Monthly Archives: March 2012

Creating HTML Canvas content with Flash Pro

Flash, HTML5

Let’s get a lot more people making animated HTML5 content. To do that, we need to lower the barriers to entry. Letting the hundreds of thousands of people with Flash skills leverage those skills is a good solid step. Flash PM Tom Barclay shows how the Toolkit for CreateJS can help smooth the transition from ActionScript development to the JavaScript world.

And here Christian Cantrell goes into a bit more depth around things like sprite sheets:

Lightroom 4.1 Now Available on Adobe Labs

Lightroom

Lightroom 4.1 is now available as Release Candidates on Adobe Labs.  It adds support for the Canon 5D Mk III and, according to the Lightroom Journal, fixes a number of bugs:

  • Point Curve adjustments made in Lightroom 3 and before have been restored.
  • Lightroom 4 did not properly open external applications when using the “Edit In” functionality.
  • Addressed performance issues in Lightroom 4, particularly when loading GPS track logs, using a secondary monitor, and the controls within the Develop module.
  • Ability to update DNG previews and metadata for more than 100 photos has been restored.
  • This update allows for improved viewing of subfolders and stacks in folders with a large number of photos.
  • It was possible that a layout of a saved book could be lost after quitting Lightroom 4.
  • Please provide feedback on your experience with the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate in our feedback portal.

Demo: Lighting Effects in CS6

3D, CS6

For years, at the start of every Photoshop cycle, some version of the following conversation repeated itself:
“People really love Lighting Effects, but we haven’t touched it in *years*.”
“Yeah, there’s so much cool stuff we could do there! This should really be a major investment.”
“Ah, but we can’t this time… Could we at least just make the dang preview window bigger?”
“Well, that code was written on punch cards during the Nixon Administration, and the effect should really just work on canvas (no preview window at all), so really we should rewrite everything, but…”

…and so on.
At last, though, the team has had time to deliver something that’s worth the wait. Check out the goodness in action:

Photoshop CS6 beta: 500,000+ downloads & counting

Uncategorized

I’m delighted to see that the Photoshop CS6 beta has been downloaded more than half a million times in less than a week!  The response I’ve seen so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

Nice press quotes:

  • Gizmodo: “Photoshop CS6: The Best Update In Recent Memory“
  • PC Magazine:
    • “The future of creative image editing is upon us.
    • “You would think that after a program has been the leader in its field for over 20 years, there wouldn’t be much to add. But quite the opposite is the case with Adobe Photoshop CS6.
    • “The new version will thrill nearly all categories of users, from photographers to designers.
    • “All of this adds up to a superb upgrade that should make anyone serious about image editing salivate over Photoshop CS6.”
  • Wired: “Content-aware brushes, Liquify filter and new Blur tool will amaze. In-app search is a huge time-saver for sifting through giant stacks of layers.”
  • USA Today: “We’ve been testing CS6 for the last week, and having lots of fun with the new tools. The new interface is a huge improvement — the images really do look sharper and more pronounced.”

And from some designers I follow on Twitter:

  • “I’ll use it for a few days so I can give a better assessment, but so far: ball out of the park.” — Neven Mrgan
  • “I’ve been using PS CS6 for a while, and it’s been sweet… The truth is that CS6 has a bunch of changes that make my life a lot better but may piss off some users. Which is great. Adobe did well.” — Sebastiaan de With
  • “I think the community at large agrees: PS6 is an incredible update.” — Cameron Moll

Thanks for the kind words, guys!

Photoshop online seminars this week

CS6
  • On Thursday Photoshop diva Katrin Eismann will be talking photography, color management, and more. She’ll show off Smart Objects, Smart Filters, HDR creation using Nik’s HDR Efex Pro, and black & white conversion with Nik’s Silver Efex Pro. Sessions are at 12pm & 2pm Eastern. Register here.
  • On Friday Photoshop PM Zorana Gee will show new features in the Photoshop CS6 beta. She’ll give you an overview of the release as well as some tips and tricks on how to get started. The session is at 12pm Eastern. Register here.

A new color-picking panel for Photoshop

CS6, Suite Development

Check out the latest from Anastasiy Safari:

Did you know that computer-based color schemes do not correspond to fine art ones? Where you expect green to be a complement color to red, the computer gives you cyan. Why is that? Because computers usually use a HSV color model, while classic painters use a completely different color wheel. And it’s available now exclusively to Photoshop in the MagicPicker color wheel panel! Painters, photographers, designers and everyone else can know use their knowledge of classic arts. They can build their unique color schemes based on intuitive, real-world paint behavior.

MagicPicker 2.1 also brings a Photoshop CS6 beta support and a significant speed increase.

The full version costs $14.

Update: Here’s a screenshot:

Demo: Filter layers by name, type in Photoshop CS6

CS6, User Interface

Sometimes the best things are the smallest. I’m so weirdly proud of the layer searching shortcuts in PS CS6.

  • You can hit Cmd-Opt-Shift-F to put focus on the Layers panel’s new search field. Start typing and Photoshop will start displaying only the layers whose names match.
  • Hitting the same command highlights the text in the field, letting you start typing again to filter with a new string.
  • Hitting Delete clears the field, making Layers display all layers again.
  • Hitting Return/Enter will put keyboard focus back onto PS proper (consistent with how other text fields work in the app). Esc does the same but also cancels whatever change you just made.

 

Note that clearing the field isn’t the same as toggling filtering on/off with the little red switch to the right. Why? Because toggling the switch is non-destructive: You can set up filtering criteria (e.g. show me all text & adjustment layers), then quickly enable/disable filtering; you don’t have to keep setting up the parameters.

A big deal, used by tons & tons of people? Maybe not. But to me it speaks volumes about quality and craftsmanship, and God help me, I live for this stuff.

Here Grant Friedman of PSDTUTS quickly demos the basics:

Great places to learn about Photoshop CS6

Uncategorized

More great content is going live all the time, so feel free to mention good things we may have missed.

PS Touch, Ideas bundled with new Galaxy Note

Mobile, Photoshop Touch, Tablets

Says Engadget:

PS Touch is the Note 10.1’s undisputed S-Pen gem. Creative pros will find comfort in this tablet adaptation of Adobe’s über-popular Photoshop program, as most of the features, though laid out differently, remain intact. While it’s not a complete replacement for a desktop graphics workstation, the app does give pros some flexibility, letting them create on-the-go much the same way they’d do in the office or at home.

[Via Stephen Nielson]

CS6 is the biggest Web/screen design upgrade in 12 years

CS6

If you design apps, Web pages, or anything else for the screen, you need to check out this terrific overview of Photoshop CS6 improvements from UI design expert Marc Edwards.  A few of my favorites:

  • Real strokes (including dashes) on vectors, with a faster (Options Bar) way to edit them
  • Type styles (both character & paragraph)
  • Better font anti-aliasing
  • Path snapping & anti-aliasing improvements (critical for exacting work)
  • Layer search/filtering (e.g. show me just the type layers in this doc)
  • Multiple strokes per layer (you can apply a new vector stroke + a traditional layer effect stroke, and by applying layer effects at the group level, you can effectively put multiple sets of layer effects on each layer)

…and that’s a truncated list. Check out Marc’s article for more.

We had so many of these improvements in mind for many years, but other work like the Cocoa & 64-bit transitions kept getting in the way. (Type styles & layer searching almost made the cut for CS5.)  It’s not since Photoshop 6.0, which introduced shape layers & which was released back in 2000, that the team has made this much progress for Web/UI folks in one rev. We hope you like it.

[By the way, if you’re stuck on CS4 or earlier, you can also check out all the Web/screen enhancements we made in CS5, too.]

Come download Photoshop CS6!

CS6

I’m delighted to announce that a preview release of Photoshop CS6 is available for download from Adobe Labs.  New awesomeness:

Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop. Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.

New and re-engineered design tools — Create superior designs fast. Get consistent formatting with type styles, create and apply custom strokes and dashed lines to shapes, quickly search layers, and much more.

Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.

 

Here Russell Brown shows off his six favorite features (Camera Raw enhancements, wide-angle image correction, Blur Gallery, and more):

 

And here Julieanne Kost shows off her six favorite features, including type styles (!), vector layers with real stroke & fill (!!), video editing, and more:

 

There’s much more info to come, and I look forward to zeroing in on the Web & app design features especially. In the meantime, go grab yourself a copy, and check out the user forum to ask the team questions & share your feedback.

Adobe Ideas gets new features on iOS, Android

Illustration, Mobile, Tablets

Adobe Ideas 1.6 for iOS is now live in the App Store. New features:

  • Easily pick up colors using the new Eyedropper tool
  • Choose colors using new HSB and RGB color pickers
  • Drag and drop to save your own color themes
  • Name your ideas to distinguish them on your device and for easier sharing
  • Use up to 10 drawing layers for each sketch at no extra cost

 

Ideas 1.5.1 for Android is live in Google Play. This version will also be bundled with the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. New features:

  • Bug fixes, including a fix for a problem with sign-in to the Creative Cloud on Android 4.0 (ICS)
  • Support for Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 S-Pen

 

Metadata can kill you

Uncategorized

How’s that for a salacious, click-baiting title? But this bit from the US Army is eye-opening:

A real-world example from 2007: When a new fleet of helicopters arrived with an aviation unit at a base in Iraq, some soldiers took pictures on the flightline, he said. From the photos that were uploaded to the Internet, the enemy was able to determine the exact location of the helicopters inside the compound and conduct a mortar attack, destroying four of the AH-64 Apaches.

[Via John Dowdell]

CSS Regions: One Year In

HTML5

To make tablet publications lighter weight & more dynamic (offering liquid layout, etc.), publishers need HTML to get smarter.  Otherwise, to get the layout richness their brands require, they’re stuck with things like creating huge piles of PNGs.

That’s why Adobe’s been helping advance proposals for CSS Regions & Exclusions.  To hear about the progress they’re making, check out CSS Regions: One Year In. (For background, see the demo below from a couple of months back.)

Come help us make WebKit more kickass

Uncategorized

“The better the web, the better tools we can build, and the happier our customers.” With that in mind, Adobe’s putting more & more muscle into advancing HTML standards & helping rendering engines support them.

Adobe’s WebKit Contributions group is improving the web as a platform for applications by implementing features that enable new classes of applications, new levels of application richness, and by improving the tools web developers use to create, debug, profile, test and maintain applications. Features are developed in the open and contributed to WebKit trunk. This group works closely with web application developers and the web standards community to identify opportunities for improvement.

Currently open positions:

  • Engineering Manager – WebKit Development — 11843
  • Sr. Computer Scientist – WebKit Development — 11836
  • Computer Scientist – WebKit Development — 11835
  • WebKit Engineering Intern — 13714
  • QE developer for WebPlatform/WebKit — 13989

Just type in the corresponding job number, or simply search for “WebKit.” Hope to meet you soon!

A new Lightroom 4 video workshop

Lightroom

Former Adobe evangelist George Jardine is now offering the Adobe Lightroom 4 Video Workshop, 16 new tutorials that focus on the Library workflow & digital asset management:

This all-new set of 16 video tutorials gives you over 6 hours of the very best online education available. It covers the Adobe Lightroom 4 Library and your digital photo library management from top to bottom. We start from the ground up, and guide any serious photographer—professional or passionate amateur—through the process of building an easy-to-use, but incredibly effective digital photo library. The complete series is only $24.95.

A sample video (“Collections & Virtual Copies”) is available to check out.

Motion graphics: A Hunter S. Thompson homage… for a bookstore?

Illustration

“It is not very often that we have the opportunity to create a graphic equivalent of a drug-fueled rant bringing all of our collective skills to bear,” writes the team at Buck. “And it is almost unfathomable that we could actually do something like this and benefit a good cause.”

The project promotes Good Books, an online bookseller that passes all its profits through to Oxfam. [Via Russell Williams]

Do not taunt Angry Time Machine

Uncategorized

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. — Not Jack Handey

If you’ve had trouble backing up your Mac via Time Machine–as I did once I installed Lion–do not, for the love of God, push your luck and try to use Time Machine to migrate data from one Mac to another. Just don’t.

Details if you want ’em:

Post-10.7, I couldn’t update my backups on my Drobo and Time Capsule, nor could I get one to work on the new USB 3.0 drive I bought for the job. When I tried a fresh FireWire drive, however, everything seemed cool. Thus when my new Mac arrived, I tried transferring apps & data via the Migration Assistant.

And now begins the screamin’ & the wailin’: The apps that made it over were all zero KB, and files never transferred. Not a big deal, I thought: I can just re-install apps & move files manually.  The trouble is, when I tried to install Apple Motion, I got a series of errors about missing files (ProKit). I tried various work arounds, including installing the FCP X trial.  Soon, though, all the Apple apps, as well as iPhoto, were crashing on launch.  It seems that the failed app migration stomped a bunch of critical libraries.

Here’s the excellent part, though: Lion’s airbag works great.  At the advice of my exhausted Apple friend (who’d been supplying would-be fixes), I finally reinstalled the OS. Fearing the worst (bare-metal, nuke-from-orbit, dogs-and-cats-living-together stuff), I backed up my files and blocked off a bunch of time. I still cannot believe how well it went: restarted the machine, held down Cmd-R, okayed a couple of prompts, and half an hour later 10.7.3 was up and running as if nothing had happened.  Everything (open docs, browser history, passwords, etc.) was restored.  I’m still kind of holding my breath, but so far, so amazingly good.  Hats off to the Apple folks behind this capability.

Brad Bird on morale

Uncategorized

Via his Pixar colleague Michael Johnson:

In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Interview: Adobe inside the CSS Working Group

HTML5

Eng manager Arno Gourdol nails it:

We are in a unique position: we have deep expertise in relevant areas (typography, animation, layout, digital imaging, video and so on) and we have a deep understanding of the needs of creative customers who want to use the web to express themselves. We can represent their point of view and advocate on their behalf. The better the web, the better tools we can build, and the happier our customers.

Check out the rest of his interview with Molly Holzschlag for details (Adobe’s priorities on CSS; Regions & Exclusions; Shaders; and more).

Adobe Edge (HTML5 animation) Preview 5 is available

HTML5

Sounds like a lot of great stuff in the new build (available free on Adobe Labs):

New Publishing and Optimization Features:

  • Publish to web: Preview 5  has an option to specify if jQuery should be packaged with the composition, or downloaded from a CDN to produce lighter code and improve caching.
  • Down-level browser support: Define a fallback state of a composition for non-HTML5 browsers like IE8 and below.
  • Preloader improvements: Choose what gets shown during the preloader (before the framework, jQuery, or composition is loaded).

Emphasis on animation:

  • Timeline: We made several significant improvements to the timeline that make composing animations much easier and faster, such as an easier to use Pin (formerly the Mark) and smarter playback behavior.
  • On-stage tools: New clip and transform tools make it easier to manipulate objects and create animation effects.

Many other enhancements:

  • Improved symbol functionality, stage editing options, the ability to swap images, more intuitive contextual menus, many bug fixes, and much more have been added to preview 5.

"What happened to Fill Light and Recovery?"

Lightroom

The Lightroom team has evolved the editing control set in the just-released LR4, replacing a couple of popular but sometimes problematic controls:

Recovery can result in muddy highlights, and Fill Light can lead to visible halos at high-contrast boundaries. Furthermore, it is difficult to transfer the technology behind these controls to local adjustments.

With Process Version 2012 in Lightroom 4, we have introduced a new set of Basic tone controls that overcomes these limitations and results in much higher image quality. For example, the Highlights and Shadows tools are optimized for very high contrast images, produce much smoother highlight and shadow gradations, are available as local adjustments, and minimize halo artifacts.

Check out the Lightroom Journal for more details. [Via Jan Kabili]

Hasselblad cameras will ship with Lightroom 4

Lightroom

Badasses unite:

Hasselblad’s Chris Russell-Fish said: “Integrating the Adobe platform with Hasselblad is a ground-breaking step… [N]ow all users can have the excellence of a Hasselblad image file married to the functionality and ease of use of Adobe Lightroom.”

Hasselblad customers who buy new medium format H4D cameras will receive Lightroom 4 software with their new camera equipment at no additional cost.”

 

Digital Publishing Suite to support the new iPad

Mobile, Tablets

Good news:

When the new iPad ships, Digital Publishing Suite customers will have support for these new features in the enterprise-signed Adobe Content Viewer. This means you’ll be able to display stunning, full-bleed, immersive publications using every pixel of the 2048 x 1536 display with richer color saturation using Adobe Content Viewer technology.  When the newest build of Content Viewer is approved in the Apple App Store, these features will be supported in all published new iPad applications.

Learn more about how to start publishing with DPS.

Introducing Adobe Shadow for mobile development

Mobile

Emulators only get you so far, and that’s where the new Adobe Shadow comes in:

Web pros can wirelessly pair multiple smartphones and tablets with their computer and simultaneously view real-time previews of Web content across multiple iOS and Android devices, quickly seeing refreshed website designs with live updates… Adobe Shadow’s synchronized browsing nearly eliminates the need to touch the device, but still provides a real, on-device experience.

 

 

Adobe Shadow is available now, in English, worldwide on Adobe Labs. It’s made of several components, including Mac and Windows desktop software, a Google Chrome extension for desktop browser synchronization, and mobile apps for iOS and Android tablets and phones. Free Android and iOS applications for Adobe Shadow are currently available in the Android Market and the iTunes Store.

Check it out and let us know what you think via the forum on Labs.