Monthly Archives: May 2013

Adobe contributes font rasterizer technology to FreeType

Typography

No, I hadn’t heard of it either, but the short story is that Adobe is giving away its IP to make type look more beautiful on your screen.

FreeType, an open-source library for font rendering, is used either partially or exclusively by Android, Chrome OS, iOS, GNU/Linux and other free Unix operating system derivatives such as FreeBSD and NetBSD. This makes FreeType the font rendering software of choice for more than a billion devices.

Details & examples are here. I’m just excited that Adobe, which since its founding 30 years ago has been redefining what’s possible around beautiful type, is making this contribution. More info from Google is here.

CNET: "Adobe to bring Lightroom-style photo editing to tablets"

Lightroom, Mobile

Stephen Shankland covers today’s sneak peek (emphasis added):

[Hogarty] wouldn’t promise when it would ship or what exactly it would do, but he did demonstrate some features on prototype software running on an iPad 2, and he did offer several details about its features:

  • The ability to edit photos taken in raw photo formats, including Lightroom develop-module parameters like exposure, clarity, shadows, highlights, and white balance.
  • Cloud-synchronized editing so that changes made on a tablet arrive on the same photo on the PC.

And without promising anything, he also said he’d like to see some of Lightroom’s library-module features such as sorting them into categories or flagging picks and rejects. […]

Adobe will use technology called Smart Previews in the new Lightroom 5 beta that creates a version of a photo that’s takes up many fewer megabytes than the original. The full gamut of raw editing controls can still be used on Smart Preview images, though, and the editing instructions synchronized back with the original files.

Photographers have been demanding these moves for a long time. I’m glad to say that the wheels are turning.

Stay tuned for more info about Smart Previews. They’re a big (little) deal.

Image Correction Master Class for Lightroom

Lightroom

Former Adobe photography evangelist George Jardine is back with tutorial content: The Image Correction Master Class – For Lightroom 4 & 5.

Image and color correction are not a mystery, but mastering them does take time and practice. The goal of this new series is to help you become fluent in correcting your own pictures—as quickly as possible. We accomplish that by guiding you toward a complete understanding of the tools, in both Lightroom 4 and 5. (With a healthy does of Photoshop thrown in for good measure, in the portrait tutorials.)

The new series is 20 videos, with over 5 hours of content. Flash and HTML5 versions are ready now, as well as online streaming for the iPad.