This tour (hitting 31 cities around the US this summer) sounds pretty cool:

[The tour] delivers an intense educational overview of the artistic elements and core principles of cinematography. Taught by Oscar nominee and Director of Photography of the Saturday Night Live Film Unit, Alex Buono, this all-day class features training that will dramatically increase the impact of your films. 

I was talking about attending with a couple of teammates, only to discover later that Adobe’s a sponsor. Maybe I’ll see you there!

Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes writes, “This presentation of Hidden Gems was popular enough to get a second session added and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I don’t touch CC (as that’s all still a “hidden gem”), and instead focus mainly on CS6 (though I also show some cool stuff in CS5 and CS4… and people really seemed to appreciate that).”

“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]

[Via John Dowdell]

How cool: 

The next version of Adobe video tools has been developed with features created in direct response to the needs of filmmakers, broadcasters and video professionals. In fact, the multiple Academy Award winning Coen brothers have been working directly with the Adobe Premiere Pro product team and are switching to Adobe Premiere Pro for their next feature film slated for late 2013.

I remember Apple demos at NAB featuring these guys. How times change. [Via]

10am Pacific time with evangelist Paul Trani:

Creative Cloud is so much more than just the apps available. It’s about removing the clutter from work and focusing on producing great projects. It’s about sharing and collaborating. It’s about syncing more than just a file, and more than just with yourself. In this session, Paul Trani will take you through this new way of working and new ways of thinking about Creative Cloud.

I’m delighted to say that accomplished young storyteller Bianca Giaever has just joined my team at Adobe.

Bianca recently graduated Middlebury College, where she created her own program as an Independent Scholar in Narrative Studies. Her short film “The Scared is scared” (below) recently crossed the million-view threshhold on Vimeo, and in 2011 she conducted interviews with veterans across the country by bicycle for the War In Voice Project through a grant from Davis Projects For Peace. She’s been all over public radio, featured at TED, working at the New York Review of Books, and generally making me feel like an underachieving slacker.

Now, why exactly would Adobe want a storyteller on staff? I can’t explain in full yet, but it’ll make sense soon enough. (In the meantime, if that piques your interest, shoot me a note: tinyElvis at adobe.)

For now I’ll just say welcome, Bianca!

Master digital painter Bert Monroy will be speaking at the San José Photoshop User Group Tuesday evening at 7pm:

Bert Monroy is an accomplished teacher and lecturer, having served on the faculty of a list of institutions that includes The School of Visual Arts (New York), Center for Creative Imaging (Maine), California College of the Arts, the Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging (California) and currently teaches at San Francisco State University. He also consults with and trains corporate clients, including Pixar and Disney Animation. His film credits include work for Industrial Light & Magic, Pacific Data Images, and R/Greenberg Associates.

Bert is a member of the Photoshop World Dream Team. In 2004, he was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame.

Bert Monroy returns to show us some of his recent work, sharing techniques he has developed in the creation of his photo-realistic paintings.

Check out the event page for full details.

Check it out here. Today’s going to be a very news-rich day.

Color-correcting a single image can be a challenge. Correcting a video clip, even more so. Correcting a whole series of shots & making them look good together—well, that takes some skill, plus some tech like the forthcoming release of Adobe SpeedGrade:

Starting at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific:

In this special live episode you can go right to the source and ask Tom Hogarty from Adobe your questions about their story for photographers and their photography roadmap. Also, Tom will sneak peek some future products and give us a look into the roadmap for photographers.

You can tweet questions to Tom via #thegridlive.

Of LayerMiner Tom Krcha writes:

In the designer/developer workflow it often happens that you want to export the Layer Style out of a Photoshop layer for custom processing in app UI development – native, web, gaming… I wrote a tiny script that exports data like Drop Shadow, Gradient Fill, Stroke, etc to a JSON file next to your PSD file.

As I type this, Lightroom PM Tom Hogarty is en route to Florida, preparing to talk live with Scott Kelby on The Grid tomorrow at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific. Scott writes,

Feeling like photographers have been left out of this whole “cloud” discussion from Adobe?

In this special live episode you can go right to the source and ask Tom Hogarty from Adobe your questions about their story for photographers and their photography roadmap. Also, Tom will sneak peek some future products and give us a look into the roadmap for photographers.

I think you’ll like what you see.

A treat for robots’ eyes:

They had me at “Marshmallow Laser Feast”:

I would sure like to unleash some Micronaxx on this bad boy. [Via]

Full-body, mixed-media free-for-all: That’s how I’d describe the Russell Brown at MAX sessions I’ve had the pleasure to experience over the years. This year’s in LA should be no different:

Seven reasons to sign up for RussellBrown@MAX

1. Classic Movie Monsters
2. Amazing Photoshop Instructors like Julieanne Kost and Joel Grimes
3. Meet the Wolfman and Frankenstein’s Monster in person!
4. Print directly on to a t-shirt with a Brother Garment Printer!
5. Print 60X40 inch Epson GIANT movie posters
6. Learn cool things about Photoshop that you have NEVER been shown before!
7. Photograph with a RED Epic camera!

What are you waiting for?! Sign up here.

Hmm—interesting concept (reversing what we normally see, i.e. PSD to HTML):

The app costs $28.99 on the Mac App Store. [Via Stephen Nielson]

Bob Zelin writing for Creative Cow:

Adobe Anywhere was the most important product at NAB 2013 – more amazing than the Blackmagic 4K camera, or anyone else’s product. The reality that “one day soon” (and “one day” right now for CNN) that you can be in Iraq with a WiFi Connection and can access your company server’s 4K media and edit it over WiFi, and don’t need any other equipment – well that just makes me sick.

Anyone that can afford it will buy Adobe Anywhere, and anyone that has Adobe Anywhere will never use any other editing software other than what Adobe provides. […] As this product becomes more accessible to the regular production and post production companies, the only products that will survive will be the ones that tie in with Adobe Anywhere.

“If people say it’s impossible we have to prove them wrong.”

Design students Anna and Terese took on a giant challenge as an exam project. Something no one had done before. If they could swing it, it would for sure be revolutionary. The bicycle is a tool to change the world. If we use bikes AND travel safe: Life will be better for all.

[Via Maria Brenny]

Last month the design team of Jessica Walsh and Stefan Sagmeister locked themselves away for 24 hours to create a new logo for Adobe MAX. Here’s a time lapse of what happened:

From your lips to the Adobe brass’s ears. (And yes, there’s a sort of cheesy “push” aspect to the early set of questions, but there are legitimate questions and a free-text entry field at the end.) Thanks for your help!
[Update: I’m sorry that I didn’t read through the whole survey before posting it, and sorry that it comes off as self-promotion masquerading as a real invitation to dialog. I believe that the creators’ intentions were good, and that people really will listen to the answers you supply.]

Wow—talk about rapid iteration & being close to customers. In this short piece, Nordstrom’s Innovation Lab team shows how they conducted the 1-week experiment of building an iPad app that helped customers (and sales reps) pick the best sunglasses for them. The team set up workstations inside the Seattle flagship store so that they could tweak designs and code immediately based on customer feedback.

[Via Molly Ruf]

High praise from Filmmaker IQ:

This. Changes. Everything. […]

While every product being marketed out there was about making the image better and more beautiful, or the workflow easier and more automated, Adobe Anywhere was the only thing I saw that enables better collaboration and communication on a fundamental and crucial part of the filmmaking process. Although I’ve been a die-hard Adobe fan since I started editing, I’m trying to say this as best I can without bias – this idea of collaborative editing is one who’s time has come. Even though the current Adobe Anywhere may require be a little too much for small shops to implement right now, I have no doubt Adobe or whoever will find a way to bring this idea to everybody.

It’s only a matter of time for this paradigm shift.

[Via Todd Kopriva]

A little bizarre fun from Russell Brown:

[Via Ammar Al Midani]

If you’re not an administrator responsible for deploying Adobe apps, you can skip this one. If you are an admin, however, you may well be excited. According to PM Karl Gibson, “This new tool lets admins download all Creative Cloud products & updates; define custom installation behavior; and at the end have a native MSI or PKG that you use with your deployment tool.” See Karl’s post and product docs for more details, and check out the demo below:

I’m so proud that my wife Margot gets to help deliver the next generation of collaborative awesomeness. Adobe Anywhere helps editors, VFX artists, and other video pros simultaneously access, stream, and work with remotely stored media. As the product site says, “There’s no need for heavy file transfers, duplicate media, or proxy files.”
Here’s how it works, in under 3 minutes:

And check out how CNN & others are putting Anywhere into action:

It’s fun for me to see some of these customers at last. Many are based in Europe, so I’ll often wake up to the sound of Margot dialing into early morning conference calls. One day Finn, age 4, asked me, “Dad-O, is Mom-O talking to Germans?” Yes, I told him. “No!” he said, “Nein nein nein nein!” 🙂

Hmm—I’d never heard this metaphor when discussing the quantity vs. quality of pixels on a sensor, but I like it. Here’s HTC’s Symon Whitehorn talking about their move from 8 to 4 megapixels:

This debunks the so-called “megapixel myth,” which says that more megapixels equals a better image. “The old analogy that the industry uses is called pixel rain, so you can imagine photons coming down as rain—with photon rain being collected in buckets with the buckets being the pixel,” says Whitehorn. “Now you could put a lot of little cups out and try to collect the same amount of rain and you wind up getting noise between the cups as opposed to it all falling into one big bucket.”

Of course, now I kind of want to see some cheeky artist take this idea to its absurd extreme, producing a sensor that’s just 1 pixel in resolution—but oh man is that pixel’s quality ever high.

The special introductory price of $19.99 is good until tomorrow, April 7. Grab it here.

Frivolous, silly? Possibly. Cool, impressive? You bet.

Here’s how they did it. [Via John Dowdell]

From CNET:

Martin Cooper changed the world when he made the first cell phone call 40 years ago.

The former Motorola vice president and division manager made the call on the company’s DynaTAC phone while standing in front of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue. His first call: to the head of research at Bell Labs, a company that also was attempting to build the first cell phone.

Check out the rest of the article for a fun (albeit sadly Gekko-less) infographic.

Julieanne Kost shares her advice.

Completely legal! April Fool’s? Not so much.

• The good news: It runs great in just 2MB of memory on an 8MHz machine.
• The bad news: The version is 23 years old & requires use of a compiler.

According to CNET,

The Computer History Museum has made the source code for Photoshop 1.0.1 into an exhibit that lets the public, or at least programmers, appreciate the inner workings of the historic software.

The museum also published the Photoshop 1.0 user guide and tutorial documentation.

Enjoy!

Okay, let me be honest: I generally hate the veneration of tech successes, particularly very newly minted ones (i.e. maybe you got lucky, and now I’m told to sit enraptured at your knee). Dang, though, if I didn’t find this talk from Twitter creator Jack Dorsey interesting. Key points:

1) Draw: get your idea out of your head and share it, 2) Luck: assess when the time (and the market) is right to execute your idea, 3) Iterate: take in the feedback, be a rigorous editor, and refine your idea.

“Get it out of your head” has sure been true in my experience. Sketch ideas out yourself, and if need be pay someone to design/animate them. Aids to audience imagination make all the difference between blank stares & “let’s do this.”

[Via]

British artist Peter Root is the god of office supplies, arranging 100,000 staples over 40 hours to create “Ephemicropolis.” He writes,

A shining monochrome mega-construction defies immediate identification of scale. Vulnerable, not to a rampaging Godzilla, but to the looming threats of a micro-apocalyptic light breeze or a ballistic projectile fired from the shoe of an unwitting passer-by.

[Via]

Check out the first fruits of Adobe’s acquisition of social network Behance: You can now build a beautiful home for your photography, design work, and résumé—all for free (instead of the usual $100/yr.), and without writing any code, as a full Creative Cloud member.

Check out this quick demo of Behance ProSite, and take a look at some lovely example sites.

To get started:

1. Log in and go to the Apps page on creative.adobe.com
2. Find the ProSite icon under “Other Services” and click on the “Get Started” link
3. You’ll be brought to the ProSite welcome page on Behance, where you can either log in or sign up for Behance to build your portfolio and launch your ProSite when you’re ready.

The Behance team hints at more good stuff to come:

We will start integrating some of Behance’s best community features into Adobe tools. Want feedback? Adding new work to your portfolio? We want to make this more efficient and more integrated into your everyday workflow. Stay tuned for updates in May!

We have grand plans for ProSite – and other “Pro” features – that will make Behance a more powerful utility for creative careers. We’ve got a long list of enhancements and features that will bring online portfolios to a whole new level.

Stay tuned, and meanwhile enjoy ProSite.

“If you don’t showcase your work because ‘it’s not good enough,’ don’t expect it to get any better.” Sounds about right to me. With that in mind, check out the Behance Portfolio Review Week, May 13-20:

Attend or organize an in-person Portfolio Review with the creative community.

Behance Portfolio Reviews bring members together at events in cities and towns around the world – organized by members, for members. Attend a Portfolio Review to present and get feedback on your work, hear from experienced professionals, and meet your local creative community.

Check out the site for full details (what goes on, how to find or start one, etc.). Last year nearly 4,000 people participated in 46 countries (80% of participants being outside the US). (Here’s an infographic.)

Jessica Walsh and Stefan Sagmeister* are going to lock themselves into a photo studio starting this Thursday, March 28 at 6AM Pacific time in order to reinterpret the Adobe MAX logo. The session will be live streamed on the Create Now Facebook app and on a billboard in Times Square in NYC. Details are here.

*presumably clothed this time; sorry, weirdoes!

In less than 12 months:

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that Adobe® Creative Cloud™ has exceeded 500,000 paid individual members. The company also reported that free and trial memberships have exceeded 2 million. Free subscriptions are a proven on-ramp for customers to move to a paid Creative Cloud membership.

I know this subject arouses a lot of strong feelings. I can’t always provide satisfying answers, but please know that people are listening. It’s totally valid to raise questions & concerns. I just want to note that a huge number of people have already migrated to Creative Cloud subscriptions and are, by all accounts, digging it (even if they’re not necessarily motivated to comment here).

I’m delighted that Bryan Lamkin, the PM of Photoshop back in its early days & later a key executive at Adobe, has returned to the company.

In a wide-ranging blog post he offers his take on the merits of Creative Cloud:

As a former product manager, I remember the team’s frustration when they were forced to hold back features to fit our 18-month Creative Suite product cycle. It was very difficult to deliver new innovations “off-cycle” due to our delivery and accounting model. (Every desktop software company struggles with this same challenge.) Nothing is more satisfying to one of our talented engineers than getting a new product feature into the hands of customers quickly, and now we can.
Creative Cloud… will be the hub for creativity worldwide and enable you to work when and where you want. It will be where creative communities gather to be inspired by each other’s work and collaborate on projects.

Right on. Glad to have you back, Bryan.

I’m pleased to see that Adobe is designating more than $1 million to the Adobe Foundation’s Creativity Scholarships for youth.

The Creativity Scholarships program was developed to support the next generation of creative thinkers and equip them with resources to apply creative confidence to advance their education in creative fields.

The scholarships provide financial support to high school seniors and students in their first year of post-secondary education who have participated in the Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) program and will be attending or continuing an accredited post-secondary degree or certificate program.

To apply, submit your application AdobeScholarship.com by March 31, 2013. Full details can be found here.

Glad you asked!

Join Creative Cloud Evangelist, Paul Trani and Director of Evangelism for Creative Cloud, Greg Wilson on Thursday, March 21, 2013 at 8AM Pacific for a Google Hangout to get the inside scoop on Creative Cloud for teams – our solution that makes working together — and managing licenses — easier than ever.

Be sure to submit your questions for the evangelists using #CreateNow.

For more information on Creative Cloud for teams, visit our official website.

From Julieanne Kost’s blog:

Adobe is looking for art student interns with expertise in any of Adobe’s Creative Suite products. These interns will interact with our user communities by answering questions and providing learning content to our customers. They will use Adobe’s products to create video tutorials, artwork, animations, and samples. Ideal candidates will have strong writing and communication skills as well as experience with social media, forums, or blogging.

Apply for the Digital Media Intern position at Jobs at Adobe and search for job number 20458.

The Royal Irish Academy has used Adobe DPS* to create “a gift from the people of Ireland to the people of the world for St. Patrick’s Day to mark Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union: ‘A History of Ireland in 100 Objects'” (available for iPad/iPhone, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets):

“Fintan O’Toole, a journalist from The Irish Times, launched the project in 2011 with a series of newspaper columns highlighting 100 objects from Ireland, the UK and Norway that connect with Ireland’s rich past,” writes Joe Zeff, whose design firm produced the app.  “Those columns became a hardcover book, and that book became the series of apps that we designed and developed for multiple platforms using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.”

Elsewhere, the NY Times tells the story of the Jackie Clarke Collection, “an astounding treasure of more than 100,000 items that provide an intimate retelling of Ireland’s long struggle to free itself of English rule.” The collection was amassed by a fish merchant from County Mayo (home of my family). Check out the photos, audio & video.

* Did you know that if you subscribe to Creative Cloud, you can create an unlimited number of DPS titles for free? Just sayin’.

I still have scars from making HTML “presents pages” at the very last minute for client reviews. Now some new tools promise to make things much easier.

Web service Flatsies bills itself as “a tool for designers to share their concepts with clients in a simple and elegant way.”

Elsewhere, Filefolio promises to help you “Share images, fonts, color swatches, documents and login codes. All on one gorgeous looking page.” It hasn’t yet launched, but you can sign up to be notified.

[Via Khoi Vinh]

This blog used to be better. Instead of posting just a bunch of semi-random content finds, I used to talk more about ideas that matter. Since incurring the vocational brain damage that is fatherhood, however, I’ve struggled to find time to compose meatier thoughts. I want to try to change that.

Silicon Valley loves to talk about the importance of celebrating failure. It’s mostly crap (when’s the last time you saw the Pets.com CEO speak? or WebVan, or Excite@home, or…), but there can be real value in reviewing what’s worked & what hasn’t. I plan to share some constructive reflections over the next days & weeks. Stay tuned.

I think you’ll enjoy “the tale of a crochet quadropus, who journeys throughout the land turning things blue… All stop motion animation, painstakingly made by Oh Yeah Wow.”

You can check out some behind-the-scenes photos on Flickr. [Via]

Check out Dustin McLean’s painstaking handiwork:

According to PetaPixel:

McLean used an entry-level Canon DSLR and an iPhone to capture the 67 shots in the trailer (some of which only appear on screen for half a second).

Here’s the original alongside the remake:

Here is an admirably simple (and free) way host static Web sites via simple Dropbox folders:

I found it incredibly simple to set up, though for my team there’s a significant limitation: we can’t share the Dropbox folder used to host the content. That’s not the end of the world, and it might actually be wise to have a single person be responsible for pushing all changes live. In any case it’s neat stuff. [Via Brian Nemhauser]

• Holy crap: Şakir Gökçebağ turns toilet paper into elegant sculptures (really!).
• Lucas Simões creates rich, intricately layered paper cut portraits.
• Philippe Pétremant “collages together paper money from all around the world to form the faces of different political figures, including Che Guevara.”

In this brief but interesting video, 42-year-old Canadian industrial designer Karim Antoine Habib pays homage to design history & talks about what inspires him.

Details:

• I love that he drives a vintage 2002, though in his shoes I’d try for a 3.0 CS.
• For a guy who cares so much about detail (and who hangs out in a room full of people sporting poncey scarves), it’s interesting that he uses such a humble (even crappy) pen. It’s nice to be reminded that tools are just tools.

[Via]

Via Sally Cox:

Join us at the San Jose Tech Museum and Adobe San Jose for CreateNOW, an Adobe Camp full of hands-on and lecture-style sessions. This event is geared toward photography, video, graphic design. Featured speakers are Colin Smith, Jeff Foster, Chana Messer, and Sally Cox. Our keynote speaker is the amazing Rufus Deuschler, worldwide Adobe evangelist.

Two tracks held simultaneously at the two locations, and you can pick/choose which tracks you wish to attend. All-day event includes breakfast and catered lunch for $35.

Adobe is raffling off Creative Cloud licenses and we will have other surprise raffles, as well. First 120 guests to arrive get an Adobe goodie bag, as well.

Learn more and register here.