“A tip of the hat to America’s hat.” 🙂

[Via]

He writes,

“Your photos look better processed in Lightroom 4. Period… The improvements in Lightroom’s Development module are so significant, and so much better than what we’ve ever had before, that I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find most anyone still using Lightroom 3 in just a few months from now.”

As Bryan demos & notes in the Photoshop sneak below, the same engine is coming to PS, and you can try it out in LR4 right now.

“Text says ‘We want cheaper Photoshop! Down with Comic Sans!,'” reports the excellently named Marius-Remus Mate.

Jon Stewart one mentioned that American troops were teaching Afghan kids to play baseball. Whole families were really getting into the spirit of the game, he said, showing a dad in the stands holding a sign reading “ESPN: Execute Some Pashtuns Now!” Ah Photoshop, you do get around.

Margot once sent me a stop-motion valentine involving Lego Chewbacca, so these kids are right up my alley:

In brief, stand-out things I saw in my first few hours: A bus with the Virgin Mary on the side and a Confederate flag in the back window; a truck whooshing up on me and displaying a crowd of peeing cows with Stars of David branded on their rumps; another bus whose windshield featured a three-eyed graffiti smiley face above a bunch of unpatched bullet holes; and hopped-up paramilitary pickups laden with soliders and emblazoned with the word “Quiche” (gourmet troopers?).
I snagged photos (of very uneven quality) of some of this and hope to share them soon. I’m finding, though, that photo-editing workflows on iPad remain about as graceful as a toddler–full of both promise & constant painful wipeouts.

Well, the day has come, and I’m off to Guatemala. Thanks for all the kind wishes of support & great camera advice! (I ended up grabbing a Nikon 1 from the Photoshop QE folks, but clearly the market is full of excellent choices.)
I promise I’ll try hard to unplug and fully engage with the experience. I’m really trying to tell myself I can get by with just an iPad, though until I’m in the air my hand will keep flying up, Strangelove-style, to grab my Mac.
Regarding the blog, I’ve queued up daily content to carry through to the end of January. After that, it’s likely to be radio silence for a few days at least (well, unless I have some downtime and write up a–DOWN, hand!!).
Catch you on the flipside,
J.
PS–Sorry if your comments get caught in the moderation queue for excessively long periods. I’ll try to check it when I can.

I am a lucky, lucky man.

I’m blessed with a wonderful wife, amazing kids, and a great job. For the last 12 years I’ve somehow gotten paid to spend time with terrifically bright people (customers & colleagues), helping to build the tools I love.

I’m ashamed, though, that I don’t appreciate these things the way I should. Too often over the last few years, I’ve been fried or worse. How can I change that?

Adobe wisely encourages employees to take a sabbatical* every five years. I’ve decided to take a belated one starting today, and on Friday I’m heading to Guatemala to do a couple weeks of service work** through Cross-Cultural Solutions.  I have no delusions about saving the world myself, much less in two weeks.  If I can improve my perspective, though, making myself more grateful and perceptive, I’ll count this time as a great success.

I’m still figuring out just how active I’ll keep the blog in my absence.  I have this crazy fear of/aversion to the prospect of letting people down, of wasting your time by failing to keep content flowing. (I mean, what sane, balanced person would stoke this damn fire every day? ;-)) Maybe that’s part of the perspective I need to gain: the world won’t end without me or my blog. Still, though, I have a big backlog I can queue up…

I’ll ping you with a few travel photography ideas and questions over the next few days–then hit the trail.

Incidentally, I happened upon this quotation today (via Wordsmith) and found it appropriate:

I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. -Frederick Douglass, Former slave, abolitionist, editor, and orator (1817-1895)

*Sabbatical length depends on length of service; the longer you’ve worked here, the longer the time off. My current “10 year” one runs for five weeks.

**These things aren’t cheap, and I thought about soliciting donations to support my trip. Truth is, though, many people and causes need help much more urgently. If the spirit moves you, please consider supporting CCS so that another person can volunteer, or support another worthwhile NGO (Doctors Without Borders being my favorite). Thanks!

Vintage fun, worth another look:

[Via Veronique Brossier]

Very cool, although:
A) I was just thinking “My windows are plenty fragile, but their carbon footprint is too low.”
B) What’s with the prominent “Don’t Touch” sign below this touch screen?
[Via Tobias Hoellrich]

Russell Brown & artist Bonny Pierce Lhotka are presenting a couple of free half-day workshops next weekend (Jan. 21-22nd) in Los Angeles. [Update: I’m told that the classes are now sold out.]

Russell will lead the class in an introduction to using mobile software Apps with lots of opportunity for creative expression!  Props, costumes, tin-type backgrounds, printed backgrounds and a professional lighting kit by Westcott will be made available to help students take fantastic mobile photos. […]

Bonny will teach the “cooking” of aluminum plates to create antiques surfaces that look decades old.  After distressing, washing and cooking the plates, participates will compose and alter both the plate and the image that has been printed on a transfer film.

Fauxtanical hydro-jargon microbead extraction for the win!!

Behind the scenes:

[Via Jim Geduldick & Serge Jespers]

Free, too:

More info is on the Evernote team blog.

Seems like a nice way to ring out the year: The crew at Bright Bricks (“The UK’s only LEGO Certified Professional”–who knew there were such things?) has put together the world’s largest Lego Christmas tree. Check out a nice set of photos, or just the little vid below:

Kind of puts the “creep” back into “crepuscular.”

Check out more photos and details.

“Isaac Newton just pooped his pants.” Oh my. (Or, as Core77 puts it, “Electromagnets Now Powerful Enough to Repel Good Taste.”) So, now this happens:

I’ll be sure to try one with my un-backed-up hard drive.

“Hello, my name is John, and I practice unprotected computing…” (“Hello, John.”)

Until I upgraded my Mac to Lion, I was a rigorous user of Time Machine: I’d plug in a Drobo at work, and I’d connect to a Time Capsule at home. It paid off when my hard drive died & my bacon was saved.

Ever since moving to Lion, though, I’ve been unable to back up. Connecting to either backup produces a “Preparing to back up” cycle that can last for hours or even days. It’s unusable to the point that I think I should just wipe the backups and start fresh.

Here’s where more problems ensue, however:

• Deleting the backup from the Drobo was incredibly slow, to the point that I reformatted the drives and thus somehow rendered them inoperable (!). I need to carve out time to work with Drobo tech support, but I haven’t been able yet.
• I can’t wipe my Time Capsule (which contains other data), and due to space constraints, I can’t start a new Time Machine backup without trashing the first. I fear the process taking more hours or days.
• Okay, fine–for now I’ll just buy a new, fresh, cheap hard drive. Without doing research (!), I grabbed a big Seagate 2TB USB 3.0 drive. “No prob,” I figured, “this thing should be USB 2.0-compatible and more future-proof.” Now, however…
• After reformatting the drive, Time Machine backups continuously fail. Things seems to go great for tens or even hundreds of GB of data–then simply stall out forever. This has happened several times, always at different points, even across reformatting.
• Okay, fine–forget Time Machine, let’s do Carbon Copy Cloner. Unfortunately, even after reformatting (again) per CCC’s instructions, the backup failed ~66GB in. Given the TM failures, I’m not inclined to try again.

So, here’s what I’m wondering:

• Is there something wrong with the data on my Mac–something that would cause old backups to stall & new ones to fail?  And if so, is there a diagnostic I can run to find & hopefully fix the problem?
• Is there something screwy with Mac OS support for USB 3.0 devices?
• Is there something screwy with this particular drive?

My Google-fu has failed to provide a solution, so thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.

Wherever you are, and whatever holidays you may celebrate this time of year, I wish you great peace and happiness. Thanks for reading & for making it possible for me to do this fascinating, occasionally frustrating, often greatly rewarding job.

All the best to you and yours, now and in 2012,
J. (+M & the Micronaxx)

At Christmas (or almost), here’s something awfully sweet:

Of the shoot the groom’s co-conspirators write,

We went to venue a day before to scout the place, discuss how to hide those cameras and look at how to be invisible.

On that day, we were all dressed in black. Talked using walkies. Used wine bottles, glasses, cutleries, vases and flowers as cover. We sat around the restaurant as guests but with our cameras on. And yes, we achieved total invisibility. Audrey walked into the restaurant, sat with her friends and never noticed us.

Not until the prime time when Tim revealed himself with meme place cards that was part of his proposal. That was when all the cameras (all 4 in total) started rolling.

The bride shares an after-action play-by-play on her blog.

As Towelie might say, “I have no idea what’s goin’ on right now…” I kinda like it, though.

Read more about these guys here. [Via Bill Roberts]

Think we’ve beaten the tilt-shift faux miniature thing entirely into the ground yet? Me neither! Here’s another fun one:

[Via]

Check it out:

Students are invited to compete in 13 categories, including Game Design and Development, as well as Application Development and Mobile Design. Since the ADAA competition began in 2001, nearly 25,000 students from 73 countries have been involved; in 2011, a record 4,600 entries were submitted.

Free to enter and open to students, faculty and staff of higher education institutions worldwide, the 2012 ADAA will be judged by a panel of international design experts in three independent judging sessions. Submission deadlines are January 27, April 27, and June 22, 2012.

Semifinalists will be announced after each judging session, providing participants with early visibility into their competition status. In October, finalists will be invited to attend the ADAA awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Calif., where winners will be announced and awarded Adobe software and cash prizes.

[Via]

Bryan O’Neil Hughes provides a 2-minute overview:

Starts tonight at 6:30pm at Adobe San Francisco (see details):

In this presentation, master photographer Harold Davis explains his complete digital workflow starting with his digital photography techniques. He shows how he uses multi-RAW processing and hand-HDR with layering to enhance original photos.

Along the way, Harold will demonstrate how he uses the LAB color space to improve imagery and create special color effects.

Finally, Harold will discuss how his images are prepared for publication and archived in the books he packages for major publishers, including Focal Press.

There will be ample time for Q&A, so please bring your questions for Harold to this presentation.

The brilliant little utility Alfred has reached v1 status after a couple of years of public testing.  For me it’s an invaluable way to launch apps & start Web searches quickly (in my case I hit Opt-space from any app, then start typing a name or query) and to get multi-clipboard functionality.  For some reason I could never get into the command-line Quicksilver or other multi-clipboard tools, but Alfred hits a sweet spot.

The app is free, but the paid Powerpack (which enables multi-clipboard support and numerous other features) is well worth the £12 price.

(Come on, it’s Thanksgiving; you weren’t working anyway, were you? Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!)

[Via Sebastian Marketsmueller]

I’m taking the week off to squire young dudes around chilly Illinois, but I’ve scheduled some blog posts to auto-publish over the course of the week. I mention it because I’ve seen a few comments asking questions or requesting feedback, and I didn’t want you to think that I was working normally & blowing off replying.

View PSD layers, Illustrator artboards, and InDesign spreads on the Web; share files with teammates; and more. Here’s a 1-minute tour of the new Creative Cloud:

A few years ago I was giving some boo-hoo rant about my job’s frustrations to a co-worker when I noticed a little Abrams tank model on his desk. When I inquired he casually answered that he’d been a tank commander in Bosnia, modestly mentioning some of the responsibilities he’d shouldered in his early 20’s. Way to put my challenges in perspective, sir.
In this brief clip, veterans now working at Adobe share thoughts on how their military service experiences have helped shape their careers.

Come hear photographer Mark Lindsay talk about “Inspired Compositing and Masking” starting at 6:30pm at Adobe San Francisco. Check out the MeetUp page for details & to vote on topics that Mark should cover in depth.

I can’t claim I find this slick, free app from Autodesk useful, per se–but hey, who hasn’t wanted to spew fire from his eye sockets from time to time?

I have no intention of making this blog a political one, but I did find interesting Frank Rich’s insight into the phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street protesters mourning Steve Jobs, a multi-billionaire:

Yet those demonstrators who celebrated Jobs were not necessarily hypocrites… Jobs’s genius… was his ability “to strip away the excess layers of business, design, and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.” The supposed genius of modern Wall Street is the exact reverse, piling on excess layers of business and innovation on ever thinner and more exotic creations until simple reality is distorted and obscured.

Just food for thought. (Oh, and if you haven’t read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, you’re missing out. I’m halfway through his follow-up, Boomerang, and it’s similarly compelling.)

This special offer ends Monday, Oct. 31.  It’s a great deal even for someone who just wants Photoshop, since the price of the suite is less than Photoshop alone (!). [Via Todd Kopriva]

Dwight Schrute gets outsourced using some clever technology that matches the timing of vocal tracks, letting you swap one for the other. Very cool.

If you’ll happen to be in New York on Saturday, check out this session at PhotoPlus (8:45-11:45 AM) from our friends Dan Marcolina & Matthew Richmond.

Dan plans to deconstruct some of his favorite interactive photo experiences including “World Without Photoshop” and the “iObsessed Companion“. He’ll show you how to create a portfolio for the App store by using Adobe Indesign and the new Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. (Here’s their iPad portfolio, Printeractivideo.) He’ll also explain the cross devices benefits of authoring with the unique, in the cloud, toolset called SlideRocket. As a bonus he’ll share some insights from producing the Book iPhone Obsessed, photo editing experiments with apps that includes the use QR Codes for triggering mobile formatted portfolios of work.

Matthew plans to show:

• PhotoSmith and Lightroom workflow
• A handful of mobile/tablet-friendly Web gallery solutions
  • Some mainstream options
  • Some just good frameworks/snippets for those crafting HTML (example)
• Some non-Adobe photo portfolio apps & solutions for iPad
• Eye-Fi card to iPad/iPhone workflow
• How to build full-bleed Photo ePub files for iPad/iBooks
  • Essentially it’s CSS & HTML, hacking away at a example file. Not for the faint of heart but really cool.

I propose some new government branding: “DARPA: Hey, What Could Go Wrong?” I’m going to dream of this thing c-c-coming to k-k-kill me:

It can haul 400 pounds of gear 20 miles on a single charge. Read all about it. [Via John Dowdell]

If you’re shooting video with a DSLR (or if you’d like to be), come check out this session (Tuesday, Oct. 18 starting at 6:30pm) at Adobe’s San Jose HQ:

Michael Lewis is a Quality Assurance Engineer at Adobe Systems, Inc.  He is currently a member of the Adobe Premiere Pro team, but began his career at Adobe on the Adobe Photoshop team.  While he enjoys working for a company that is continually at the forefront of digital imaging, he can still be found on weekends shooting with his favorite Super 8mm film camera.

Daniel Brown worked for Adobe Systems Inc. in the role of “Senior Evangelist” on the Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects teams applying his experience “in the trenches” to product development, demonstrations, and communication with customers at industry events worldwide.In 2001, Daniel got his first taste of both diving and, simultaneously, underwater photography and has been hooked ever since. He’s been a lecturer at numerous Digital Shootout events and regularly contributes to Stephen Frink’s week-long “Digital Immersion” classes in Key Largo, Florida.

For RSVP details, etc., please see the Evite (linked above).

Check it out. Offer ends tonight, October 11, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. PT; valid in North America only.

If you’re a serious video editor and want to know how to set up a great workstation, check out Dennis Radeke’s “Diving into NVIDIA GPU’s and what they mean for Premiere Pro.”

Great recollections from Russell Brown, Mark Hamburg, and many others.

From the team’s Facebook page:

Photoshop was invented on the Mac. The Mac is a key development platform for the entire digital imaging team, particularly Lightroom that was first launched at Macworld. Steve Jobs was a visionary who inspired tech innovation. We are grateful for his contributions and sorry for this loss. – The Lightroom Team

From John Warnock & Chuck Geschke:

“We met Steve Jobs about 3 months after we started Adobe. He called us and said: ‘I hear you guys are doing great things – can we meet?’ He came over to our tiny office in Mountain View and saw the early stages of PostScript. He got the concept immediately and we started about 5 months of negotiations over our first contract. Apple invested $2.5 million into Adobe and gave us an advance on royalties. This allowed us to help Apple build the first LaserWriter. Without Steve’s vision and incredible willingness to take risk, Adobe would not be what it is today. We owe an enormous debt to Steve and his vision.
“We have always had great admiration and respect for Steve. The world is a better place because of him, and his absence will leave a huge hole in the world of technology.”

And from the Adobe.com home page:

“Steve was a unique visionary and his influence as a technology innovator will be sorely missed. This is a sad day for the entire industry, and we offer our deepest sympathy to his family.”— Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe Systems

The service promises simple cloud backup & versioning of PSDs & other formats:

If the LayerVault guys can crack this particular nut, God bless ’em. Years ago Adobe Version Cue tried integrating check-in & versioning into Creative Suite apps, but designers didn’t bite. Later GridIron Flow arrived with what I thought was brilliant auto-versioning, but I haven’t seen it get wide adoption. It’s just hard to move people beyond the dirt-simple “final,” “finalfinal,” “finalfinal02,” approach they’ve used for 20+ years.

Not a bad way to spend an evening with a customer:

Thanks, Weezer, for rocking way the hell out.

See what I and many others have been working on, live tomorrow & Tuesday:

Monday, October 3, 9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. PDT)
Creativity unleashed

Join Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch and guests to learn how Adobe is transforming the creative process across mobile devices, personal computers, and the cloud.

Tuesday, October 4, 10 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. PDT)
Creating the very best user experiences

Join us as we explore the best solutions for delivering highly expressive and usable experiences, both in the browser and as apps. We’ll look at a variety of technologies and products, highlighting current opportunities, and peering into the not-so-distant future.

In addition to presenting some new technology in the Adobe booth, I’ll be on hand for the following sessions that you might find interesting.

Continue reading →

Utterly amazing dancing to “Pumped Up Kicks.” (Make sure to give it a minute.)

It reminds me of this Levi’s classic from ~10 years (!) ago:

Solid. Apparently he scans everything into Photoshop Elements & organizes it there:

Julieanne Kost shows off one of the most perennially underused capabilities in Photoshop–namely, the ability to create & use presets that store settings for tools (e.g. common crop dimensions, type styles*, brushes with colors, etc.).

* It’s true, tool presets aren’t as powerful as live type styles (ones where changing the style changes layers to which it’s been applied), but they’re still handy.