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Thursday, Jan 28
"Ask an Adobe Engineer": RetouchPRO LIVE with Chris Cox
Although Chris Cox posts regularly in the Adobe support forums, many of you probably have never heard of him. But every single one of you has a favorite Photoshop feature that he is largely responsible for. Sometimes it seems there's not an area of Photoshop that Chris hasn't either written...
Sunday, Jan 24
The creators of Photoshop, After Effects, and Flash speak
By coincidence, the following interviews with the creators of Photoshop, After Effects, and Flash have popped up in the last week: First, Robert Scoble traveled to Industrial Light and Magic to chat with visual effects supervisor John Knoll--who, with his brother Thomas, created Pho...
Friday, Jan 22
(rt) Illustration: "Crayola's Law," Photoshop, & the Beatles
CUTUP-MX showcases the unintentional art of cut-up Mexican billboards (apparently mashed up by billboard owners during lulls between paying advertisers). Penney Design imagines recent movie posters as Atari 2600 cartridges. (Tangentially related: I was mentioning Panic's awesom...
Wednesday, Jan 20
Rollin' on the River
Having grown up by the Mississippi, I often make fun of the feeble Guadalupe River (aka "The Mighty Guat") that trickles past Adobe HQ. Then there are the days (like today) when I see why the city lavished money on a huge flood-control channel:
Thursday, Jan 14
Batch-creating PNGs or CMYK JPEGs from Photoshop
If you've ever wishes that Photoshop's Image Processor script offered the ability to create PNG and/or CMYK JPEG files, you're in luck: scripter Mike Hale has modified the script to add these options. Thanks, Mike. [Via Jeff Tranberry]
Wednesday, Jan 13
New Pixel Bender Technology Center
Adobe's Pixel Bender technology enables fast, GPU- and multicore-savvy filters to run in Photoshop, Flash, and After Effects. Now the Pixel Bender Technology Center provides one-stop access to a large variety of resources, including download of the PB plug-in Photoshop...
Tuesday, Jan 12
Learn Lightroom next week in NYC
Thursday, January 21st: Learn Adobe Lightroom 2 from Adobe specialist Bryan O'Neil Hughes, as well as see what's new in Lightroom 3. Please RSVP by calling 212-741-2990 or email seminars@fotocare.com Session 1: 9:00am - 11:00am Speaking of Bryan, remember that he's speaking at the SJ Ph...
Sunday, Jan 10
"FedEx days"
Building on the After Effects team's approach, the Photoshop team has introduced "JDI days" this cycle, and we'll have some great results to share with you. There's always an ocean of "wouldn't it be great if..."/"just one more thing..." ideas, and obviously we have to balance addressing those...
Saturday, Jan 9
Feedback, please: The "Replace Files" dialog in Save for Web
We're not taking about dropping all of Save for Web, obviously--just about making a file replacement operation all-or-nothing. If you chose to export a sliced PSD, selected "Images And HTML," and replaced the HTML file Photoshop generates, all the images would be automatically replac...
Friday, Jan 8
San José Photoshop User Group meets Tuesday night
We'll have pizza and drinks at 6:30, and 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 entr...
Saturday, Dec 26
(rt) Illustration: Negative space, minimalism, & more
I dig these beautiful minimalist renderings of TV shows from Albert Exergian. See also his excellent portfolio site.The Web Design Ledger showcases clever negative space in logo design. [Via]Crazy, often beautiful: Matt Kish is doing one drawing for every page of Moby-Dick.True copy &am...
Wednesday, Dec 23
Doing the right thing with Cmd-H
As I've written previously, when OS X took over long-standing Photoshop shortcuts, it created a tricky situation: break Photoshop users' habits/flow by changing PS to match the OS, or deviate from the new OS conventions? It's possible to switch shortcuts back by dropping in a plug-in/...
Saturday, Dec 19
PS Elements voted Photography Gadget of the Decade
Viewers of Channel 5's Gadget Show have voted Photoshop Elements Photography Gadget of the Decade. On behalf of the Elements team, wow, and thanks, everyone! Evidently I can't watch the video from within the US, but I'm told that Elements...
Friday, Dec 18
See how Photoshop & Adobe apps helped make Avatar
Ah well: this morning the Photoshop team is off to see Avatar--a welcome little break from the whole march to Cocoa. I justified it to my wife, saying, "Well, they used Photoshop to make the movie." Raising a dubious, I-know-you're-all-cutting-class eyebrow, she asked, "Don't they use Ph...
Thursday, Dec 17
Camera Raw 5.6, Lightroom 2.6 now available
See the Lightroom Journal for additonal release notes. As always, you can use the free (and now updated) DNG Converter (Mac | Win) to make files from these cameras compatible with older versions of Photoshop & Lightroom, as well as other DNG-savvy software.
Inspector panels: Food for thought
The richness that's possible in a PSD file has totally outstripped the Layers panel's ability to display & control it. [...] Photoshop needs a properties inspector, a panel that lets you view & adjust the parameters of the selected object. [...] Such a panel can supplant & control ot...
New Photoshop contest from Deke McClelland
Create a magnificent piece of artwork that celebrates your favorite features of Photoshop. But you must do so using not fewer than three of the Top 40 Features I've posted so far. (Note that you'll need to be a member of dekeOnline to participate so that you can post your artwork and include co...
Friday, Nov 27
Photoshop, you're a tough old bird
If nothing else, I thought this list of shortcuts might be handy.It's this kind of fastidious attention to detail that made me delight in Photoshop & After Effects. I remember sitting in an AE class & figuring out the meaning of a couple of modifier keys, then combining them and seei...
Monday, Nov 23
Photoshop "vs." Fireworks: Quick clarifications
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 ca...
Saturday, Oct 3
Opinion: New iPhone-based Photoshop training apps
The folks from Adobe Press have introduced Adobe Photoshop CS4: Learn By Video. The application introduces the most essential topics in Photoshop CS4. Users can: In a similar vein, Richard Harrington's Understanding Photoshop: Quick Fixes (iTunes link) offers the following:
Wednesday, Sep 23
Help has arrived: Learn about Photoshop Elements 8
The Autumn harvest includes a new version of Photoshop Elements. To learn more, click the links for your platform below: Windows Help for the Editor Help for the Organizer Mac OS Help for the Editor Help for Adobe Bridge...
Friday, Aug 21
A 64-bit reality check
It bums me out that I'll be seen as "The 64-Bit Wet Blanket Guy," especially when Adobe has been way out ahead of the pack on the Mac*, shipping the 64-bit-native Lightroom 2 for more than year. I think 64-bit is great, and it can yield huge performance gains in Photoshop--sometimes 10x or mor...
Tuesday, Jul 14
MEADOWVALE SAYS "NO!" TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN and Photoshop Elements helps bring it all to life
Photoshop Elements 5.0 (and this year the province has upgraded to Photoshop Elements 7.0 and included Premier Elements 7.0 to go along with the existing CS3 Web Standard licensing) is a powerful tool ready to do a lot of what a high school student needs. While it will never equal the full blown...
Friday, Jul 3
Notes about PS printing performance
In your opinion, would a Mac Pro significantly accelerate the processing [while printing]? Is the printing engine in Photoshop multiprocessor aware? I put the question to Photoshop printing engineer Dave Polaschek, and here's his reply:
Wednesday, Jun 24
Masters of the Midwest: Ben Willmore
How did you get into Photoshop? What's been the best thing about being involved with Photoshop? What's the least understood feature in Photoshop? What's the most under-utilized feature in Photoshop? There is a long list of under-utilized features:
Wednesday, Jun 17
Brush locking (aka "Huh?")
We'd like to discard an obscure feature in Photoshop & replace it with something better. First, though, I'd like to sanity-check that no one needs the existing feature. (Fair warning: This is some nerdy, slightly esoteric stuff.)
Saturday, Jun 13
Opinion: The Photoshop Marketplace is live
Anyone can publish information about solutions related to Photoshop, including details about events, hardware, software, training (for example, books or DVDs), communities, etc. For more info, click on the “Become a Publisher” box on the main page. (The site admin suggests reading th...
Thursday, May 21
Podcast: Thursday Type: Steve Jobs, flying milk, & more
Dylan Roscover has used typefaces from Apple ads to render a beautiful portrait of Steve Jobs. (Make sure to click the image to see a larger version.) [Via] Fair warning: seeing this portrait gave me weird dreams.To borrow from AJ Soprano, "What, no {freakin'} Papyrus??" Still, this take on...
Monday, Apr 27
Best practices, PSD to CSS?
For "effortless conversion of your Photoshop designs into standards-compliant, CSS-rich webpages," check out MediaLab's SiteGrinder 2. The plug-in runs entirely within Photoshop and promises to require no hand coding. Check out the product's feature tour for more info.
Tuesday, Apr 14
Quick text tips for Photoshop
Support for type styles (i.e. the ability to define a set of text characteristics as a style, then to modify the style & have text layers updated) was the top requested feature among those I proposed to improve management of complex PSDs. Photoshop doesn't yet support type styles, but in...
Saturday, Apr 11
Adobe podcasts, sober & otherwise
Elsewhere, photographer & author Derrick Story sat down with the man who oversees Photoshop & Lightroom engineering: Adobe. Develop module in Lightroom and the sliders in ACR, improvements in Photoshop, and some great lesser-known features such as Camera
Thursday, Mar 26
New Wacom Intuos4 rocks
We worked with Adobe to understand what features we could add that most complemented the direction you were going with CS4 and get validation on some of the ideas that we had such as the ExpressKey Displays. One direction that was totally changed based upon Adobe feedback was using the Touc...
Friday, Mar 20
Photoshop video tutorials, a world tour
Adobe and its partners provide Photoshop video tutorials in several languages. To learn more, check out the following resources in Community Help: English 日本語 Français Español Deutsch Italiano...
Wednesday, Feb 25
Patch: Photoshop CS4 (11.0.1) Update (and Plug-in) Available
Adobe has released an update for Photoshop CS4 [via John Nack]. Some of the issues that have been addressed include: A number of issues that could cause slow performance have been addressed. Pen barrel rotation with Wacom tablets now works...
Tuesday, Feb 24
Patch: Photoshop CS4 update now available
Photoshop now correctly recognizes 3D textures edited by a plug-in. The quality of the results of Auto-Blend Layers (Stack Images) has been improved. A problem that could result in a crash when pasting formatted text has been fixed.
Thursday, Feb 12
Scrubby sliders & more
It's all these little custom behaviors that help make moving Photoshop from Carbon to Cocoa a rather involved affair. The app has developed a lot of little tweaks (e.g. holding down Opt/Alt in dialog boxes to turn Cancel into Reset) that don't just come along for free. It's also an illustrat...
Wednesday, Dec 17
Supporting colorblind accesibility in CS4
One of the sleeper features in Photoshop CS4 is new support for simulating color blindness. My fellow PM Bryan O'Neil Hughes managed the development of the feature, so I invited him to share more info in a guest blog post (below). --J.
Sunday, Oct 26
Feelin' a little love
We never stop looking for ways to make Photoshop better, but every so often it’s nice to take a deep breath and reflect on how far the app has come. Here are some nice props I've seen in the last few days about CS4: On CreativePro.com Ben Long says, “This is what a must-have upgrade looks like: New...
Wednesday, Oct 8
Introducing Adobe Configurator
Make Photoshop "everything you need, nothing you don't" Navigate Photoshop as task-based pieces (think workspaces on steroids), each showing only what you need for the task at handLet anyone remix the Photoshop UI to fit their needsMake it drop-dead easy to share these remixes
Thursday, Sep 25
Illustrator CS4 goodness
Among the comments on my list of details polished in Photoshop CS4, a number of people wished for a similar list for Illustrator & suggested that the Illustrator team start a blog. As it happens, my friend & former Illustrator PM Mordy Golding runs the great Real World Illustrato...
Tuesday, Sep 23
Reboot: New Habit, New Machine
So, there's an interesting engineer-ism that I've seen be true more often than not: software will run best on whatever is on the engineer's desk. Well, here at work, for my Windows box, I've now been running Vista since it came out, and the 64-bit version of Vista for over a year. (I spend equ...
Friday, Sep 12
Photoshop 3D is not about 3D
I worry a bit about Photoshop users seeing the app branch into 3D and thinking we've taken our eye off the ball. Earlier this week reader Jon Padilla commented, "Some of my disgruntled co-workers grumbled 'oh great! a bunch of cool features we'll never learn to use...'" No matter what Photos...
Friday, Aug 1
The Lightroom vs. Aperture plug-in situation
Lightroom PM Tom Hogarty has posted some info about how Lightroom & Aperture compare in terms of enabling image editing via add-on code. Being addicted to bulleted lists, here's my summary of where things stand: If what you're after is local image editing (e.g. dodging and burning), L...
Tuesday, Jul 29
Lightroom 2 is here!
Videos: The NAPP has launched their Lightroom 2 Learning Center. Colin Smith of the Photoshop Cafe posts videos and screenshots. Reviews and overviews: As noted above, Ian Lyons gives an in-depth tour and talks about how to pair Lightroom & Photoshop to support CMYK files.Scott Kelby...
Friday, Jun 20
Creative Suite Scripting Survey
Please take this Scripting Survey to help us understand how you use ExtendScript, JavaScript, ActionScript, AppleScript, VBScript and other scripting languages with Photoshop and the Adobe Creative Suite....
Wednesday, Jun 18
The Color & the Shape, in PS & AI
Dr. Woohoo has been creating some very cool images by driving Illustrator and Photoshop from Adobe AIR. Check out Generative Painting in AI with 3D Symbols, as well as some good bits on Flickr. "For this animation," says the Adobe Design Center, "Dr. Woohoo developed an AIR app that drives t...
Thursday, Jun 5
Opinion: Future Photoshop UI changes
Our job is about functionality, not ideology. Whatever works best, wins. Obviously the Apple development teams feel free to depart from strict adherence to the baseline OS when they feel that doing so would benefit their customers. I'd argue that Adobe teams should have similar latitu...
Monday, Jun 2
Some thoughts about platform consistency
I had a rather eye-opening experience the other day. I over heard an Adobe employee using Photoshop exclaim, "No way... they overloaded Cmd-H!" In other words, he was surprised that pressing Cmd-H didn't hide the application. He was obviously A) a Mac user, B) relatively unfamiliar with P...
Thursday, May 29
Good intentions gone awry
In short, I just meant to say that we weren't promising any particular features at any particular time--nothing more, nothing less. Hopefully needless to say, we'll work as hard as we can to bring you the good stuff sooner rather than later.
Saturday, May 24
"Oct. 1" (aka, "Just make something up")
Gizmodo is repeating info found on a site called TG Daily, stating that "Photoshop CS4" (a term that I've never heard anyone from Adobe use publicly) "is expected to be released on October 1." Uhh... expected by whom? And based on what? J.
Tuesday, Jan 15
GridIron Flow: Ridiculously cool workflow management
Let's say you copy some vectors from Illustrator and paste them into Photoshop. Flow, running invisibly in the background, notices the event and sees that there's a relationship between the AI and PSD files. When you pop open the Flow browser, you can see a connection between the files--...
Sunday, Jan 6
'007 in review: Photography, design, and more
Adobe: The company was so busy (Creative Suite 3, Lightroom, new CEO...), it's hard to believe that it was just in '07 that so much went down. Fortunately Scott Kelby provides a thorough overview. Zeroing in just on Photoshop Lightroom, Scott's colleague Matt Kloskowski offers A look back at...
Monday, Dec 31
Opinion: Photoshop & "The Paradox of Choice"
PS--I sometimes have to chuckle when people talk about the complexity of Photoshop, or any professional software for that matter. Sometime I should post screenshots of what features look like while in development. A dialog like Shadow/Highlight might have literally 50 or 100 control...
Friday, Oct 26
Adobe apps on Leopard: What you need to know
So, what does this mean in terms of running Adobe software? The good news is that most Adobe apps don't require updates in order to run well. That is, the CS3 versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and other apps are good to go for Leopard right now. ...
Tuesday, Sep 25
Photoshop Elements 6 and Premiere Elements 4
Adobe recently released Photoshop Elements 6 and Premiere Elements 4. Both products offer hot new features that are sure to excite both students and teachers. What I like most about the Elements packages are how easy it is to create exciting projects.
Wednesday, Sep 12
Photoshop World - Heavy Lifting
Well, another Photoshop World come and gone. This year Adam Jerugim and I did a presentation on setting up a machine for doing very large file work. Thank you again to those who attended - we were up against some interesting stuff. I know I promised to have this entry up on Monday, but I've bee...
Thursday, Dec 14
Opinion: Beta!
It's real. A big, public beta of Photoshop CS3. Now, if you own CS2, you can see what's been keeping us so busy lately. So, if you've got the time and inclination (and Photoshop CS2) go ahead and grab the beta from Adobe Labs tomorrow and see what we've been up to.
Wednesday, Mar 8
Opinion: Reap what you Measure
Note that there are side issues, such as the current pause on Macs with more than 4GB of RAM in them (a stale leftover of the Unix days is kicking in and spoiling the fun - the disk cache that Photoshop writes the scratch file through in large memory situations is getting flushed occasionally...
Friday, Nov 18
Opinion: A Good Day
We started up Task Manager and went to the Performance tab. Yup, available RAM was sitting at 3MB. On Windows XP, if your machine every has less than about 15MB of free RAM, you know you’re going to be in for trouble performance-wise. Ugh. So we quit Photoshop - which took a bit, since there was so m...
Friday, Sep 9
Opinion: Favorite Tools
My favorite tool around the house is my DeWalt 18v cordless drill. It’s just a brute. I like the three speed clutch - can really help with the Forstner bits - and the chuck is really nice. It’s great when a tool is robust enough to put up with the kinds of abuse and just not give up. I don’t like having a...
