Tag: software

919 And I Froze

Chris invites you into the world of building new neural pathways by talking about one of the biggest learning experiences he had in a long time. Also: how about using video tools to inspire some new photo editing tools?

Topics:

  • [AI, PHOTO] Greg Rutkowski : Fantasy artist Greg Rutkowski is not happy. His name shows up in a substantial number of AI art generation prompts to make the results more like his art style. While that made him much more known, it also means that it’s now fairly simple to create art that is inspired by his style.
  • [PHOTO, CREATIVITY] Coming from Video : Video production and editing has a few tools to offer that we could use in photography. A few have made their way into still photography already, such as LUTs for color grading and some cameras even offer zebra stripes to make manual exposure easier. But there are more that we haven’t really seen in still photography yet. One being video waveforms for judging exposure and node-based editors for more control over editing.
  • [PHOTO, CREATIVITY, AI] And I Froze… : Sitting in front of an empty text box can be a very daunting task. Chris talks about how his experience building the first prompts was very similar to that of AI god Andrei Karpathy and how he tries to cover both his caution regarding AI-induced societal changes and his excitement of building new brain pathways.

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Affinity Designer might give Adobe a bit of a headache

affinity-designer-logo Many of us have reluctantly signed up for the Adobe Creative Cloud because .. well .. because there’s not much of an alternative. A monopoly is a monopoly and monopolists have the tendency to take what they think is theirs.

This might be changing right now. A few days ago, Affinity Designer has emerged. It’s a vector program that works remarkably well. You get to switch between three different modes (they call them “persona”): vector, pixel and export. It’s fast, it’s small and it seems really well programmed.

While that in itself is all great, here are a few more goodies:

Affinity is planning to release two more products: Photo and Publisher. If the quality of Designer is any indication on what’s to come, Adobe might have a bit of a problem on their hands. I’m serious. This thing is speedy and fun to work with. Watch the video on their home page, after playing with Designer on my 2012 Macbook Air, I can confirm that what they demo in the video isn’t sped up.

And then there’s the pricing model: bye bye subscriptions. Affinity Designer is $39.99 (20% discounted launch offer until Oct/9/2014) and if you buy it, it’s yours to keep.

Oh, and did I mention that they support Mac OSX 10.7 and up? So my old 2007 Mac Pro can play too!

I’m convinced. Bring on the Photo and Publisher!

» more information

Update:
The more I rummage around in Designer, the more little delightful things I discover. For example the non-destructive boolean operations (hint: select two shapes, click the boolean toolbar icons while holding down the Alt/Option key) and then I found this in the help file: the Affinity Cat

Site updates

TFTTF on the iPad

I’ve just updated Tips from the Top Floor to the latest software, installed a new theme (I like its visual simplicity) and have given it a brand spanking new set of mobile themes, which means it’ll look great on pretty much all smartphones and of course on the iPhone and the iPad.

Baby, TFTTF is mobile!

I will be playing with the detail settings for the new site for a few more days, but you’ll probably only see minor changes.

Please let me know what works and what doesn’t. Also: how do you like it?