Monthly Archives: July 2013

[OT] One of the best Lego investments you can make

Apropos of nothing (well, except that I’m getting jazzed for our first-ever trip to Legoland next week!), $12.99 gets you a sack o’ wheels & axles. Our boys delight in making hilariously offbeat “vehicles” (incredibly long series of planks connected via random wheels, etc.), and you can never, ever have too many wheels and axles.

Glamorous? No. A catalyst for hours of good times? You bet.

Adobe Ideas adds pressure-sensitive stylus support, more

Improvements in the newly released version of Adobe’s vector-drawing app include:

  • Stylus Support – Ideas now includes pressure-sensitive stylus support for Ten One Design’s Pogo Connect Bluetooth Pen, which enables users to be more expressive with their drawing strokes and achieve creative effects more naturally. It also allows for palm rejection so that users can draw while resting their palm on the iPad without interference. In addition, users cancontrol their brushes, colors, opacity and size by simply tapping the button on the pen. Pogo Connect works with the iPad 3, 4 and iPad Mini.
  • Stroke Smoothing – Based on community feedback, designers can now choose their preference on what line smoothing method works best for them. Users can choose to smooth the drawing stroke while drawing for increased accuracy, or after to achieve smoother curves.
  • Share to other applications – Users can also share designs to other applications such as Behance and Photoshop Touch.

110 animators tackle a single typeface in After Effects

Check out Franchise Animated:

For this specific animated typeface we have rounded up 110 talented animators from all over the world. We asked every animator to pick a glyph and animate it using no more than 4 colors, 25 frames and a 500 x 600 px canvas in Adobe After Effects. The animators had complete freedom to work their magic within those 25 frames. The result is a wide variety of styles and techniques. The color palette and letterforms tie it all together.

The downloadable source file contains all the keyframes, expressions and artwork from the artists. This makes it a great learning source for motion students and professionals. 

[Vimeo] [Via]

Adobe Configurator 4 for Photoshop, InDesign released

Streamlining complex apps isn’t easy, but it can pay off hugely.

That’s why we created Adobe Configurator, the tool for creating your own custom panels that can be shared & saved as workspaces in Photoshop and InDesign. This was my pet project for a long time, and I’m pleased to say that Configurator 4 is now available. It helps you easily roll your own panels for both CS6 and CC versions of PS/ID.

Configurator 4 is compatible with Photoshop CC and CS6, and InDesign CS6; supports new features and automatic conversion of existing panels. The latest release supports the new Adobe Exchange. To distribute and share panels you create in Configurator with other Creative Cloud and Creative Suite 6 users. The Configurator 4 release offers these new features:

  • Support for Creative Cloud: With this release, you can create panels for Photoshop CC, as well as for Photoshop CS6 and InDesign CS6.
  • Automatic Conversion: The automatic conversion feature has been extended, so that if you open a CS5.x panel for Photoshop, you can convert it to either the CS6 or CC version.
  • Open extensions from a panel: A new widget allows your user to open other Adobe Application Extensions from your panel. You must provide the ID of the extension to open.
  • New scripting functionality: The HTML widget now has enhanced scripting capabilities that allow you to open other extensions and call into the ExtendScript DOM of the host application.
  • Hi-DPI support: You can create panels that will run in high resolution on Apple Retina™ Displays.

Are you using Configurator or panels made with it? If so I’d love to see what you’ve created & to hear how you’d like these technologies to evolve.

Friday demo/Q&A: Improve your career via Behance

Sure, well over a million people use Behance, but there’s so much power yet to unlock. Check out this session at noon Pacific* on Friday:

Mell Perling, Community Manager at Behance, as she demonstrates how Behance can take your work directly from the cloud and into the creative community on Behance. In this Ask A Pro session, you will:

  • See how being on Behance increases the discoverability of your work
  • Share work on Behance easily using your files from Creative Cloud and in CC apps
  • Learn how Behance fits into your Creative Cloud workflow
  • Explore the activity and inspiration stream of Behance on Creative Cloud Desktop
  • Harness the power of the creative community on Behance

time zone convertor

Video: Every Photoshop filter packed into one animated tribute

Clinton-Dole… Toad the Wet Sprocket… “the Jennifer”… Oh, excuse me: During the seizure that this clip induced, I fell down a memory hole into the mid-’90s when I swiped the “Gallery Effects” set of filters from an Adobe CD. They were later bundled into Photoshop, and thus appear here:

“Photoshop CS5 Filters Animation” is a small tribute to Photoshop filters. We used the Ps logo and systematically applied the filters in the same way, seeking the essence of the software, exploring the aesthetic values of its resources but letting the spectator judge them. […]
[The video shows] every filter one after each other, with a custom sound design that uses the same sound for each filter but with a different distortion effect for every case, exporting the graphical concept to the sound.

[Vimeo] [Via]

Lightroom 5: A video deep dive into Develop

Former Lightroom evangelist George Jardine has returned with what promises to be another great set of training videos:

The new Develop video series for Lightroom 5 is ready to go. This time I’ve expanded the series to 23 videos with over 6.5 hours of instruction, music, and great examples to help you master the new Develop controls.

George has posted a sample movie covering the crop tool. Access to the whole set costs $29.95.

Illustration that can save you from shark attack?

That’s what Australian company Shark Attack Mitigation Systems claims with their new wetsuits. Seems like dazzle camouflage for humans—though hopefully more effective. Design Taxi writes,

Sharks rely on their vision when going in for the kill, so the two new designs work to confuse and counter a shark’s dependence on its vision.
The first design, the ‘Cryptic Pattern’, is meant for divers and swimmers. Researchers say that “sharks have trouble seeing this pattern because of its disruptive coloration blends into the background”.
The ‘Warning Pattern’, designed for surfers, warns the shark against the wearer by imitating the warning patterns of fish that send out a “stay away” message.


[YouTube] [Via]

Attend Photoshop World, get a free year of Creative Cloud

Very cool. To quote a very excited-sounding Scott Kelby:

As I’m writing this, I gotta tell ya — I can’t believe it myself, but Adobe is giving everyone who attends the upcoming Photoshop World Conference & Expo (Sept 4-6, 2013) in Vegas, a FULL one year Adobe Creative Cloud membership. I am just floored!

That’s a $600 membership, because you get it all!!! Photoshop CC, Lightroom, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Muse, Dreamweaver, and on and on, and it all comes with your paid full conference registration. […]

You can sign up right now for a full conference pass for $598 (or just $498 if you’re already a NAPP member). Here’s the link. This is you’re best deal….well…ever!

Beautiful art from a 97yo using MSFT Paint. I am not kidding.

“I came here to pimp Adobe products & chew bubblegum—and I’m all out of Adobe products…” Well no, but I like being reminded that tools are just tools, and artists can make beauty from the simplest of media. As Colossal explains,

Meet Hal Lasko, mostly known as Grandpa, a 97-year-old man who uses Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95 to create artwork that has been described as “a collision of pointillism and 8-Bit art.” Lasko, who is legally blind, served in WWII drafting directional and weather maps for bombing raids and later worked as a typographer (back when everything is done by hand) for clients such as General Tire, Goodyear and The Cleveland Browns before retiring in the 1970s. Decades after his retirement his family introduced him to Microsoft Paint and he never looked back. 

[Vimeo] [Via]

HTML5 meet up at Adobe SF on Thursday

Tantek Çelik, Web Standards Lead at Mozilla, will be speaking at the SFHTML5 meetup, 6-9pm:

New HTML5 elements and microformats give us a simple way to represent web data without additional URLs, file formats, or callbacks. Microformats2 and HTML5 improvements bring better accessibility, simpler markup, improved semantics, and a direct mapping to JSON APIs for data consumers.

Millions of web sites use microformats to make their data available. Other approaches have emerged as well (e.g. RDFa, microdata, OGP, schema, Twitter Cards). Tantek will discuss which microformats to use for search engines and for public APIs.

Adobe Kuler gets enhancements (beta)

Check ’em out here. According to the product team, enhancements include the following:

  1. Extract color themes from an image: The original Kuler web app included the ability to extract a theme from an image. That feature is back. Just click the camera icon in the upper right corner of the Create page and choose a photofrom your library.
  2. A color wheel in two sizes: When we updated the interface many of our long-term users thought we’d made the color wheel too large. Now, with a click, the wheel can be larger when you need it and smaller when you don’t.
  3. Reduced borders around individual colors in a theme: Now you can see more of each color and the play and interaction between them.

Kuler

DSLR footage for the rest of us?

“Encourage [your kids] to play somewhere well-lit,” they say. Riiight… and the rest of the time, a big aperture (with corresponding shallow depth of field) is your friend. This has meant, unfortunately, that on the relatively few occasions I’ve tried it, I’ve gotten pretty miserable results shooting video with a DSLR: kids run in & out of focus with abandon, and without any sort of autofocus, I’m lost.

Now, however, the Canon 70D promises great things in that regard:

At present I’m shooting with an original 5D (passed on to me by Bryan O’Neil Hughes when he upgraded to the 5D Mark II, and still one of the nicest gifts I’ve ever gotten), but I’m starting to feel sorely tempted to upgrade, even sight-unseen. Any reason I shouldn’t? Yeah yeah, there’s the whole not-full-frame thing, but I think people get a little irrationally fetishistic about that one, and I doubt I’ll die as my 24-70mm f/2.8 lens ends up effectively zooming in a bit. (By the way, it’s the investment in that thing that’s keeping me in the Canon camp, but I’m open to hearing ideas from Nikon & other shooters.)

In any case, I’m excited that the technology is evolving to this point, and at a fairly attainable price point to boot. Viva competition.

"Search Replace Transfer" for Lightroom upgraded

Photographer John Beardsworth has upgraded his Search Replace Transfer for Lightroom:

  • Search and replace features
    • Searches and replaces text like a word processor
    • Appends text before or after existing text in metadata fields
    • Transfers text between fields
    • Changes the case of text fields
    • Copies the filename to the title field
    • Copies location metadata to keywords – and vice versa
    • Copies location metadata between IPTC-Core and IPTC-Extension fields
  • Parse + audit features
    • Transfers metadata from iView/Expression Media to 18 custom fields
    • Looks for missing metadata – title, caption and keywords
    • Adds custom field for months

The free version runs on 10 images at a time. Paying £20 (about $30) removes that limitation.

Instagram video -> Legos

Zorana Gee talks about writing a coffee table book called “…For San Jose,” which would bestow the left-handed compliment of saying, for example, “Yeah, that’s a great restaurant… for San Jose.”

I’ve wondered this about Instagram videos (and Vine, for that matter): Good, or just hard? Is this stuff worthwhile, or only “good” if you lower your expectations?

I realized, though, it’s like people building with Legos*: It is cool to see what people can do within certain constraints. One doesn’t judge a watercolor using the same criteria as for an oil painting. Different media, differently beautiful. Hey, I didn’t say it was a profound insight, but it’s made me feel better about these ultra-short-form videos as their own genre—and at last I’ve captured one I quite like.

By the way, I’m curious: Do people actually watch videos, and do they capital-L Like them? I’m finding that the vids I’ve posted draw only about one half to one third the likes of a typical photo of mine. Hopefully the companies will someday reveal numbers on actual consumption (and not just sharing) of these vids. I’d love to see whether it increases or decreases over time.

*fine, “LEGO,” pedants

Apply to become an Adobe Student Rep

This would’ve been a good gig for me back in the day (when I was an Apple student rep):

If you’re passionate about design or video and want hands-on marketing and event planning experience with a company that is changing the world through digital experiences, this program is for you.
The ideal Student Rep will be creative, entrepreneurial, and well-connected, with strong online and offline social networks. A deep knowledge of and passion for Adobe applications is essential. This career-building position will potentially lead to a creative internship in a top advertising agency, so the ability to work independently to meet deadlines and reporting requirements will be hugely beneficial.

Check out the program page for complete details.

An augmented-reality coloring book

ColAR (iOS/Android) is “the coloring book of the future.” As TechCrunch explains,

First, you go to colAR’s web site and print out your coloring page of choice (the free app usually comes with one option included and a few others available for in-app purchase, but their full catalog is free until July 28th)… Once you’re done [coloring], pop open the app, and hit the “Play” button to bring up a camera view. Hold your drawing up to the camera, and bam! It takes your work of art and wraps it around an animated 3D model.


If only one could draw a Centrifugal Bumblepuppy in this thing, it would be perfect. (Or my head would explode. Or both.)

Tippett Studios FX come to an app

Cool news from stop-motion legend Phil Tippett:

The Tippett Creature Shop, featuring downloadable, quality creature animations including dinosaurs, robots, dragons, zombies, monsters and penguins has just opened in the free app Efexio, a marketplace for special effects. Standard animations are priced between $0.99 and $1.99. Pro versions are available for between $4.99 and $9.99 for those users who wish to export videos at full HD resolution. Each animation is fully textured.
Efexio comes with one free effect and a new free effect will be released each month.


Check out the app’s community channel for more info. [Via Dan Goldman]

The Adobe Output Module returns, now in Bridge CC

Good news:

When Bridge CC shipped, it shipped without the Adobe Output Module, which allowed you to create PDF Presentations and Web Galleries. Adobe Output Module is now available for Bridge CC. Use the instructions below to install it.

Make sure you have the most recent version of Bridge CC installed. To check for updates, in Bridge, choose Help > Updates. Follow the instructions to install any updates.

Check out the page for download links & installation instructions. Update: Sorry, a database problem is presently causing trouble with the download links. If they’re not working for you, please try again in a bit.

Stay frosty, Star Wars

  •  Vesa Lehtimäki makes terrific images of Legos on Hoth. On Flickr he shares some of his techniques (e.g. creating snow by using ground plaster of Paris flakes underwater).
  • Adobe’s own Christian Cantrell makes tons of fun Lego Star Wars portraits (e.g. the pet AT-AT below).
  • Elsewhere on Wired Spencer Ackerman breaks down what Kottke calls “The hubris and folly of Darth Vader at Hoth.” (Pro tip: “Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.”)
  • On Quora someone dares to ask, “Did the Rebel Alliance really blow up the Death Star, or was it all planned by Vader and the Emperor to drum up support for their war against the terrorists?”
  • And this… I don’t even know what to say about this. But I want to drive it, immediately.

 

ATAT

MirrorMe plug-in brings instant symmetry to Illustrator

Astute Graphics, makers of popular & powerful Illustrator plug-ins like VectorScribe, have introduced the cool-looking MirrorMe for Illustrator CS5 & above:

  • User-defined origin and axis angle
  • User-defined number of axes
  • Flexible live annotations to keep you informed
  • Pause and resume mirroring on layers
  • Copy and paste mirror axes in and across documents
  • Auto-trim and joining of paths across axes

The product costs £39 +VAT (approximately $58 / €45) and is part of their larger product bundle (£149/$225/€173).

Premiere Pro CC gets 20+ improvements

“In my 18 years here at Adobe,” writes video specialist Dave Helmly, “I’ve never seen this many updates in .01 release.” This is just a matter of weeks after version CC first shipped. PM Al Mooney writes,

One of the best things about Creative Cloud is that we’re able to develop and release features in cadence with the demands of this rapidly growing and evolving industry… These features are focused in the areas of timeline editing, viewing, navigation and media management, and are direct responses to customer feedback we’ve been closely listening to. The release also includes a number of bug fixes, including a documented critical bug with multicam workflows, and is recommended for all users.

Check out the list of improvements on the team blog. See also the improvements just made to Adobe Media Encoder, and lastly this comprehensive list of updates to Adobe video apps (CS4 onward).

Shake Reduction vs. Smart Sharpen in Photoshop CC

How do the various improvements to sharpening in Photoshop CC relate to each other? PM Zorana Gee posted a blurb I found helpful:

Shake Reduction is to remove blur caused by subtle shaking of your camera. Smart Sharpen is about sharpening the existing pixels (2D blurs) – no analysis of image or how the blur happened. They do actually work quite well together. Start with Shake Reduction as it requires the most original data in order to find the blur trace and then use Smart Sharpen.

Update: Zorana points out a detailed article on shake reduction (showing numerous before/after examples) from Andy Trice.

Warm photos, warm hearts

I’ve always said that Instagram isn’t about photography, but rather about making people feel loved & validated. Perhaps the warmth of “vintage” effects is more than figurative. The NYT, writing about the benefits of nostalgia:

It has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer.

Alternatively, guzzle sepia-hued video clips until your phone toasts your palms. [Via]

Bruce Lee gets unearthed through CGI

For real?

Creator Joseph Kahn writes,

My good friend BBH Creative Executive Johnny Tan and I first talked about doing this concept a year ago. We shot it in Hong Kong, and then we worked with vfx company The Mill in London to create a completely CGI Bruce Lee over nine months. EVERY shot of his head and every detail in there is completely cgi. We got Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, to come aboard and we really picked her brain to make sure that everything was accurate from look to soul. We wanted to be as respectful to the man and legend as we could.

Be like water, my friend, so that someday you may bend when they dig up & puppet you, too. [Vimeo] [Via Fran Roig]

What's the most effective way to request product improvements?

In brief, tell product creators what you’re trying to accomplish, then give them a chance to figure out how to help you accomplish it.

Lightroom creator & longtime Photoshop leader Mark Hamburg puts things really well:

Lists of desired features are interesting because they let us know what it is you want. Descriptions of what these features should do are interesting because it provides clarity around how you think about the features.

But what really scores points are use cases. Tell us what you are trying to do because that tells us what problem we need to go solve.

For example:

“I shoot pictures of sunsets. Almost always this generates a lot of photos — 10, 20, 30, 100. I want to share the photos but I want to just share a few so as not to overwhelm my audience. I need Revel to make it easier to go from 10 to 100 photos down to 2 to 5 photos.”

Note that that didn’t specify particular features. It specified a problem and what it gave us was a use case that we can reference and judge features against. It sets us up to ask “how well does the image review feature work for solving the sunset problem”?

Sometimes the use case for a feature is obvious. But that’s not always true, and by couching requests and discussions in terms of use cases, we have another way to check and confirm that we are all on the same wavelength.

Photoshop users, Jeff has your back

My friend Jeff Tranberry is one of the great unsung heroes of the Photoshop community. After working in design & photography, he joined Adobe, did many years of testing of Photoshop & ImageReady, and most recently became Chief Customer Advocate. He tackles what’s sometimes “an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about*” on behalf of customers, all while maintaining composure during his little daughter’s medical odyssey. You can read about Jeff & his work on the Photoshop team blog.

*Okay, Cameron Crowe’s words, not Jeff’s, but always kinda great