Unless you’ve been away to somewhere very remote you will undoubtedly know about the launch of Apple’s iPad.
Seen by many as nothing more than a big iPhone, I see the iPad will be much, much more than that. Still in it’s infancy, the iPad is in a period of discovery; a quirky plaything for cats seems to be popular at the moment.
American technology magazine Wired are really on the crest of the iPad wave. In its first nine days, the iPad version has sold 73,000 copies, vs. average monthly print news stand sales in the mid-80,000s.
Rather than me try and explain how good the Wired iPad version is, here is a quick presentation:
We could argue all day about the user-experience not being like that of a traditional print magazine, but I don’t think that is the point here. The iPad publication is in a different league and I don’t think the experience can be compared. It will be interesting to see over the coming months whether ‘reader engagement’ is still there and that gimmick doesn’t become a substitute for content. Exciting times for the editorial design wor…
Director Chris Cairns has teamed up with Beardyman and holographic projection experts Musion to create a live performance based on his Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs film, which features a number of disembodied rapping heads…
The film below shows live footage from an initial test performance of the holographic heads, with no post-production added.
Photoshop turns 20 this week, the product that has become the byword for picture editing, and is seemingly ubiquitous in the modern world.
Adobe, the company behind the software, are going to conduct a celebratory broadcast bringing together the team that first created Photoshop to discuss and demonstrate their work.
In a recent interview, Shantanu Narayen, President and Chief Executive Officer at Adobe, said: “For 20 years Photoshop has played many different roles – it has given creative people the power to deliver amazing images that impact every part of our visual culture and challenged the eye with its ability to transform photographs.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that, thanks to millions of creative customers, Photoshop has changed the way the world looks at itself.”
In 1987 Thomas Knoll developed a grayscale pixel imaging program that blossomed into a way to process digital image files. Called Photoshop, it was licensed by Adobe, with the first product hitting shelves in 1990. Knoll recalled that originally Adobe expected to sell 500 copies of Photoshop a month.
“We knew we had a groundbreaking technology on our hands, but we never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us,” he said. “The ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of Photoshop’s magic.”
Here’s a look at how the main tool palette has evolved over the years:
So what has made Photoshop the industry standard?
For one, it integrates perfectly with other Adobe software for media editing, animation, and authoring. The .PSD (Photoshop Document), Photoshop’s native format, stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings.
The software’s popularity means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software. The .PSD file format can be exported to and from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects, to make professional standard DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds, textures, and so on, for television, film, print and the Web.
Photoshop can utilise the color models RGB, lab, CMYK, grayscale, binary bitmap, and duotone. Photoshop has the ability to read and write both raster and vector image formats such as .EPS, .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, and Adobe Fireworks.
It really has to be in every professional creative’s toolbox. With CS5 due out in mid-2010, rumoured to have new 3d brushes and warping tools, there seems to be no end to the continual development.
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