Monthly Archives: August 2010

Lightroom 3.2, Camera Raw 6.2 arrive

Lightroom, Photography

The Lightroom 3.2 update (released in preview form a couple of weeks ago) is downloadable for Mac & Windows and adds direct publish functionality to Facebook. Along with the latest release of Camera Raw for CS5 (Mac|Win), it adds new camera support:

  • Casio EXILIM EX-FH100 (DNG*)
  • Leica S2 (DNG*)
  • Panasonic DMC-FZ100
  • Panasonic DMC-FZ40 (FZ45)
  • Panasonic DMC-LX5
  • Pentax 645D
  • Samsung NX10
  • Samsung TL500 (EX1)
  • Sony A290
  • Sony A390
  • Sony Alpha NEX-3
  • Sony Alpha NEX-5

*The DNG raw file format is supported in previous versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw. This update improves the color and noise profiles for these models.

Numerous lens profiles have been added & bugs squashed, so please see the Lightroom Journal site for more details.

Big money (literally)

Illustration, Scientific & Technical Imaging
  • What’s the name for those fine, moiré-looking swirls often found on banknotes?  Guillochés, it turns out.  Aegir Hallmundur features a nice set of them, plus info on how they were created.  See also his Future of Money designs. [Via]

  • The folks at the GigaPan project provide close-ups of guillochés, pennies, and much more with their new giant close-ups. Here they demonstrate photographing a circuit board:

64-bit Alien Skin Bokeh filter now shipping

64-bit, Photography

People sometimes ask for a faster, easier-to-control version of Photoshop’s venerable Lens Blur filter.  Alien Skin’s just-released Bokeh 2.0 is a great answer, providing fast on-image control, compatibility with both Photoshop and Lightroom, and interesting creative effects like spiral blurs.  I’ve just taken it for a spin and am impressed.

 

Bokeh costs $199. See their press release for more details.

WSJ: Demand for Flash development increases

Flash

Interesting news from the Wall Street Journal:

Top full-time Flash engineers can now command more than $150,000 a year in salary, says Stuart Liroff, a headhunter at GreeneSearch recruiting firm. That compares with $50,000 to $80,000 a year three years ago, several entrepreneurs say.

With the advent of online social gaming start-ups such… demand for Flash engineers has suddenly surged.

I’m sure you’ll see this news on Mac fan sites, right about… now [commence breath-holding].

And yes yes, let me save people some typing: No doubt demand for HTML5 development is going up, too, and that’s good news for Adobe as we make great tools for HTML5 work & will make even more going forward.  I just get tired of one-sized, zero-sum, non-pragmatic, and–it turns out–inaccurate triumphalism. [Via Jens Loeffler]

Photoshop Express online editor gets upgraded

Mobile, Photography

Sync your images with the cloud; organize your Flickr, Facebook, and other images in one spot; and edit them more easily through the new Photoshop.com.

According to a post from project PM Jordan Davis, highlights of the new release include:

Photoshop Express Editor: Redesigned to be faster and easier to use. As an added bonus, you can now edit files directly from your hard drive (no Photoshop.com account needed).

Photoshop Express Organizer: Now a standalone application that serves as an online hub for all of your media on Photoshop.com. It also gives you easy access to your images on Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa.

Photoshop Express Uploader: A lightweight, installable application that enables two-way syncing between files stored on your computer and those stored online on Photoshop.com.

 

Check out the site to get started (and to get 2GB of online storage free).

Mac Photoshop users needed for benchmarking

Uncategorized

The Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test is being updated to a new version (2.0) in the near future.  Test creator James Alexander is looking for beta testers both to test the action and to provide times for the site’s baselines. Testers need to have standard stock configuration of current Apple machines that are currently being sold on Apple.com.

If you’re interested, please send an email with your system specs. James notes that he welcomes suggestions on what to include in the test, regardless of whether you’re currently able to perform testing.

 

"Ask a Pro" tomorrow with Bryan Hughes

Uncategorized

Should be a good session:

Learn about the new features of Photoshop CS5 and get your questions answered in the upcoming Ask a CS Pro Session with Photoshop Senior Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes. Join us this Friday Aug 20th at 12 noon PDT!  RSVP here.

That the session will be recorded and posted to the Creative Suite Facebook page soon after the event, alongside recordings of the previous sessions.

Tangentially related: I need to make time soon to help you get to know Photoshop PMs Bryan, Zorana Gee, and Pam Clark better.  More to come.

Tablet companions to Photoshop?

Tablets, User Interface

In playing with Photoshop Express for iPad, Jesus Diaz from Gizmodo observed:

I got a craving for something very simple, which I hope Adobe can make (and which will be extremely useful for me and other desktop Photoshop users): Release an application to convert the iPad into a Photoshop control surface. I will love to display this application while I’m working on the image and quickly use it to apply filters and transforms. Or just access many of the Photoshop tool palettes, adopted to touchscreen use.

Photoshop-control apps such as Photokeys, Keypad, and perhaps others already exist & have for some time.  Do you use them?  I haven’t encountered anyone who’s mentioned using them, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.  How widespread is this desire?

Other companion ideas that spring readily to mind:

  • Using multitouch input from a tablet to drive Liquify (for pinching, rotating, etc.)
  • Using multitouch to mix paints together, a la a real artist’s palette, then send the results to Photoshop (i.e. what gets mixed on the tablet is streamed into your PS brush)
  • Using a tool like Configurator to assemble custom layouts of tools, buttons, interactive tutorials, etc. that would run on a tablet and drive desktop Photoshop
  • Other?

Your feedback and ideas would be most welcome.

Thanks,
J.

Adobe & Typekit team up on Web font delivery

Typography

Great news for anyone who cares about great-looking Web content: Adobe and Typekit are now offering a selection of Adobe typefaces for use in Web browsers.  Christopher Slye from the type team explains:

Every popular Web browser now supports font delivery over the web (via the CSS @font-face rule), giving designers more typographic options than ever before. We here at Adobe have been looking for the best way to get some of our most popular designs to you, so today we’re excited to announce a partnership with Typekit, the Web font pioneers of San Francisco who, since last year, have been leading the way in web font technology and delivery.

He goes on to share some details on the typefaces now offered:

Everyone knows Myriad and Minion — pervasive workhorse sans serif and serif typefaces, respectively, which will prove to be as useful on the Web as they have been in print. Thomas Phinney’s Hypatia Sans and Carol Twombly’s Chaparral are distinctive and versatile. Adobe Text is Robert Slimbach’s newest design which a lot of people haven’t even seen yet (so far it has only been available as a registration benefit for CS5 customers) but I’m certain it will quickly establish itself as a flexible and reliable text typeface, and I’m pleased it will now get a wider audience.

Richard Lipton’s classic Bickham Script is one of our most popular display typefaces and a distinctive addition to the Adobe Web Fonts collection. More of Robert Slimbach’s work now available for Web use include Adobe Garamond, Caflisch Script, Cronos, and the “display” designs for Garamond Premier (based on Claude Garamond’s beautiful Gros Canon type).

For complete details on browser support, licensing, etc., check out the project FAQ.

Photoshop Express comes to iPad

Mobile, Tablets

What do you do after more than 10 million people download your iPhone app? Bring it to the iPad, of course!

Photoshop Express–formerly called Photoshop.com Mobile–has been updated for both iPhone and iPad.  In addition to stability & performance improvements, iPad-specific features include:

  • Support for portrait and landscape orientations
  • Redesigned Online, Edit, and Upload workflows
  • Ability to work on multiple photos in sequence from within a single workflow
  • Redesigned Organizer view with simplified album sharing
  • Updated icons and visuals that make it easier to navigate and use the Editor
  • Ability to upload to Photoshop.com and Facebook simultaneously

 

The update went live yesterday, but it contained a couple of bugs for which it got justifiably dinged.  The bugs are now fixed; sorry that they got past the team initially. (Thanks, Apple, for pushing out the update quickly.)

Plenty of cool additional enhancements are in the works, and your feedback is more than welcome.

Adobe Drive 2 now available on Labs

Uncategorized

This one’s admittedly esoteric, but potentially interesting.

Adobe Drive lets Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign work more easily with asset management systems.  A preview version of Drive 2.0 for CS5 is ready for download from Adobe Labs, enabling you to:

  • Open and save files directly from the CMS/DAM server
  • Enter check-in or version comments
  • View multiple versions of managed files
  • Browse/search the CMS/DAM server for assets based on metadata

 

The interesting part is that Drive connects with third-party systems that support the CMIS standard.  I don’t have more details at the moment, but I’d like to see working with Photoshop and Subversion et al. made simpler.

Photoshop extensions: DiskFonts panel, Clarté script

Suite Development
  • The DiskFonts panel for CS5 offers a simple way to type in some text, then see it previewed in all the fonts on disk (not just those installed) on your system.  Running in Photoshop, Illustrator, and five other apps, it’s $29 from Anastasiy Safari (whom you may remember from his very handy MagicPicker panel).
  • Max Penson & Tal Ninio have started PSKiss.com, a site where they’ll offer simple scripts and tools for complicated Photoshop tasks.  First up is PS Kiss Clarté, a script that produces a similar effect to Camera Raw’s clarity control.  According to Max, “It also has negative clarity and a spacial algorithm to calculate the correct filter size according to the size of the image.”

Do you care about PNG-8 with transparency?

Mobile

Fans of Adobe Fireworks have long pointed out that Photoshop’s Save for Web feature doesn’t support the ability to generate an 8-bit PNG file with variable transparency.  That is, Photoshop’s 8-bit PNGs support 1-bit transparency (just like a GIF), whereas Fireworks PNGs support multiple semi-transparent colors. (Here’s a really ugly comparison I threw together.)

Question: Is this still relevant, e.g. in building mobile apps?  Is it important to the point where the Photoshop team should prioritize adding this support ahead of doing other Web-/mobile-oriented changes? [Update: If it’s relevant to you, it would be helpful to know specifically how/when you’d use it.]

Thanks,
J.

Flash video gets more efficient on Macs

Flash

I’m pleased to see that today’s update to Flash Player 10.1 (get it here) brings hardware-accelerated playback of H.264-encoded video to the Mac. Similar support has been available on Windows for some time, but it wasn’t until a recent OS update (10.6.3) that Apple enabled plug-in access to the necessary APIs. The Flash Player & Safari teams worked closely together to get things humming.

Long story short: If you’re running Snow Leopard on a supported Mac, you should get video playback with much lower CPU usage. If you’d like details see Flash Player engineer Tinic Uro’s post from April.

Lightroom 3.2, Camera Raw 6.2 available on Labs

Lightroom

Lightroom 3.2 and Camera Raw 6.2 are now available as Release Candidates on Adobe Labs. Lightroom adds direct publish functionality to Facebook, and both releases add new camera support:

  • Casio EXILIM EX-FH100 (DNG*)
  • Leica S2 (DNG*)
  • Panasonic DMC-FZ100
  • Panasonic DMC-FZ40 (FZ45)
  • Panasonic DMC-LX5
  • Pentax 645D
  • Samsung NX10
  • Samsung TL500 (EX1)
  • Sony A290
  • Sony A390
  • Sony Alpha NEX-3
  • Sony Alpha NEX-5

*The DNG raw file format is supported in previous versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw. This update improves the color and noise profiles for these models.

Numerous lens profiles have been added & bugs squashed, so please see the Lightroom Journal site for more details.

Contest: Design a shirt for Adobe MAX

Uncategorized

Designers & illustrators sometimes ask how to get their work featured on Adobe posters, etc. Here’s one opportunity:

Win $2000 + a copy of Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Design Premium software (MSRP US$1899) if your design is chosen the winner in the Threadless t-shirt design competition. Just use your design talents to create a tee inspired by the MAXtopia theme for Adobe MAX 2010. Contest ends August 29th, so don’t delay.

The purpose of the submissions relating to this promotion is to create a stand-alone design inspired by the challenge, not a brand tee. Your design should not have brand names or logos on it.

Visit the Threadless site for rules & other info–and good luck.

Scientific art: Macro eyes, colorful brains, & more

Photography, Scientific & Technical Imaging
  • Phil Hart has posted a lovely gallery of Bioluminescence and Weather Phenomena.  For me the two will always be associated with my one cruise in the US Navy, watching bioluminescent algae spatter the bridge windows of our ship all night during heavy seas–then puking my guts out (rinse & repeat). [Via]
  • Your Beautiful Eyes: I kinda can’t deal with this macro photography by Suren Manvelyan. (I feel a T.J. Eckleburg reference coming on.) [Via]
  • The Beautiful Brain: Artist, former lawyer, and MS patient Elizabeth Jameson colors images of her own & others’ brains, using her art to “make medical imaging and its representative humanity more accessible.” [Via]

Please welcome…

Uncategorized

As part of our family Egg:Basket Concentration Regimen 2010, I’m delighted to say that my wife Margot Liggett Nack has accepted a program management job at Adobe.  (Maybe the talk about Adobe being the second-best tech company to work for* finally wore her down.) She’ll be joining the digital video group in a few weeks to build… The Future (more details later).

As my friend Adolfo notes, “Now Adobe has 50% market penetration among Nacks (or Liggett-Nacks).” Two down, two to go.  In any case, welcome, hon!

*Curse your free food, Google!

Reminder: Learn DSLR video workflows tomorrow in SF

Uncategorized

Tomorrow at Adobe’s San Francisco office, Adobe evangelist Jason Levine will be showing the “Fundamentals of Working With DSLR Video;” please see the sign-up page and the notes below for more info.  If you can’t wait or can’t attend, you might want to check out “Getting Started with Premiere Pro CS5,” a recorded demo/Q&A session with filmmaker Dave Basulto.

For Jason’s session:

Learn the fundamentals of working with DSLR footage natively inside Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop. From basic import, creating sequences, adding effects and transitions, all the way through export. We’ll also cover questions regarding transcoding footage and using DSLR video with green screen.

Prior to Adobe, Jason was a full-time recording and mastering engineer, working in studios coast-to-coast, engineering hundreds of recordings from Classical to Country, Rock to Reggae. In 2008 alone, Jason presented to over 75,000 people from San Francisco to Singapore, Amsterdam to Auckland, and everywhere in between.