For most of us adjusting a room’s lighting means either making it light or dark with the flip of a switch. But Japanese researchers have come up with a far more advanced approach that lets you literally paint where you want the light to be using an interactive stylus-driven interface. More »
You can create all sorts of awesome stuff with Photoshop, provided you know how to use the filters and practice moderation when it comes to applying certain effects. You can come up with works of art, tweak photographs and turn them into timeless prints, or you can use it to create posters to drive a point across (and sell your product.)
The last one is what online service provider Universo Online did for their campaign to promote their parental control service.
Wondering whether she’s still a child or already an adult? Well, she’s actually a bit of both. The ad people behind the campaign Photoshopped various kids’ portraits like crazy to make them look like adults. They did that, to a certain extent. While I admit it’s bound to be a successful campaign, I can’t help but be creeped out by the end results all the same.
Pure win or epic fail? What do you think?
[via BuzzFeed]
Here’s something that’ll brighten you up just in time for the end of the week: Calvin and Hobbes being spliced into real life photographs. I don’t know how many times I wished these guys existed in real life when I was young. Hell, I think I still do. More »
I’ve been using Alien Skin plug-ins with Photoshop for years, so it’s nice to know that the company behind these plug-ins continues to improve their tried-and-true Eye Candy package for those of you who want to embellish your images with cool effects.
Original Tennis Ball Image via Shutterstock
The latest version, Eye Candy 7 improves on past generations, adding a new suite of lightning effects to its already impressive realistic fire, smoke and other filters. The plug-in installs easily on either Mac or PC and works with Adobe Photoshop CS5 or later or Photoshop Elements 10 or later. It includes a wide variety of effects and textures, including chrome, animal fur, reptile skin, wood, clouds, snow, ice, metal, rust, and many others.
It’s also deft at placing perspective drop-shadows behind objects – a significant improvement over the basic drop-shadow feature in Photoshop itself. When combined with the extrude filter, it can be used to create a fairly convincing illusion of 3D depth.
You can also use Eye Candy 7 to add curved motion trails to objects, which is really helpful for adding movement to static images.
Original Airplane Image via Shutterstock
The interface itself is easy to use, offering quick access to numerous pre-built effects, but once you drill into a specific effect, sliders and a large library of presets let you have a tremendous amount of control over the appearance of your effect. You can also zoom in, view effects in split-screen mode with the original selection, and save presets.
Keep in mind that Eye Candy 7 is really designed for applying effects to selected objects, shapes or text layers, not as embellishment to a flat, full scene. That said, you can easily select areas where you want to apply effects using Photoshop’s robust selection tools – and this gives you a much more fine-grained control over effects.
Original Snow Image via Shutterstock
Filters automatically preserve your original selection, and store the effect-enhanced image in a new layer. For those times that you want to fill an entire image, Eye Candy offers a nearly endless variety of texture-making tools which can be used on all, or a part of your images.
While Eye Candy 7 definitely can be used to create realistic (or at least semi-realistic) effects and textures, the huge number of controls available for each one will have you experimenting and playing around for hours. For instance, I found that with the right settings, the Rust tool could actually be used to add moss to objects – and that the Electrify effect could be used to create blood vessels. The possibilities are pretty limitless, and this single plug-in adds a huge variety of capabilities in a single package.
Alien Skin Eye Candy 7 retails for $199.99(USD) over on their website. However, if you buy today (February 20th), Alien Skin is offering a 30% off discount on all of their software. Eye Candy is also available in a demo version if you’d like to try before you buy.
This. Is. MADNESS. Watch Deviant Art user Elemental79 converting a 320 x 240 pixel screenshot from Doom—the legendary 1993 game that made first person shooters popular—into a stunning 9,600 x 7,211 image complete with textures, lighting and 3D effects using Photoshop. It’s absolutely nuts. More »
Our Antipodean chums might be getting a raw deal on modern versions of Photoshop, but at least they can try 1989’s vintage without paying. The Computer History Museum, with Adobe’s permission, has released the source code to version 1.0.1 free to citizens of the world, just as it did with MacPaint back in 2010. It’s just a shame that current CEO Shantanu Narayen isn’t feeling so generous to those on the southern hemisphere.
Filed under: Software
Via: Adafruit
Source: Computer History Museum
Oh, Iran. Your Qaher 313 stealth fighter jet sure looks intimidating but it will never get off the ground. So why do you insist on tricking everybody into thinking that the beast can fly? Iran’s latest transgression is especially hilarious: they’ve photoshopped the Qaher 313 onto a stock image of Mount Damavand to make it look like it’s flying. More »
Photography is getting easier thanks to cameras that are able to better evaluate and automatically choose the best settings for a given scene. But photo editing, that’s still a bit of a mystery to most amateur photographers. So Adobe—the makers of Photoshop—are working with the University of Michigan to develop an extremely intelligent photo editing app that simply does what you tell it to do. More »
With Photoshop’s ubiquity, it’s actually surprising that scenes like this don’t happen more often: Greek police may soon be under investigation for attempting to airbrush out evidence of police brutality in the mug shots of four young men. And they did a horrible job of it, at that. More »
At least some of the tablet-loving public picked up a Surface Pro this weekend. Those earliest of early adopters have discovered an unpleasant limitation, however: the vaunted pen input doesn’t have complete support in important apps. Microsoft is using only an official driver without any current option to install an alternative, leaving artists without eraser or pressure support in creative industry staples such as Adobe Photoshop. While there’s no immediate fix, a Microsoft spokesperson tells us that it’s working with the “necessary partners” to expose full pen functionality; we’ve reached out to Adobe as well, and will let you know if it’s one of the chosen few. In the meantime, Surface artisans who need full pen recognition may want to consider an add-on tablet as a stopgap. Read Microsoft’s full statement after the break.
Update: Adobe tells us it’s “working with [its] partners to explore the possibility” of support, which suggests that we’ll need to be patient.
[Thanks, John]
Filed under: Tablets, Microsoft
Source: Reddit, TabletPC Review
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