After a 4 year hiatus, the popular web comedy series “You Suck at Photoshop” has returned to My Damn Channel for a 3rd season (episode 1 and episode 2). Back in 2008 we wrote about the orginal seasons, along with the unmasking of the show’s creators: Troy Hitch and Matt Bledsoe.

On a recent episode of Ze Frank’s relaunched show, Ze demonstrates some of his new “Special Effects” using the Emotionz Pro software suite. The episode also features an animated segment based on dream by Veronica Belmont.

Color Forecast shows what colors are trending in real time in the fashion capitals of Paris, Milan and Antwerp. High speed cameras are strategically placed in these cities and the color information is analyzed by software created by Pedro Miguel Cruz. Ad agency Happiness Brussels created the project for retail chain Pimkie.

…The cameras are connected to Mac Mini’s with color tracking software developed by Pedro Cruz…
The software analyzes the passing colors and shows in real time which colors are worn the most.
All colors are then compiled in nice infographics, so you can follow how the cities evolve and how trends change.

via Wired

Fireplace by Ted Martens is an interactive pixelated fireplace for Mac or PC. Commands like “marshmallow” and “hotdog” enhance the interactive fireplace experience. The digital log burns down to ash in about 30 minutes.

via Waxy

photo 1 by The Verge, photo 2 by Justin, and photo 3 by David R.

At the 2011 Adobe MAX Conference, Adobe researchers unveiled a prototype image deblurring software that can remove blur caused by camera shake with remarkable effectiveness (see the presentation).

via PetaPixel

In “Faces,” Spanish computer engineer Arturo Castro seems to replace his face with those of a variety of famous personalities, thanks to “realtime face substitution,” a diabolical combination of a digital camera, projector, and face tracking and mapping software.

via The Next Web

ToyToyota, Toyota Motor Corporation’s new kid-friendly offshoot project, has them driving early, at least from the backseat, with the recently released the iPhone app Backseat Driver. In this app, the GPS functionality of the iPhone is used to mirror the route of the real car (Papa Car) that the child is riding in and allows them to steer and pick up objects in their car (Mama Car) for points. Virtual car customization is allowed as is the sharing of designs and scores via Twitter.

First offered in Japan, ToyToyota has created an English language version of their marketing video and website. The app is also now usable on U.S. roads.

Let’s grow your car more and more, by enjoying the actual car ride!

via Gizmodo

images via ToyToyota

“Welcome to the world of tomorrow!” Futurama fans: Your destiny awaits with the new Futurama Head-In-A-Jar Creator app for the iPhone that allows users to create custom, well, Futurama-style heads in jars. This character generating app not only allows the creation of custom human heads to stick in a jar but also allows the creation of aliens and robots too. All the custom personalities can live on in your very own Head Museum and you can pretend you are in New New York.

Go glamorous with a giant cyclops eye, or class things up with a gleaming robot antenna. With a dizzying assortment of human, alien, and robot features, the possibilities are literally finite.

You can share your heads on Facebook and Twitter or save them to your phone as a background. You can even create and share collections of heads in your own personal Head Museum, populated with Futurama versions of your family, friends, or fellow inmates.

images via Comedy Central

Photofly is an application that converts digital photos into 3D models. The processor intensive conversion is done entirely with cloud computing. Photofly is a free experimental app (Windows only) by Autodesk.

via Fast Company Design

Andrew Tait made a video of him upgrading every version of Microsoft Windows from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7.

via Waxy

Naked Password is a jQuery plugin by Platform45 that rewards improvements in password strength with an increasingly racy 8-bit striptease. It’s currently only available with a female stripper, no word yet if a male version is in the works.

via Business Insider

they existed as isolated islands of data center insanity…

Of course they did. I like to think that this video was directed by Terry Gilliam’s third cousin twice removed after drinking a case of cough syrup and calling in a big blackmailish favor from the one and only Mr. T.

But of course the truth is much more mundane, and Wikipedia has the deets:

Mr. T did a video campaign for Hitachi’s Data Systems that was created and posted on consumer video sites including YouTube and Yahoo! Video. According to Steven Zivanic, senior director and corporate communications of HDS, this campaign has not only helped the firm in its own area, but it has given the data storage firm a broader audience.

There will be a quiz later on where virtualization belongs. So pay very close attention. Holy crap.

Have you come across an image and had no clue who the original artist or photographer was? Have no fear! TinEye Reverse Image Search is an amazing website / plug-in that will sift through the interwebs and help find the source.

An excellent “3.5 inch poster set” by designer Mehmet Gozetlik. Each set shows the approximate amount of 3.5″ floppy disks needed to hold the current version of a specific program. It really gives you a look at how much memory storage has improved over the many years.

Approximate Results:
46 disks for iTunes 8.02
358 disks for Adobe Photoshop CS4
1760 disks for The Sims 3
12 disks for Firefox 3
36 disks for Firefox Add-ons

Available to purchase for $350 at AntrepoShop.com.

Skitch, an amazing screenshot and image editing desktop app for Mac, is even better now with the release of their new version 1.0, which includes a bunch of new features.

For those of us who secretly (or not so secretly) love the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone [iTunes link] and upgraded to the newly released iPhone 4, we were sad to discover that the current version is laced with oddities and a crash or two.

There was some debate as to what was going on, so I decided to take it upon myself to dig deeper and get down to what the potential causes are.

The company behind the app, Synthetic Corp., just released a new photo booth app, IncrediBooth [iTunes link], to simulate the bar-o-liscious photo booths people tend to get drunk and make out in.  Now you can do it all with the front facing iPhone 4 camera in your own living room.

It seems that their energy was spent creating this new app instead of updating Hipstamatic to be iPhone 4 and iOS 4 compliant.

I go into great detail into how I debugged the current issues of using Hipstamatic on the new iPhone 4 on my blog:

Hipstamatic on the New iPhone 4

(Click to see my Flickr set of test images used to write this article.)

Twitter has acquired the company Atebits, run by Loren Brichter, which makes the awesome iPhone app Tweetie. They will be renaming it Twitter for iPhone and it will be a free application in the iTunes Store. An iPad app is in the works.

Indie+Relief features a great list of independent Mac software and apps for sale with all the proceeds from January 20th being donated to the Haiti relief effort.

via Neven Mrgan

Portland based Mac software company Panic finally launched their own blog and it rocks. Their latest blog post imagines what it would have been like if Panic were around in 1982 and their apps were actually Atari 2600 video games. To illustrate this concept, they created wonderful artwork which is available through their store.

Clearly “inspired” by existing Atari 2600 games, with cringe-inducing graphics (at one point, a tester confused a smiley face for a wagon wheel) and inscrutable gameplay (”Rotate joystick to fire!”, read the manual of one), the games, once thought to be the savior of the company, almost heralded its demise.

via Phillip Bowden

Last week Adobe released a free Photoshop.com iPhone App, that allows you to manipulate photos shot with an iPhone and share them on Photoshop.com.

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides a fun, seamless experience to view photos with full-screen previews and edit images with gesture-based editing. Consumers can transform their photos with essential edits like crop, rotate and flip. Users can correct and play with color by adjusting the saturation and tint, enhancing the exposure and vibrancy and converting images to black and white.

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone also offers eye-catching special effects. The Sketch tool helps photos look like drawings, and Soft Focus can give photos a subtle blur for artistic effect. With just one click, users can also apply dramatic changes to the look and feel of their photos with effects such as Warm Vintage, Vignette and Pop. Edits or changes can be undone or redone so users can experiment without the worry of losing the original photo.

Here’s more on the app from Josh Lowensohn (CNET’s Web Crawler) and Thomas Hawk. The Photoshop.com iPhone App can be downloaded from the iTunes store.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple’s refined upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will be available this Friday, August 28th. Pre-orders can now be made through the online store with a price of $29 to upgrade from Leopard.

“Filter Heroes” by Chop Shop, their latest t-shirt featuring super heroes based on Photoshop filters.

After a bizarre lab experiment, this ordinary studio of designers were transformed into The Filter Heroes! No design project is too high brow to resist the powers of Lens Flare. What client could challenge the combined effects of Crystallize and Emboss!? Their only known weaknesses are large file sizes and molecular solvents.

Panic, the guys who make really great Mac software like Transmit, Coda, CandyBar, and Unison, are having a big 50% off sale. Check out their hilarious infomercial.

The New York Times has just released Times Reader 2.0, a really nice update to their desktop newspaper application, which now runs on Adobe Air.

ExpanDrive 2.0 for the Mac has just been released. One of the best FTP/SFTP programs just got better. It’s super easy to setup, remote servers are mounted as a local drives and it’s excellent at keeping an active connection. There is also an ExpanDrive for Windows.