The real plan for Google Glass

And all this time, Sergey Brin wasn’t looking at you; he was looking at your CEO. AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

The real plan for Google Glass may be to sell it to businesses, not consumers!

Yesterday evening in New York City, Google’s Glass team threw a party. It brought together “Explorers” and “Influencers”—the lucky few people who got to try out the computerized glasses Google is developing. Over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, the diverse crowd gushed about the joys and dissected the drawbacks of the device, which they’ve been wearing for the last few months.

The takeaway? Google Glass is not for who you think it is. Though Google has been promoting the device with heart-warming videos on rollercoaster rides and in children’s playgrounds, for the next few years at least, its main customers will be large businesses.

Members of the Glass operations team have been on the road showing it off to companies and organizations, and they told Quartz that some of the most enthusiastic responses have come from manufacturers, teachers, medical companies, and hospitals. That suggests that they may be trying to persuade firms to buy the device and develop applications for it. (Google had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.)

Those potential uses are manifold. For example, two Explorers I spoke to gushed about inventory programs they were developing that could save manufacturers tens of thousands of dollars in compliance costs. Currently, manufacturers hire expensive consultants to help them keep track of inventory and guard against stuff going missing or being stolen. They may even shut down for a few days to make sure their books are in order. But if the employees are wearing Glass, a simple app could not only record them taking inventory, but even recognize products automatically and transmit data about them to a company’s servers, to make sure stock doesn’t run out.

Other uses of Glass would be in medicine. Both new and experienced surgeons could transmit what they’re seeing during a procedure to colleagues for advice. It could also serve as a medical device. One Glass user—a patient with brain damage—has been using it to take pictures of where he left his keys so that he can find them later.

Finance companies are already taking to Glass. We’ve written previously about how it could streamline decision-making for bankers. Boston-based Fidelity Investments has already developed an app that will help Glass users monitor markets.

This is not to say that ordinary people won’t ever use Glass. But not too many people are likely to walk down the street sporting it—at least not anytime soon. Explorers I spoke to agreed that the device can get in the way of normal social interaction. The head movements that control the device can masquerade as normal gestures, they said, disrupting conversations and making other people feel uncomfortable. Its notifications can be distracting and—though this gets better with practice—it’s still hard to navigate and control.

Moreover, even the consumer-oriented apps that Explorers said they were developing weren’t things you might use continuously, but had specific purposes. Some talked about apps that would help a shopper find a specific product in a store. Another mused that mechanics connected to Glass could help stranded drivers fix their cars.

These aren’t the kinds of uses that keep a Glass on your face 24/7. They also require a lot of investment and development by retail companies, and that may not come until a fair number of people have Glass. Right now, there are only around 10,000.

So you might one day walk down the street with Glass glued to your face. But at least in the near term, it could be your boss who makes you start wearing one.

The real plan for Google Glass | The Red Elephant

Skype confirms 3D video calls are under development

Skype said that limitations with current 3D technologies had stopped it launching the feature

Skype has confirmed it has developed 3D video calls.

The news was revealed by a senior executive in an exclusive interview with the BBC to mark Skype’s 10th anniversary.

There had been speculation about the possibility after the firm posted an advert in April saying it wanted to find a way to create “body-doubles” for workers unable to travel to meetings.

However, the executive warned it could be many years before the tech launched.

“We’ve done work in the labs looking at the capability of 3D-screens and 3D-capture,” said Microsoft’s corporate vice-president for Skype, Mark Gillett.

“We’ve seen a lot of progress in screens and a lot of people now buy TVs and computer monitors that are capable of delivering a 3D image.

“But the capture devices are not yet there. As we work with that kind of technology you have to add multiple cameras to your computer, precisely calibrate them and point them at the right angle.

“We have it in the lab, we know how to make it work and we’re looking at the ecosystem of devices and their capability to support it in order to make a decision when we might think about bringing something like that to market.”

3D indifference

A decision by Skype to support 3D could provide a boost to device-makers at a time the format has shown signs of flagging.

Disney’s ESPN division recently announced it was dropping a 3D channel and the BBC has said it would end a two-year experiment with the extra dimension after the broadcast of the Doctor Who 50th anniversary episode in November.

In addition, retailer John Lewis has said it has seen dwindling consumer interest in the technology, despite the fact that 3D had become a standard feature on many higher-end displays.

However, there are those who champion the standard. They include James Cameron – the movie director behind Avatar – who recently told the BBC it was “inevitable” that all entertainment content would eventually be made in 3D once special glasses had stopped being needed “because that’s how we see the world”.

Mr Gillett said he agreed with Mr Cameron’s claim, but warned 3D video chats would take longer to catch on than other uses.

“I can imagine a day when you have a 3D-cellphone screen that doesn’t need 3D-glasses to use it,” he said.

“It’s less clear to me that we’re close to having 3D cameras on cellphones.

“We’re in the first year of your TV at home potentially having a camera attached to it, but we’re several years away from the cameras capturing 3D in that context.

“You’ll see much more penetration of 3D on TVs, on computers and ultimately in smartphones, probably, ahead of seeing it for sending a video call.”

Skype support PS4

In the meantime Mr Gillett said Skype was exploring how to offer 1080p “super-high definition” video call resolution to other devices apart from the forthcoming Xbox One video games console.

Since the standard would require extra processing power, he added that tablets and laptops were set to gain the facility ahead of smartphones.

And he would not rule out the software coming to Sony’s PlayStation 4 which will compete with Microsoft’s machine.

“We’ve worked with Sony for a long time,” he said. “Skype ships today on the PlayStation Portable amongst other cross-platform devices that we deliver to, and for the last few years we’ve also been shipping versions of Skype that run on Sony TVs.

“We’re obviously not party to their pre-release [PlayStation] hardware road map [but] we’re committed to cross-platform.”

Mr Gillett would not comment on leaked documents suggesting the US National Security Agency had been able to spy on Skype video calls since July 2012.

The Guardian quoted one memo as saying: “The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video. Now, analysts will have the complete ‘picture’.”

Microsoft previously declared that any changes it has made to Skype’s systems since acquiring the business in 2011 “were not made to facilitate greater government access”.

‘Fight hard’

Mr Gillett did say that the takeover had resulted in several advances including the integration of Skype into Microsoft’s Outlook email service and its forthcoming Windows 8.1 operating system.

However, Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee and its former marketing director, told the BBC he was not convinced.

“It’s unfortunate, but the company has lost focus on product and delighting its users and instead has been busy with corporate restructuring and being bought and sold,” he said.

“Skype should refocus itself on providing the best communication tools and fight hard for mobile.

“Today companies like Whatsapp, Viber and others are leaders in the mobile communication space – that’s something that Skype has to fight hard to get back.”

Skype confirms 3D video calls are under development | The Red Elephant

Instagram your images using Photoshop

Instagram reinvented the photo sharing on our social media structure. It’s a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your pictures to friends and family. And what I like the most about Instagram, are the various schemes that offers you to filter your pictures with your own little touch.

My all-time favorite Instagram filter is the “Nashville” and today, I will show you a quick tutorial about how to achieve that same effect on your images. It’s a very simple effect and very easy to accomplish in Photoshop.

Step 1

Open your image in Photoshop and double-click on the background layer to make into a layer and named it Nashville.

For this tutorial, I’ve used an image from Patrick Smith from Patrick Smith Photography. You can check more of this work on his Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrick-smith-photography.

Step 2

Create a new layer and fill it with the color (Red: 247 , Green: 217 , Blue: 173) and leave the opacity to 100% and your blending options to “Multiply”.

Step 3

Click back on the “Nashville” layer and click Image > Adjustments > Curves. First go into the green channel and put the output to 37 and then go to the blue channel and put the output to 133.

Step 4

After click Image > Adjustments > Levels, change the gamma (the middle) to 1.36 and the input to 236.

Step 5

Now let’s play the contrast by going to Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast. Put the brightness to 6 and contrast to 51. Don’t forget to uncheck “Use Legacy” if it is checked.

Step 6

Give another curves to the image by again going to Image > Adjustments > Curves. But this time go to the green channel and put the input to 13 and in the blue channel, put the input to 88.

Step 7

To give more depth let’s change again the contrast by going to Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast. Simply enter the brightness to -6 and contrast to 33.

Step 8

Give another one last curves touch by going to Image > Adjustments > Curves. Go to the red channel and put the output to 4 and in the blue channel, put the output to 14. Lastly merge all the layers to visible.

Final Words of Instagram

That’s it! This is how we create the “Nashville” filter from Instagram in Photoshop. At this point, the rest is up to your creativity to experiment different concepts to finish this image.

You can also use the same technique for your own images and also create an action in Photoshop. By creating an action, you’ll just have to play the action instead of redoing all the steps!

Instagram your images using Photoshop | The Red Elephant

How To Give Your Photos a Cool Retro Analog Effect

Do you know how to give your photos a cool Retro Analog Effect? Back in the days of analog photography imperfections were part of the job. Colour washes, light leaks, vignettes and blurs were all common problems that appeared during the processing of your film, particularly from cheap cameras such as the Holga, or simply down to human error. While these problems don’t affect digital cameras, we can recreate the cool effects in Photoshop to give our shots that cool lo-fi retro effect.

Inspiration

You don’t have to look far before finding quality examples of old style analog photography. Characteristics include inaccurate colour washes of warm tones, dark vignettes surrounding the shots, blurred focus and light leaks where the film has been excessively exposed.

Create your own retro analog effect

Once you have your photograph of choice, fire up Adobe Photoshop. This particular image I’ve sourced from ThinkStock.

Add a Curves adjustment layer to begin altering the tones of the image. Using an adjustment layer as opposed to the menu command gives you the ability to go back and tweak the settings, or remove them altogether.

Change the drop down menu to the Red channel and begin manipulating the curves. Tweak the line into an S shaped bend.

Move onto the Green channel, this time increase the green midtones by creating a large flowing bend in the line.

In the Blue channel, add both a slight S shaped bend and move the start and end points above and below the original curves line.

Fill a new layer with magenta, then change the blending mode to Soft Light. Reduce the opacity of the layer to around 20% to tone down the effect.

Press CMD+A to Select All, then go to Edit > Copy Merged (CMD+Shift+A). Paste this duplicate on a new layer, then add a Gaussian Blur. Add a Layer Mask to the blur layer and erase the blurring from the main subjects, leaving spots of blurring creeping in from the edges and in the background.

Dab spots of red using a large soft brush on a new layer. Change the blending mode of this layer to Linear Dodge to create a series of light leaks. Reduce the opacity to around 70%.

Select All, then right click the document and select Stroke. Add a 100px black stroke to the inside of the canvas.

Blur the stroke with maximum settings using the Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur option to form a vignette. Set this layer to Soft Light at 70%.

Dab a large spot of white in the centre of the canvas to highlight the main subjects. Change this to Soft Light at 100%.

Fill a new layer with black and add some noise (Filter > Noise > Add Noise). Give the noise layer a slight Gaussian Blur to take the edge off the noise particles, then change the blending mode to Screen at 15%.

How To Give Your Photos a Cool Retro Analog Effect | The Red Elephant

Professional Retouching Tutorial: Healing

Welcome to the first in a series of tutorials on professional retouching. Healing. Ever wondered howcommercial and fashion photographs have that beautifully flawless look?

Final Image After Healing

This two part tutorial will work towards creating this professionally retouched result:

Ever wondered how commercial and fashion photographs have that beautifully flawless look?

It takes a while to master, but here are a few things to consider;

•- Keep as much texture as possible, this means keeping your brushes small and avoid any tutorial that tells you to blur huge sections of skin!

•- Develop an eye for what is and is not a blemish. Beauty spots should in most cases be left well alone, keep the character of the model as well as the texture.

•- Know when to be subtle, know when to stop. It’s disturbingly common to find beginner retouchers who absolutely will not stop until their 40 year old subject looks like Megan Fox.

•- If you’re hoping to retouch photos professionally for other photographers, respect their work. This means not making changes for the sake of it, always remember that the model was chosen for a reason, as were the clothes, backgrounds, lighting, only make major changes on request. Be invisible.

With those points in mind, here is part one, and the easiest in the series; healing with minimal evidence!

And here’s the starting image I’m using for demonstration;

Always start with a high resolution image. Politely ask a photographer if you need starting images, large JPEGS are fine for now (if they’re less than 1Mb in size they’re probably too small). Photography forums are a great place to find portfolio work when you’re starting out, try not to use the same photographs as a thousand other people on the web. Develop an entirely individual portfolio!

When you’re retouching professionally, remember that your client might be using their images for large print, imagine every eyelash out of place or stray hair on a bus shelter poster. It may not be noticeable in a web-sized image, but just imagine dozens of people idling at that bus stop every hour. Your perfect work might go unnoticed, but any flaws will certainly be picked up on!

One of the fundamental parts of the retouching process is the healing stage, and we’re going to look into that with this first tutorial. Open your image in Photoshop, and drag your Background Layer to the New Layer icon to create a copy of your image. This new layer will be our working copy, saving the original so we can always pull parts of it back if we need to.

Here I’ve decided to retain these beauty marks, but it’s always up to you to decide which to keep or remove, or even move slightly to improve composition;

Select your clone stamp (C) and zoom in to 100%. Use the Lighten blend mode to remove darker blemishes and Darken blend mode to remove lighter distractions. This way your clone tool will ignore the ‘good’ texture and only alter the problem pixels. Keep your brush as small as the blemish and use a hard brush (around 90%) to avoid blurry edges, Alt-click to select a local sample of good texture of a similar tone and carefully paint out any major blotches.

Zoom to 200% and deal with any smaller imperfections, including stray eyebrow hairs;

Once you’ve imperceptibly removed all major distractions and stray hairs you’ll start to notice the next problem to tackle; shadows and highlights that betray wrinkles and deep pores, skin depressions and bumps, and even tonal variations caused by digital compression.

This is where we’ll start off in the next The Red Elephant professional retouching tutorial, using Dodge and Burn to achieve flawless, magazine cover results. And absolutely no blur filters!

In the meantime, keep practicing, I want you to come back for Part Two as clone stamp ninjas! Pride yourself on every seamlessly perfect removal and every pixel rescued from the fate of large-brush slap-dash cloning. Remember the bus stop and make sure Mr. Eagle-Eyed waiting traveler never even knows you were there…

Professional Retouching Tutorial: Healing | The Red Elephant

Master a Professional Photo Retouching Workflow

Professional photo retouching workflow

For this Retouching Workflow tutorial Mowaffaq has asked me to provide an overview of a full retouching process. Most tutorials and indeed most tutorial sites will give you snippets of information, teaching a lot of bad habits and a few good ones, and it’s often difficult for the beginner or serious amateur to know when they’re following good advice. I’ve written three retouching tutorials for my old company so far, including healing, dodge and burn and using curves in Photoshop. These will continue to develop and you can use them alongside this professional workflow overview to get the best from your photographs, from start to finish. Just keep folloing us on Photoshop Category, or on our Facebook Page!

As a freelance designer I’ve developed a regular retouching workflow that I adapt from job to job, and if you’re ready to do a bit of reading and a bit of research, bookmark this page and use it as your reference. Come back to it, master each section and ultimately adapt what you learn and develop your own retouching workflow. There is no right way, this is just one (for examples of work retouched using these methods.

But enough about me, let’s move onto you and what you need in your retouching workflow. Whether you shoot or retouch portrait, fashion, beauty, commercial, whatever the genre your work will benefit from an understanding of a good workflow, and there are few retouching tutorials that provide such an overview, which is where I applaud Mowaffaq Tahir’s thinking. I’ll try to keep it simple, but in the links provided you’ll find a wealth of invaluable information, how much more you want to read and how far you want to push yourself is completely up to you.

Cropping

I recently discovered that the Crop tool in Photoshop CS5 has a really handy rule of thirds grid. To quote that Wikipedia article there, “The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.” Makes lining up your crop a little easier, although in earlier versions it can be done with Photoshop’s rulers.

It’s important to start with a good shot so the viewer’s eye is led to the correct focal points of your image. Try to crop to traditional print sizes.

Colour Correction

The camera doesn’t see what you see, and often you’ll need to correct an image to make it look more natural, closer to what the photographer saw. Have you ever looked at a photograph taken in a room lit with fluorescent lights and noticed it looks a lot yellower than you remember? That’s because your eyes compensate for colour casts and your sight adapts and changes constantly, whereas a camera is simply a tool that obeys its settings (most of the time).

It’s important to develop an eye for colour casts, note the common yellow cast problem in the image below. You’ll know if you read the Curves tutorial that this can be fixed by adding blue.

Healing/Dodge and Burn

Once you have your perfectly cropped and balanced, colour corrected photograph it’s time to do the time consuming Photoshop work. Remember to retouch the whole image, most retouching tutorials will give you techniques for skin, or eyes, or hair; make sure you combine all your techniques (if in doubt, trust the Professional Retouching Series here on The Red Elephant) and retouch even the background. There might be a fly on the table, a shirt button missing and a ball of white fluff on the carpet, you’ll never spot them if you’re staring at the skin for too long, but be sure the viewer will see them.

Sharpening

Once you’ve cropped your image, colour balanced it and completed your healing and dodge and burn, you’re ready to sharpen your image for print. Ignoring the default sharpen filters, I want you to take a look at using the high pass filter, you’ll find the basic method here.

Now as always with the The Red Elephant professional retouching tutorials we’re going to go one better. Notice how it is suggested to choose a radius from 0.5 to 1? In a future tutorial we’re going to look at using multiple radii and learning how to choose them, so stay bookmarked, stick around, we’ve a lot more professional photo retouching advice to come on the new The Red Elephant.

Master a Professional Photo Retouching Workflow | The Red Elephant

Security Researcher Hacks Mark Zuckerberg’s Wall

Mark Zuckerberg’s wall on Facebook

Security researcher hacks Mark Zuckerberg’s wall to prove his exploit works.

Earlier this week, security researcher Khalil Shreateh discovered a Facebook bug that allowed a hacker to post on anyone’s wall — even if they weren’t that person’s friend.

While he was able to prove to Facebook that his bug was legit (despite an initial response that it wasn’t a bug at all), Facebook wasn’t too happy with the way he did it: by using the bug to post on Zuckerberg’s otherwise friends-only wall.

Security research can be a pretty tough balancing act. If you don’t follow a company’s responsible reporting terms to a T, you might be robbing yourself of your fair share of recognition and, if the company is one of many that gives bug bounties, a chunk of cash. Alas, exploiting your way onto Zuck’s timeline… doesn’t exactly comply with Facebook’s reporting rules.

In his initial report of the bug, Khalil demonstrated that he was able to post on anyone’s wall by submitting a link to a post he’d made on the wall of Sarah Goodin (a college friend of Zuck’s, and the first woman on Facebook.)

Unfortunately, the member of the Facebook Security team who clicked the link wasn’t friends with Goodin, whose wall was set to be visible to friends only. As a result, they couldn’t see Khalil’s post. (While Facebook Security can almost certainly over-ride privacy settings to see anything posted on the site, they didn’t seem to do that here)

“I don’t see anything when I click the link except an error”, responded Facebook’s Security team.

Khalil submitted the bug with the same link again, explaining that anyone investigating the link would need to either be Goodin’s friend or would need to “use [their] own authority” to view the private post.

“I am sorry this is not a bug”, replied the same member of the Security team, seemingly failing to grasp what was going on.

Khalil responded by taking his demonstration to the next level; if posting on one of Mark Zuckerberg’s friend’s walls didn’t get his point across, perhaps posting on Zuck’s own wall would?

On Thursday afternoon, Khalil posted a note into Zuckerberg’s timeline. “Sorry for breaking your privacy [to post] to your wall,” it read, “i [had] no other choice to make after all the reports I sent to Facebook team”.

Within minutes, Facebook engineers were reaching out to Khalil. He’d made his point.

Security researchers are paid at least $500

Through Facebook’s whitehat exploit disclosure program, security researchers are paid at least $500 for each critical bug they report responsibly. $500 is just the minimum — the size of the bounty increases with the severity of the bug, with no set maximum.

Alas, there would be no bug bounty for Khalil. Amongst other terms, Facebook’s bug disclosure policy requires researchers to use test accounts for their investigations and reports, rather than the accounts of other Facebook users. By posting to Goodin and Zuck’s walls, he’d broken those rules pretty much right out of the gate. His reports also didn’t include enough detail of how to reproduce the bug, says Facebook:

Unfortunately your report to our Whitehat system did not have enough technical information for us to take action on it. We cannot respond to reports which do not contain enough detail to allow us to reproduce an issue. When you submit reports in the future, we ask you to please include enough detail to repeat your actions.

We are unfortunately not able to pay you for this vulnerability because your actions violated our Terms of Service. We do hope, however, that you continue to work with us to find vulnerabilities in the site.

Since Khalil’s initial post went up on Friday, there’s been a healthy debate as to whether or not Facebook should be paying him a bounty. On one hand, he broke their disclosure rules (perhaps unknowingly — as many have pointed out, Facebook’s disclosure terms are only available in English, which doesn’t seem to be Khalil’s first language); on the other, he was seemingly trying to report it responsibly rather than selling it to spammers.

Even Facebook’s own engineers have entered the discussion. On Hacker News, Facebook Security Engineer Matt Jones laid things out as he saw them:

For background, as a few other commenters have pointed out, we get hundreds of reports every day. Many of our best reports come from people whose English isn’t great – though this can be challenging, it’s something we work with just fine and we have paid out over $1 million to hundreds of reporters. However, many of the reports we get are nonsense or misguided, and even those (if you enter a password then view-source, you can access the password! When you submit a password, it’s sent in the clear over HTTPS!) provide some modicum of reproduction instructions. We should have pushed back asking for more details here.

However, the more important issue here is with how the bug was demonstrated using the accounts of real people without their permission. Exploiting bugs to impact real users is not acceptable behavior for a white hat. We allow researchers to create test accounts here: https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/accounts/ to help facilitate responsible research and testing. In this case, the researcher used the bug he discovered to post on the timelines of multiple users without their consent.

What say you? Should Facebook bend the rules and shell out? Would breaking the rules set a dangerous precedent?

Security Researcher Hacks Mark Zuckerberg’s Wall | The Red Elephant