Color Forecast by Pedro Miquel Cruz

Color, the emotional message that infuses freshness into our daily lives is the subject of an engaging color harmony experiment recording the most popular tones.

Color Forecast, designed by Pedro Miquel Cruz, is a hue clustering program computing the key colors in select fashionable European cities. The color experiment gain its intelligence with cameras setup in Milan, Paris and Antwerp digitally capturing the colorful information in pedestrian districts.

Color Forecast

The visualization is generated through frame differencing focusing on the moving pixels narrowing the camera’s activity on the colorful targets. As the algorithm averages the predominant colors and displays the weighted results, color swatches and bars illustrate the local spectrum activity.

Color Forecast

Visit the Color Forecast site for the newest trending rainbows and you can even participate in your experiments with their iPhone app!

Color Forecast

Color Forecast

Color Forecast

Color Forecast

Color Forecast

Adobe Illustrator CS6

The last few weeks Adobe has introduced their sneak peaks for the major CS6 releases. Another gem that has caught our eye is Illustrator’s new Pattern Creator! After creating your vector designs, simply select the single repeat and choose Pattern>Make.

This brings a new palette with a bounding box around the editable area and Illustrator automatically previews the full seamless repeat. The tile is automatically saved in the swatch palette and double clicking the design allows for further editing. Simple and no more headaches matching seams!

Watch the full video tutorial on Adobe TV!

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sneak Peak's Pattern Creator

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sneak Peak's Pattern Creator

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sneak Peak's Pattern Creator

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sneak Peak's Pattern Creator

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sneak Peak's Pattern Creator

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sneak Peak's Pattern Creator

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sneak Peak's Pattern Creator

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Sneak Peak's Pattern Creator

Our finished example of the vivid afternoon in the NYC's West Village.

As the digital camera transformed the photographic industry, the iPhone has converted professional DSLR photographers to leave their gear behind. The native iPhone camera app has improved with the iPhone 4S but the photo app community created the mobile photography evolution.

Ask every photographer and the narrative with composition is key to make an expressive image. But replacement photo apps such as Camera+ will capture a more dynamic range. And more sensitive editing can go further with apps like Snapseed to heighten the color exposure and detail.

With a simple interface, Snapseed brings out the richness in images. Our example photo was originally very lackluster and with a few taps and swipes, Snapseed brought out the original vibrancy of the afternoon. We’ve created a simple overview to demonstrate just some of the app’s capabilities.

Step 1

The original image shot with the iPhone 4 doesn't capture the day's vivid quality. Snapseed enhances the image to match the actual afternoon.

From the iPhone camera roll we opened the magnolia image in Snapseed and selected Tune Image to adjust the brightness, saturation and contrast. Swipe your finger left and right for all the app’s menus.

Step 2

Using Snapseed's Tune Image we're able to adjust the saturation level.

Tap the screen and vertically swipe your finger up and down to make the specific adjustments. Swipe your finger horizontally to adjust each filter’s intensity.

Step 3

Now we're able to adjust the brightness in Tune Image.

Step 4

Snapseed's Selective Adjust feature can target the attributes of each element in the image.

To bring out the detail in each part of the image, Snapseed’s Selective Adjust can alter the specific pixels. Tap your finger on the area you want to edit and then you’ll see a pin with a circular region. Swipe your finger up and down to get access to the menu.

Step 5

Choose Center Focus to create a shallow depth of field effect to place emphasis in the composition.

Shooting with the iPhone, the entire image is usually kept in focus. Snapseed’s Center Focus feature can give the impression of shallow depth of field using a DSLR camera. By keeping an area of the image in focus and blurring some of the background can place emphasis in your composition.

Step 6

The Center Size of the focus can be adjusted to give the quality of shooting with a DSLR.

The size of the circular region area can be adjusted by swiping your finger.

Step 7

Adjust the Filter Strength to give more realistic results.

And finally the filter strength of Center Focus can be finely tuned. For more tutorials and examples visit Snapseed’s site to learn more about the photo editing app.

Scott Citron presents Adobe Muse.

This week we invited Adobe Certified Trainer and designer Scott Citron to demonstrate Adobe’s beta application, Muse. The drag and drop website creation tool is built from familiar InDesign features that extends designing in print to the web.

The presentation hosted at Parsons The New School for Design is in collaboration with our university Classroom Events student series and Digital Design Therapy Meetups.

Muse (code name), available for free in the beta version, offers the ability to craft a fully functioning static website. However, dynamic content such as Google Maps, Twitter feed and contact forms can be imported into Muse and placed on one of your pages.

The core of Muse is its sitemap builder with Master Pages. InDesign users will certainly gravitate to placing content on their Masters that will keep the design continuity throughout the site. Once the sitemap is arranged, from the Menu palette, users can access the menu placeholder and the names used in the sitemap will appear in the menu. Styling text and formatting alignment is easily specified as in InDesign. In the background, Muse is writing the html, css and scripting necessary to power the site published in modern web browsers.

Finishing the presentation, Scott demonstrated the simplicity of creating slideshows with corresponding thumbnails on gallery pages. And of course utilizing popular Lightbox effects for slideshows are found in Muse and can be edited to match the look of your design.

Over the years, the trend definitely has gravitated to WordPress-like CMS dynamically updating content and accessing information from the web. And the combination of social blogs such as Tumblr give the availability to upload your work to the web. These services provide templates but learning to edit or even create the code has always been an ambitious task.

For content such as portfolios, micro-sites or businesses looking for an unique immediate web presence, Muse is a powerful alternative. Especially for print designers who are interested to broaden their skills to include the web, Muse gives the necessary tools. Designers can personalize and specify their layouts and Muse will publish the pages to the web.

Visit the Muse site for their free tutorials and sign-up for future webinars.

Powerful sitemap features allows for seamless navigation creating menus in Adobe Muse.

Building menus from the sitemap organization can be styled and easliy linked throughout the website.

Setting the page size, padding and margins can be specified through the Page Properties in Adobe Muse.

Familiar text wrapping features used in InDesign are found in Adobe Muse.

Google Maps can be imported into an Adobe Muse website.

Building impressive slideshows in Adobe Muse are easily created.

Adding Lightbox effects are featured in Adobe Muse.

Our animated Valentine gif.

One of the many guilty pleasures of creating vector art with Adobe Illustrator is the “Live Effects” feature – especially the Transform Effect! The Transform Effect enables a seemingly endless variety of transformations applied to a vector shape. Each of the whimsical kaleidoscope forms in our Valentine’s Day animated GIF were originally created as vector art in Adobe Illustrator using the Transform Effect on a single vector shape Heart motif.

The Adobe Illustrator technique is simple. Select the original vector art motif with the Selection Tool, go to the pull down menu “Effect” and navigate to the “Transform Effect” dialogue box (Effect>Distort & Transform>Transform).

As demonstrated in the graphic below, we chose a Heart motif and applied 9 copies, anchored to the bottom-right, and rotated at an angle of 36 Degrees (this completes a 360 Degree Circle). Selecting the Preview Box permits viewing the Effect prior to its application. For each variable change made, reselect the Preview Box to refresh the transformation choice. Click “OK” to complete the transformation.

Adobe Illustrator Transform Effect.

Effects are Live so to continue to alter a design, select the art with the Selection Tool and revisit the Transform Effect via the Appearance Palette (Window>Appearance). Double-clicking “Transform” in the Appearance Palette reopens the “Transform Effect” dialogue box to where the settings were last left so further transformations can be created.

If desired, deconstructing the newly created shapes to further manipulate (not necessary in our instance), can be achieved by releasing the shapes to individual grouped vectors by Expanding its Appearance (Object>Expand Appearance); however, the “Live Effect” feature will no longer apply.

Now it’s time for you to have some fun! Download the original Adobe Illustrator file (Valentines_2012_DDT.ai) in which each of the kaleidoscope forms featured in our Valentine’s Day greeting were originally created from the single vector shape Heart motif. Re-envision our designs or better yet follow our lead and create an original vector shape motif to explore the amazing and unexpected designs that can be achieved with the Transform Effect.

We’ve also included the final Valentine’s Day animated GIF for you to share with someone special!

Click to download the AI file.

Click to download the Gif file.

Photoshop's Senior Product Manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes.

The sneak peeks of Photoshop wizardry for future releases are beginning to be showcased on Photoshop’s Facebook page and YouTube channel!

This weekend, we were lucky enough to get an invite for the official Adobe Photoshop Meetup in NYC demonstrating these future tools. Hosted at fashion photographer Sarah Silver‘s studio near Union Square, the creative event was the perfect bridge between art and technology.

Photoshop Senior Product Developer, Bryan O’Neil Hughes began the presentation introducing the program’s new sleek interface taking inspiration from Lightroom providing more visual consistency. The demo was filled with wonderful enhancements beginning with Camera Raw for even more non-destructive pixel editing sensitivity. The lens correction tool gets an amazing upgrade to specify individual objects in a scene to edit distortion!

The new Content Aware move feature in upcoming Photoshop releases.

As big Content Aware Fill users we were especially delighted to see the added function of movement! If removing objects from a scene with Photoshop intelligently filling the space with continuous neighboring pixels wasn’t enough, you can now select an object and move anywhere in the frame and Content Aware will patch the previously occupied area.

In the slide above, Bryan selected the model in the red dress. After an accurate selection, the model can be re-imagined in the landscape.

The new Content Aware move feature in upcoming Photoshop releases.

Now, with the edit in place, Content Aware will fill the previous area the model occupied and seamlessly match the scene.

The new Content Aware move feature in upcoming Photoshop releases.

Fashion photographer Sarah Silver sharing her craft at Photoshop's Sneak Peek event.

The Photoshop preview session finished with a lively and inspirational presentation from fashion photog Sarah Silver.

A self proclaimed Photoshop lover, Sarah’s masterful approach to her craft fuses her art and technical prowess. As unique as introducing dance and movement to her fashion editorial spreads, Sarah embraces a complete digital workflow. Discussing her approach photographing for the fashion industry’s top magazines and brands, Sarah generously shared her process and expertise with the group of professionals, students and enthusiasts.

Fashion photographer Sarah Silver sharing her craft at Photoshop's Sneak Peek event.

Fashion photographer Sarah Silver sharing her craft at Photoshop's Sneak Peek event.

Fashion photographer Sarah Silver sharing her craft at Photoshop's Sneak Peek event.

The Coffee Break palette

Mining for color is our favorite step to begin a creative project. We browsed through our digital folders and thought these images of our coffee breaks and city park strolls would create interesting harmonies.

Just click the download link and import the Adobe Swatch Exchange palette in Photoshop or Illustrator. We hope you like them!

Click to download the Coffee Break inspired palette.

The West Village palette

Click to download the West Village inspired palette.

The Highline palette

Click to download the Highline inspired palette.

The Leaves palette

Click to download the Leaves inspired palette.

The Swan palette

Click to download the Swan inspired palette.

The Holga Lens & Filter

Holga, the addictive lofi toy plastic camera made in China that produces analog style vignetting, blur and distortions, is available as an iPhone 4/4S attachment. The turret snaps on the back of the iPhone and offers 10 different positions.

Just turn the dial to shoot with the selected filter or lens and enjoy the unexpected mashup effects. We got our Holga iPhone lens from Photojojo.

The Holga Lens & Filter snaps on the back of the iPhone 4/4S.

Photo captured with the Holga Lens & Filter Dual Image Lens.

Photo captured with the Holga Lens & Filter using the Heart Filter.

Photo captured with the Holga Lens & Filter using the Yellow Filter with clear center.

Photo captured with the Holga Lens & Filter using the 60 mm Macro Lens.

Photo captured with the Holga Lens & Filter using the Quadruple Image Lens.

Our finished animated gif card.

With 2012 approaching we had some fun going back to the future making an animated gif e-card. The simple digital format that was so 90s before Flash (and now HTML5 and CSS3) has made a resurgence especially on Tumblr.

Using the Animation features in Adobe Photoshop is as simple as saving your file in layers. Using the Layer visibility eyeball icon to reveal the layer content you wish to place in each frame or not, creates the sequence.

For this example, we used a digital photo taken with the Canon EOS Rebel T3i and added glowing lights and our text. You can download the Photoshop file to follow along with the tutorial and download the gif to view the finished animated document. Just open the Animation palette from the Window menu to view the frames.

Click to download the PSD file.

Click to download the Gif file.

Step 1

In Photoshop create your digital artwork in progressive steps placed in layers.

You can begin your art in Photoshop or open an Illustrator file saved as a PSD to preserve layers to create the animated gif. Each element should be placed in its own layer.

Step 2

Choose Convert to Frame Animation to animate your gif.

When you open Photoshop’s Animation palette the Timeline view is displayed. From the Animation flyout menu, select Convert to Frame Animation.

Step 3

Place the art in the individual frames using the Layers palette.

The Animation palette will create the first frame and click on the palette’s page icon to add more. Use the Layer Visibility eyeball icon to choose the art that will be displayed in each frame. Continue to create the entire sequence.

Step 4

Select the looping repetition.

Below the first frame, click on the triangle to select the looping repetition. We chose Forever!

Step 5

You can alter the individual frame timing by clicking on the triangle at the bottom of the frame.

To alter the individual frame timing, click on the triangle at the bottom of the frame and choose the duration.

Step 6

Test your animation sequence by clicking on the Animation palette play button.

You can test the animation by clicking on the Animation palette’s play button.

Step 7

When you're satisfied with the sequence, choose Save for Web & Devices from the file menu.

Choose Save for Web & Devices from the file menu to create the gif file.

Step 8

Select gif from the file type menu and click Save.

You’re finished! Choose gif from the file types and click save. If necessary, you can resize the file at this point. Hope you enjoyed the quick tut and have fun animating your holiday messages!

Software to measure the amount of digital photo editing.

The pixel generation has liberated photographic reality evolving the craft to remove our “blemishes” with editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop. However in the pursuit of perfection, doctoring commercial imagery to reimagine unrealistic human forms has attracted a universal backlash.

The NYT recently reported on a new software tool developed by Hany Farid a Dartmouth professor in computer science and Eric Kee Dartmouth computer science Ph.D student, to measure the amount of digital editing.

Their sleuthing algorithm denotes from a 1-to-5 scale the amount of retouching mimicking human perceptions. Recruiting online participants to judge images from the minimally altered to the extreme hatchet jobs trained the software.

In an era of digital reality either adding layers to supplement information or recreating context, this type of pixel transparency just might become the norm. Read the full Times article here and the Dartmouth team’s complete research can be viewed following this link.