Who says that absurdly high-res televisions won’t change the world? Not LG, whose little prank walks the brilliant/brutal line:
[Via Chris Regan]
Conceivably related: Store mirrors can now be programmed to make your prospective purchases look better—and make you look happier holding them up.
Monthly Archives: September 2013
Animate storyboards with "Boardo" for AE
Stu Maschwitz has created Boardo, “A set of animation presets that streamline the process of creating an animated storyboard, or board-o-matic, in Adobe After Effects CS6 and greater.”
I love that the built-in camera shake settings include “Mounted Inside Speeding Car” and “Mounted To Saturn V Rocket.”
[Vimeo]
Demo/Q&A Friday: Designing for any screen with vectors
Lots o’ tips for Illustrator & beyond from Justin Seeley, tomorrow at noon* Pacific time:
- Setting up Illustrator for a web workflow
- Designing for mobile responsive layouts
- Using & setting up grid systems
- Web graphic optimization
- New CSS & SVG features of Illustrator CC
Photographers: A great new deal on Photoshop CC + Lightroom
I’m pleased to say that if you own Photoshop CS3 or higher, you’ll be able to get Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, and more for $9.99 per month.
Photoshop VP Winston Hendrickson writes, “One common request was a solution specifically tailored for photographers. We listened, and at Photoshop World we’re announcing a special offer for our loyal Photoshop customers.” The new package includes:
- Photoshop CC
- Lightroom 5
- 20 GB of online storage
- Behance ProSite (custom site/portfolio hosting)
- Access to the online video tutorials in Creative Cloud
The Photoshop team provides some details:
To be clear, $9.99 is not an introductory price. It is the price for those of you who sign up by December 31, 2013. This offer will be available at the same time we introduce the new version of Lightroom 5.2 in a couple weeks. Visit the FAQ to learn more and follow Photoshop on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to find out when the offer goes live.
To reiterate: the intention is not to get you in at $9.99/mo., then crank up the price after a year. $9.99 is the expected ongoing price.
I know that this change won’t address every concern, but I’m happy that the offer makes it much easier for photographers who want just two Adobe apps to get the benefits of Photoshop CC & the Creative Cloud. As time goes by the cloud component will grow more & more valuable, and I’m excited that more people will be able to get new capabilities the moment they’re available.
Check out the Photoshop World keynote, live this morning
Streaming starts at 9am Pacific. You’ll get to hear about Adobe’s vision for the future of photography workflows. There will be news I think you’ll find interesting.
Photoshop + GoPro = Aerial pano
Russell Brown compares panorama creation via stills vs. video capture, then imports video frames to Photoshop layers & works his magic (color- and lens-correcting via Camera Raw):
A storytelling app I want but can't build; maybe you can.
The Micronaxx & I make up bizarre, freewheeling bedtime stories nearly every night, just as my dad did with me. Unlike in the old days, we at least occasionally record the stories, but it’s rare. What would change that, giving us a better archive of family memories? I’d like a mobile app that would:
- Record you telling your kids bedtime stories (maybe after prompting you just before bedtime)
- Transcribe the text
- Organize the sound & text files (into a book, journal, and/or timeline layout)
- Let you add descriptive metadata & tags to stories
- Enable easy publishing from the journal to a blog, Tumblr, etc.
- Maybe let you add other supporting media (illustrations, photos, links, etc.)
- Maybe let you present those images, etc. at various times as the story progresses
I think the key thing is in the recording/transcription: Without that it’s dead in the water, even for a guy like me. Prompting & organization would be good, but I really want to see the output (even if rough).
I won’t get to build such an app anytime soon, if ever, so I’m throwing the idea into the ether in case you’d find it interesting (either as a user or as a developer). Maybe the “bedtime story” angle seems too niche-y, but you might be surprised: RapGenius started just by annotating rap lyrics & is now very well funded to socially annotate any kind of document. “Do one thing well” instead of starting with ocean-boiling.
If you’d pay for such an app, please speak up—and if you’d build it, I’ll happily be your first customer.
Photography: Atom-Lapse
Beautiful time lapse work from Richard Bentley. (And yes—previously unbeknownst to me—Atomium is a real building.)
The sleeper hit in iOS7 (?)
[Update: I’m not taking about making it possible to transfer photos wirelessly to iPads/iPhones. That kind of works today, but it’s laborious. I’m talking about making it Just Work.]
For the last 3+ years, customers have clubbed me over the head with the following request:
I want to go on a hike, vacation, etc. and toss my iPad in my bag. I want to pair my nice camera (SLR, Micro 4/3rds, etc.) with the iPad just as easily as I could any Bluetooth device. As I shoot (or later), I want to beam my raw files right into the iPad. I want to review those images on a 10″ rather than a 2″ screen. I want to swipe through to pick the good ones & hide the crap. I might want to apply some edits & share the output directly, but when I get home, I want all the images & their edits appear in Lightroom, ready for any further work.
I want that, too. Everyone wants that. Could we finally be getting there?
AirDrop in iOS7 makes it easy to have nearby iOS devices share photos and videos. Will this extend to pairing cameras with iPhones & iPads, particularly if the former support Wi-Fi Direct? I don’t know—but man, my fingers are going blue from being crossed so long. (Meanwhile we’re not just sitting around, either.)
In tangentially related news, it’s rumored that Sony is about to announce “lens cameras” that connect to & augment smartphones, communicating via Wi-Fi. They promise to combine more powerful optics with immediate access to processing & sharing.
It’ll be fascinating to see how all this plays out. Here’s hoping Apple is working to extend the connective tissue & help make things seamless.
Neat event photography idea: A slow-mo photo booth
What a cool concept from Seattle’s excellently named Super Frog Saves Tokyo: a photo booth set up at a wedding featuring a RED Epic camera capable of shooting at 160fps.
As PetaPixel reports, the creators had this to say:
We just made sure the look was clean in camera and then did color correcting afterwards. Blaine Ludy (Director/Editor of this project) is just really great at getting people to do stuff. In the beginning, people were timid, but as he showed them takes they began to understand what we were doing. Also, it was a wedding with an open bar. The video is edited (mostly) chronologically so you can see people get progressively less inhibited as the night went on.
Super cool. Here’s hoping the necessary camera tech keeps coming down in price, putting this kind of production into more people’s reach.