

Lightroom, Mobile, Tablets

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.

Lightroom 3.4 & Camera Raw 6.4 are now available

CS5, DNG, Lightroom

Lightroom 3.4 (Mac|Win) & Camera Raw 6.4 (Mac|Win) are now available for download, adding support for the following cameras:

 

  • Canon EOS 600D (Rebel T3i / Kiss X5 Digital)
  • Canon EOS 1100D (Rebel T3 / Kiss X50 Digital)
  • Fuji FinePix S200 EXR
  • Fuji FinePix F550 EXR
  • Fuji FinePix HS20 EXR
  • Fuji FinePix X100
  • Hasselblad H4D-40
  • Kodak EasyShare Z990
  • Nikon D5100
  • Olympus E-PL1s
  • Olympus E-PL2
  • Olympus XZ-1
  • Samsung NX11

 

The releases also add support for dozens of new camera profiles, add new tethered camera support, & fix a number of bugs. For a complete list, see Tom Hogarty’s post on the Lightroom Journal.

Virgin ad drawn, animated (!) all in Photoshop

After Effects, Illustration

Every so often I think, well, we pretty much know the limits of what people can do in Photoshop. And then something like this happens:

Check out the making-of story from the team at Three Legged Legs. Amazing work, guys! [Via Stéphane Baril]
To defuse a possible criticism: I can imagine someone saying, “Whoa, see, Photoshop is trying to be everything to everyone, and now it’s a poor man’s After Effects.” That’s not the case & was never our intention. Rather, video layers & onion skinning enable using Photoshop’s unique paint tools frame by frame. PS complements, rather than competes with, AE’s motion graphics chops.

Photosynth panorama maker for iPhone

Mobile, Photography

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.

Time Lapse: "The Mountain"

Photography

Terje Sorgjerd (see previous) has produced another lovely time lapse, this time taken atop Spain’s highest mountain:

He writes,

A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes. Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds.

[Via Mark Kawano]

Brief thoughts on the Photoshop CS5 Touch apps

CS5, Suite Development, Tablets

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.

Got CS 5.5 questions? Tune in Thursday.

CS5

Live Q&A this Thursday, noon to 1pm Pacific time. Check it:

Join Adobe Creative Suite Evangelists, Terry White (Design), Greg Rewis (Web), Paul Trani (Flash Platform) and Jason Levine (Digital Video & Audio) to learn more about the new features in Creative Suite 5.5 and get your feature related questions answered. This a great opportunity to see our very latest technology in action and to find out how it could benefit you. The Evangelists will be covering a range of features across multiple products so there will be something for everyone. Please RSVP and we hope to see you then!

In case you can’t attend live, the session is to be recorded for later posting.

Demo: Adobe Nav for iPad for Photoshop CS5

CS5, Mobile, Tablets

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.

How to set up & tune a great Photoshop machine

64-bit, CS5

Photoshop gets used in a huge variety of ways, from editing tiny icons laying out multi-hundred-layer Web designs* to wrangling gigapixel photos. The optimal settings depend on the work you do. Now the Photoshop performance team has posted a white paper on Photoshop CS5 performance, explaining various cache & GPU settings, discussing the impact of 64-bit and multicore, and more.  Hopefully you’ll find it helpful.

* Web guys: Try the “Tall & Thin” option (yes, there is such a thing) under Preferences->Performance.

A look at Color Lava for Photoshop CS5

CS5, Illustration, Mobile, Tablets

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:

Eye-Fi enables direct-to-tablet transfer

Mobile, Photography, Tablets

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.

Astronomical distances

Illustration, Scientific & Technical Imaging

Happy 50th anniversary of human space flight!. Healing Brush creator Todor Georgiev, noting that April 12 is World Cosmonautics Day, somewhat ruefully observes:

If 50 years ago we had a state-of-the-art spaceship, and if we launched a flight to the nearest star (at the same time as Gagarin’s flight), where would we be now? Already there and back, right? No. Or maybe halfway there? No! The answer is: We would have travelled 0.03% of the way. I just did the math. It would take us 150,000 years to get there. And I am not counting the costs.

Lest that get you down, here’s NASA astronaut Cady Coleman and Jethro Tull founder Ian Anderson in an earth/space flute duet playing homage to Yuri Gagarin. (Also, you might like Chopping Block’s Above Earth t-shirt, commemorating 23 historic flights. The little chimp & dog silhouettes make it for me.)

Russell Brown demos a couple of useful panels

CS5, Suite Development

Apropos of the blending modes panel I mentioned the other day, Russell Brown has put together a quick video demonstrating some uses for this panel. He also demos a panel that sets the stack mode of Smart Objects (good for running the “tourist remover” trick on video, etc.). Download the panels here.
If design & layout is more your thing, check out Russell’s tutorial on the use of Cameron McEfee’s GuideGuide panel (see previous for info, and download here).

Photoshop CS5 gets tablet-savvy

CS5, Mobile, Tablets

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.

"Tych," a free diptych-maker for Photoshop

CS5, Suite Development

Reimund Trost has created what looks like a cool panel for Photoshop:

Tych Panel is an extension to Adobe Photoshop that automates diptychs and triptychs creation. It supports an arbitrary number of layouts using the compositing feature making it the perfect tool for your photo blog… Tych Panel is released as open source and can be used, modified and redistributed in any way you want.

Check out the demo:

What's this about "Photoshop for iPad"?

Mobile, Tablets

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.