- Open the Google Photos app on a mobile device or go to photos.google.com using a computer .
- At the top left, touch or click the menu icon > Help & Feedback.
- Touch or click Feedback. You can tell us things like:
- What you like or dislike about the app
- Things that are confusing or don’t work
If you check the box to include screenshots and logs, it helps us understand your feedback.
Thanks in advance!
I love Dylan Tweney’s reaction to what Google can create from photos:
In short, Google had reached into the depths of an overwhelmingly large photo library, identified some highlights, and put them together in a way that surprised and delighted me.
And animation is great for
conveying the spirit of the event more concisely than I could have done in any number of words.
I’ve had similar experiences, including the time that our deceased beloved wiener dog came back to life (or at least to motion) when a burst of photos became a looping GIF.
I’ve been hearing (no pun intended) for a while now about Google experiments in using sound to help nearby devices communicate, and this is a funky application of the tech: install a Chrome extension on multiple computers to let them pass around links via short bursts of audio.
[YouTube]
File under “Seems potentially handy”: Mr. Stacks “is a Photoshop script that rapidly generates storyboards, stacks, and PDF(s) for CD check-ins, client-ish presentations, and whatever else it is you do. Helping to Nail some of the most monotonous tasks in art direction.”
Check out Didú. Designtaxi writes,
Six different masterworks have been reproduced through this technique, and is now being exhibited at the Prado Museum, located in Madrid. This selection is available to touch, with the hope to translate the detail, volume and texture we perceive with our eyes into the tactile language understood by the blind.
[Vimeo]
There are Lego cars, and then there are Lego cars…
When he was a teenager in Romania, Raul Oaida became obsessed with building things: a jet-engine bike, a tiny spaceship, a LEGO car that runs on air. Why? Well, why not?
[YouTube] [Via Uri Ar]
Hasselhoff. Hitler. Power Glove. You’re welcome.
Detail by crapulent detail, this lovingly art directed video channels the eye-gouging best of the 80’s, complete with multiple Countaches & awful lip syncing:
Consider your week started properly.
[YouTube] [Via Alex Powell]
Super fun robot puppetry courtesy of Opificio Sonico:
Toa Mata Band is known as the World’s first LEGO robotic band controlled by Arduino Uno which is hooked up to a MIDI sequencer. In this video, the third episode, the robots are playing some unconventional drum-percussions made by some food packaging are captured by a contact microphone (piezo) and processed in real time in the D.A.W. Ableton Live. A brand new device appears for the first time, it’s a sliding platform on x-axis, made of Lego bricks, gears and servo motors that allows the tiny synth to move in semitone steps.
[YouTube] [Via Jeff Tranberry]
Short of wiring your brain’s AV receptors to actual jumper cables, I’m not sure what’d be more stimulating than this Lil Jon-enfused visual onslaught from the LA Clippers:
If that’s up your alley, check out this recent projection work on American Idol:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0v6ITyTWv4&feature=youtu.be
Someday soon it’ll be remarkable that we found this remarkable. Until then…
[YouTube]
Collaborative video creation FTW. And more interestingly, look at the hot chick they have demoing the app (not to mention program-managing it while helping me raise the Micronaxx :-)).
How much of this is actually real? I don’t know, but given that Google recently invested $400 million in these guys, I’m hoping it’s a lot. Here’s a bit more info.
[YouTube] [Via Alex Powell]
“Meh—it’s just affected pinner-hipsters skating around,” you think for the first minute. Then it gets ultra bananas.
[Vimeo]
Have you ever auto-aligned & blended layers in Photoshop (e.g. making a panorama)? Applied a wide-angle lens correction or perspective warp? Warp-stabilized video in After Effects? Quickly segmented an image in Photoshop Touch? Dreamed about voice-driven image editing?
All of these projects & more had key contributions from researcher Aseem Agarwala, so I’m incredibly excited that today is his first day at Google. In just his first few weeks at Adobe we were able to get his alignment & blending tech into CS3, and Aseem was always one of my favorite research collaborators (energetic, thoughtful, and aesthetically savvy). Let’s see what we can do with the resources of Google!
“I swear, drop shadows used to be *cool*!” I used to tell people. “That was back when only barrel-chested, meat-eating heroes could wade through all the steps—before Photoshop made them easy & really cheapened the coin.”
I think of that watching this charming little clip from CreativeLive. As PetaPixel writes,
They asked 8 well-known Photoshop experts — Dave Cross, Jared Platt, Ben Willmore, Chris Orwig, Julieanne Kost, Aaron Nace, Tim Grey, Matt Kloskowski, and Jason Hoppe — to try their hand at version 1.0.
Oh, and the single-undo thing? That persisted for the first eight-plus years of Photoshop’s existence!
[YouTube]
Based on having used it for many months, I think you’ll really dig this thing:
Highlights, according to the team blog:
- Events from Gmail, which turn emails into Calendar events automatically
- Assists, which make suggestions that save you time creating events
- Schedule View, which makes your calendar easy to scan and lovely to look at
[YouTube]
I’ve been a ridiculously big fan of Dave Werner since discovering his student portfolio some nine (!!) years ago. Now check out the labor of love he’s been crafting (singing, drawing, and animating) for and with his young kids:
Make sure to enjoy a charming look behind the scenes, too. Homemade skateboard camera dolly FTW!
As part of their 25th anniversary celebrations, the Photoshop team is looking for great young artists to showcase:
In the coming months, we’ll be scouring the globe, turning over every rock, to find artists that represent the future of Photoshop. But we need your help. We’re looking for the most innovative, forward-looking work out there that will show the world what the next generation of Photoshop artists is made of.
These 25 game changers will be from all parts of the world, and their art will represent their diverse cultures, life experiences, points of view and dreams…all brought to life with the help of Photoshop. In honor of our 25th year, each artist will be creating an original piece of art to celebrate the milestone. Over the course of the next year, each of the 25 will stage a two week takeover of our brand new Photoshop Instagram channel sharing their story and their art with the world.
Check out the blog post for details. [Via]
Farhad Manjoo writes about how PS “has not just survived but thrived through every major technological transition in its lifetime: the rise of the web, the decline of print publishing, the rise and fall of home printing and the supernova of digital photography.”
The current talk of atomizing & democratizing Photoshop technology reminds me of “Photoshop & Punk Rock,” a Computer Arts guest piece I wrote 6 years ago. As they put it, “Adobe’s John Nack would like to blast Photoshop into a million pieces. He tells us why.”
Let’s measure the development team in the thousands, not in the dozens. Instead of relying on just the comparatively small crew at Adobe, let’s tap into the ‘Photoshop Nation’. And, rather than delivering improvements only every 18 to 24 months, let’s allow everyone to deliver them continuously, on the fly and on demand.
If the arc of my career bends towards one thing, it’s towards removing barriers between people & creative expression, on as large a scale as possible. It’s what I continue to do today.
Power to the people,
J.
“We’ve never been more confused, and it’s all thanks to you!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8XXCudKdeU
[YouTube]
Old friends celebrating an old friend, 7pm tomorrow at the Computer History Museum. Hope to see you there!
How did this remarkable tool come to be and what has been its influence on our lives and larger culture? Join us for a remarkable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear the answers from three key people who made Photoshop what it is today:
Russell Brown – Original Photoshop evangelist
Steve Guttman – Original Photoshop product manager
Thomas Knoll – The programming genius who created PhotoshopPlease join us for this special panel discussion on Photoshop, a unique creativity tool that has changed our world and how we see it forever.
Once costing $399, the service is now available free of charge. According to TechCrunch, the pro version lets you:
- Print images at 4800×3200; non-Pro is capped at 1000×1000.
- Automatically import a few thousand addresses at once to be pinned on a map
- Capture HD videos of what’s on screen.
- Measure distances/areas using lines, paths, polygons, circles, and more. Non-pro can only handle lines/paths.
Sign up via this form, then download the free Pro client. (Several commenters noted that they got an error message upon submitting it, but that re-submitting fixed the problem.)
Now, Google Fiber is live in Kansas City, Provo and Austin, and we’ve started to see how gigabit Internet, with speeds up to 100 times faster than today’s basic broadband, can transform cities […]
[T]oday, we’re happy to announce that Google Fiber is coming to 18 cities across four new metro areas: Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham. We can’t wait to see what people and businesses across the Southeast U.S. do with gigabit speeds.
We’re also continuing to explore bringing fiber to five additional metro areas—Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and San Jose, and will have updates on these potential Fiber cities later this year.
Now, excuse me while I go try to cut in line—I mean, generously offer my testing services—to get access in San Jose… 😉
If this hack doesn’t make you smile, you may want to check yourself for a pulse.
Dillon Markey, an animator for Robot Chicken and PES, modifies a Nintendo Power Glove as the most awesome animation tool ever.
Around the midway point (4:20+) he reveals some hilarious details that I won’t spoil. 🙂
I wish I’d known about this project & could have promoted it sooner, but I mention it now in case you are/know a kid who’d like to participate:
The theme of this year’s festival is “The Impact of Giving Back”, and it’s open to U.S. students, grades K-12. So tell a story about paying it forward, about community service, or what making a difference looks like in your eyes and through your lens.
Rules:
- All films must be shorter than 3 minutes.
- All films must be made by students in grades K-12.
- No film may use copyrighted material including music, TV shows, or movies.
- All films must be uploaded to YouTube.
- All film submissions must be received by 11:59 p.m. EST on February 2, 2015.
Enjoy two and a half thoughtful, beautifully produced minutes of Neven Mrgan’s observations about design evolution:
As it happens, I first got to know Neven after he knocked Photoshop for its unruly sprawl of UI elements (specifically, lots of arbitrarily different sliders). I was stung as by then I’d been writing about and fighting to address this phenomenon for years. We had so many good intentions & false starts trying to re-wing that old plane in flight, and I was sick to death of hearing Apple zealots (not Neven) say, “Just use the standard Mac elements”—when in practice no such standards existed. In any case, Neven’s post broke the ice, and we ended up dropping in on the Panic team a couple of times over the years. Their ideas on how to evolve PS were always helpful—and I was deeply gratified to rationalize a bunch of those slider types in CS5 and beyond. [Vimeo]
Michael Rubinstein & team have developed tech that can “track an individual’s pulse and heartbeat simply from a piece of footage” and “recreate a conversation by amplifying the movements from sound waves bouncing off a bag of chips.”
And it’s not just Google, of course:”Identifiable Images of Bystanders [Can Be] Extracted from Corneal Reflections.”
Jeez—just when Hollywood was starting to acknowledge the limits of “Enhance!”…
[Via James Morehead & Bill Roberts]
Color expert Patrick Palmer of the Adobe SpeedGrade team once showed me two wildly different scenes from a movie (one balmy & sunlit, the other shivering & wet) and asked how many color looks I thought were involved in telling the story. The answer turned out to be “one,” and the changes came simply from adjusting the color temperature. The example drove home the storytelling power of even simple tweaks to color.
This example from Grade in Kansas City demonstrates the impact color can have:
The colorist has shared some technical details via Reddit. [Vimeo] [Via Aravind Krishnaswamy]
Props to Jerry Courvoisier of LightroomWorkshop.com for pulling together this handy document.
Having explored the collaborative video space in my last role at Adobe, I’m excited to see smart folks joining YouTube/Google. I can’t say what this means for the future, but here’s a bit about what they’ve previously shipped:
[YouTube]
Dig this bit of flying papercraft (and feel free to mute the sales pitch):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8bPp3_sXfc
[YouTube] [Via John Schlag]
Margot is giving me the gift (intervention?) of horrible connectivity so that I can detox a bit from manic blogging, tweeting, etc. Therefore the blog & I will see you in the new year. Thanks for reading, and all the best to you & yours!
I’ve been a huge fan of Chopping Block and its cofounder Matthew Richmond for as long as I’ve been around the industry. (Actually, that’s not quite right: I used to kinda loathe them for being so, so much better at design than I was!) Therefore I’m thrilled that Matthew has signed on Director of Experience Design at Adobe. For years he’s been a thoughtful & generous sounding board for Photoshop, Illustrator, and many other apps, and I can’t wait to see him apply his creativity & fiendish attention to detail to Adobe’s offerings.
Google has put together an interesting & nicely designed Year in Search site for 2014, giving some bottoms-up context to many of the year’s top news stories.
[YouTube]
We’d love to hear your thoughts via Google User Experience. My team constantly chats with interesting folks from all walks of life (a Navy chief, a musician, and a homemaker among others this week) and would value your perspective.
A spiritual successor to the late Adobe Collage (mentioned yesterday), Curator could be interesting:
When I first saw Khoi Vinh’s collaborative design app Mixel, I wanted to throw up—from jealousy.
I’d first met Khoi while moderating a Layer Tennis match between him & Nicholas Felton, and at the time I was brainstorming about designers’ needs for tablet apps. “What about ‘Photoshop Volley,'” I asked Khoi, describing a totally non-destructive, cloud-backed design environment centered on playful exchange of ideas & artwork. It turns out he was working on something very similar, so we went off on separate paths. My team ended up building Photoshop Touch (a far more traditional app than I wanted to make), and Mixel launched as much more what I had in mind.
Sadly the app didn’t take off, but Khoi has continued to think about ways for tablets to help designers think & share better. He’s been working with Adobe on a new iPad app call LayUp, letting you make quick sketches that can evolve into styled renderings, and the response looks pretty enthusiastic. Check out some demos:
The sketch-to-shape tech reminds me of (and almost certainly was lifted from) Adobe’s innovative Adobe Proto (for sketching wireframes that turned into real code), the moodboarding aspects recall Adobe Collage—apps that were launched 3 years ago, then summarily executed some months later. Maybe LayUp’s export of native PSD, AI, and InDesign files, its Typekit integration, and its cool history feature will change the game this time.
What do you think? Will LayUp earn a place in your design process?
