John Nack @ Adobe

“A tip of the hat to America’s hat.” :-)

[Via]

Background save, anyone? How about massively faster Liquify?

Both of these features have been in the team’s sights for a long time, but they kept getting derailed by things like the Carbon-to-Cocoa conversion effort. Nice to have that behind us.

He writes,

“Your photos look better processed in Lightroom 4. Period… The improvements in Lightroom’s Development module are so significant, and so much better than what we’ve ever had before, that I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find most anyone still using Lightroom 3 in just a few months from now.”

As Bryan demos & notes in the Photoshop sneak below, the same engine is coming to PS, and you can try it out in LR4 right now.

See anything you like?

Our globetrotting photo evangelist has created a slideshow of images taken during her travels.

I would not expect the images to hold the same significance to you, the viewer, as they did for me. But that is not the point.

I am sharing this slideshow to encourage every image-maker to begin a visual journal for themselves – as a personal project. I am a firm believer that you have to exercise your creativity and you have to practice in order to improve.  So when I found myself in a rut last year, I started capturing images that were meaningful to me –  purely because I wanted to, for my own reasons – not because I think someone else is going to “like” it. And I had a delightful time.

[Via]

Adobe’s HTML5 animation tool gets beefed up with a host of new features in Preview 4, available now. Here’s a demo from Mark Anders:

Looks creamy smooth. Here’s a bit more info.

“Text says ‘We want cheaper Photoshop! Down with Comic Sans!,’” reports the excellently named Marius-Remus Mate.

Jon Stewart one mentioned that American troops were teaching Afghan kids to play baseball. Whole families were really getting into the spirit of the game, he said, showing a dad in the stands holding a sign reading “ESPN: Execute Some Pashtuns Now!” Ah Photoshop, you do get around.

Ned Wenlock used After Effects to create a neat, endlessly layered look in this short piece:

[Via]

Russell speaks highly of Jim Goldstein’s work:

The next next thing is going to be Long Exposure Night Photography! I recently attended one of Jim Goldstein’s night photography workshops and I was influenced to take the path to the DARK SIDE. Night photography is really amazing and Jim’s latest book lays out all the details for the beginner, to the advanced geek, who hangs around large telescope arrays. I’m not a super techno nerd, and I love a book that show you how to do something without a lot of magic incantations that make your brain explode. I highly recommend Jim’s latest digital book.

This strikes me as a bit like jamming a V8 into a Miata, but it’s impressive: Adobe’s Dave Helmly beefs up a wee MacBook Air via the power of its Thunderbolt connection, using it to edit full-res RED video footage in Premiere Pro:

Lagomorphs, man–lagomorphs.

Of potential interest to Web/screen designers:

• “Gesty is a set of vector gesture icons useful for UI/UX designers, manuals publishers and many other creators.” $4.99 [Via]
• The $8 UI Toolkit offers “20 Photoshop Styles, 94 Vector Glyphs, 40 Background Patterns, Shadow Creator Action, 130 Custom Shapes, 10 Ring Indicators, 10 High-Res Photo Textures, 34 Common UI Symbols.” [Via Jason Santa Maria]

Margot once sent me a stop-motion valentine involving Lego Chewbacca, so these kids are right up my alley:

In brief, stand-out things I saw in my first few hours: A bus with the Virgin Mary on the side and a Confederate flag in the back window; a truck whooshing up on me and displaying a crowd of peeing cows with Stars of David branded on their rumps; another bus whose windshield featured a three-eyed graffiti smiley face above a bunch of unpatched bullet holes; and hopped-up paramilitary pickups laden with soliders and emblazoned with the word “Quiche” (gourmet troopers?).

I snagged photos (of very uneven quality) of some of this and hope to share them soon. I’m finding, though, that photo-editing workflows on iPad remain about as graceful as a toddler–full of both promise & constant painful wipeouts.

No, I don’t really know what it has to do with this blog, either. Pretty great, though, right?

The original version makes interesting use of stop-motion painting (ah, there’s the tangential connection):