SCW, aka Sweet Cheeks Willie, posted a link to this video in a comment he left on my iPhone Photography article showing a “not yet released” iPhone camera app called “RetroCamera FREE”. This app looks pretty feature rich, but it’s hard to tell from the video what the quality will be of the photos once they’ve been processed. Plus the UI elements on some of the filter options look a little overwhelming to actually interact with and it’s hard to tell if you can fine tune any of these adjustments. But the app has yet to materialize, so I’ll reserve judgement until it actually shows up. It does continue to show off what the iPhone is capable of as a computing platform.

Oh and yeah, I recommend the mute button.

I’ve had my iPhone for a little over 2 months now and have been experimenting with its photographic capabilities. I love the instant availability the iPhone gives me to be able to snap a picture wherever I am and easily share it via various social channels such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. While the built in camera in the 3Gs is decent and the “touch to focus” functionality is a step closer to the control I’m used to with my digital SLR, the raw images from the iPhone camera ultimately leave a lot to be desired. Unless you’re in bright daylight and are usually a fair distance from your subject, your images end up looking flat.

Clearly one of the greatest strengths of the iPhone is it’s application environment and the thousands of developers busily working to get in on the action and on your phone. Many very talented developers have produced some amazing applications built to take the iPhone’s photographic capabilities to the next level by giving us tools to enhance our images. Some of the favorites are CameraBag, QuadCamera, Best Camera, Toy Camera, and TiltShift Generator. All of these apps are essentially post-processing tools that edit the photos hue, saturation, contrast, exposure (kind of), and maybe offer a couple of other specialized effects like vignetting and framing.

After trying these out and putting them through their paces, I found myself getting frustrated with the fact that these apps are similar enough to want to only use one, but different enough in the style of photos they produce that it’s hard to decide which one to use at any given time.

CameraBag for example gives you style presets such as Helga, Infrared, Fisheye, and Lolo, but with no option to fine tune those styles. Best Camera is from professional photographer Chase Jarvis and features custom, stylistic filters that you can add to an image and then rearrange their order for a little more creative control. That level of customization is really nice and the results generally look good, but again the filters are essentially “hard coded” and lack individual editing control. Best Camera does have amazing social integration with the ability to publish your images to Facebook, Twitter, and to The Best Camera community.

After more experimentation and an inspirational tweet by Kory Westerhold, I came across the magical combination of using TiltShift Generator and Mill Colour. TiltShift Generator is an app that at it’s core gives you tools to simulate the look of tilt-shift photography, but as you experiment with the controls you can easily move beyond the typical “miniature” look that’s synonymous with a tilt-shift lens. What I love about this app is that it helps simulate a stronger depth-of-field than the native “touch to focus” feature gives you and you can also get creative in where that focal point exists. From there the app provides color editing for saturation, brightness, and contrast which, regardless of being only 3 sliders, can dramatically alter the look of your photo. Lastly you have a slider for adding a vignette and then the option to save your photo to the photo library or export (I presume to twitter, but I’ve never used it).

At this point I move the photo over to Mill Colour, which I’m convinced is one of the best image/photo apps available on the iPhone. Plus, it’s free. Mill Colour is a color grading application built by the ridiculously talented people at The Mill. I usually start with one of the color presets and then adjust the saturation, lift, gamma, and gain from there. These kinds of tools are what professional color graders use in the entertainment industry. Granted, I’m not saying this app and an app like Autodesk Lustre or Apple’s Color are equal, but, in principal, you’re doing the same thing to an image. You’re creating mood.

This image above was done using the TiltShift Generator and Mill Colour combination, but with one additional step of adding a white border using Adobe’s recently released Photoshop Mobile for the iPhone. It’s an interesting app, but I really only use it to crop or add a border like this to my images.

Here are a few more images that I’ve created using this app combination:

The iPhone photography landscape is still coming into focus and these apps are young, but the future looks promising. I do have a couple of wishes such as the ability to save my own presets in Mill Colour and being able to automate my progression through these individual apps would be nice. This last wish I know is a platform issue and not something I see Apple doing anytime soon, but the idea of me being able to string together apps much like I create actions in Photoshop would save me the time it takes to open and close each app. Plus these “application workflows” (for lack of a better term) could be shareable with other iPhone users and promote apps that a user might not own but be enticed to purchase. The more the iPhone becomes a productivity device the more the idea of using multiple apps to accomplish a single goal will become a reality.

As I’ve migrated into using vector shapes in my Photoshop work as much as possible, the difference in control you have with vector objects between Photoshop and Illustrator has been a constant source of frustration. One specific example is that for years I’ve wanted to have the same or similar functionality of combining vector shapes in Photoshop that Illustrator has with it’s Pathfinder tool, arguably one of the most powerful tools in Illustrator.

My solution has been to use the vector tools in Photoshop for basic shapes such as rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles, and lines and if I needed a more complex shape I’d jump into Illustrator, build it, and then copy it back into Photoshop. This was not only annoying from an efficiency perspective but also because I didn’t have the contents of the rest of my Photoshop comp to rely on when building the shape I needed unless I saved a jpg and used that in Illustrator for reference.

I was recently working on a project that called for a tabbed navigation element and I really wanted that object to be one single vector shape. I got fed up and did some searching to see if there was any possible way to combine vector shapes and found this solution that looked exactly like what I’ve been looking for. While the content was good, the steps weren’t very clear, but I was able to figure it out and thought I’d pass this info along with expanded details and screenshots. Here’s the process:

1. Create a New Document

Draw two or more vector shapes in your document and make sure they overlap. Your “Layers” palette should look something like the 2nd screenshot.

2. Choose the Path Selection Tool

From your “Tools” window select the “Path Selection Tool” (dark arrow). If you have the “Direct Selection Tool” (white arrow) enabled then you’ll need to click and hold to bring up the option to choose the “Path Selection Tool”. This is what had me stumped for such a long time. I always had the “Direct Selection Tool” enabled because I regularly adjust individual points on my vector shapes. I had long forgotten that there was another arrow under that option in the “Tools” window. The “Path Selection Tool” gives you the ability to select vector paths as a whole and move them around or copy them, which we’re about to learn is a very vital step.

3. Select Vector Mask

With the “Path Selection Tool” enabled, select the vector mask for the top shape in the “Layers” window and hit cmd+C (ctrl+C on Windows) to make a copy of that mask. Now select the vector mask of the shape below it and hit cmd+V (ctrl+V) to paste the copied vector mask onto the bottom shape’s layer. Your “Layers” window should now look like this:

4. Combine Vector Masks

With the “Path Selection Tool” still enabled you can either hold down the “shift” key and make multiple selections of the vector shapes in your document or simply click on the vector mask thumbnail of the bottom layer that now contains multiple paths, which selects all of the paths for that layer. Which route you take depends on if you want to combine all of the shapes or only some of the shapes in that layer. At the top of the application you get the option to “Combine” these shapes.

The options available look very similar to the main options you have with the “Pathfinder” tool in Illustrator. You can “Add to shape area”, “Subtract from shape area”, “Intersect shape areas”, and “Exclude overlapping shape areas”. If you click “Add to shape area” you’ll get the following result:

That’s it!
Another interesting thing to note is that once you have multiple masks on a single shape layer you don’t have to combine them for them to perform as a single shape. You can apply layer effects to that layer and Photoshop will treat all of those masks as a collective whole. Leaving these as individual shapes on the same layer provides flexibility to where you can copy and paste them out of that layer and into a new layer or drag them around individually.

I can’t tell you how happy I was to learn this feature. It’s been a huge time saver for me. Hopefully it’s helpful to you if you’ve wondered the same thing or are new to Photoshop.

I use the align tools in both Illustrator and Photoshop a lot to help make sure various elements are properly positioned in my comps. Sometimes when working in Illustrator I want to center multiple objects around a single “master” object and so I use the “Horizontal Align Center” or “Vertical Align Center” buttons on the “Align” palette. These actions will center those objects, but Illustrator will shift all of the selected objects to a common center based on your selection. This has always frustrated me because I then have to reposition all of these now aligned objects back to where my “master” object was positioned before I performed the alignment.

This morning I guess I decided to pay closer attention to the options included in the Align palette and I noticed the “Align To:” drop-down box. Clicking on this brought up the following 3 options:

The “Align to Key Object” option sounded like it would do what I’ve always wanted to do with the align tools. I selected it and noticed that Illustrator drew a thicker selection around my top two buttons. I could tell those were now the “Key Objects” and all I had to do was click on the “CTA Button” to assign it as the Key Object and then click on the “Horizontal Align Center” button. Bam, my top two buttons aligned perfectly over the “CTA Button” and the “CTA Button” remained in it’s position.

I don’t know how long this feature as been in Illustrator and it may very well be common knowledge to most Illustrator users. It was a huge time-saver for me and felt worthy of passing on to the rest of you. I’ve run into several situations like this with Adobe’s applications, which isn’t surprising since they’re fairly complex and feature a lot of small UI elements that aren’t always noticeable at first glance.

On another note, I’m not a fan of how Adobe has chosen to indicate which element is the “Key Object”. The highlight treatment is horrible and looks to be somewhat of an afterthought. I’d recommend another highlight treatment and possibly change the highlight color so it doesn’t blend into the selection color.

John is the Principal Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop and produces a fantastic blog devoted to that product and other related issues. Outside of the tips, techniques, and insider info on Photoshop, one of the greatest reasons why John’s blog is so helpful is that he actively engages in the comments left by his readers. I believe the method by how he goes about engaging with Adobe’s userbase is one that should be admired and gleaned from by other companies.

This article on feature requests and this follow-up one on feature requests that already work are great examples of what you can expect from John’s site. Definitely worth subscribing to.

Albert Poon of Odopod has a great write-up on their design work for the iPhone app Routesy. I believe their decision to go with a slightly more matte finish to their UI elements as opposed to glossy buttons was the right call and the large, colorful badges help with scanning the route and bookmark lists. I also love the idea of having the bookmarks sort based on your current location.

Screenshots emerged this week on what could potentially be the next version of Microsoft Office. The image above is an example of the new UI.

From what I’m seeing here I sincerely hope that this UI is either false or an early version of what will finally launch when Office 2010 ships. I think it leaves much to be desired. The nav elements in the “ribbon” at the top of the window are all over the place. Everything is crammed together and there is a severe need for whitespace to provide more context to each of those “Message” options and aid the eye in drawing distinctions between those options. You’ve also got text labels in multiple locations. Some are next to the nav icon, some below, and some just floating out by themselves.

The email header is okay, although I wonder why the “sent’ field is thrown over by itself on the right. The audio player, that I’m assuming features the voicemail that was sent to Ankur Kothari, is again in a weird spot. It also bumps down the entire message pane and creates some awkward negative space to the right side of the message window.

I’m not going to get into the spacing of the content in the message because it’s hard to tell if that’s being set by the application or by the user, but there’s plenty to mention in there too.

Again this is an early build and a lot of these issues could get resolved by the launch of the product. Hopefully that will be the case. Until then I’ll refer you to a wonderful quote by Steven Frank (posted on Daring Fireball) concerning these same UI problems:

This is impenetrable. It’s UI salad. I realize this is not (yet) shipping software, but my god. If you sat me down in front of this, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to begin.

“It’s UI salad.” Classic.