If you’re in the Bay Area on Tuesday, you might want to check out this gathering at Adobe HQ:

We will have a short but info-packed ColdFusion demo by Sid Maestre, manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group. Then our panel experts will each show you some cool tricks for each of the Creative Suite Design Premium apps. We will take your questions and comments after the presentation.
So many of you have responded “yes” to attending, so we have moved to a larger meeting room – “Park”. Remember: parking is free in the Adobe garage. Jot down Sarah Fiedor’s name, as she is our Adobe contact. Let the Security Guard know you are there for the CS user group meeting.

More info is on the group meeting page.

It’s $169.99 on Amazon right now (US only) instead of $299; just thought you’d want to know. 🙂
[Update: I’m told the deal may not last long, so I suggest pulling the trigger quickly if you’re so inclined.]

Adobe video specialist Dennis Radeke shares quite a few details about how Adobe is leveraging graphics processors (GPUs) to greatly accelerate common operations in Adobe video apps. Taking this together with After Effects & Premiere Pro going 64-bit, I think a lot of Adobe video customers will be very happy. Check out his post for more info.
Inevitably this news will raise questions about what’ll happen with Photoshop. I can’t get into a lot of details, but here are a few points offhand:

• We’re working together with other Adobe teams, including the video & Flash teams, on core GPU & multicore acceleration technology. That’s how we’ve started delivering GPU-based features, including Pixel Bender in Photoshop.
• It’s a long and tricky road, as folks who ran into driver incompatibilities, etc. in CS4 can attest.
• To that point, we think technologies like OpenCL are exciting, but they’re young. Dennis notes that some new features are NVIDIA-only right now and points out, “Given a choice between doing it with CUDA or not doing it for a while [while waiting for] OpenCL, we chose the former.”
• Obviously we want Adobe apps to run as well as possible regardless of your configuration. Just as they used to optimize for both PowerPC and Intel/AMD chips, Adobe engineers continue to work closely with multiple manufacturers (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and others) to wring the most out of their hardware. Again, this is where standardization will help, but it does take time.

We’ve heard a number of requests (e.g. here, here) for the ability to make Photoshop stop adding the word “copy” to layer names when duplicating layers. Out of curiosity, does anyone actually like this behavior? If not, it should be easy enough simply to stop adding “copy.” If some people really like the existing behavior, however, we’d do well to add a preference.
Therefore please speak up if you like the existing behavior. If you’d be happy with “copy” going away, great, but no need to speak up.
Thanks,
J.

Thanks for all the feedback in response to the survey I posted earlier today. I feel I should clarify a few things.

• I’m touchy about hearing things like “As soon as Adobe bought Fireworks, the PS guys would be trying to kill it. Good job, mission accomplished.” To set the record straight, Adobe bought and revived Fireworks. To the best of my knowledge the app hadn’t gotten much love, to say the least, in its last couple of years with Macromedia. (Did they add anything in Studio 8?) And when Adobe was in the process of acquiring Macromedia, I spoke up strongly in support of Fireworks. Just thought you should know.
• The list I posted isn’t a promise or a hint that the Photoshop team will undertake any–much less all–of this work. As I say, it’s just my aggregation of some of the suggestions I’ve heard a number of times. I thought it would be handy to collect them for your input.
• Likewise, it isn’t a hint about the future of Fireworks or anything else. Sometimes a survey is just a survey.
• Believe me, we’re sensitive to the subject of “bloat,” and I’m actively pitching ideas (here’s one) for how the apps can better integrate without just duplicating one another. Having said that, we can’t err too far in the other direction, saying that if one app does something, no others can do it (or do it well). It’s possible for apps to have different core missions and yet have tools & capabilities in common. (To that end, people flamed us for not moving animated GIF import from ImageReady to Photoshop, feeling it was a conspiracy to force them to buy Fireworks. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.)
• People have always complained that Photoshop does too many things. I guarantee that whoever added text for the first time got an earful about it not being a “photographic” feature, and probably caught static from other Adobe teams. So it goes. Of course, people always say, “Stop adding anything new… except this handful of things for me, personally.” And they always push us to “simplify” and “just reduce” the application, yet they flip out if you take away their cherished anachronism. I always think of the Onion article, “98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others.”
• We have serious ideas about how to break this logjam, but there are no silver bullets, and it’s not going to happen overnight. But it is happening.
• Finally, a couple of practical tips: Here’s a Lorem Ipsum generator for PS, and here’s the GridMaker panel.

I am, at heart, a Web designer, and I came to Adobe to improve the ways software could help design and build Web content. Therefore I’m keenly interested in advancing Photoshop’s graphic & Web design chops.

Below you’ll find some of the ideas that have bubbled up in discussions on this blog and elsewhere. The list isn’t exhaustive (I tried to keep the length reasonable), and it’s not a promise or a hint about what might be in development. Think of it as just a quick straw poll to gauge temperature.

DRAWING

• Better vector drawing tools
• Better control over strokes and fills, including dashed lines
• Better Illustrator integration (e.g. make using Illustrator inside Photoshop as easy as double-clicking to edit a symbol in Flash or Illustrator)

RICHER/SMARTER OBJECTS

• Buttons with states (editable Up, Down, Over, etc.)
• Intelligent widgets (e.g. buttons that resize smartly (a la 9-Slice); button bars that automatically scale/add buttons when resized; arrows with variable heads that orient themselves to path direction; etc.)
• Ability to edit widget skins & to switch among skins (e.g. flip a button from Mac to Windows, or iPhone to Android)
• Intelligent, skinnable charts (including ones with live data feeds)

FILE ORGANIZATION/MGMT.

• Linked files (edit one document & have the change reflected in several documents that link to it)
• Symbols (reusable objects that can be dragged in from a Library panel)
• Type styles (edit a style definition in order to update multiple type layers at once)

OUTPUT & INTEGRATION

• High fidelity Web output (e.g. dashed lines that convert to CSS definitions)
• Pixel-accurate Web rendering (i.e. text and objects that appear exactly as they would in a browser)
• Better integration with Flash and Web authoring tools (e.g. components that translate with code & behaviors intact)

To help measure your interest, I’ve put these ideas into a quick survey. Please take a minute to let us know which ones are most interesting, and feel free to add comments via this post.

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing your thoughts,

J.

[Update: I’ve posted some clarifications in response to comments below.]

This is your head.
This is your camera.
This is your head & camera inside the mouth of a giant leopard seal…
Paul Nicklen gives new meaning to “stay frosty“:

Amazing (even more so when viewed in high def). [Via]

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls through this funky facial mapping/animation software. NPR’s Science Friday writes:

“Like a digital video puppet, the facial expressions of one person can be cloned in real time and mapped onto the digital face of another person. Barry-John Theobald, computer scientist at the University of East Anglia, explains the technique and Steven Boker, of the University of Virginia, explains what facial cloning can reveal about human nature.”

Check it out:

[Update: The embedding code seems to be spazzing out at the moment, so I suggest watching the video on the SciFri site.]

It’s easy (especially for me) to get hung up on digital tools, so I found it refreshing to spend 4 minutes listening to Milton Glaser talk about drawing–especially about how, in his opinion, art schools have let digital training compromise the fundamentals.

[Via]

• Vintage posters:
  • Neat Russian posters from the ’70s.
  • Cool 60’s-style posters celebrating the International Year of Astronomy.
• Offbeat:
  • Killer! Big-Headed Papercraft Self Portrait using Photoshop + 3D. [Via]
  • View the source of this page for a bizarre Easter egg.
  • Creepy & excellent: The skeletons of Charlie Brown, Hello Kitty, & others. [Via]
  • “We did it for the show.” (“America’s dream family” indeed…) The shirt is now available for purchase. [Via]
• Excellent pixelated Halloween costume (“Low Resolution”). [Via]

Tomorrow evening (Thursday), all-around smart/interesting guy Adam Jerugim from the Photoshop team will be speaking at the San Francisco Photoshop User Group meeting:

The talk will focus on Photoshop performance best practices to help enable users to get the most out of Photoshop with their current hardware setup. In addition, there will be guidance provided for users that plan on buying new hardware or upgrading their existing Photoshop & Lightroom systems. Information will also be provided about tools you can use to optimize your specific workflow, GPUs, and running 64-bit applications.

Our speaker, Adam Jerugim, has been part of the Photoshop engineering team for the last 10 years and is mainly responsible for performance and hardware compatibility testing. In addition to being an avid photographer, he is also working to complete his MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz.

See the event page for more info. For a slide deck from Adam & co. on the subject of optimizing Photoshop performance, see previous.

Wow–what an amazing online community: I’m overwhelmed by all the detailed & generous feedback I’ve been receiving in response to yesterday’s query. Yes, there’s plenty of brain-dead self parody out there, but I’m really pleased by the number of people eager to help make things better.
I’m kind of buried in the resulting mail just now, so sorry if it takes me a little while to reply.

Illustrator PM David Macy points out a couple examples of converting static graphics into dynamic and interactive experiences bound with data and published through Flash. He writes, “These were created using an Illustrator plugin called MAPublisher that can import GIS data and export interactive SWF.

• First is an interactive map of US unemployment published on Forbes.com.
• The second, simpler example is a map of The Who’s 1997 Quadrophenia Tour in Europe.”

• Who’s a tender little death’s head, then? ‘Till Death Do Us Part. [Via]
• The Lions & Lambs* logo nicely pairs these moral foes.

Utterly tangential: In March, Stephen Colbert said, “I’m coming in like a lion, and going out like a lamb-fed lion.”

The San José Photoshop User Group is meeting next Tuesday, Nov. 10, at the Adobe SJ office (map). Pizza and drinks kick off at 6:30pm, with talks beginning at 7. The meeting will feature two speakers. As group organizer Dan Clark writes,

Jim Tierney is from plug-in maker Digital Anarchy. He will demo a range of their products, such as Primatte Chromakey, Knoll Light Factory, Backdrop Designer, Texture Anarchy, 3D Invigorator and more.

Jim McCrary was Chief Photographer at the A&M Records photo studio for many years. He shot over 300 album covers along with related publicity and advertising work. Among his many classic album covers are Carole King’s “Tapestry”, Lee Michaels’ “5th” and Joe Cocker’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and many others. From 1974 through 1990 he operated his own studio on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, specializing in technically difficult photographic still-life problems, as well as difficult personality portraits.

The meeting will start at 7:00, in the Park Conference Room of Adobe Systems’ East Tower, 321 Park Avenue, San Jose. To park underneath the Adobe building, use the Almaden Avenue entrance, under the East Tower. If the security guard at the parking entrance asks for an Adobe contact, use Bryan O’Neil Hughes’s name. Please RSVP to Dan Clark. See you there.