Reprising the session from a couple of weeks ago, I again joined Deke McClelland & Colleen Wheeler for a Martini Hour podcast. This time we were joined by Adobe creative director Russell Brown. Both conversation & sidecars flowed freely, though only the latter stayed within predictable boundaries.

Regarding the low-level fly-over of NYC by an Air Force One 747 trailed by fighter jets–an act that inadvertently terrorized New Yorkers:

“Hey, you know another way you could’ve gotten that picture… Photoshop. Remember? We did it? [showing obviously faked picture of Joe Biden flying the plane] Remember?? Oh, but that’s right, Photoshop can look so fake–when the look of terror on so many people’s faces today, you can’t fake that.”

My wife made exactly the same suggestion upon hearing the news earlier in the day.

Update: Here’s the clip:

What exactly is the best way to construct a Web page comp in Photoshop, then convert it to a clean, CSS-based HTML layout? To many designers the process remains a black art.

At Photoshop World I got to chat with the guys from WebAssist, a developer with a distinguished track record of extending Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks, about their new CSS Designer Starter Kit for Photoshop. In describing the $19.99 training product, the company writes:

If that sounds appealing, check out the feature tour on the product page.

Elsewhere, PSDTUTS lists a set of 30 Brilliantly Flexible Templates & WordPress Themes. Each one goes for $15 or so. Meanwhile, PSDtoWordPress will have a real person do just what it says, for a fee. [Via] Adobe Blogs use Movable Type, so I can’t evaluate either offering, but I certainly see the appeal: I found skinning this blog fairly painful.

For “effortless conversion of your Photoshop designs into standards-compliant, CSS-rich webpages,” check out MediaLab’s SiteGrinder 2. The plug-in runs entirely within Photoshop and promises to require no hand coding. Check out the product’s feature tour for more info.

If you know of other good tips or resources in this department, please feel free to share them.

Update: How I could have failed to mention Fireworks, I don’t know. FW offers excellent PSD import, and in CS4 its CSS-generating chops are better than ever. See John Wylie’s notes on Exporting CSS and images in Fireworks CS4 for more details. [Via Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Numerous sites (including Adobe’s own Exchange) facilitate the sharing of Photoshop brushes, but BlendFu caught my eye for its inclusion of a cool Flash-based preview engine. You can load up a brush tip, then vary brush engine settings (e.g. size, scatter) & lay down some sample strokes. Groovy. [Via Freddy Wang]
Incidentally, I continue to long for a day when a background synchronization agent (a la the one that syncs contacts & bookmarks between a desktop & an iPhone) would observe the creation/modification of all Adobe app files (brushes, swatches, actions, styles, etc.) and sync them with an online repository.

• Your settings–i.e. that little layer of DNA that makes your copy of an app yours–would be backed up at all times, period.
• To share any bit of content (e.g. a set of brushes), you’d simply check a box, then optionally add some metadata (keywords, description, etc.).
• You could browse & use others’ shared content right from within your app. For example, in the Brushes panel you could type “airport signage” to get matching brushes–no need to leave the app, start downloading & installing files, etc.

Note: I’m not hinting at anything specific, just sharing a very long-standing desire to plug the “Photoshop Nation” that much more directly into the software itself, helping people continuously improve the tools for themselves & for others.

Everything must go…

• 19 great ads. The Hoover & Amnesty International pieces are my favorites. [Via]
• George Lucas frozen in Carbonite
• Design history:
  • Current Apple design owes more than a small debt to 1960’s Braun, it would appear. [Via]
  • Cold War Calculators rounds up just one thing. Check out the book. [Via]
• Post-It note sculptures [Via]

I obviously scan a ton of content in order to create this blog, and rather than just spray random links, I like to group them & add a little context. The process consumes more time than you’d think, though, and I’ve managed to rack up hundreds of links that just haven’t fit into other posts. Therefore, being on vacation this week, I’m clearing out a bunch of old, random, potentially interesting stuff that would otherwise go unmentioned.

• Customers mistake familiarity for superiority [Via]
• David Byrne goes to IKEA
• Eastern Bloc:
  • "Svimvear!!" Sweet Russian fashions of the ’80s
  • Weird Serb Christmas tank.
• Modular pie-cosahedron [Via]
• Arrogance + Humility = Design
• An alarm clock you have to chase
• Terrible iPhone concepts [Via]
• Automotive:
  • Hubcap creatures [Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]
  • Hood ornaments
  • Great examples of urban camouflage [Via]
• Now-defunct musicians Fine China have the best band URL I’ve ever heard.

Check out what Daring Fireball calls the “Jedi Mind Trick Error Dialog in Dreamweaver.” I have to smile a little thinking about similar alerts that could pop up from time to time: “Photoshop is not messing with picutres of your exes. Nope, don’t know where you heard that. [OK]*”
Elsewhere, I just stumbled upon this old weirdness in the bowels of my hard drive. It’s a screenshot I took ~15 years ago, squirreled away, and forgot until now. Props to that old developer for having a sense of humor.
* Absolutely tangential, and in no way work-related, but tied to the “don’t sweat it vibe”: Peter Bjorn & John’s “Nothing To Worry About” video.

• Sex, Lies, and Photoshop: Jesse Epstein interviews retouchers and talks about, among other things, the French government’s desire to mandate the disclosure of image manipulation. [Via Marc Pawliger] Much related conversation ensues on The Online Photographer blog. This reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut/Kilgore Trout story in which unrealistic body images pave the way to interplanetary conquest.
• The Danish Press Photography Union has excluded photojournalist Klavs Bo Christensen from the judging for this year’s Press Photo Awards due to excessive post-processing (in Danish*; here’s a machine-translated version.) Again T.O.P. features discussion. [Via Zalman Stern]
• Government in action:
  • “Women in Israeli govt? Not if Photoshop can help,” reports the Seattle Times. [Via Margot Nack]
  • AP Suspends Use of U.S. Army Photos Over Digital Alteration

* Does “råfiler” mean “raw files”? If so, cool. I’m always a fan of the “a with the little hat.”)

Developer Garrett Dimon has posted a nice set of suggestions for making feature requests. None of them are likely to come as a surprise, but it’s still a good refresher of things to bear in mind.
I mention this, by the way, not just as someone on the receiving end of feature requests, but as one who frequently makes them. Working with other teams at Adobe, we frequently pass along what we’ve heard from customers plus our own ideas for other products. Interacting with teams like Flash Player, I have to remember that they’re just as overwhelmed with good suggestions as we are on Photoshop, and that everyone comes to them asking for “just this one thing.”
Before I came to Adobe, I’d frequently craft suggestions for Adobe, Macromedia, and other companies. (In fact, I think they hired me in part to say, “Okay, smart guy–let’s see *you* do it!”) Garrett’s suggestions ring true in my experience. [Via]
[Update: I meant to mentione that the Acrobat.com team has kicked off ideas.acrobat.com to help gather community feedback & conduct discussions. We’re thinking about similar options for Photoshop. –J.]

Not long ago, I was snatched off my bike, thrown in the back of a dirty Econoline van (is there any other kind?), and taken to the undisclosed location of Martini Hour, the imbibing-positive podcast featuring long-time Photoshop expert Deke McClelland & editor Colleen Wheeler. Over the course of a half hour or so, we talk about sidecars (.XMP & otherwise), “the labyrinthian nature of Photoshop” (not in the David Bowie/Muppet-sense), Eyes Wide Shut, and more.

Here are the regular & high quality versions of the file.

Elsewhere, photographer & author Derrick Story sat down with the man who oversees Photoshop & Lightroom engineering:

The perfect blend for a Photoshop discussion: an expert who oversees the Photoshop engineering team, and who is a photographer too. Meet Winston Hendrickson, Sr. Director, Engineering, Digital Media, forAdobe.

During this chat in a conference room at Adobe headquarters, Winston and I talk about what’s happening under the hood for Bridge, ACR, and Photoshop. He explains lots of goodies such as, the difference between the Lightroom and Bridge “databases,” the similarities between the Develop module in Lightroom and the sliders in ACR, improvements in Photoshop, and some great lesser-known features such as Camera Profiles. Terrific, informative interview.

The chat, downloadable directly here, runs 29 minutes.

• “Danish photographer Peter Funch stakes New York City street corners out for two weeks at a time, taking pictures of passersby from the very same spot.” He then uses Photoshop to composite the results into single images. I love the mass of yawners. [Via Dave Dobish & VSL]
• Tomato-upon-dog? Nothin’ wrong with that.
• Sony Photographer of the Year Awards 2009 features, as expected, some winning pix. Dig this one from Amit Madheshiya. [Via Emma Wilkinson]
• Photojojo shows a simple technique using old photos that might, as a side effect, land you in “a nightmarish half-life of Morlocks, flux capacitors and Michael J. Fox”–oh my.
• Al Vinjamur shares his large & impressive wildlife photography portfolio. [Via Ken Lawson]

Adobe is developing a new version of the ExtendScript Toolkit for use with CS4, and the development team is looking for input. Program manager Elba Sobrino writes:

I am collecting the names of any external developers who may be interested in installing and testing this new ESTK CS5 with their CS4 products, including InDesign, After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Please contact me directly if you’d like to participate and provide your feedback.

The San Francisco Photoshop User Group is meeting tomorrow night, and the San Jose chapter is meeting on Tuesday the 21st. Here’s the agenda for both meetings:

Photoshop Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes will deliver a presentation on the many new technologies released since CS4, including the DNG Profile Editor, Pixel Bender, updates to Camera Raw/Lightroom and a recent performance update to Photoshop CS4. Additionally Bryan will show and discuss some hidden gems for photographers in CS4.

The new version of Bryan’s Black & White book is now out, so he may well show some interesting B&W techniques.
To RSVP & for details, check out the San Francisco and San Jose meeting pages.

We’re delighted to learn that young Gareth David Clark Graham, the 2.0 launch from our fellow product mgr. Pam Clark & husband Greer, has come into the world. The little hombre is 8 lbs 6 oz, 21 inches, and quite sleepy, but everyone is doing great. Congrats, guys! Now it’s up to Margot & me to round out the explosion in July (Project “El Segundo” remains on track), bringing the total to six MicroPMs in sixteen months (!). (No word yet on whether the babies will join together to form one large, Suite-steering megachild.)

Do you read/write the old PICT file format in Photoshop? We’re not aware of current workflows that have any dependency on the format, but if you have one, please speak up ASAP.
As we move Photoshop forward, we need to keep pruning dead branches off the tree (rather than spend time rewriting them for Cocoa, 64-bit, etc.). We’d like to drop PICT support unless there’s a good reason to keep it around.
[Update: Thanks for the quick & copious feedback. I got a kick out of reader Gordon Williams’s suggestion that the Photoshop team put old features “On Notice,” Colbert-style.]
[Update 2: Based on your feedback, the plan is that in the future, Photoshop will keep reading, but will no longer write, PICT files.]

The folks responsible for managing the Adobe User-to-User Forums are excited to announce that the legacy Adobe and Macromedia forums have now been integrated onto a single platform, and they asked me to help spread the word.

Notable highlights:

• Integration of Adobe ID for true single sign-on to all forums
• Updated look and feel, more consistent with other forum systems
• Email participation, including starting a new discussion and alerts
• RSS feeds for many parts of the forum (topics, users, announcements, etc.)
• Improved moderation capabilities (hosts can delete inappropriate content)
• Rich text options: inline images and videos, file attachments, code samples
• Improved search capabilities:
  • Wildcard searches (Multiple or single character)
  • Fuzzy Search (e.g. searching for “foam” also retrieves “roams”)
  • Proximity, weighting, date range, specific user

If you’re planning to attend the NAB tradeshow in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks and would like to discuss your ideas for Photoshop vis-à-vis film & video production, drop me a line. I’m planning to be in town at least part of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday & would love to hear your thoughts. The company is planning a number of events at the show, so check out this list for more details.

Filter Forge , the Photoshop plug-in that lets you build your own filters, is now available for the Mac as well as Windows. Filter Forge consists of a node-based editor used for assembling a series of mathematical operations into a filter. The tool is available in a variety of editions, ranging from $6 (!) to $209 (regularly $299). $69 gets you access to the nearly 6,000 filters already generated by users.