posted August 4th, 2008
A bunch more filters are up; this time all filters that aren’t in Core Image.
posted July 25th, 2008
Naked touch is still going strong, so I’m picking some easy stuff to knock of the Naked light to do list: filters. I’ve recreated a bunch of Core Image filters in Anatomy.
As always, filter requests are very welcome: if you use one a lot—whatever program it’s in—just leave a comment and I’ll try to put it in.
Filters are fairly easy to just crank out, so expect a tiny flurry of Preview 4.2.x releases until around when Naked touch comes out and I can focus more fully again on Naked light. Sorry; I know some people don’t like too many releases. You don’t have to download them all.
Shadows + Highlights
This is absolutely one of the most useful Photoshop adjustments, and it’s not at all easy to do manually. So here it is.
Pixellate + Crystallize
Pixellate, Hexagonal Pixellate, and Crystallize.
Less useful, but always fun.
Bloom and Gloom
Camera bloom is a great filter, and the algorithm I’ve used is much closer to an actual camera bloom than the one provided by Core Image.
I’ve also copied the Gloom filter—again with a different algorithm, however.
Get it
posted by Brandon | 5 Comments
posted July 16th, 2008
Here’s a few quick updates on Naked touch.
I (along with I believe everyone else) was accepted into the iPhone Developer Program on Saturday. There’s still a bit of work left to go, but this means that Naked touch is coming out sooner rather than unascertained-er.
Even though I promised screenshots for last Friday, I’m holding off on releasing more than one right now until Naked touch is ready to launch in two or three weeks.
Unfortunately, a few abrupt changes in my personal life last week have limited the amount of time I have to work. I guess the problem with being a one-man shop is an occasional lack of professionality. With luck, things should be back to normal (albeit a different and much better normal) on Sunday.
posted by Brandon | 2 Comments
posted July 4th, 2008
Today I’m incredibly excited to announce Naked touch—quick and easy image editing on your iPhone.
Edit your pictures
Naked touch features an incredibly advanced 96-bit graphics pipeline—unprecedented for a handheld platform—to tear through your images at incredible speeds.
Filters include Sharpen, Curves, Brightness + Contrast, White Balance, and Color Balance. Noise Reduction and Highlights + Shadows are in the works, and may or not make their way into Naked touch 1.0.
Images can be pulled from the camera on your iPhone, or from your iPhone or iPod touch photo library.
Share your pictures
When you’re done perfecting your picture, you can quickly upload it to the web through Flickr or social networking sites like Facebook.
Naked touch 1.0 supports Flickr, Facebook, and Tumblr.
FAQ
When will Naked touch launch?
Naked touch should launch in mid to late July.
Like 80% of other iPhone developers, I have not yet been accepted into the beta program. Apple has indicated it will open up the iPhone more widely after the 2.0 launch, but has been unclear about how wide this will be and how soon this will happen.
After acceptance, Naked touch will still need to go through heavy performance optimization and testing.
What will Naked touch cost?
Naked touch will cost $9.99 at launch for a short period of time, before settling at around $16.99.
Does Naked touch feature nodes or layers?
No, Naked touch does not do any image compositing.
It’s feature set is closer to what Aperture and Lightroom offer for image adjustments.
When will screenshots be released?
Screenshots will be released on Friday, July 11th.
Is there a Naked touch beta?
No. Naked touch is a much simpler design than Naked light, targets a single platform, and is currently incredibly stable. Beta testing is not necessary as it is for Naked light.
posted by Brandon | 10 Comments
posted July 1st, 2008
Effects are up—including Gloss, Shadow, Inner Glow, Outer Glow, and Reflection.
posted by Brandon | No Comments
posted July 1st, 2008
A few releases of WordPress back—the platform this blog uses—had a rather egregious security hole.
In some cases, when a blog would be hacked, it would be immediately obvious. In others, they would store your password or inject code that could let them get back in later—even after WordPress had fixed the original hole.
I just found out that The Emperor Has New Clothes is in the latter group. So if you get strange pop-ups or redirects, I’m really sorry. I now need to go figure out how to fix this.
UPDATE: Fixed. I still now need to go and reinstall all of my plug-ins. Literally 7/8ths of my RSS subscribers stopped subscribing (or got redirected to spammy-spam-spam-a-lot before Wordpress tracked them as a hit). Let’s hope this doesn’t financially cripple me too much.
posted by Brandon | 1 Comment
posted June 20th, 2008
Stuff left to do in Naked light can be roughly divided into three categories.
The most egregious issues are the bugs in Anatomy, Naked light’s rendering engine.
Then we have incomplete features. These are things like undo support, resizing the canvas, selections. Things that sorta work, but are clearly pretty half-assed.
Finally, there’s a few new features I need to add. Photoshop support, noise support, and a few other tricks up my sleeve that may or may not make it into Naked light 1.0.
The Anatomy bugs get divided into two sections: GPU bugs and the CPU implementation and bugs.
The GPU is hard to debug: most of the bugs exist only on specific hardware combinations; the bugs change from OS version to OS version. This needs to get pushed back.
This is why the CPU renderer is out now. The CPU bugs are pretty easy to fix. I expect the CPU renderer to be feature complete and sufficiently bug free within a month.
The incomplete features will take a month to a month and a half. These are fun and easy, especially compared to the hell that is graphics bugs. But there’s likely to be more incomplete features than I realize at the moment.
New features can take a variable amount of time depending on how many I want to add. I’d say there could be as little as two weeks and as much as eight weeks.
Finally, comes the GPU debugging, by which point hopefully I’ll have been able to eBay a couple different pieces of hardware. I’d say a month for this, but this is really difficult to predict.
Right now, it’s looking like Naked light 1.0 should come around late September.
posted by Brandon | 3 Comments
posted June 20th, 2008
What are your favorite filters, in Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom, etc?
What filters do you really wish Naked light had?
posted by Brandon | 6 Comments
posted June 14th, 2008
Current versions of Naked light use the GPU to render incredibly fast. This has its problems:
Graphics chips, their drivers, and Mac OS X’s OpenGL implementation simply aren’t really all that stable. This has caused even virtually identical sets of hardware to fail in different, spectacularly bad ways.
Not all GPUs support the advanced feature set Naked light needs. The algorithms that work really well on the GPU work, well, less well on the CPU. So much less well, in fact, that on some models Naked light is so slow you want to rip your hair out. Sorry, Mac mini users.
Hard limitations on graphics cards simply impose a silicon ceiling on the quality of certain filters (namely those from the Blur family).
Some time ago, probably as I was starting Beta 2, it became clear that there needed to be a preview-quality GPU renderer and a high-quality CPU renderer. The GPU renderer is there, albeit still rather buggy. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working the other half.
The CPU renderer brings in higher render quality (again, largely to blur and sharpen filters, but images on the CPU use Lanczos resampling instead of linear interpolation), better performance on unsupported computers, and a nice safety net from various bugs that arise on different platforms. Moving forward, it’ll provide some speedups where (a) I can cache images for reuse and, in some cases, (b) I can render simultaneously on both the CPU and the GPU, increasing both speed and quality.
As a quick test, I’m putting up a partial build of this right now before I get deep in polishing things off. Most features—most notably all tools and all Core Image-based filters—don’t work (and may crash/beachball). All of the Adjustments (save Curves) and all of the Focus filters (save Bloom and Gloom) do work, with a few bugs.
This is a barely functional release (less so than usual!), so I’m not putting it up for auto update. But with luck it should work on a far greater number of Macs than previous releases have. As usual, if it doesn’t work, leave a comment or an email at brandon@naked.la!
