As smartphones started gaining popularity, Adobe saw potential and spearheaded the Open Screen Project. The idea was to get all of the industry developers together and come up with a way to give users an identical flash experience across devices. This includes companies like Samsung, Google, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, the list goes on…

This summer, smartphones will not only be able to see flash in a browser, but AIR apps as well—without consuming all of their resources. In the past, flash depended solely on a device’s CPU (central processing unit) to render graphics. This enabled it to be viewable across platforms—but at the cost of reduced overall performance. This is why flash player 10.1 (currently in beta) has been tailored to work with available hardware to accelerate graphic rendering. The result is a much smoother user experience, and the potential for more impressive apps on a higher scale.

And of course, with new devices come new features. The new flash player will enable developers to detect and take advantage of common smartphone features such as multi-touch detection and accelerometers. CS5 also comes packed with basic touch gestures, such as detecting a pinching motion to zoom. Or, you can develop your own. With all the new advancements, the possibilities are endless.

If you would like to read more on the upcoming features and advancements, checkout Justin Everett-Church’s post on Adobe’s Development blog.

This is nothing new for Apple. The iPhone and iPod Touch have lacked any support for Flash since coming to market, relying on custom apps to allow access to content on sites like YouTube (which ordinarily streams content as Flash video files). As described in an earlier post on this blog, Adobe has once again found themselves with the ball in their court. I wouldn’t be surprised if Adobe Flash Professional CS5 winds up able to compile apps for both the iPhone and the iPad. Or who knows, maybe that’s a CS6 feature?

But why take such a hard line against Flash with the iPad? First, Apple has been consistent in its position that Flash is too resource intensive for its mobile devices, citing decreased battery life and processor strain as the two primary examples of why it could be considered advantageous to drop support altogether. Secondly, Apple is pushing standards with the launch of this device—HTML5 specifically.

By supporting HTML5, Apple has enabled the iPad to stream video content without the need for a browser plugin. Most mainstream video content providers, including YouTube, are already moving to adopt HTML5. Currently, web browsers Opera and (unsurprisingly) Apple’s own Safari boast strong support of HTML5, while Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer lags far behind.

It would be unwise to take all of this as reason to be dismissive of Flash altogether, however. Roughly 96 percent of internet users have some version of Adobe’s Flash installed on their computers. While HTML5 may be the future of video distribution on the web, Flash developers continue to push the platform’s boundaries, delivering not only video, but games, advertising and interactive media to a steadily growing global market.

We may be just catching a glimpse of the end of Adobe’s market dominance on the horizon, but in the meantime, it’s still the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to the multimedia content being consumed by the one billion plus global internet users online in 2010. Apple’s decision to essentially “lock out” its iPad users from this type of content may have been intended to be a push toward the future, but could wind up hurting them in the end.

Pushing standards is one thing, but denying people access to content they have become widely accustomed to consuming is another thing entirely.

A couple more Photoshop CS5 videos:
Spot Healing and Fill Tool
Painter-Style Brushes and the New Warp Tool

Want to see into Adobe’s future? Pretty amazing and exciting stuff!

The release of every Adobe Creative Suite is always a big deal to the design community, but this one is especially huge for ole’ Apple PowerPC owners. You guessed it, CS5 will be Intel-only, so that gives you a great excuse to buy a new computer! Adobe’s rationale is that “if you haven’t upgraded your workstation in four years, you’re probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either”. Oh Snap!

Allowing users to play free games while browsing the web would impact the number of sales generated from the Apple Apps store. From a business perspective, it’s kind of hard to brush that off. And so flash gets to sit in the corner, ignored and neglected, awaiting the day that Apple notices it.

Well wait no more!

Apple still hasn’t noticed flash, but Adobe got tired of holding their breath.

Adobe recently announced that Flash Professional CS5 is able to take ActionScript3 code and compile it as an iPhone app. There is no run-time interpretation, it is actually building a true native iPhone .ipa, following all of the guidelines Apple has set for their development community. The new Flash IDE comes equipped with tools geared specifically towards accessing the iPhone’s capabilities, including touch and tilt detection.

There are, of course, features in flash that the iPhone doesn’t allow, such as accessing the camera and microphone, or loading external .swf files that contain actionscript. But all in all, this is a huge score for the flash development community, allowing us to distribute our flash games and applications via the Apple Apps store.

So I guess flash is still technically on the sidelines, but its genetically altered clone gets to walk through the front doors without the bouncers even giving it a glance; which is the next best thing, really.

The public beta for Adobe Flash Professional CS5 will be released this month. So sign up to be notified and Adobe will let you know when it becomes available.

Many of the technical details haven’t yet been released, but here is a useful link if you would like to learn more.

There are three separate services in total: Distribution, Collaboration, and Social (coming soon). I decided to take a closer look at all three, to find out more and see if these services are right for me. Read on to discover how they can help you as a designer.

Distribution

This service enables businesses to share, promote, track, and monetize apps. There are free, paid, and revenue earning features that can be utilized.

“Free,” you say? Absolutely! Developers can now easily add sharing capabilities to their apps, making it a breeze for users to tell their friends, giving businesses a better chance at making their apps viral. And to monitor the success of the app, tracking is also included as a free feature. During the beta phase, mobile distribution is being offered for free, however, Adobe reserves the right to change the pricing at any time.

“Paid,” you ask? Yes, some services do come at a cost. Promoting your app does have a CPI (Cost per Install) charge. The overall price varies based on target audience. Ad hosting is also an option, with a typical CPM of $5. Again, this price varies.

“Monetize,” you wonder? Adobe is offering the chance to generate revenue by hosting paid ads for other apps within your apps. The amount, like everything else, varies.

The developer extensions are only available for Adobe Flash Professional CS4, Dreamweaver CS4, and Flex Builder 3. Mobile distribution is only available for Adobe Flash Professional CS4.

Collaboration

This service enables users to communicate with each other in real-time. This interaction ranges from simple text chats, to audio/video streaming. It also enables the developer to manage user statuses and connections.

Only paid features are available for this service. Real-time bandwidth usage runs at $0.49 per GB. Message pushing goes for $0.10 per 1000 messages sent. User minutes are charged at $0.01 per hour (this is where user status comes into play, allowing developers to disconnect an idle connection).

Social

This service isn’t available yet, but will be in the near future. The goal is to enable developers to easily integrate flash apps into the leading social networks, without dealing with their respective APIs. This means less of a learning curve, and MUCH less time spent implementing over multiple sites. Seriously, just being able to avoid fbml (facebook markup language) gives this feature an A+++ in by book.

No word yet on which features will be free or paid.

There are many factors that can affect the quality of a photo on your website. The clouds, the sun, even the light-bouncing qualities of the objects in focus. Often times, it may be better to take a dark photo that can be corrected by computer, rather than risking over-exposure to achieve a vibrant image. Here is a “before and after” example of what you’ll be learning in this tutorial.

Step 1 – Adjusting Levels

Changing the levels of a layer is really just a quick way to adjust the brightness/contrast of an image. First, let’s apply a new adjustment layer. To do this, click the ‘create new adjustment layer‘ icon from the layers window, then select ‘Levels…‘

You’ll see what looks like a black bar-graph. The graph gives an overview of the light and dark levels of the image.

The left end shows the blackest blacks while the right shows the whitest whites. As you can see in the image, there is a decent sized gap on both sides of our graph. This means that the black in our image is really more of a gray, and our white isn’t very bright.

There are three markers below the graph; one for black, white, and mid-tones. By moving the black marker to the beginning of the graph’s “wave,” we make our shadows appear more black. The same can be done with the white arrow on the right to brighten the highlights of our image. It’s usually best to adjust the mid-tone marker last. I suggest keeping it in its original position (1.0) in most cases as it tends to make the photo look faded. Use your judgment.

Step 2 – Masking Mistakes

When we changed our highlights we made the sky appear to be over-exposed. This is easily correctable by applying a layer mask to the levels layer we just created.

Ensure that the “levels” layer is selected in the Layers window, then click the ‘add layer mask‘ icon, located directly next to the ‘create adjustment layer‘ icon.

Using a black paintbrush, paint over the sky area. You’ll notice that the original color reappears. If you make a mistake, simply change the brush color to white to reapply the mask where necessary. You can also use gray if you want to partially apply the filter in certain areas.

Step 3 – Color Overlay

The first two steps are usually enough to make most old pictures look 100% better. But why stop there when being creative is so much fun?! What our canyon picture now lacks is “natural” breath-taking colors. So, we’re left with no choice but to digitally thwart Mother Nature’s perfect creation.

Start by adding a new layer and use the paint bucket to fill the layer with red. From the Layers window, select your new layer and change the blend mode to “Overlay” and adjust the Opacity to around 15%.

The stone (and everything else) now appears more red. It’s time for some cosmetic touch ups. Notice the slight color variation in the rock wall? Let’s emphasize that a bit. Get out your paintbrush and select a yellow color. With the red layer selected, paint over the highlights to make them more apparent.

Step 4 – More Masks!

Once again, we fixed one thing only to break another. Let’s resurrect the plant life from the early grave we sent it to. With the red layer selected, add a new layer mask.

Trying to paint precisely over each leaf is not only unbearably tedious, but nearly impossible with this over-compressed cloud of pixels. To ease the processes, use the gradient tool with black as the primary color, and white as the secondary color. Now, with the mask selected, click and drag upward as illustrated in the images below.

This gives us a gradual transition with the plants in our foreground, making the next edits less apparent to the viewer. Now back to familiar ground, pull out that black paint brush and have a blast with those plants. To help you on your adventure, a quick keyboard shortcut… the ‘[' and ']‘ keys can be used to quickly resize your paintbrush for those hard to reach places. As long as you use a soft brush (hardness set to 0%), you’ll find that being exact isn’t necessary.

One final touch; while our gradient worked wonders on the plants, it made the ground look out of place. If we apply the full overlay then we’ll lose that separation. The solution is to paint gray over that section in order to partially apply the mask, giving the ground a slightly reddish tint while maintaining that pop-out effect.

There you have it! A nigh-perfect billboard representation of a vacation hot-spot, set and ready to catch the eye of tourists from all four corners of the globe!

Download the PSD (Photoshop Document) from this tutorial.

There have been many changes and advancements with Flash since Macromedia first introduced it back in 1996; the majority of which occurred with Adobe’s release of Flash Player 9 and ActionScript3.

In this article, we’re going to uncover some of the upcoming features of Flash Player 10, which has recently been released for public beta testing.

3D Environments

New to Flash Player 10 is the native 3D support. Previously, Flash only allowed us to move images around on a 2D workspace by changing the ‘x’ and ‘y’ position of an on-screen object. The ‘z’ position has been introduced in Flash Player 10 as a way to move images in a 3D workspace by adjusting the depth.

The new 3D environment is incredibly easy to use and requires little learning for someone with past Flash experience. However, the features are still insignificant compared to what has already been developed by the Flash community (like PaperVision3D). Still, this is a major advancement in the Flash Player’s native graphic capabilities and, with a bit of creativity, the possibilities are endless.

In addition to depth control, there are also new rotation properties. In Flash Player 9 and earlier, the ‘rotation’ property would rotate an object using the z-axis as its guide. This is useful if you want to turn the hands on a clock, but in a 3D world we want to be able to do much more than that.

By changing the ‘rotationY’ and ‘rotationX’ properties, we can effectively achieve the true feeling of a 3D environment. By default, a display object is flat and will appear as though it were cut from a sheet of paper. With some minor code manipulation we can give our objects mass, unlocking the door to even more creative potential.

Lastly, it should be noted that there is no “camera” object in Flash Player 10. However, it is possible to imitate a camera by putting all the display objects inside a container. Now, when the container moves, we get the appearance of moving through the environment.

That’s all for now, but check back for the next article installment: Dynamic Sound!