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Red Giant’s first iPhone app, my first iPhone app. I’m kinda excited about this.
If you’ve ever shot with a Lomo, a Holga, a Diana, or any of the other plastic “toy” cameras out there, you know that part of the magic is the surprise factor. Did your photos turn out good? Or bad? Or so terrible they’re amazing? Just like a real plastic camera, Plastic Bullet never does the same thing twice. It develops your iPhone photos into literally infinite variations. They might look awful. They might look awesome. The good news is that you can keep tapping the refresh button until you get something you love. The look you love is yours and yours alone—not a canned preset than anyone can use.
…as soon as you’ve pressed the button to take the shot the Holga does its own thing altogether and, depending on the camera’s mood, produces either the most enormous crap you’ve ever seen, or the most wonderful image ever to have caressed your oppressed creative soul.
I was in Seattle last weekend. I carried my Canon 5D Mark II with me wherever I went, with both my 24–70 f/2.8L and my 50mm f/1.2L. I pulled it out maybe once. I was having too much fun shooting with my crappy iPhone 3GS camera and Plastic Bullet.
Adobe Creative Suite 5 is out today, and Red Giant Software has several of their most popular plug-ins available for upgrade to 64-bit today. Check Red Giant’s 64-bit FAQ here, and a compatibility chart here.
The day-one upgrades are:
Magic Bullet Colorista 1.1
Magic Bullet Mojo 1.2
Trapcode 3D Stroke 2.6
Trapcode EchoSpace 1.1
Trapcode Form 1.1
Trapcode Horizon 1.1
Tracpdoe Lux 1.1
Trapcode Particular 2.1
Trapcode Shine 1.6
Trapcode Soundkeys 1.2
Trapcode Starglow 1.6
Trapcode Suite 10
With more on the way soon. I want to personally thank the amazing team at Red Giant for their hard work in getting these updates out.
If you’re looking to upgrade your Production Premium to CS5, I’ve created a convenient store page here. Looking to upgrade your Master Collection? That’s here. If you have some other permutation of Adobe CS5 needs, including student/teacher editions, you can get started here.
I’m not at NAB this year, because Las Vegas murders my soul and trade shows stomp on the remains—but there are some cool things happening at and around the show already.
First a small but important thing: Red Giant Software is having a big sale between now and April 18. 30% off everything. More details here.
Adobe announced Creative Suite 5, which includes new versions of After Effects and Premiere Pro. Both and standout releases, and I extend a hearty congratulations to the product teams. The After Effects feature that has everyone flipping out is Roto Brush, which uses, presumably, some sort of alien technology discovered beneath the Great Pyramids to semi-automate complex rotoscoping tasks. Like the Content-Aware Fill technology in Photoshop CS5, it has the potential to save you tons of time, which you can repurpose for more important things like staring at your computers screen muttering “How the hell do they do that?” Read more about what’s new in After Effects CS5 at the blog of After Effects Product Manager Michael Coleman.
The CS5 tools we care about are now 64-bit applications, which means many good things, but also means that all your third-party plug-ins need to be re-engineered for compatibility. Red Giant Software’s announcement about this is here.
Redrock Micro has teased some images of new products to be announced later today, including one that apparently eats your iPhone and turns it into Pure Awesome:
microTape Range FinderiPhone/iPod Touch advanced automation
Storm
The Foundry has released details on Storm, the end-to-end filmmaking tool tool they’ve been teasing us about. As expected, fxguide has thorough coverage.
Panasonic AG-AF100Panasonic has somehow found the stash of Obvious Pills that have eluded every other video camera manufacturer who also makes the still cameras masquerading as video cameras that have captured all the attention of digital filmmakers. Yesterday they announced the AF100, a “professional” video camera based on the 4/3” sensor from the GH1. Rumored price is to be in the $6,000 range, and although the internal codec is the much-maligned (and, by definition, non-professional) AVCHD, it’s maxed-out 24mbps AVCHD, so it should do better than the GH1. It also will have uncompressed HD out (which your could capture with, say, an AJA Ki-PRO), bypassing the ACVD codec entirely. I hope it also has some buttons.
UPDATE: Oh look, it does:
Jan Crittenden, Product Manager at Panasonic, had this to say about the camera on DVXuser: “There will not be aliasing as we actually have a clue about what causes that.” Nice.
Update on Monday, April 12, 2010 at 12:25PM by
Stu
The press release is up now—Blackmagic Design announced today a software-only version of the DaVinci Resolve color grading system, starting at $995. If you think Apple’s Color is immensely powerful and nearly impossible to use, wait until you see Resolve’s user interface. Still, this is pretty much the coolest thing anyone could have imagined doing after acquiring DaVinci last year.
Yesterday Red Giant Software announced the release of Magic Bullet PhotoLooks. It’s the same Magic Bullet Looks you know and love, re-engineered for use on high resolution stills in Adobe Photoshop.
In case you don’t know, Looks, and now PhotoLooks, is a creative toolset for giving your images an overall cinematic look. It’s based on the model of an actual camera, with filters, lens characteristics, and film processing tricks. By accurately simulating the physics of light, glass, and celluloid, it creates a fun, creative environment for experimenting with your shots. Start with one of 100 presets, see how they’re put together, then modify them to taste—or design your own and share them with friends.
Longtime Magic Bullet Looks users will recognize the interface, presets, and tools—so much so that they might even wonder what’s new about this new version. A lot has changed under the hood, but all in ways designed not to be noticed. Here are some examples:
That PhotoLooks is a native Photoshop plug-in means that not only can you use it directly from within Photoshop, but you can also use Photoshop’s Smart Layers to keep PhotoLooks as a non-destructive adjustment that you can tweak again and again, even after closing and re-opening the file. Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to do this in the above tutorial.
PhotoLooks contains the beginnings of a Color Management solution, so that your color-managed Photoshop workflow will match what you see in the PhotoLooks UI. Future versions will refine and enhance this feature to work with any popular color space you might care to use for your photography workflow.
The last one is the biggest change and hopefully the most invisible: The Looks rendering engine has been re-written completely to work on high-resolution stills. While working on your look, you get the fluid, GPU-accelerated experience Looks has always provided, but when you press OK, your look is rendered by the new CPU render engine that can handle the gigantic image sizes common to current-generation cameras. If you’ve used the “secret” stills feature of Magic Bullet Looks, you may have run up against limitations in resolution. That won’t happen with PhotoLooks.
What’s fun for me, as the guy who designed it, is to see a whole new legion of creative professionals exposed to the power and creativity of Magic Bullet Looks. Here are some of their impressions:
I am not exaggerating when I say that Magic Bullet PhotoLooks will re-invent the way people think about filters in Photoshop—I have never seen anything like it.
-Deke McClelland, award-winning Photoshop author, and trainer
Another favorite feature of mine is the Look Theater. I get creatively stumped with my photography occasionally, and it is so cool to be able to just sit and watch my photographs take on a new persona without me having to lift a finger.
-Justin Seeley, Photoshop trainer and graphic designer
Magic Bullet PhotoLooks is a fantastic tool, with absolutely no adoption curve.
To make a perfect look for a photo [using Photoshop’s built-in tools] can be an arduous process of changing levels, curves, diffusion, glows, spot exposure, color correction, vignetting, edge softness, etc. However, the thumbnail for each of the 100+ presets in Magic Bullet PhotoLooks instantly updates to show its effect on your photo making it really easy to compare the effect of each one.
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 9:21PM 
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