This super cool project applied artwork to the exterior of an English mansion:

If nothing else, jump to the Pac-Man section around the 3:45 mark. [Via]

Creative Suite of San Jose User Group organizer Sally Cox notes that they’re meeting at 6pm Pacific Time on Tuesday evening to cover Lightroom 3.0.

Adobe San Jose (345 Park Ave.) – or join us online via Adobe ConnectPro. All meetings are recorded, though you must join to view past recordings (membership is free).

Agenda:

6:00-6:15 Introduction
6:15-6:45 Jason Eskridge
6:45-7:00 Q&A
7:00-7:30 New Features
7:30 Break
7:45 Workflow tips
8:15 -8:45 Open Forum for Members

Ultimately kind of a drag, but beautifully rendered:

[Via]

CS5 is the most consistently, easily extensible Creative Suite yet.  If customizing & connecting Photoshop, InDesign, and other apps is up your alley, check out the Creative Suite SDK Team blog for demos, links, and more info.

Heh–fun with papercraft:
[Via]

As Linda Richman might say, “Discuss.”
[Via]

• BP has caught flak for digitally altering an image of their crisis response HQ.  “‘Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping,’ [a company spokesman] said in an e-mail. ‘In this case they copied and pasted three ROV screen images in the original photo over three screens that were not running video feeds at the time.'” [Via Noah Mittman]
• Meanwhile UFOs over China are being attributed to Photoshop work.  It’s kind of a weird, sloppy article, though: no details are given about how Photoshop (or anything else) could or did produce the video included on the page, and in any event what’s shown is a UFO (that is, an unidentified flying object); it’s just not necessarily an object of extraterrestrial origin. [Via Pete Falco]
• Update: There must be something in the water (no pun intended), as now the controversial action is spreading to golf.

Speaking of InDesign and rich publishing, here’s an example of the sort of interactive content (here displayed through Flash) that can be generated in CS5. (Click the main image to display the document.)
Ten years ago Michael Ninness brought me to Adobe to work on LiveMotion, and he went on to product-manage InDesign CS5. I’ve kidded him that a decade later, he managed to transplant LiveMotion 1.0’s heart into ID. I’m kidding, but it is cool to see a number of the features and concepts that customers liked back then–e.g. preset animation styles, easy button creation/interactivity assignment–brought forward. Now, unlike then, the content can also integrate with the Flash authoring environment, meaning you can get a fast, code-free start without eventually hitting a wall.

The folks working on Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution have posted some additional details on what’s coming:

Late this summer, we’ll post these new publishing technologies on Adobe Labs… Publishers can add interactivity without writing code via InDesign and create monetizable digital magazines for the Apple iPad – with other platforms and devices expected in the future. […]
With layouts in hand, production teams package the assets using the new Digital Content Bundler utility that allows publishers to import vertical and horizontal InDesign CS5 layouts, add metadata, (article title & description, issue number, etc.) and export them into a new “.issue” format. […]
Previously we announced the Digital Content Viewer for Apple iPad; in the future we also expect to develop the Digital Content Viewer on Adobe AIR for desktops and other devices.

Check out the whole post for more info & additional links.

“Chest pumped elegantly elephantine
southern hemisphere by Calvin Klein…”
There really is a song called “Photoshop Handsome”:

See also a review & lyrics. Madness. [Via Claudio Calligaris]

The exact times I want to read magazines on a tablet are the exact times I can’t.

What are the odds we can get the publishing industry to throw some blows at the airline industry (or FAA), finally nixing the prohibition on using electronic devices during taxi, takeoff, and ascent/descent?  I’m typing this on a plane where I’ve got a couple of paper magazines* stashed, ready for landing–this despite also carrying an iPad.  I bought the mags for reading when my laptop is verboten.  Wasting paper sucks, but at least this way I can, y’know, actually read the content during my downtime.

For bonus points, SFO’s anachronistic for-pay WiFi needs to die screaming. Paying eight bucks to access the net to then pay for tablet mags was a non-starter.

*A retronym in the vein of “acoustic guitars.”

On August 5 at Adobe’s San Francisco office, Adobe evangelist Jason Levine will be showing the “Fundamentals of Working With DSLR Video;” please see the sign-up page and the notes below for more info.  If you can’t wait or can’t attend, you might want to check out “Getting Started with Premiere Pro CS5,” a recorded demo/Q&A session with filmmaker Dave Basulto.

For Jason’s session:

Learn the fundamentals of working with DSLR footage natively inside Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop. From basic import, creating sequences, adding effects and transitions, all the way through export. We’ll also cover questions regarding transcoding footage and using DSLR video with green screen.

Prior to Adobe, Jason was a full-time recording and mastering engineer, working in studios coast-to-coast, engineering hundreds of recordings from Classical to Country, Rock to Reggae. In 2008 alone, Jason presented to over 75,000 people from San Francisco to Singapore, Amsterdam to Auckland, and everywhere in between.

The San José Photoshop User Group will be meeting next Tuesday evening at Adobe HQ, featuring photographer Suzette Allen.  According to the RSVP page:

Suzette Allen is always focused on efficiency, but this time, she will be showing some of the fun things you can do with Photoshop (including painting with CS5!) and the design tools (like making brushes and templates) that take a wee bit of time but can turn into profits as you re-use them creatively in templates. Of course she will show you how to save time with the amazing new features of CS5 as well. Be prepared for a fun and creative evening that will get you inspired to pursue your own creative vision.

Pizza & drinks will be served at 6:30, and the presentation begins at 7.  For directions and other details, please check out the Evite.

Or rather, it isn’t just about Web pages.  Responding to my post about CSS as the new Photoshop, Neven Mrgan makes some good points about HTML & CSS as a general purpose graphical system:

That assumption is that Nack is talking about creating web pages. I don’t believe he is… This is not the web Zeldman is interested in. It’s no web at all, in fact. […]

Look at any of Apple’s stores on the iPad – App Store, iTunes Store, iBookstore. Heck, look at the iTunes Store on your computer: it’s all made with HTML and CSS. Why? Because in the year 2010, if you’re going to be describing layouts, it’s not a bad call to describe them using very well adopted, rapidly developing technologies. […]

There’s no pride or glory in tweaking number after number and reloading a page to make sure my drop shadow looks nice.

On this last point, I’m hopeful that if Photoshop made it possible to copy/export styled text and objects as HTML/CSS, developers would accept the generated code.  There are only so many ways to specify box dimensions & borders, right?

More broadly, people are clearly interested in doing demanding, print-quality typesetting using HTML, the better to create things like magazines for tablets.  I’m encouraged to see work that enables better text breaking, kerning pairs & ligatures, proportional leading, and more. Onward and upward.

One other thing: I’ve gotten to know Neven a bit after he (justifiably) needled Photoshop for its admitted hodgepodge of UI elements. I’ve never managed to finish my long and detailed response, but in it I talk about how using Web elements (e.g. embedded WebKit) makes it hard–if not impossible–to match everything with OS-native controls.  I go on to cite numerous examples of Apple’s Web content not matching Aqua, etc.  The point is, the more powerful & ubiquitous Web content becomes, the more we’ll deal with the challenges of making the complete desktop/online experience feel cohesive.

Having logged lots of childhood hours with these toys, I really dug Patrick Boivin’s AT-AT Day Afternoon when it made the rounds a couple of weeks ago:

Now he’s shared some background info in a CNET interview & has posted a behind-the-scenes video, briefly showing Photoshop video layers in action:

The secret must be in his flappy-fingered typing style:

[Via Mordy Golding & John Lin]

The After Effects team has long done “ship trips,” wherein they hang around a design shop, production facility, etc., watching over customers’ shoulders while generally trying to make themselves unobtrusive/useful (e.g. bringing bagels, etc.).  Seeing someone doing real work is different than just talking about what they might like or need.

A number of my colleagues are enjoying some well-deserved R&R this month, so things are a bit quiet at the ranch, and I’m kind of itching to re-connect with the real world of design and production.  If you’re a designer in the Bay Area who wouldn’t mind having some spiky-haired, slightly over-solicitous guy hang around your workspace a bit, please let me know so that we can try to sync schedules.

Heh–good fun with (actual) cut-n’-paste from the folks at Melt Media. (Let’s hear it for flying toasters!)

Photoshop gets its 15 seconds of fame around the 1:40 mark. (For a really deep trip in that vein, see Russell Brown’s Photoshop Space Odyssey.) [Via Marc Pawliger]

I’m glad to hear that people seem pretty happy with the Photoshop CS5 update, but there’s always room to improve. If and when you encounter bugs in Photoshop or other Adobe apps, however, please report them via the online bug form.
Also, in case you’re wondering whether anyone actually looks at crash reports that come in, the answer is emphatically yes. It’s really helpful if you take a second to jot down your email address. That way, if we need more info about what you’re experiencing, we can drop you a line. (I know, this should never be necessary, and I know it’s an extra inconvenience, but we’re grateful for any data you can provide to help make the apps better.)

The new version of Filter Forge, a visual (node-based) tool for creating your own filter effects, has been released for Mac and Windows.  According to the developers, new features include:

• Support for non-seamless filters
• Unrestricted transform components (Move, Scale, Rotate, etc.)
• Full support for HDR colors (they may even have negative RGB values)
• Instant filter search (searches your collection of downloaded filters)
• ‘Bomber’ component for spraying particles (very fast, very versatile)
• Lua scripting (Lua is a fast scripting language also used by Lightroom)
• Photorealistic lighting (shadows via Ambient Occlusion, point/area lights etc.)

Neat stuff.

• Good: Daniel Pink on motivation (with or without free sandwiches).
• Also good: The RSAnimate project, illustrating interesting ideas.
• Even better: The two combined:

One more (hopefully last) bit of current blog housekeeping: Some folks mentioned encountering broken links here following the move to WordPress, and I’ve been working with the blog admins to fix the problems.  If you spot any continued problems (broken links or otherwise), please let me know via comments or email (jnack at adobe).  Thanks.

Answer: Hopefully not.  We moved this blog over to a WordPress foundation yesterday, but there shouldn’t be any visible changes or disruptions, including to permalinks and RSS subscriptions.  If you hit any snags, please let me know.

One somewhat minor, hopefully temporary problem is that comments listed on the right side of the main page no longer include an excerpt.  I know that some of my teammates scan that list so that they can jump in with replies when needed, so we’ll try to fix the problem.

Thanks to the folks at blog consultancy Firmdot for making the move so painless.

• You didn’t want to want to walk through a 140-meter long PVC habitrail?  Uh, okay–then I guess this Spanish guy misunderstood.
• BMW created a shape-shifting car made of fabric? Really?  Cool, but man, if getting keyed wasn’t bad enough already…
• Dyson’s bladeless Air Multiplier fans look pretty amazing, though claiming that they end the horrors of regular-fan “buffeting” seems like a stretch (selling the need right in the box, as we sometimes say).

If you’ve got 10 minutes–or even one or two–I think you’ll enjoy this little talk by Philip Zimbardo, cleverly illustrated by Cognitive Media:

[Via]

It’s a little off topic from my usual blogging fare, but I love seeing how New York’s High Line park has evolved & will continue to develop:

I haven’t been back to NYC since the park opened (thanks, kids!), so maybe I can live vicariously through Tom & Bryan. (*cough* You know they’re doing a photo walk nearby on Saturday, right? *cough*)
Here’s some context for the video. [Via]

Lordy, lordy: roughly five years after its launch, this blog has racked up some 20,000 reader comments:

That’s just as I’d have it, and it says more about the Photoshop/Adobe community than it does about me. I’ve always wanted the blog to be about others’ voices as much as mine (okay, almost as much!), and reader feedback has proven invaluable. Whether it’s opining on new product ideas, puking on the app icons, exchanging product tips, or even trying to steal Photoshop, I’m always eager to hear what people are thinking & trying to achieve.
Thanks so much for your generous feedback, and here’s to the next 20,000 (!),
J.

PS–I believe the honor of being #20k goes to my pal Adolfo Rozenfeld, who was in fact remarking on approaching 20k–appropriately meta & self-referential.

I’m delighted to hear that Adobe is bringing Audition to the Mac. As video evangelist Jason Levine explains in the videos below, this professional audio software packs a big, fast wallop. If nothing else, go to around the 3:20 mark in the first vid below to see how you can use Photoshop-style painting and Spot Healing brushes to edit audio (!):

The public beta should be available later this year, and you can sign up to be notified when it’s ready to download.

“There’s a guy riding his horse, he makes a big tree house, has dinner with a bunch of ghosts and then everything gets cut down by some scissor birds. Very random, very beautiful.” That seems about right.

Check out the behind-the-scenes video for a taste of the crazy amount of work that went into the production.

If you’ve ever wanted to step right into a Daft Punk video, you may be in luck:

[Via]

Next Friday (June 25th) from 4:30-7:30 pm, Scott Kelby & crew will be joining Adobe folks for a free Photoshop CS5 Summit:

You’ll see exactly how Scott, Matt, Dave, RC, and Corey (NAPP’s own Photoshop team) plug the amazing new features of CS5 right into their daily Photoshop workflow. Plus, you’ll be able to meet one-on-one with Adobe’s own Photoshop and Lightroom product managers (Bryan Hughes, and Tom Hogarty) and get your questions answered direct from the source.

We’ll have drawings for some very cool giveaways, including versions of Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, tickets to the Photoshop World Conference, and much more. You’ll have a blast, you’ll learn a lot, and best of all – it’s all free! But it doesn’t happen if you’re not there!

Check out the event page for sign-up & location details.

The 64-bit-native CS5 video apps are faster than ever. I just saw this blurb in email:

• On average, 130 different benchmark tests are more than twice as fast in Premiere Pro CS5 than in CS4.
• Working with XDCAM footage in CS5 with a CUDA-accelerated card is more than six times faster than CS4. In software-only mode, it’s still about 33% faster.
• Compared to CS4, working with R3D footage takes about two thirds of the time in software-only mode–and about half the time with a CUDA card.
• Simple rotoscoping tasks take one tenth the time they required in CS4, and the time savings for complex, real-world projects are likely to be even more significant.

I’ll try to point to more details when I see them posted publicly.

The folks at Fotocare in NYC will be hosting CS5 and Lightroom 3 sessions in a couple of weeks:

Join us in welcoming Adobe specialists, Bryan O’Neil Hughes and Tom Hogarty as they present Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3. In these workshops you will learn the new features in Photoshop and Lightroom. See how to use the new tools to enhance your workflow, making it easier and faster.

June 28th:
Photoshop CS5 : 10:00AM – 12:00PM
Lightroom 3 : 2:00PM – 4:00PM

June 29th
Lightroom 3 : 10:00AM – 12:00PM
Photoshop CS5 : 2:00PM – 4:00PM

RSVP Required
Email: seminars@fotocare.com
Phone: 212-741-2990

Meanwhile on July 13 the Creative Suite User Group of San José will be hosting their first all-video meeting, and the last of their three CS5 launch events. Event organizer Sally Cox writes,

Join us for product demos, raffles, baked goods and other surprises, it’s all free! Meet us at Adobe San Jose or join us online via Adobe Connect Pro. Sign up here.

I’m headed to the HOW Conference in Denver on Sunday. If you’ll be at the show and want to say hello, talk about Photoshop, tablet apps, etc., please drop me a line (jnack at adobe). I’ll be floating around the Adobe booth Sunday evening and midday Monday-Tuesday. I’m told that the uniform consists of black t-shirt plus “stylish jeans” and sneakers. How bold would it be to rock a pair of mom jeans and, I dunno, some British Knights?

Ah, but does it use PostScript??

(Name CAPITALIZED to avoid abuse from brand pedants.) [Via]

Camera Raw 6.1 is now available for Photoshop CS5 & Bridge CS5. The release adds lens correction (see previous demo), improves performance, & fixes a crashing bug on OS X. The release includes camera support for the following models:

• Canon EOS 550D (Digital Rebel T2i/ EOS Kiss X4 Digital)
• Kodak Z981
• Leaf Aptus-II 8
• Leaf Aptus-II 10R
• Mamiya DM40
• Olympus E-PL1
• Olympus E-600
• Panasonic G2
• Panasonic G10
• Sony A450

For release notes please see the Lightroom Journal.

Thanks for all the feedback about my HTML layers idea. In the comments I think I can see the exact moment when someone on a Fireworks forum/list linked to the post and suggested that everyone pile on in hopes of getting the feature into FW instead of PS. For what it’s worth, I’ve been asking the FW team for four years to implement some version of this idea. They’ve liked the concept, but for whatever reason the work hasn’t happened.
A request: If you voted in the survey & rated the idea lower in hopes of getting the feature into Fireworks, please revise your vote and assess just the merits of the idea in general. Thanks.

Somewhere, a dude you kept at arm’s length in high school is preparing to “take a little off the top” of all of us:

Here’s a bit more info. [Via Mark Coleran]

This Thursday (May 27) the Washington DC chapter of ASMP is hosting a talk from Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost. According to the Web site, the event will feature a giveaway of one copy of Photoshop CS5, plus Julieanne demonstrating the following improvements:

• New selection technologies and tools
• Content-Aware Fill
• New tools for HDR imaging with HDR Pro
• Automated correction of lens distortion in Adobe Camera Raw 6
• Improved raw conversions, noise removal, additive grain in Adobe Camera Raw 6
• Puppet Warp – Transform on steroids
• New brush engine for a natural media look with Mixer Brush and Bristle tips
• Integrated Lab B&W action for an easy and interactive way to convert color images
• Accelerated workflow with GPU-enabled cropping and new, integrated Adobe® Mini Bridge panel
• Improved integration with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom® and much more

PS–So take that, folks who complain that I never blog about East Coast Photoshop events. 😉

Bizarre:

Check out the inventor’s site for more info, including building instructions. [Via]

Round 2 in “a little less conversation, a little more action:”
Today during the keynote at Google’s I/O conference, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch demoed Illustrator and Dreamweaver working together to create interactive Web graphics:

I should hasten to note that although Illustrator has supported creation of interactive, open-standard SVG for 10 years, the exact capability shown here isn’t part of Illustrator CS5. HTML5 is a work in progress, and not everything could make it into the current release, but work continues and we’ll keep sharing details as they become available.
See also from last fall: Sneak peek: Illustrator + Flash + Dreamweaver -> CANVAS

User group organizer Sally Cox writes,

The Adobe Creative Suite User Group of San Jose is holding their first of three CS5 launch party meetings on Tuesday, May 4 at Adobe San Jose. This meeting will focus on Design Premium CS5, and will be broadcast online via Adobe Connect Pro. They will cover all the Design Premium apps, raffle off great prizes and their guest speaker is Chris MacAskill from new sponsor SmugMug.
June 1 is Web Premium, July 13 is Production Premium. Check out the site for more info about these and other exciting events, including an online-only InDesign workshop and a San Jose Photowalk. The best part? All their events are free!

Hats off to the guys at Panic on releasing the great new Transmit 4! Transmit has been my workhorse FTP app for years, and I’ve been beta testing the new release for several months. (I find it refreshing to help debug someone else’s app for a change!) I think you’ll love the big & small improvements, including the ability to mount servers as disks (enabling things like editing files directly using Photoshop).
As it happens, earlier this year our UI designer Matthew Bice and I went to Portland to spend a day with Cabel, Neven, and their team. (As you’d imagine, Photoshop and Illustrator get a workout in their design and production work.) As John Gruber notes, “their office is like a movie set of a cool software office.” Maybe now that Transmit 4 has been released, they’ll have time to show some of the recent awesomeness they’ve added. Just two quick tastes: They’ve got a Lego version of the famous Panic truck, and they’ve created custom pixel-art bathroom signage. Too bad I can’t find my picture of the burger-with-glazed-donut-as-bun+milkshake lunch with which they tried to explode my heart.
Anyway, congrats on the great release, guys!

Dave Girard from Ars Technica points out BrushViewQL, a Mac OS Quick Look plug-in that displays the contents of Photoshop brush files. Nice.