Photoshop

It's been a long time coming but early indications are that Adobe has delivered a solid iteration of Photoshop Touch for those with phones running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or using an iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 or fifth-generation iPod Touch. Priced at $4.99, it's now available for purchase on the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Let's face it, most music videos are pretty banal, endlessly recycling a visual language that goes back to the 80s. So when an attempt is made to break out of this tired mold, it's worth celebrating. This is certainly the case for a recent interactive video created by design agency OKFocus to promote Not the Same, a tune by Tanlines. Best experienced with Google Chrome, the site mimics aspects of the Photoshop interface, complete with layers and a toolbar that lets move and resize band members and choose from a selection of backgrounds that includes webcams and animations. You can even click on the word Experiment up near the top to have your Instagram photos tagged with #notthesame show up as the background of the site's Instagram layer. Fun stuff.

You may recall that Adobe recently posted download links to the entire Creative Suite 2, complete with license numbers, and then was shocked, shocked I tell you, when people mistakenly interpreted that as a gesture on the firm's part to make old, commercially unviable versions of their apps available for free download. You'd think Adobe would like that little incident swept under the rug.

At least, that was my first thought on watching this clip demonstrating voice-controlled image editing. We're barely into the era of touch but it's a safe bet that voice will be the next "big thing" in interface innovation. The example here shows off PixelTone, an experimental effort created by Adobe Research and the University of Michigan that combines voice and touch.

It's hard to know at this point whether Adobe has just pulled off a brilliant viral marketing move or has simply screwed up. I'm speaking here of the current abillity to freely download the entire Creative Suite 2 from Adobe's site, which almost collapsed from the load once this became known. Admittedly, using software released in 2005 isn't everyone's idea of a good time and in fact you might have trouble running it at all, given the hardware and operating systems for which it was created. But still.

Although the pressure was actually on Adobe to add touch-sensitivity to the tablet version of Photoshop, given that this functionality has been provided by more than a few mobile image editing and creation apps for some time now. But better late than never. In the clip below, Terry White shows off the new capabilities.

After a wait that has made more than a few MacBook Pro users increasingly restless, Adobe has now released updated versions of Photoshop and Illustrator for both Creative Suite subscribers and perpetual license customers as a free update.

The release came ahead of yesterday's Create Now Live event, which is now available for viewing as a series of videos.

You might want to have the sound turned down a notch before playing this brief video, which provides a tantalizing look at upcoming Photoshop CS6 functionality. It's expected that the features flying by in the clip will form an integral part of the Adobe Create Now Live event scheduled for December 11. The bad news for many Photoshop users is that the new features are expected to be available only for Creative Cloud subscribers.

Or will you? It all depends on whether you're a member of Adobe Creative Cloud. Is you in or is you out, as they say? Because if you're out, you'll increasingly have to watch helplessly as new functionality is added to your favorite image editing app -- functionality which you simply won't have access to, even if you upgraded to Photoshop CS6.

Just when you think you've seen everything, you stumble across something like the work of Bologna-based Il Dito, a pseudonym which is apparently Italian for "the finger." According to UK-based site Metro, the artist has explained this unusual approach to portraiture thusly: "In Italian someone could say I wanted to 'hide myself behind my finger' - it's a metaphor to indicate a not-very-effective hiding place. I used this metaphor to say we all try to hide ourselves behind an image of us we create. That's my finger, the changing masks everybody wears in playing life... especially famous people." Works for me, since there are certainly worse Italian metaphors based on body parts. I've posted a few fave portraits below from the many to be found on the Ditology site.