“Hyperlapse” processing—which analyzes a video, reconstructs the 3D input camera path, and then synthesizes a smooth new camera path—could pair brilliantly with Google Glass, GoPro cameras, and other wearable capture devices:
Here’s a more technical description of how it works:
I’d love to work with you to redefine the future of storytelling through photos, videos, and more. On Daring Fireball John Gruber writes,
My thanks to Google — that’s right, Google (kind of awesome, right?) — for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. They’re hiring developers and designers for their iOS app teams, which operate like a start-up within the walls of Google.
Google’s iOS apps are really good, and incredibly popular. How many people do you know who don’t have at least one installed on their iPhone or iPad (probably on their first home screen, if not in their dock)? If working on Google’s iOS apps sounds like your kind of gig, you can apply to job openings in San Francisco, Mountain View, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Paris, or London.
Turning “everyday visible objects into visual microphones”? Enhance! Check out what researchers from Adobe, Microsoft, and MIT have been up to:
Full blurb:
When sound hits an object, it causes small vibrations of the object’s surface. We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, allowing us to turn everyday objects—a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips—into visual microphones. We recover sounds from highspeed footage of a variety of objects with different properties, and use both real and simulated data to examine some of the factors that affect our ability to visually recover sound. We evaluate the quality of recovered sounds using intelligibility and SNR metrics and provide input and recovered audio samples for direct comparison. We also explore how to leverage the rolling shutter in regular consumer cameras to recover audio from standard frame-rate videos, and use the spatial resolution of our method to visualize how sound-related vibrations vary over an object’s surface, which we can use to recover the vibration modes of an object.
[YouTube]
Flying bananas? “Appearance Hallucination?” Photoshop Vanishing Point on steroids & acid? It’s all pretty interesting. Engadget writes,
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon are pushing into the third dimension, using a technique that compares the 2D objects in a regular photo with 3D models freely available online. The result? The ability to manipulate part of photo as if it were a real, three-dimensional object, even exposing angles and sides that weren’t visible in the original image.
[YouTube] [Via Brian Matiash]
From the department of Things That Look Like Faces comes this delightfully weird, Creature Comforts-style animated taste of NYC and its inhabitants:
I’ll say it again: Thank God E.T. sucked, because otherwise Russell Brown might never have gotten laid off, joined a startup called Adobe, helped revolutionize an industry, and years later save me from layoff & open the door to my joining Photoshop.
In any event, this documentary about the notorious game’s rushed development from lab to landfill could be fascinating:
Hmm—this free plug-in could be interesting:
Hopefully these guys will fare better than Adobe itself did when we added the ability to start an Acrobat Connect meeting right from within PS circa CS4. (Not only does no one remember that; I can’t even find references to it on my old blog.)
[Vimeo]
I relied on much cruder predecessors of this app back when I was a Web designer. QuickLens offers the ability to:
- Zoom into pixels
- Sample colors and export as Html/CSS color sheet or Photoshop Swatch
- Measure dimensions and angles
- Inspect alignments with screen-wide guides
- Overlay grids
- Take snapshots
- Simulate vision defects
The app is $14.99 on the Mac App Store.
Filmmaker Casey Neistat & his son visited—then snuck around—a German water park housed in an enormous former airship hangar. It makes for a fun three-minute film. (Bonus: German rap meets Biggie Smalls!)
As Kottke quotes the park’s site,
The Tropical Islands Dome is gigantic. In fact, it is the largest free-standing hall in the world: 360 metres long, 210 metres wide and an incredible 107 metres high.
That is big enough to fit the Statue of Liberty in standing up and the Eiffel Tower lying on its side. The Tropical Islands Dome covers an area of 66,000 m², the size of eight football fields. And it is high enough to fit in the whole of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, with all its skyscrapers.
[YouTube]
Navah Wei writes,
The newest version (1.207) of the Nik Collection has now been released, bringing you more bug fixes and adding installer compatibility for Photoshop CC 2014. This update will be installed in the background, provided your host applications (Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture) are not running and that you are connected to the Internet.
You can check out the full release notes here.
Anastasiy Safari’s invaluable color-picking panel has long been among the most popular Photoshop panel extensions, so I’m delighted that he’s ported it to HTML to enable use inside Photoshop CC 2014 & beyond.
Incredibly rich data capture & mapping on the fly? Yes please.
Shared previously, but worth a re-look:
Peter Krogh writes,
Buying Photoshop Extended and Lightroom four years ago would set you back $1300. You can buy a decade of CC software and services for that price.
Subscriptions were always meant to democratize access to what had been exclusively-priced tools.
The rest of Peter’s post (regarding the non-expiration of Lightroom following a subscription’s end) is worth a read in light of my post last year about how “You should never lose access to your work, period.”
Could be useful to painting apps, games, and more:
[YouTube]
A kid talking about Snapchat made me consider something interesting: It inverts the traditional assumption that longevity correlates to importance.
Because Snapchat images show briefly & then disappear forever, they demand attention. This is special, this moment won’t come again. That’s quite different from other human experiences: If this matters, write it down, make a copy, back it up, etc. Particularly in photography, it’s generally our most important images that we want to preserve the longest (that we commit to archival prints, etc.).
“Pay attention; this is going to go away!”
And, of course, it’s all going to go away.
I always had this in mind for the just-retired Mini Bridge, but we never quite got there. PetaPixel writes,
Doco’s goal is to help you better view and manage multiple Photoshop documents when they’re open at the same time. Using the extension’s cleverly-designed panel, swapping between images or compositions becomes a far more intuitive experience… no more having to remember what tab holds what photo.
The panel site says,
Doco brilliantly lets you copy selected layers or adjustments from document to document with a simple drag and drop. Moreover, drop the layers icon outside and Doco will create a new document for you. How awesome is that!
Interesting & nicely produced mini-bio of Claud Shannon, of whose contributions I was previously unaware:
[Vimeo] [Via Jim Goldstein]
If this doesn’t get you ready to take on the day… what could?
You’re about to face your greatest battle be it your nemesis/space aliens or just life in general. What do you do? You need to GEAR UP. Check out this awesome supercut of all finest ‘gearing up’ scenes from movie land.
[YouTube] [Via Shawn Cheris]
Seeing this migration (which entails more nuking of work I’d done, hopefully making room for future growth) makes me take comfort in what Steve Jobs said 20 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zut2NLMVL_k
Or as Jeff Bezos might put it, “Be stubborn on the vision & flexible on the details.”
[YouTube]
I’ll be showing some really interesting photo editing developments & answering audience questions on Scott Kelby’s show, starting just after 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific this Wednesday. See you there!
Browser-compatible type rendering; live previews of cloud-hosted fonts; smarter Smart Objects & guides; slicker layer comps; enhanced automatic export through Generator… it’s all pretty damn cool. Check out this tight little demo from Paul Trani:
Having started my career as a Web designer before joining Adobe, I’m so pleased to see folks like Stephen Nielson, Tim Riot, Bradee Evans, and many others really championing the needs of designers. Onward!
[YouTube]
HTML has now replaced Flash as the mechanism for extending Photoshop & other Creative Suite apps. This plan has been public since last fall, and with last week’s CC 2014 release, the change has come to pass.
So adios, Configurator, Mini Bridge, Kuler, and crew. It was real, it was fun—it wasn’t all real fun. Here’s hoping that developers take advantage of the new path to build what matters in the real world. (Cloud-backed Library panel for collaborating through linked Smart Objects, anyone?)
Courtesy of the incomparable Julieanne Kost:
Congrats to all my Adobe pals on what looks to be a killer release! (I’ve just arrived home after a week in Germany & am just catching up on videos & other materials. So much to go through—a nice problem to have!)
[YouTube]
My old roommate & friend Khoi Uong & his friends are kickstarting State X State:
Curated products and travel inspiration. By the designers we admire. From the places they love.
Looks like a fun, useful project. Check out the quick overview:
Brutal & hopefully effective. Khoi Vinh writes,
This public service announcement from Volkswagen was run in a Hong Kong movie theater. It’s extremely clever in using two media channels to re-create the perils of texting while driving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHixeIr_6BM
[YouTube]
I’m off to the beach with Margot & the Micronaxx. Later, nerds! 🙂
(I’ll have to try to post a picture of the custom “Dad-O” felt cape that the boys presented to me in bed this morning. Lando Calrissian would be jealous.)
This neat VFX-laden movie is meant to get kids moving in an effort to fight childhood obesity.
[T]he movie is the result of a two month-long contest that invited kids ages 5-18 to submit videos on KIDZBOP.com that showcase their action moves and healthy eating habits in one of nine different scripted scenes. […] More than 1,300 kids submitted videos and auditioned for the film, and over 5,000 kids cast their vote to select real kids from across the nation to star in G.A.M.E. alongside Ryan Ochoa.
[Vimeo] [Via Ben Jones]
Helping get this stuff into Photoshop remains one of my proudest accomplishments. It remains cryptic & obscure to more people than it should, however. Here’s a quick primer to get you working more flexibly:
[YouTube]
“A Web page? What’s that? Something ducks walk on?”
It’s fun to hear these kids learn what “.COM” and “AOL” stand for.
“Look, I’ve made it to Google!”
“There was no Google.”
“Oh…!”
[YouTube] [Via Brian Matiash]
Yale’s Shane Frederick gives a fascinating, lightning tour of just how susceptible our minds are to context—answering questions & evaluating people totally differently based on simple re-orderings, etc. Give it a quick listen; I think you’ll be glad you did.
[YouTube]
Check out this handy find from Scott Valentine. Even if you don’t care about using Photoshop for design, click through just to check out the unique way the video was created—a mechanism they tease about at the end. [Via Scott Valentine]
Waldo Bronchart interesting little utility shows you interactive charts of the keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom & Photoshop. You can hold down various modifier keys to see what they do in combination with other modifiers + letters, etc., and you can search for shortcuts (e.g. everything related to Print).
Hmm—this would actually be kind of brilliant for the teams to use when finding open shortcuts (never an easy task!).
[Via]
As The AV Club explains,
Everyone who donates $10 to the charity’s website before July 1 is automatically entered to win a chance to be flown to the set of Episode VII, where they will meet the cast before likely being dressed up as some sort of alien, and probably thrust far into the background behind characters who actually matter. Nevertheless, you will technically “be in Star Wars,” with all the decades of lucrative convention appearances that promises.
[YouTube]
“This is not a how-to guide to get a job at Google,” cautions Evan (Google Maps PM for for Views, Photo Sphere, & Panoramio). Having said that, you might appreciate his perspective on how he scans for candidates.
Hand Jim a printout of your résumé and tell him he has 30 seconds to read it. But, after just 10 seconds, grab the paper back. Ask Jim what he knows about you from this.
I’m reminded of Steve Martin finally erupting in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: “Have a POINT! It makes it SO much more interesting for the listener!!“
I also enjoyed this succinct advice from Laszlo Bock, who’s in charge of all hiring at Google: “[F]rame your strengths as: ‘I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing Z.’” The rest of Thomas Friedman’s conversation with him is well worth a read.
aka, “This is What Happens When a Squid Listens to Cypress Hill.”
I predict that when we attach your body to these stimuli, your smile muscles will fire.
The video is a view through an 8x microscope zoomed in on the dorsal side of the caudal fin of the squid. We used a suction electrode to stimulate the fin nerve. Chromatophores are pigmeted cells that come in 3 colors: Brown, Red, and Yellow. Each chromatophore is lined with up to 16 muscles that contract to reveal their color.
Here’s more info on the project. Now excuse me while I try to explain the concept of membranes (and Cypress Hill) to the beguiled Micronaxx.
Dave Wiskus and Jaimee Newberry sat down for a fun chat the other day about how the Photoshop sausage (er, code) gets made, startup weenies, double-decker couches, and more. Here, give it a listen.
Check out this interesting project:
The user starts with a mechanical model, then sketches motion curves to indicate how different parts of the character should move. “The resulting mechanisms are attached to the character,” write the researchers, “and then connected to each other using gear trains, which are created in a semi-automated fashion.”
[YouTube] [Via Matthew Richmond]
Bizarre team presentation style notwithstanding (were these guys media-trained by Michelle Bachmann?), this project looks rather cool:
LIX 3D printing pen has the similar function as 3D printers. It melts and cools coloured plastic, letting you create rigid and freestanding structures. Lix has a hot-end nozzle that is power supplied from USB 3.0 port. The plastic filament ABS/PLA is introduced in the upper extremity of Lix Pen. The filament goes through a patented mechanism while moving through the pen to finally reach the hot-end nozzle which melts and cools it down. An interesting fact about this light-weight, engineered pen is that these structures can be formed in any imaginable shape.
[Via]
I’m so pleased to see that my longtime boss & friend Kevin Connor, together with imaging forensics pioneer Dr. Hany Farid, has introduced Izitru (pronounced “Is It True?”), a free app & Web site for checking whether digital images have been manipulated:
CNET’s Stephen Shankland writes,
To use Izitru, a photographer can upload a photo through the Web site or an iPhone app. Izitru then runs a battery of tests that can identify editing or authenticity. It then posts a version of the photo with its trustworthiness rating. […]
Izitru is free to use, but the company hopes to make money by letting other Web sites tap into it through an application programming interface (API), which lets software use the service automatically. That could help social-media services, journalism sites, or insurance companies, Connor said.
[Vimeo]
Artist Sipho Mabona crowd-funded the creation of a life-sized fashioned from a huge, uncut piece of paper:
Weird personal detail: When my son Finn was just about to turn 3, he devised an elaborate story about an elephant named Psycho Tomoda. I now must commission Sipho Mabona to fold a Psycho Tomoda!
Who knew? But so you can, and to enable good causes:
Visual anonymity in video allows people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not. […]
YouTube is proud to be a destination where people worldwide come to share their stories, including activists. Along with efforts like the Human Rights Channel and Citizentube that curate these voices, we hope that the new technologies we’re rolling out will facilitate the sharing of even more stories on our platform.
To use the feature:
Once you’ve chosen the video that you’d like to edit within our Video Enhancements tool, go to Additional Features and click the “Apply” button below Blur All Faces.
