Live at noon on Friday:

The timeline panel in Adobe Premiere Pro is where the story comes together… In this session you’ll learn essential operations and advanced features like replace edit, creating custom transitions, and using Adobe Dynamic Link to exchange files with Adobe After Effects and Audition. The session is being run by Richard Harrington of RHED Pixel.

Check it! (Offer applies in North America only through 11:59pm Pacific time tonight.)

The move will enhance Premiere Pro’s workflow integration. PM Al Mooney writes:

I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to say that Adobe and Automatic Duck are now partnering with the aim of bringing absolute best-of-breed workflow integration into Premiere Pro. This means that, as we work together, Premiere Pro’s ability to integrate with the industry’s other leading tools using technologies like AAF, XML and OMF will get stronger and stronger. And so Premiere’s ability to be a good citizen in all kinds of broadcast and post-production workflows will get better and better.

Recent/related: Adobe acquires IRIDAS video tools

Now that’s some good image compositing.

[Via]

Weezer’s playing Adobe MAX the week after next!  (If you haven’t yet registered, there’s still time.)

I used to joke that the one good thing I’d done at Adobe was to get Run-D.M.C. to play our party at Flashforward 2000.  Seems that once a decade, at least, we’re due for hosting a really good band.  (And this time I won’t embarrass myself by trying on shell-toe Adidas & a Kangol hat.)

The apps add a wealth of new features, including what looks like a really interesting “search photos by object” capability. Here’s a 1-minute overview:

For more on details like 64-bit video handling & AVCHD support for high-def output, check out an interview with PM Bob Gager. Each app has a list price of $99, and bundled together they’re $149.

Check it out:

In this Ask a CS Pro session, Muse PM Dani Beaumont will show you how Muse allows you to include arbitrary HTML code in your project. We’ll take a look at how you can easily add elements like Google Maps, YouTube videos, Facebook ‘Like’ buttons and such. We’ll even get a little more edgy and look at embedding Flash slideshows and blogs from platforms like Tumblr.

Friday, noon Pacific time (converter).

Looks lovely:

The Cintiq 24HD features a generous 24″ display (1920 x 1200 resolution), a 92% Adobe RGB color gamut, a wide viewing angle, and an adjustable stand for hours of comfortable and productive use.

Core77 writes,

The part of the 24HD we’re most excited about is a new physical design feature which incorporates solid industrial design thinking to solve an ergonomic issue: How can we get this massive tablet into multiple working positions that we favor? The answer comes in the form of a well-thought-out base and adjustable supporting arms that move and lock the tablet into a variety of positions.

Sounds like some fast, powerful color grading & HDR tools are coming to the Production Premium suite. According to the press release,

The addition of IRIDAS technology includes SpeedGrade, an award-winning toolset for Stereo 3D, RAW processing, color grading and finishing of digital content. IRIDAS offers the only non-destructive tools for primary and secondary color correction that are optimized for multi-core CPU and GPU performance.

Adobe’s video apps have been on a tear lately, with more exciting developments to come. (My wife works in that group & I love getting peeks at what’s brewing.)

Update: The team requests (and is getting lots of) feedback on the acquisition.

This cleverness from down under reminds me of vintage Saturday Night Live titles:

[Via]
Elsewhere, Joe Clarke’s Tchaikovsky Timelapse features stop-motion animation of the animator himself at work:

[Via]

A friend of mine is just about to start working at Fanhattan.  I’d never heard of the service, but having just signed up for Hulu Plus, I was wishing for a way to find out what shows are available there vs. on Netflix, iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, etc. Well, here we are:

The iPad app is pretty dope: Not only does it show you where program X is available, it can launch the needed app and start the show.  In my experience it’s not perfect (I can’t get Netflix to launch, and backing out of viewing a show’s details dumps me back at the top level of the app), but the search alone is invaluable–and free.

How these guys plan to make money, I have no idea (premium placements, referral fees?); happily I’ll leave that to my friend to sweat.

I’d like to extend warm congratulations to my friend and fellow PM, Bryan O’Neil Hughes, on his induction into the Photoshop Hall of Fame this week. Well done!

I spent my first two years at Adobe bouncing coast to coast (three times in 24 months!), and I found myself pretty strung out and lonely. Bryan & his family welcomed me to California and helped me start putting down roots–something for which I’ll forever be grateful. For my part I helped convince Bryan to turn his charisma & charm in a more public-facing direction, trying out the product management game. (I mean, if they let me do it, for God’s sake, how hard could it be? ;-))

Anyway, Hughes, congrats from all your friends & colleagues on the Photoshop team, and thanks for all you do.

[Related: Bryan’s Content-Aware Fill demo that’s drawn more than 4 million views–an even drawn a Hughes impostor from College Humor.]

I’m doing my best to field lots of good questions coming in regarding Adobe Carousel, but if you want to talk with a real product expert and get a more in-depth demo, come back tomorrow at 1pm Pacific time for a chat with team member Christopher Quek.

I promise it’ll be newsworthy. The show will air 9am-10:30am Pacific time on PhotoshopWorld.com.

Back in college I had a summer roommate named Johnny, a super bright guy who was studying Arabic en route to Georgetown Law. He was quite well versed in world affairs, able to talk at length about all sorts of crises, etc. That’s why it was all the more bizarre–and delightful–to see him coolly reading the Washington Post each morning, calmly taking out a ballpoint pen, and then drawing puke lines & mustaches on all the world leaders.
Clearly I’m a sucker for that sort of thing, though I’m still slightly embarrassed at how many times I laughed out loud at these sign hacks.

Nifty:

Twenty-one large triangles animated by Melbourne, throughout Federation Square. MÖBIUS is a sculpture that can be configured into many cyclical patterns and behave as though it is eating itself, whilst sinking into the ground.

The result is an optical illusion and a time-lapse of people interacting with the sculpture and moving through Melbourne’s landmark location throughout the day.

MÖBIUS was animated over two weeks Friday, Saturday & Sundaybetween the 6th and 20th of May 2011.

[Via]

3D printer, weather balloon, GPS-enabled phone, & camera = good times.

Now, who’s up for giving my head a lift?

Jonatan Castro has created a layered PSD file for designers targeting Mac OS X Lion. HTH, as the kids say. [Via]

Bonus for me: it’s not me. 😉 Check out a live chat today at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific:

If you ever wanted some one-on-one time with Adobe’s Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, well…today’s your day. We’re doing a special bonus LIVE episode of ‘The Grid” today and Bryan is our in-studio guest, taking your questions on the air about….well…anything!

Send your questions now (and during the show) via Twitter—just include the hashtag #grillbryan, or you can just post a question on Scott Kelby’s blog. Hope you’ll join us for a history-making live event, today at 4:00 pm EDT, on “The Grid.”

[Via Andrew Kavanagh]

Join us at noon Pacific (time zone calculator):

In this Ask a Pro session, Dani Beaumont, Muse Product Manager, will show you how Muse makes designing websites as easy as creating print layouts. Muse (code name) is a preview of a new product from Adobe that allows designers to design and publish HTML websites without writing code. Dani will showcase the robust design tools, demonstrate how to add interactivity to your site and then show how easy it is to publish your site.

The Connect room will open up 15 minutes before the session starts. At that time please sign in as a guest to join.

Nice. Thanks for all the lively feedback here and elsewhere. I’m passing your comments along to the team. [Via]

You can read all about making this art via the molecular-dynamic process of salvation solvation, involving a key component of milk fat, palmitic acid, and C12H25SO4Na (sodium dodetsilsulfonat)–or, like me, you can just zone out with some Sunday-morning prettiness:

[Via Mark Coleran]

Early bird registration has been extended until the end of August, so you can sign up now for the show (Oct. 1-5 in Los Angeles). I’ll be there, and I promise we’ll be showing some really exciting stuff. Here’s more info on MAX.

A fun, tongue-in-cheek, whirlwind tour of the making of a magazine:

[Via]

Greetings from rural Illinois, “The Land Connectivity Forgot,” where I’ve just set up my parents’ new iMac. We’ve had some minor hiccups (e.g. repeatedly explaining that an “app store” is neither a physical place nor something that mails you CDs; realizing that N-finger gestures are going to be the source of many panicked “Oh, Jaahn, it disappeared” calls), but overall things are good.

In particular I’m delighted with how well FaceTime is running. I don’t know whether their ISP splurged and added a second upstream cocktail straw, or whether the combo of new hardware/compression has done the trick, but it seems to be a vast improvement over our excruciatingly laggy iChat sessions.

Two questions, though:

• I want to connect to their machine, wake it up, and drive anytime, regardless of whether they’re around. (Yes, they’re cool with this.) iChat requires someone to accept my screen-sharing request. What’s a more robust alternative? Do I have to spring for Apple Remote Desktop? I’ve occasionally used VNC clients, but do those require me to know the other machine’s (static) IP address?
• Why, for the love of God, can’t Mail on Lion import a mailbox (.mbox) from Mail on Leopard? I’ve tried every method I can think of (archiving, exporting), but I always get a “some [meaning all] messages could not be imported” error. I’ve even tried dragging everything into my mom’s Gmail account, thinking I could upload from the old machine & download it onto the newer one, but the messages never seem to reach the server. I’ve tried downloading the new Outlook, but it requires 10.5.8, and the old iMac won’t accept its admin password (needed to run a system update).

Yes yes, #firstworldproblems, to be sure, but any advice would be most welcome. Thanks in advance!

This week’s live Q&A:

Carey Dissmore will talk about the importance of demo reels, and provide an overview of the editing workflow in Premiere Pro from the perspective of an editor who is comfortable with Final Cut Pro. Carey will also share the similarities, differences and unique advantages of Premiere Pro, including its tight integration with other products in the Adobe Production Premium bundle such as After Effects, Photoshop and Audition.

We’ll see you Friday, August 5, at 12 p.m. Pacific (time zone converter) in our Connect Room. The room will open up 15 minutes before the session starts. At this time, please sign in as a guest to join.

(Sounds a little like some acid-rock holdover, doesn’t it?)
If you haven’t yet checked out the Photoshop store at 550 Sutter, you still have from now through Saturday to do so (see the remaining schedule of events). Here’s what it’s like:

How does Photoshop…?
Why won’t Photoshop…?
What does Photoshop mean by…?
When will Photoshop…?
Where does Photoshop…?
Could Adobe…?

Longtime Photoshop engineer Chris Cox will be answering questions as the featured guest on RetouchPRO Live, starting at 4pm Central time this Saturday. The cost to attend is $10. Chris’s brief bio:

Chris Cox’s education is in Physics with a minor in painting – and he’s still not sure how he got this deep into software. He is currently a senior engineer on the Photoshop team responsible for performance, color management, and other random large features. Things he’s done in Photoshop: presets, half the file formats, 16 bit/channel, 32 bit/channel, documents over 30k pixels, files over 2Gig, and more adjustments and filters than he can recall right now.

Meet the folks building Adobe Edge, the guys behind the new Expressive Web showcase site, the founders of Ajaxian, and more this Friday starting at 9am at the Hudson Theater on W44th.

Sign up here.

Hope to see you there!

If two minutes ago you’d asked me to imagine Pac-Man crossbred with the Karma Police video, I’d have kinda scratched my head. Well, that was two minutes ago.

[Via]

To celebrate tomorrow’s Photoshop store launch in San Francisco, the team is giving away Adobe software, Canon and Leica cameras, and iPad 2s.
“Get in early,” they write, “because the first 100 attendees will also receive iTunes gift cards, with some valued at up to $100.” Here’s the Facebook event page, and here’s the schedule of all that’s going on (including Scott Kelby’s “Light It. Shoot It. Retouch It.” session tomorrow).

Laser etching!
Giant posters!
T-shirt making!
Photowalks!
Dogs & cats living together, mass hysteria!

Starting this Saturday & running through August 6, the Photoshop team will be in Union Square, taking over 550 Sutter Street in SF to conduct hands-on training & demos–and it’s all for a good cause.

Luminaries like Russell Brown, Scott Kelby, and others will be on hand to teach & consult.  The days are jammed, so check out the full range of events and register for what are going to be popular events.  (Russell’s laser-shirt-printing-lab-thing accepts 5 registrations per hour.)  Many engineers & other team members will be dropping in, and they write,

We’ll also have some cool Photoshop gear for sale, as well as a special 15% discount off regularly priced Adobe software. The best part? The net proceeds from the sale of Photoshop gear will go directly to Adobe Youth Voices (AYV).

Hope to see you there,
J.

I’m pleased to see that the #1-selling consumer photo-editing software, Photoshop Elements, has just become available for download via the Mac App Store for $79. According to the press release, new features include the following:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 Guided Edits offer easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for creating artistic effects such as Out of Bounds for making photos leap off the page, Pop Art for creating retro-style images, or Perfect Portraits for easy retouching. Users can instantly remove clutter from photos or repair imperfections with one stroke of the Spot Healing Brush, which uses powerful content-aware technology adapted from Photoshop CS5.

Check out the product pages for screenshots & more info.

Sign up here (and/or if you’ll be in Tokyo in August, look here):

• 5:00 pm – 5:45 pm Food and Drink
• 5:45 pm – 6:00 pm Welcome & Opening Remarks
• 6:00 pm – 6:45 pm The State of the Web – Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith from Ajaxian
• 6:45 pm – 7:30 pm Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5 and HTML5 & jQuery Mobile – Greg Rewis
• 7:30 pm – 7:45 pm Break
• 7:45 pm – 8:15 pm Google Chrome Evangelist Topic Q&A
• 8:15 pm – 9:00 pm Adobe Edge Demo and Open Discussion – Mark Anders and Doug Winnie
• 9:00 pm – 9:45 pm Deconstructing an HTML5 Project start to finish – Big Spaceship Web Designer
• 9:45 pm – 10:00 pm Wrap-up & Closing

Our friend Dave Cross passes along news of an upcoming photo workshop in Florida:

On July 29, a small group of people will get a very rare opportunity to learn from none other than Scott Kelby. Scott will be teaching a one day hands-on workshop in Tampa called Light it. Shoot it. Retouch it – Hands-on. Students will learn all about studio lighting and portrait retouching from the world’s best selling author on these subjects. Only 12 spots left!

If you’re looking for small-group, hands-on classes on Photoshop, Adobe Certified Instructor Dave Cross has a full range of classes available at the Dave Cross Workshops.

I read a few months ago that YouTube was planning to offer video stabilization for one’s uploaded clips. It’s not easy to find, but if you go to youtube.com/editor, you can drag a clip into the project timeline, then press the little magic wand icon to show the editing UI. The process is a bit convoluted: Why you can’t just set a flag to stabilize video on upload, or see this UI during the upload/tagging process, I don’t know. Perhaps that’s coming, and meanwhile it’s a little lame to pick nits with a free, fast service.
I’ve tried only one test movie so far, but I’m quite pleased with the results. Here are before & after clips. (Note that stabilizing a clip will result in a second copy on YouTube, requiring you to copy over captions, tags, etc.)
Original:

Stabilized:

I’ll be taking the week of July 4th off work for some R&R with our family. I’ll try to queue up some interesting content before I go, but please note that I won’t be able to reply to comments (or to free any that get stuck in the moderation queue) until July 11th. Have a fire-crackin’, chip-dip-snackin’, bratwurst-packin’, artery-shellackin’ Fourth!

You may have seen recent headlines like “Photoshopping Sends Unhealthy Message to America’s Youth, [American Medical Association] Says.”  The Photoshop team agrees, and you can see the AMA statement plus PM director Maria Yap’s thoughts on the Photoshop.com blog.

You’ve cloned & healed things in Photoshop, right? And you had no idea that you could scale, rotate, and flip the clone source before applying it, right? (Well, being the kind of weirdo who’d actually read this blog, maybe you did, but 99% of people seem not to.) If you spend any amount of time cloning or healing but haven’t used the Clone Source panel, do yourself a favor and spend 4 minutes with Brian Wood‘s overview:

Registration is now open to attend Adobe MAX, set to happen October 1-5 in Los Angeles. I’ll be there and… well, you’ll see. Hope you can join us.

Photographers, if you’ll be in San Francisco on Thursday evening, this session might be up your alley:

Join Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty for a session on Lightroom tips and tricks. Learn important methods for speeding your workflow, getting the most out of your images and extending Lightroom with key plug-ins.  Tom will focus on real world workflows and will and share tips from his experience as the Lightroom product manager since 2005.

What on earth, besides a vague computer graphics connection, does this have to do with the general thrust of my blog? Not a ton, but it’s just a pleasure to see someone do something so well. As Jason Kottke puts it,

It starts getting insane around the 3:00 mark and then, at 5 minutes in, all the blocks turn invisible and he keeps right on going! It’s like he’s playing blindfold speed chess on the hood of a stock car!! I mean, !!!!!

Even more tangential: I love that someone has created “Bastard Tetris,” a game specifically designed to make you feel bad by choosing the worst possible block at any moment.

What amazing options exist for visual storytellers these days.

[Via]

I’ve heard about totalitarian regimes using Facebook to promote “anti-government” rallies, then simply arresting whoever shows up.  Seems like a ruthless manager could take a similar cue: Invite employees to “training sessions” on things like how to use the new travel website, then fire anyone who attends–figuring that if you’re dumb & idle enough to attend such a thing, you mustn’t be worth keeping.

Of course, if that test were applied to people with time to write blog posts like this… uh, forget I said anything.

Ugh. The bug seems quite rare (affecting JPEG files from one camera found to date), and it should be fixed by next week, but because it could lead to file corruption, the team wants to provide a heads-up. See Tom Hogarty’s post for more details.