Hasta La Motion!

AVATAR AND ADOBE SOFTWARE

CREATING A FULLY IMMERSIVE CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE

“One of the great things about what Adobe does with its Suite of products, is they give you everything you need to complete your whole process, from concept to finish.”Producer Jon Landau
The movie Avatar takes viewers to a spectacular world beyond imagination. James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of Titanic, first conceived the film 15 years ago, when the technological means to realize his vision did not exist yet. Now, after four years of production, Avatar delivers a fully immersive 3D cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.
Adobe’s Creative Suite – notably Photoshop® , Lightroom® , After Effects® , Premiere® Pro and Acrobat® Connect – was used extensively in pre and post-production of the film, while the Flash® Platform played a major role in successfully marketing the film.
The process of creating the virtual world of Pandora as well as the CG characters began in Adobe Photoshop software.
Throughout the filmmaking process, Adobe After Effects was at the heart of the production. Initially, concept art for the film was brought into After Effects to create a pitch reel that sold the film to 20th Century Fox.
Photoshop Extended was used to paint geometry on different models of creatures and characters – refining the overall look of the film and boost the movie’s photorealism.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom helped organise the thousands of photographs and concept images into a clean, manageable project. As sequences came together, the editorial department brought them into Adobe Premiere Pro software to see the flow from shot to shot and gauge timing.
With a team of artists spread across several facilities, Adobe software also helped everyone stay synchronised and productive. Art and production departments used Adobe InDesign® CS4 software to create easy-to-read forms used throughout production. And Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro software was used for web conferencing to coordinate efforts between the lab at Lightstorm Entertainment, Inc. and the set.
The end result is breathtaking. It draws on James Cameron’s extensive innate talent, the skills of a multifacted team of artists and advanced software – and technologies from Adobe that are charting the future of filmmaking.
Watch the Adobe TV video featuring Jon Landau, Producer of Avatar, describing how Adobe software was used throughout the production of the film.
Download the cool Avatar interactive AIR app

Read the full success story here

ADOBE® PHOTOSHOP® TURNS 20

A VISUAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE YEARS

When Photoshop was first introduced, it was viewed as a great subset to Adobe® Illustrator® and a good way to promote PostScript and laser printing. But not even industry insiders closest to the product could predict the software’s wild success and the tremendous impact it would have on the design and photography industries worldwide. Within a few years of its release, Adobe Photoshop was a mainstay at publishing houses, film studios, advertising firms and within corporate marketing departments. Now, Photoshop is more than a graphics application – it is a sociological phenomenon, not to mention a verb.

Today, Photoshop is richly threaded into society and its use permeates social networking, architecture and engineering, medicine, the sciences and entertainment. Photoshop touches every aspect of modern communication – from forensics to animation to mobile gaming. It is embedded into plots of television shows and major motion pictures – used to solve crimes, simplify mysteries and wreak fictional havoc.
It started in 1987 when Thomas Knoll decided to write his own code to display greyscale images on a monochrome monitor as a hobby, while working on his PhD research. Then, his filmmaker brother John added code that could process digital image files. The brothers modified their application to include features that still define Photoshop: tone and colour controls, paintbrushes and multiple file formats. The Knoll brothers sensed the commercial potential and in 1988, John Knoll demonstrated the image editor to Adobe. The licensing agreement was soon sealed.
Once Photoshop took off, it never slowed down. Each product release brought significant new features. An entire software sub-industry cropped up, producing special-effects filters and plug-ins for Photoshop. By 1995, Adobe ended its licensing agreement with the Knoll brothers and bought the product outright for $34.5 million.
Today, with over 6 million users worldwide, Photoshop devotees can be found in every corner of commerce, entertainment and government.
The Adobe Photoshop® family of products is the ultimate playground for bringing out the best in your digital images and transforming them into anything you can imagine.
Celebrate the 20th anniversary of Photoshop with Adobe here.
Meet The Team including the four creators and other key team members.

Find the Photoshop product for you

ADOBE® PHOTOSHOP® GETS GOOGLED

OR IS IT GOOGLE MOBILE GETS PHOTOSHOPPED?

When a brand becomes a verb, you know it has etched its name deep into the public consciousness. Well here we have arguably the two biggest brandverbs in the world right now working together – as Adobe launches a mobile version of their award winning software Photoshop for Google’s Android Phones. Photoshop.com Mobile optimises the camera-phone experience by allowing users to browse for their photos online and on their phone, directly from the application.
Photoshop.com Mobile for Android offers essential, user-friendly photo-editing tools like crop, rotate and flip. The Soft Focus filter can be used to create a subtle blur effect and to perform a variety of colour adjustments. Users can automatically upload pictures to Photoshop.com albums in the background, even when the Photshop.com Mobile application is not running. What’s more, Photoshop.com accounts provide you with 2GB of free online photo storage – that’s over 1,500 photos. Lastly, you can access Photoshop.com for free online photo editing and quickly share those images on social-networking sites or through Photoshop.com online galleries.
The application is free and available today at the Android Market.
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