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.

I hate spamming people, and having discovered a setting to enable daily digests of emails instead of individual mailings, I’ve flipped the switch in hopes of cluttering your inbox less. If you’d like to get digests of posts via email, please sign up here. And if you’re a WordPress/Subscribe2 ninja who can help me offer the option of weekly digests, please let me know.

What a charmingly weird little Rube Goldberg project:

[Vimeo]

• Women Laughing Alone With Salad is “A blog devoted to the bizarre stock photo trend of women looking WAY too happy to be eating salad, sometimes literally in the middle of cracking up laughing at their hilarious greens, while alone.
• Three-Point Landing is a supercut of superheroes landing in a very distinctive way. (Prediction: This will be like the Wilhelm Scream for me now, instantly taking me out of a movie.)

[YouTube]

If Atari’s “E.T.” hadn’t sucked so much, I might not be talking to you right now, as I wrote here. Now, The Verge reports, “Construction workers unearth legendary cache of Atari games in New Mexico desert.”

Thank you, little buried cartridges—thank you.

Good news for the deeply needy: MIT researcher Aditya Khosla has a tool for optimizing response to your images. According to The Verge,

Khosla says his algorithm allows him to predict how many views your photo will get before you even upload it. The algorithm considers social factors such as how many followers a user has, the number of tags on the photo, and the length of the title. It also measures content factors such as texture, color, gradient, and objects present in the photo. (Miniskirts, bright colors, people instead of scenery = good. Plungers = bad. Pink and yellow miniskirts, even better. Green plungers, horrible.) […]

Right now the algorithm is much better when social factors are included, but Khosla hopes to improve it. He also plans to create a tool that can automatically edit your photo to make it more popular.

Interesting, though the idea of robots editing our art makes me think of Dead Poets Society:

Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? “I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!”

[Via Margot Neebe]

God is in the details:

[YouTube] [Via]

Ah—I’ve been looking forward to talking about this one for a while, and now that it’s public, I can.

I loathe making users do shit work, and laboriously converting among file formats is most definitely shit work. Back in the day it took (by my count) 168 individual steps to import a 20-layer PSD into Flash. With LiveMotion we took that down to 2. It’s maybe not that dramatic, but Adobe’s new Project Parfait is pretty slick:

Adobe’s Raymond Camden writes,

This is exactly the kind of tool that is useful for me as a web developer. I have a lot of respect for Photoshop, but I find it hard to use at times as I don’t use it very often. Something like Parfait is a heck of a lot simpler for me and I’m willing to bet a lot of developers would think the same. If you try it out, make note of the Chat option in the lower right corner. I found a small bug and reported it via that pod. You can also get support via the forums just launched for the project. 

[YouTube]

The story’s a bit slow to start, but this giant installation looks amazing:

The large-scale projection installation features 21 powerful projectors streaming mind-bending graphic patterns on over 20,000 square meters of space in Oberhausen, Germany’s massive gasometer. The installation is among the world’s largest and technically most sophisticated interior projections.

[YouTube]

All I can say is we’re building some tremendously cool stuff, and we need great imaging, iOS, and Android minds to join us. If that describes you, please drop me a line (nack at…).

For many years I’ve said, “Google’s aesthetic is speed. Stuff might look pretty spartan, but boy it’s fast, because they know that speed = money.” Here designer Jon Wiley shares some insight into a little tweak his team made (simply changing font size) to deliver faster results to millions of people:

[YouTube] [Via]

Nice; see brief demo below. (This isn’t really new, though: the YouTube Capture app has been presenting a similar prompt for some time.)

[YouTube] [Via]

Quite possibly the most fun you can have with some foam core, Final Cut, and your clothes (partially) on:

[YouTube] [Via Dave Besbris]

There is literally no limit to the number of times my young sons would watch this lovely bit of animation if I’d let them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxy4n0UT82o

[YouTube]

A neat idea from Adobe’s type-serving arm:

Fonts are great, but using them well can be hard. Volumes have been written about typography, yet every good designer will say there are no rules; there is no magic formula for success. Typography simply takes practice. Typography is a practice.

So today, we’re launching a new website: Typekit Practice, a place where novices and experts alike can hone their typographic skills. We hope it will help students learn, help teachers teach, and help professionals stay sharp.

[Via]

As a brand new Photoshop PM, one of my first trips was back to NYC to visit motion graphics artists. Touring one shop I was amazed to glimpse a technique I’d never seen, using Photoshop to break 2D photos into layers, fill in gaps, and then animate the results in After Effects. Later that year the work came to the big screen in The Kid Stays in the Picture, the documentary that now lends its name to this ubiquitous parallax effect.

Here Yorgo Alexopoulos talks about how he developed the technique & how he’s leveraged it in later works:

Below, artist Joe Fellows gives a brief, highly watchable demo of how it’s done (although it physically pains me to see him using the Pen tool to make selections & no Content-Aware Fill to at least block in the gaps):

[YouTube 1 & 2]

This “Uber for drones” parody (it is fake… right?) is utterly pitch perfect. You know it’s coming, and I can’t wait for all the breathless 23-year-old moron tech “journalists” to breathlessly cheerlead the startup-weasel brawl that’ll bring it to you. #CentrifugalBumblepuppy

“Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.” [Brave New World]

[YouTube] [Via]

Neat:

To honor Earth Day 2014, Google+ and Time want to see your best picture of your beautiful Earth, which you can share with the hashtag #MyBeautifulEarth. Google+ will feature your images on a page of all of that local loveliness from now through April 22, which can be seen and savored in real time, as the page grows. Time’s photo editors will cull through the submissions, and the best of them will appear here on TIME.com on Earth Day. 

Upload a photo via plus.google.com, add a description including the hashtag #mybeautifulearth, and make sure visibility is set to “Public.” [Via Brian Matiash]

The Photoshop team, especially engineer John Penn, do a lot of work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I visited there once & was fascinated by their process. Artists use various tools (especially Liquify) to combine photos of a missing child with images of a similar kid who was the appropriate number of years older, drawn from a huge collection of donated school photos.

Now new technology from a team at the University of Washington for Illumination-Aware Age Progression seems like it could be a great aid to that kind of work:

[Via Eunyoung Kim]

Looks like a neat community/subscription system for visual effects mavens from Stu Maschwitz & the crew at Red Giant:

They write,

Red Giant Universe is a community that gives members access to fast and powerful free tools for editing, filmmaking, visual effects and motion design.

Every tool in the Universe library of effects and transitions is GPU-accelerated, both Mac and Windows compatible, and works across multiple host applications including: After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X and Motion.

Stu notes,

A free subscription gets you access to tons of effects. A paid subscription ($10 per month, or $99 per year) gets you more. Don’t like subscriptions? Buy a perpetual license for $399.

[Vimeo 1 & 2]

Intriguing:

PetaPixel writes,

NPR just released a fascinating video that does a fantastic job of explaining something called Schlieren Flow Visualization or Schlieren Photography: a photographic trick that allows you to see density changes in air and, therefore, actually capture sound waves on camera.

[YouTube]

Hard to describe, easy to perceive, rather cool:

[Vimeo]

“It could be,” as one of my favorite posters says, “that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.” On a brighter note (what isn’t?), perhaps a difficult person (colleague, relative, whatever) is here to make you a better person (“I’m getting you into heaven,” as my mom says). Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön explains in this entertaining little anecdote:

[YouTube]

Fascinating:

Virtual Photo Walks mission is to allow isolated people to become interactive citizens again. Utilizing the Internet, video chat and smart phones, people are able to visit and interact with mobile guides all over the world and to visit they people and places they could only dream about before.

[YouTube]

Congratulations to all my Adobe pals on the launch of Lightroom Mobile for iPad! Photographers have been clamoring for this functionality for years, and I think they’ll find the results quite slick. Check out the details via the team’s Lightroom Journal blog, and see it in action via Julieanne Kost’s demo series:

[YouTube]

This is a minor point, but I’m happy that the Nik guys have done a nice job freshening up the Web photo editor (essentially Snapseed in your browser). You can check out photos.google.com, then click any one of your images & hit Edit up top (requires Chrome right now). This workflow is great if you’re using Auto Backup on your Mac or Windows machine. You can back up 15GB of full-res JPEG & raw images for free (or 100GB for $2/mo or 1TB for $10/mo), then edit the images non-destructively through your browser via the familiar Snapseed tool set.

I’m really, really excited about what we can do in this area. Stay tuned.

The afflicted model’s recent appearance on Ellen is altogether charming:

[YouTube]

Free through April 17:

Bryan O’Neil Hughes shares insights to help you import, organize, and enhance your iPhone photos using Lightroom and Photoshop.

If this is of interest, check out lots of useful related resources.

Lovely in fullscreen:

Using text adapted from Robert Marshalls “Alaska Wilderness: Exploring the Brooks Range” (1929) and images from Expedition Arguk (2013), “The World Beyond the World” aims to celebrate that most ancient and sublime of human pleasures: moving through a mysterious, beautiful, and unknown landscape.

I’d love to know more about how the parallax effects were created.

[Vimeo]

…put through its paces by no less a guru than Deke McClelland. Now see if you “can get your hands on a Mac IIci or even an IIfx model,” and let’s walk back to the bad or at least humble) old days:

[YouTube] [Via James Fritz]

My wife & her cronies have been hard at work prepping major new integrations & enhancements across the product line. Check out Todd Kopriva’s detailed overview, or just catch the highlights here:

What’s new in Premiere Pro:

What’s new in After Effects:

Welcome to the weird world of slit-scan video (and yes, there’s an app for that):

[YouTube] [Via Alex Powell]

First response: whoa.

Second response: The results here are incredibly low fidelity (compared, say, to what an industrial designer could do with a simple marker & pencil), and I’m reminded of an ancient Apple commercial that depicted a guy sketching the idea for a helicopter-car on a napkin, then scanning it into his Mac. It looked great initially, but was it actually useful? We shall see.

[Vimeo] [Via]

Legos a go-go. 🙂 [Update: Whoops, I meant this post to go to our family blog, but folks seemed to like it so I’ll leave it up.] 

Just like it says on the tin: 15 interesting bisections, from grenades to helmets to piñatas.

I… I just cannot express (much less justify) how happy this makes me:

(Inaudible offscreen: The lamentations of Zune’s women.)

[YouTube] [Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]

4CP (Four Color Process) is a gorgeous new collection of vintage comic artwork rendered at extreme close-up. In addition to the great images, they’ve posted an interesting manifesto on what they’re doing & why. (“Four-color process delivers surplus, independent information, a kind of visual monosodium glutamate that makes the comic book panel taste deeper.”)

[Via Jason Santa Maria]

Not Fountains of Wayne, but fountains of chain: Check out the beautiful kinetic sculpture that comes from ordinary household materials:

The NYT breaks down what’s going on:

And if that floats your boat (yanks your chain?), check out When Water Flows Uphill:

Colossal explains,

The folks over at Science Friday made this fascinating video about the Leidenfrost Effect, where water dropped on an extremely hot surface is capable of floating instead of immediately evaporating. While studying the bizarre effect, physicists at the University of Bath realized that not only does the water float, but under the right conditions and temperatures it can actually climb upward. The playful experiments lead to the creation of an incredible superheated maze.

[YouTube 1, 2, & 3 ] [Via]

If you work at all with layers in Photoshop (i.e. if you work at all in Photoshop), take a second to scan through this list from Julieanne Kost. I’ll bet you learn at least one thing that’ll save you far more time than it took to read.

Here’s a cool idea from the folks behind VSCO Cam:

The VSCO Artist Initiative is a $100,000 scholarship fund providing artists the resources to pursue their creative vision.  […]

Recipients will document their ideation and creation process on VSCO Grid, with the end result sold via the VSCO Store and physical gallery exhibitions. Profits are divided between the artist and a reinvestment in the Initiative, enabling future projects for other artists.

You can apply via the site.

Your move, Clooney.

[Vimeo] [Via Kalvyn Rasquinha]

Nik, Nack, ideally no paddywhack. 🙂

I’m pleased to say that version 1.111 of the indispensable Nik Collection of plug-ins for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture is now available:

This update brings more bug fixes and performance improvements and will be installed in the background so long as your host applications (Lightroom, Photoshop, or Aperture) aren’t currently running.

To check which version of the Nik Collection you currently have installed, open up a photo in any of the Collection plug-ins and click on the Nik logo on the top right of the display. That will pop up the product’s About screen with the version listed there.

You can learn more about this update by visiting our Release Notes page.

Decades before Be Kind, Rewind, a bunch of kids lovingly recreated Raider of the Lost Ark:

“…One of the strangest permutations of ’80’s nostalgia to hit movie screens—the now-notorious Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a 100-minute shot-for-shot amateur-video remake of the 1981 Spielberg-Lucas adventure flick, created over a span of seven years by a group of kids in small-town Reagan-era Mississippi. More talked-about than seen,The Adaptation arrives at Anthology Film Archives this Friday for a rare two-day run. Filled with ingenious contraptions and overweening jerry-rigs,The Adaptation remakes Raiders on less than 1/2,000th of Paramount’s original $20 million budget, conjuring exotic locales out of cardboard sets in parents’ basements, casting tweens in Boy Scout uniforms as Nazi bad guys, and rolling a gigantic hand-crafted boulder through the family garage to create the film’s signature scene. Nothing short of slapdash spectacular.”

Now they’re asking for help to fill in the project’s one missing scene—and they’re just $2,700 from their $50k goal with three days left:

[Via Sean Parent] 

(No, I’m not kidding!) Check out The Motion Photography Prize, sponsored by Google+ (purveyors of fine automatic GIF creation):

Saatchi Art, the Saatchi Gallery and Google+ will award the inaugural Motion Photography Prize, inviting photographers all over the world to celebrate this new creative art form. Six finalists (one per category) will be chosen by a jury of forward-thinkers, including artists Tracey Emin, Shezad Dawood and Cindy Sherman, as well as filmmaker Baz Luhrmann.

6 finalists receive:

• A special feature on Saatchi Art, the world’s leading online art gallery
• Inclusion in a group exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London
• A trip for 2 to London to attend the private viewing at the Saatchi Gallery

1 overall winner receives all of the above, plus:

• The trip of a life with the photographer/filmmaker of his/her choice

To create your motion photo, you can upload a series of at least 5 frames to Google+, or you can create it on your own. You can then upload one motion photo (in GIF format) for as many of the six prize categories as you’d like, found on the Saatchi Gallery’s Google+ page.

Now get out there and animate some pixels!

I just made this entirely random discovery (thanks, Pinterest):

This. Shirtless Putin airbrushed onto a conversion van. 24 years of hard work. Worth it.

I met novelist Ben Jones back when we worked at AGENCY.COM NY. (If I remember right, he was beating someone with a bat in some four-man Nintendo brawl.) He’s a great guy who works with agencies to build next-gen experiences, and his team is hiring:

We act as brainstorming partners to help agency teams make bigger, better, more resonant work leveraging all of the technologies and platforms that Google has, or is in the process of developing, or has not yet developed but should.

We are looking for a Creative Director with a portfolio of award-winning, conceptually driven work for major brands who is excited at the prospect of working collaboratively with creatives across the industry.

If that sounds like you, please read on & consider applying.

I’ve yet to visit the NY office, but it looks like a cool space:

From a conference room mimicking a tiny NYC apartment to hallways complete with subway grates and fire hydrants, get a first hand look at how we’ve styled our New York city block.

[YouTube]

People are profoundly, if unsurprisingly, ignorant:

• 11% said they thought HTML — a language that is used to create websites — was a sexually transmitted disease.
• 27% identified “gigabyte” as an insect commonly found in South America.
• 15% said they believed “software” is comfortable clothing.
• 12% said “USB” is the acronym for a European country.

Despite the incorrect answers, 61% of the respondents said it is important to have a good knowledge of technology in this day and age.

Good to bear in mind when designing experiences for a broad audience. [Via Husani Oakley]

Julieanne Kost reminded me of options that surprisingly few people know:

Use either of these shortcuts to cycle through open, tabbed documents in Photoshop:

• Command + ~ (tilde) (Mac) | Control + ~ (tilda) (Win)
• Command + Tab (this is the same shortcut for both platforms).

Adding the Shift key to either shortcut will reverse direction.

When we changed the meaning of Cmd-~ and Cmd-1 in CS4 to be more platform- and app-consistent, longtime Photoshop users flipped out, and I didn’t blame them. As I wrote then,

By and large, keyboard shortcut changes suck.  Mature tools are like musical instruments, and you don’t go moving the piano keys or cello strings without a great need to do so.  It’s painful.  We know.

I still think those were the right changes, and if you prefer the older way, you can just choose Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts, then enable “Use Legacy Channel Shortcuts.”