Well! Our tips line has certainly been a beehive of activity with WWDC just around the corner. We've gotten several purported iPhone images, which range in quality from meh to ludicrous. Particularly interesting: the iPhone Blog's 16x9 widescreen model.

As for availability of the rumored phone, GearLive is laying it on the line for an on-sale date of Monday, immediately after the announcement. Technologizer responds with four reasons we wouldn't see the new device in stores right after the keynote.

Interested to see what everyone else has cooked up for Apple to release on Monday? Check out the gallery for pictures galore.

Thanks to everyone who sent these in!

Our friends over at Pixelmator have released a new update, and while it's not quite as big as their point versions, it does add a few new features and a nice online guide to the program. The main new feature in-app is a noise filter that allows users to add random specks and pixels to an image, creating a little more realism and mess to whatever shapes they're working on. But the bigger addition is out-of-app: they've created an online Learning database with tutorials, tips, and lessons on how to make the most of the image-editing app. There's actually quite a bit of stuff there now, from text and video tutorials to even third-party tutorials submitted by users. If you are interested in learning more about how to use Pixelmator, definitely give it a look. They've also updated the user manual, too, so if you haven't seen that in a while, that's worth checking out as well.

There are also a few performance updates and bugfixes -- here's the list if you want to check it for something you're interested in. I still don't see my personal issue on there: it seems like whenever I switch between the Spaces on my Mac that hold iTunes and Pixelmator, the OS doesn't want to stay put -- it keeps jumping back to the iTunes Space while I'm trying to work on Pixelmator. Of course that might be an iTunes issue, but hopefully the Pixelmator team is looking into it.

Other than that, it's still a great app for editing and resizing images, and at $59, is definitely cheaper and simpler than investing in a big Photoshop suite. The 1.4.1 update will show up automatically for current users, and the app can be downloaded as a free trial from their site.

If you've always wondered how to draw a "ball of nodes" as featured in a variety of Mac OS X icons, wonder no more: Mike Rundle of flyosity.com has written a tutorial to show you how using Photoshop.

Rundle discusses "spheric realism," the process of understanding the materials, reflectivity, and roundness of a sphere, and how to accurately illustrate it digitally.

Clever users can easily adapt the technique for Illustrator, Acorn, or many other compositing tools that feature blur and blending mode support.

Rundle also offers a PSD file containing the artwork with no strings attached.

Thanks Todd!

The team over at Pixelmator has announced the release of their much-awaited 1.3 version, which they've titled Tempo. TUAW did a preview of this version a while ago -- it features lots of back-end updates, making the app itself much, much faster, especially when handling large images. And it brings to the table a few things Pixelmator has promised since the app first came out, including the Magic Eraser functionality, and a few magic touches elsewhere (you can use almost any of the tools in the "magic" way, by clicking and then dragging until the program automatically fills in your selection).

There are also updates to the Hue and Saturation, Colorize, and Replace Color tools, and there's an auto-hide feature (that can be turned off) that clears out some of the clutter when you're working with important tools. As a Pixelmator user, I really like the update -- I'm not sure if it's quite enough to pull you into the app if you aren't already using it (and as we've said before, this is not an app for power Photoshop users), but if you're looking for a relatively light, very stylistic photo editor, it's definitely worth a trial again. You can pick one up over on their site.

In a QuickTime screencast, Adobe's Russell Brown demonstrates content-aware scaling, a feature of Photoshop CS4, due to be released this month.

A lower-resolution YouTube demo from Lynda.com is available here, if you don't want to download a huge QuickTime movie. The content is different, but you'll get the idea.

Adobe licensed an algorithm that senses "dead" areas in photos, and resizes the image to avoid squashing or stretching every object.

In the video, Brown demonstrates resizing an image of four golfers, interactively removing space between and around the golfers, but leaving the golfers' proportions correct. He also demonstrates resizing a Volkswagen bus, making it a more "economical" size, but automatically keeping the wheels round.

For those looking for a compelling reason to upgrade to Photoshop CS4, this might be it. If not, what is? Let us know by leaving a comment.

[Via Swissmiss and Michael Sippey.]

Yesterday, I showed you how to simulate a photograph taken with a tilt-shift lens by using Photoshop CS3's Lens Blur tool. Today, we'll do something a bit more practical: clipping out an object that's not entirely in focus.

Clipping out objects that are out of focus can be something of a chore: either you have a hard, dark edge somewhere you don't want, or you have to settle for feathering the whole thing, leaving edges that should be sharp a little too blurry.

We'll be clipping out this old book, and dropping it on a new surface.

We all know Photoshop is a powerful tool. In two tutorials, I'll take you through how to use Photoshop CS3's Lens Blur filter to do two things: today, we'll make images look like they were shot with a tilt-shift lens. Tomorrow, we'll create clipping masks for objects that aren't entirely in focus.

Lens Blur gives the effect of a narrower depth of field, so some areas of your image stay in focus, and other areas are blurred. Combined with an alpha channel that defines areas of blurriness, you have a powerful way to create masks and alter photos.

The easiest thing to do is show you first how Lens Blur works in pictures.

As Robert reported earlier this month, Adobe officially announced Creative Suite 4 via a streaming webcast earlier this morning. Adobe CS4, which is scheduled to ship sometime in October, is being touted as "Adobe's biggest software release to date."

While I was watching the webcast for our sister site, Download Squad, what struck me was the focus on performance improvements and cross-product integration. I've been dabbling with some of the CS4 betas since the beginning of the summer, and I agree that the Macromedia products are now much more tightly integrated (at least on the Fireworks and Dreamweaver side, I haven't used the Flash CS4 beta) with the rest of the Adobe suite.

On the performance side, the GPU acceleration rumors for Photoshop CS4 that Mat mentioned back in May are a reality. What was really striking, to me, was that despite the all the hub-bub about the lack of 64-bit support for the Mac version of Photoshop CS4, the demonstrations for the webcast were all performed on a Mac (I'm assuming it was a Mac Pro, it was attached to an external monitor on stage and also displayed on stage/screen). Showing off some of advantages of GPU acceleration, the representative from Adobe worked on a 2 GB 400 megapixel file, showing how easy it was to zoom in and out, and roate the image without any lag or slowdown.

So, 32-bit or not, Mac design shops that have powrful systems should benefit tremendously from the speed improvements to Photoshop.

The pricing for some of the Adobe CS4 bundle suites has increased nominally both for upgrades and new purchases. Web Premium CS3 was $1599 US, whereas Web Premium CS4 will be $1699 US. Design and Production Premium prices remain the same ($1799 US for Design Premium, $1699 for Production Premium), but the price of Design Standard is now $1399 US, up $200 from Design Standard CS3. Upgrade prices on suites appear to be about the same as CS3, although Web Premium is $100 more than it was 18 months ago.

For anyone who purchased Design Premium CS3 before May of 2008, you will be happy to know that Fireworks is now included in this suite (it was included in suites sold after May of 2008 or if you paid the $160 to upgrade to Acrobat 9). Fireworks never should have been omitted from Design Premium in the first place, so this is a nice addition.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 will be shipping sometime in October. One note for PPC Mac users -- Adobe After Effects CS4 will only support Intel systems. Premeire Pro CS4, like CS3, is also Intel-only.

We asked for fakes. You responded by sending us your favorite MacTablet mock-ups. So here at last is our gallery of fake Mac Tablet concept art, submitted by TUAW readers. Now once again it's your turn.

Take a peek through these pictures and tell us which one is your fave. (I suspect that #8 is going to win in a landslide.) Leave us a note in the comments to explain your choice and what you're really looking for in a touch-based tablet computer.

It's sad how much I want this whole tablet rumor to be true. So it's always a delightful surprise to find the latest Photoshopped fake in our inbox. Above is "Max Vinegar"'s contribution to the cause. I love the way it's artistically blurred, with just the right ceiling reflections and how the new-fashioned nano gives it a frisson of verisimilitude.

Got a better fauxtotablet? Drop a link into the comments and I'll put up a gallery of 'em.

Just when you thought you just bought (or just finished paying for) Adobe Creative Suite 3, get ready to take out another mortgage for Adobe CS4, which will be publicly unveiled on September 23. AppleInsider conjectures the software will drop in October.

Adobe will be delivering several webcasts that day to showcase the new software to the public. You can register here to participate in the webcasts.

Improvements to Photoshop and Flash are expected to headline the event. Adobe did not release any details about how the software will be bundled, nor any pricing information. Full versions of Adobe CS3 can cost as much as $2,500 for new users, and $160 for those who want to upgrade.

Adobe released preview editions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth in late May.

[Via MacFreaks and cnet.]

One of the nicest features of the latest round of OS X image editors like Pixelmator and Acorn is their use of GPU acceleration. They use your Mac's graphics processor to radically speed up various image tools like filters and transformations, etc. Now it appears that the big boys are finally getting ready to play.

TG Daily is reporting that Adobe recently previewed the next version of Photoshop (CS Next / CS4) with GPU acceleration. And as expected it made for an enormous improvement in speed. They they observed "the presenter playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core [Intel] Skulltrail system."

There was no specific mention of the Mac version (the demo seems to have been done on a Windows machine) and also no discussion of if and how the 32-bit limitation of CS4 on the Mac might affect this GPU assisted performance boost. Nonetheless, the addition of GPU acceleration is a big deal, and perhaps will push Apple into getting more high performance graphics cards into its systems.

[via Gizmodo]

We've all seen our fair share of Photoshop, whether we know it or not. The PhotoshopDisasters blog, however, is compiling the most bizarre (and funny) examples of extra limbs, flipped text, and heads that don't belong to their associated bodies. Not that I'd know anything about that.

Apparently, Australian iPhones will run Windows XP. Who knew?

[Via It's Nice That]

Right after announcing the release of 64-bit support in the Lightroom 2 beta, Photoshop Senior Project Manager John Nack dropped a little bombshell on his blog, announcing that the next version of Photoshop (CS4) will be available in both 32- and 64-bit versions for Windows, but only a 32-bit version for OS X. The reason: Photoshop on OS X is written with the Carbon API. Last June Apple decided to kill 64-bit Carbon, forcing all future 64-bit application development on the Mac to Cocoa. Adobe had originally planned to ship a 64-bit CS4 as a Carbon app and port to Cocoa for CS5, but now the 64-bit version will have to wait for the CS5 Cocoa build.

The (relative) good news is that this will primarily affect users working on "very large files on a suitably equipped machine." The average speed bump "due to running in 64-bit mode is around 8-12%" when not "using a large data set." The bad news is that it is precisely those professional users who buy Mac Pros maxed out on RAM that will likely get penalized. It'll be a sad day when the Photoshop jockeys have to run in Boot Camp to get the most out of their Mac Pros.

[via Daring Fireball]