The last part is my favorite part of course!

via Aral Balkan

Skill: Intermediate

Discover a new language for image and video processing (developed by Adobe Image Foundation) that will soon be available on Adobe Labs. In this session, we will demonstrate tools for writing and testing the language, explain how to write efficient algorithms, and share examples of the possibilities for development. We’ll also show how these tools were used to create some of the video processing effects shipping in Adobe After Effects CS3.

• Wednesday, October 3, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

[via Core77]

Finally, this article on advertainment (also from NYT) reminded me how the driving force financially behind most creative businesses is the advertising agency. This is a bit of a tougher market to get into for individuals, but little studios can get attention for themselves, starting small, and get into this business eventually.

Then again, why do work for hire if you don’t have to?

Pixinfo.com checks out several current photoprinters to see whose prints last the longest.

Just stumbled across this site. Some pretty decent stuff, some not so great. Texture Library is a bit off though, not a lot that would work for 3D, but a lot of stuff that is generally well done and useful for many kinds of projects. The thing that I liked was their license model:

License

These
textures are
Copyright © Mayang Murni Adnin, 2001-2006. They have all been
taken by our own cameras or created by ourselves.

Use:

They are free to use for all
uses, whether commercial or non-commercial you may incorporate
them into your derived work with no requirement to pay us any licensing fee
etc. Your derived work must involve significant modification to the textures. It would be nice if you could credit us.

Sell:

You may not sell any of these textures in an unmodified form, or any derived works where the product you are selling is still a texture and is likely to compete with this website.

Redistribute:

You
may redistribute
give/send to somebody else/display on a web site up to 30 of these
textures together, but no more. You must credit this website as the
original source tell them about us.

Come to Dark Roasted Blend for the weird music scores, but stay for the equally weird pictures of strange tanks and a lot more fun and interesting imagery. Not really a resource for imags themselves, but definitely a resource for creative inspiration. I often poke over there when I’m trying to find new ideas. Just looking at their collections of pictures recharges my batteries and gives me ideas.

I was reading up on my Tilt/Shift photograpy, and I came across this link on how to fake it in PS. If you pick your images well, it works pretty well. It took me several tries with different pictures before I got the one above, which came out pretty well. It is a picture of Les Baux, France, by the way.

Fake model photography

This is cute. Not insanely featured, but a nice proof of concept for Flex. Maybe ’cause I write image processing code for a living, these things are really interesting to me. This would be a great Apollo shareware app. I also like that they are in Seattle. Maybe the local startup market is improving.

Anyway, John Nack on Adobe, is an awesome blog. He is the product manager for Photoshop and is one of the more interesting and productive Adobe bloggers (way better than me). He had a post recently on Atmospheric photography with links to some stuff that I really dug, so I’m reposting them here:

Photoastronomique.net: Some really amazing photos here of stars, the moon, and deeply interesting skies. With some animations as well. It is both in French and English. (also, nice modifications of the gallery templates).

Amunndn’s Photostream on flicker: Some really atmospheric (in the emotional sense) stuff. You look at them and assume they must be heavily photoshopped, but when you really look at them, you can see that he might be using a filter here and there, but they are real pics.

A collection of photos of some truly strange (and some truly beautiful) clouds.

Nicole Bengiveno created a set of photos called the “Essence of Atmosphere” for the New York Times. These are more atmospheric in the emotional sense, but they do an excellent job of conveying a mood in a very direct way.