It’s fun becoming friendly with someone online, then discovering details like where she lives. Chrissie’s business name is ‘Kakadu Design’ and it didn’t occur to me what that indicated until I visited her website and looked at the promo images. Kakadu National Park is located in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Chrissie wrote to me, “I live up here where they call ‘the top end’ of Australia. Lots of Crocodiles and gorgeous Native Birds! Winter here at present, the dry season, so it has cooled just enough to not have the air conditioning running 24/7. Very tropical type weather so still in shorts & singlets in winter! It really is a beautiful part of the world and I am working from a very small remote area town in the heart of Kakadu World Listed Heritage National Park. Only about population of 500 or so in town, one small outback store and mainly tourist type businesses. In addition to my photography and digital work, I also paint on commission from photographs so if you are ever interested, just drop me an email.”

Sounds beautiful to me as I write from the “warm & sunny” summer weather of San Francisco, CA. High 50’s and quite foggy. Also beautiful are the water-media paintings on Chrissie’s site. Check out more art on her portfolio website, and a feature of her digital work in Digital Anarchy’s online ToonIt! gallery.

kind regards -Debbie

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It’s a pretty cool idea and was great fun. Adobe rockstar Julieanne Kost joined us along with a few other Adobe folks. The walk itself was fairly short in length and mostly went a few blocks around the Adobe campus in San Jose. You’d be surprised at how long it takes for 50 photographers to go a few blocks. In any event, this led to many photos of the Adobe building (there also seemed to be a good deal of photographers taking pictures of photographers).

When you go on walks like this, it’s interesting what your choice of lens does to your photos.

In my case I brought the 70-200mm Canon 2.8 lens. An excellent lens, but not completely ideal for where we ended up walking. There’s a river that winds its way by the Adobe building and that’s where we were for most of the walk. Nice area, but somewhat closed in which didn’t give my telephoto lens a lot of room to work with.

I suppose if you don’t know where you’re going it helps to bring multiple lenses, but since this was a somewhat low key affair I thought I’d take my chances. When you only have one lens you do tend to make the best of it. Your decision making process adjusts to filter out the things you know just won’t work and you start looking (in my case) for interesting things far off.

I did get a few interesting shots…For example, this… thing. This is on top of a column out front of the Adobe West Tower. Perhaps a monument to a long forgotten turtle king? John Warnock’s Second Life avatar? A memorial to GoLive? Such are the mysteries of San Jose.

Little known to most people, Adobe has a factory that makes miniature models of factories… And the Adobe building, apparently. Deep within the bowels of Adobe is a secret chamber with a scale model of the Adobe building. We are not sure of the purpose of this, but here’s a photograph of it.

Interestingly, there are two albino figures walking amongst the faux Adobe towers. Who are they? Whither go they? Why are they walking in a planter?

cheers, Jim

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Clever commercials, not quite as clever as the Mac vs. PC ads, but obviously effective. Apple apparently had lawyers call Microsoft and request they stop running the ads.

Only Apple would have the balls to call a competitor and ask them to stop running ads that make them look bad. “Those ads are true! How dare you run them!” Poor Apple.  It’s kind of hilarious.

Here’s a link to the Journal article if you want to read it for yourself.

btw… It is true that the same laptop will usually be cheaper on the Windows side, especially if you time your purchase with a Dell 30% off sale, which are frequent these days. The fact that Apple’s machines never go on sale makes them more pricey than similar Windows machines which are constantly on sale. The laptops in the Laptop Hunter ads are usually a bit less powerful than the higher priced Apple, but the reality of computers is that many people don’t need the extra power.

fwiw… I’m platform agnostic. I use both Macs and PCs and have a love/hate relationship with both. If I get to a point where I’m thinking about the operating system, it means that said computer has done something that makes me want to drop kick it through a window. I haven’t found either platform to be more or less problematic. Yes, Vista 1.0 sucked… but then, OS X 10.2 was fraught with problems as well. It happens.

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I often check Grant’s blog posts to see what he’s thinking. He is pretty knowledgeable about industry trends, in particular how to leverage social media for publicity and marketing outreach. Check out this article about website traffic that Grant wrote in the spring. Grant’s also a great digital artist, as evidenced by the design of Colorburned. I hear he’s available for hire…

Here’s an excerpt from the Colorburned interview:

Q: Photoshop plug-ins and filters can be very useful but sometimes it seems that they have developed a bum rap among the design elite for making things “too easy.” How do you go about convincing people that filters and plug-ins are not a crutch and are ok to use?

A: It really depends on how you use them. Usually you can go much deeper into them to create things that would be difficult or very time consuming to do by hand. How much is your time worth? If you spend 30 minutes messing around with layers, blend modes, built-in Photoshop filters, etc. vs. 5 minutes applying a filter, I wouldn’t say that’s smart design. Especially if your client comes in and wants changes. But, yeah, some people are a little too reliant on the presets that ship with most plug-ins. There’s a certain level of user that really wants presets, so we always have them… but we always try to give users enough control that they can get in there and create some unique effects fairly easily.

Read more of the interview on Colorbunred.com. Thanks Grant!

regards -Debbie

Mark said, “Thanks for the cool tool. After only a few minutes of playing around with it, I decided to buy it (original and toonit versions of one picture attached). Love it!”

Mark’s ToonIt image:

When I asked him if the photo was of his band, Mark wrote back, “The folks in the photo are me, me, me and me - I was playing around with multiple exposures with my digital camera and Photoshop (when I SHOULD have been practicing the banjo - grin). Definitely not in a band - still a rank amateur. I just thought that photo would cartoon well.”

Mark’s original composite:

You can find more about Mark at www.professional-geek.com.  Looks like he’s quite busy outside of his music and art.  I love meeting intelligent tech professionals who also have a creative side and a sense of humor. It’s the best part of my job at Digital Anarchy!

regards -Debbie

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I love that Nick uses our ToonIt! Photo plugin to transform his photographs into delicate illustrations. Many people use ToonIt! for more ‘aggressive’ images, which is what cartoons typically look like, all thick black lines and bold heavy color fields. Nick’s illustrations are instead turned into soft, thin lines over a jeweled, geometric pattern of color.

Monk walking in the village, post-ToonIt! treatment:

Original photograph by Nick:

A great aspect of our Adobe Photoshop cartooning plugin is its ability to easily create a variety of visual styles. You can see some variations on this Color Styles page and this Cel-Shaded Styles page.

Nick’s illustrative treatment is very apparent in the closeups of his subjects. In the images below, the monkey’s expression is bought out by the color and contrast changes made in ToonIt! and Photoshop. The muted tones of brown and custard make a sensitive color palette.

Cartoon version #1. The new light eyes are very appealing.

Original photograph by Nick:

Cartoon version #2. Mixes in the dark/light contrast of the original photo.

Hmmm, no photographs of monkeys INSIDE the temples just yet… You can see more of Nick Cattermole’s photography and his Toonit! Photo work in our online gallery on www.digitalanarchy.com.

regards -Debbie

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First, on Computerworld.com, an article called ‘Future shock: The PC of 2019‘ talks how personal computers will look in a decade: Small.

Just yesterday, I took this photo of a charming chalk stamp on the pavement. Seems to fit the topic of this post because ‘Thylacine’ is a generally extinct, but still sighted and possibly mythological creature. Just like technology can be. See this Bizzare & Extinct site for images.

“One thing everyone seems to agree on: The PC of 2019 won’t look like today’s laptops. “I’m not seeing people carrying anything that looks like a book,” says Dan Siewiorek, a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. “It would be like a phone or a ring or watch. It will probably take multiple form factors.”… A technical worker might have her PC in her eyeglasses, allowing her to access and view information through embedded monitors and share what she’s seeing with colleagues and supervisors via a camera in the glasses.”

Next, from the Imaging Info website, a news report about someone who has already gotten started on this vision of small technology, pun intended as you will see. Meet the ‘One-Eyed Filmmaker [who] Conceals Camera in Prosthetic‘.

“A one-eyed documentary filmmaker is preparing to work with a video camera concealed inside a prosthetic eye, hoping to secretly record people for a project commenting on the global spread of surveillance cameras. Canadian Rob Spence’s eye was damaged in a childhood shooting accident and it was removed three years ago. Now, he is in the final stages of developing a camera to turn the handicap into an advantage… His special equipment will consist of a camera, originally designed for colonoscopies, a battery and a wireless transmitter. It’s a challenge to get everything to fit inside the prosthetic eye, but Spence has had help from top engineers, including Steve Mann, who co-founded the wearable computers research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

This shrinking technology all makes sense. The iPhone is now a video portal tool, both for receiving and showing video, and surely there’s a tidal wave of editing tools just waiting to break into that app space. People wander around with Bluetooth phone sets in their ear and I am no longer startled by someone appearing to talk to herself in the supermarket. Hey, I’m all for my technology having subtlety as long as it’s affordable. Hopefully fashionable as well.

regards -Debbie

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When I returned to my Inbox this morning, my favorite roving panographer (if, in fact, there is such a term) had emailed to me his own stunning, low pixel image from a recent nature walk. Here is what Stanton Perry said about his photo, which was also taken with an iPhone, and its subsequent cartoon that uses our ToonIt! Photo plugin.

“What I love most about Toonit! is its uncanny ability to turn a “less than satisfactory” photograph into a work of art! A few weeks ago on Father’s Day, we were treated to a visit (on the 7th hole of my favorite course) from the native deer family. All I had with my was my iPhone, and even though the “natives” are friendly and not easily spooked, it was still challenging getting a shot. To be honest I wasn’t very impressed with my initial results, but after an hour with Toonit, I had a shot that I was proud to add to my portfolio!”

Thanks Perry! Here’s my ‘iToon’ nature shot.

All the best -Debbie

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Very cool to see what the actual shots were and what the printed ad ended up being with all the compositing, color correction, and other assorted image processing. Oh, yeah, and the lions. Ya gotta have lions.

Of course, my all time favorite ‘breakdown’ is the Dove ‘Real Beauty’ ad,  Evolution Of Beauty on YouTube.

And, of course, the quite awesome parody of said Dove ad, which is also on YouTube as the  Dove Evolution Parody.

regards, Jim

Let’s talk about how. Here’s the original image for Gomediazine.com:

Here’s some 3D text I whipped up in 3D Invigorator in about 15 minutes:

This isn’t a perfect recreation. I didn’t spend that much time on it. And, of course, if you want the explosion and lightning, you’ll need to go through the gomediazine.com tutorial as they teach you how to do that. I’m just here for the 3D text. I wanted to show some of the possibilities of 3D Invig and on a basic level how I created it.

In the 3D Invigorator tutorial sections, the basic video tutorials go over how to move and rotate text and lights, so I recommend checking those out. They’ll tell you everything you need to know about positioning the text as I have here.

The debris around the text is a little trickier. 3D Invigorator doesn’t really have a great way of generating random polygons for this purpose. So… enter Adobe Illustrator.

I used Illustrator to create some debris. Just by going in and scribbling with the wacom pen and creating some squares and triangles. Here are a couple debris files:

Since 3D Invigorator can accept Illustrator Files (you need to save them as Illustrator CS files though!), I just imported these, rotated and scaled them a bit and instant debris! Obviously with a little more effort you can create just as much debris as the original had.

So that’s a quick way of adding random elements to the text you create in 3D Invigorator. There’s no limit to the number of objects that can be added to an Invigorator scene. So feel free to whip up all sorts of cool shapes in Illustrator to accentuate your text. HOT TIP: you can save you scenes! Go to File>Save Scene… If you’ve created a really big setup and spent a lot of time working on it, make sure you save it. If Photoshop crashes or the power goes out you’ll (as usual) lose everything if it’s not saved.

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