The CGSociety.com – part of Balistic Publishing – announced the winners of their latest CG competition. The topic of the competition was ‘Strange Behavior’ - “The unexpected can delight or shock. It can be exciting or frightening. It’s often funny. It’s never boring!” With over than US$90,000 worth of prizes, 15 winning entries were chosen by previous CGS competition winners, and Jinko Gotoh, Film Producer; Dan Curry, Film producer/director and Paul Gulino, Head of Screenwriting at Chapman film school. ” With so many outstanding entries the judging was difficult, but the jury selected the 15 entries that stood out as truly world class.” Mark Snoswell said, President of the CGSociety. To view the winning artworks, visit CGSociety.

Adobe released yesterday the latest issue of Adobe Magazine, its free quarterly online publication on visual communication. The latest issue that could be downloaded in PDF format explores the expansion multimedia onto cellular screens, the merger of technology and biology through photography, adding interactivity to print, and creating high quality videos on a limited budget. You can download this issue of the Adobe Magazine and check out previous issues as well from the Adobe Magazine website.

Nabors, an oil drilling contracting company, is looking for an AutoCAD modeler in Oman who is familiar with oil rigs and is willing to work on field when required. The candidate must have good English communication skills, must be able to control documents, and create and maintain reports using MS Office and MS Projects. Pay will be determined on the experience of the candidate. You can send your applications to mark.payne@nabors.com.

Three years has passed since the last update of GIMP, the open source image editing and image authoring program for the Linux, Windows, and Mac OSes. Highlights of the new update include scalable filters, redesigned selection tools, new align tool, newly organised menus, and additional supported format.

GIMP is totally free, so there is no excuse not to give it a try. The UI is different from that of Adobe’s Photoshop, so it might take you a while to get used to it.

Please be aware that running GIMP requires the GTK + 2 Runtime which you can download from here.

You can learn more about GIMP and download it for free from the GIMP homepage.

[via Download Squad]

Reuters is reporting that Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, said in a Q&A session during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco that Adobe sees a full shift of its applications from the desktop to the web within a period of ten years.

More and more applications are being made for the web so that they are accessed directly through a web browser without the need to install the application itself on the computer of the user. Such applications include Google Docs (for word processing, spreedsheets, and presentations) and Picnik (for simple image editing). These applications make it possible to save work data on the servers of the application provider so that the user can continue working from any machine without the need to install the applications or carry his data along with him. An additional feature of web applications worth noting is the possibility to share files and collaborate to work on the same file simultaneously.

Adobe announced several months ago its intention to release a lite version of Photoshop as a web application to be called Photoshop Express. Adobe said that this will not be a replacement of the desktop Photoshop, but it will be a much simpler version to target casual Internet users and not professionals. This recent report of Adobe’s CEO reflects Adobe serious consideration of migrating of applications from the desktop to the web, though a significant number of people think that while web applications do provide new opportunities and benefits over desktop, they will never be a total replacement due to the dependence of web applications on an active Internet connection to work, for which reliability will always be an issue.

We have ten years to see if Adobe could pull this off, while waiting for those ten years to pass, you can test drive and read about Aviary’s web creation project, an online suite created in Flex for creating all sorts of content that includes an image editor, a 3d modeling application, a vector drawing application, an audio editing application, and many others all available as web application or AIR applications. Check out their website for more info.

[via Download Squad]

Adobe has announced that the Photoshop Family is receiving a new logo and tagline: See What’s Possible. Photoshop has grown from a single image editing application into a set of application that includes Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Album Starter Edition, and soon Photoshop Express.

According to John Nack, the press docs say:

To represent this rich family of products, Adobe is introducing the Photoshop visual logo. This logo will soon appear in all Photoshop-related marketing, so keep an eye out for it. The Photoshop logo on a product, service, or technology, represents the rich legacy, technical quality, and attention to detail that has made Photoshop the gold standard in digital imaging.

If you want to read more info on this new and cool-looking addition to the Adobe Photoshop Family, you can read John Nack’s blog post.

Toon Boom animation Inc. recently released the latest version of Toon Boom Studio, their 2d animation software for the Windows and Mac platforms. Toon Boom Studio 4 new features include an increase ease of us for animating bitmap images, extended styles and calligraphy, feather edges for creating blurred vectors and glow effects, improved motion effects, advanced web publishing options and other features as well. You can learn more about Toon Boom Studio by visiting their official website here.

Adobe showed a sneak preview at the Photoshop World conference of the upcoming Photoshop Express, it’s free web-base image editing tool. Photoshop Express is not expected to replace any of the existing Photoshop products, but is directed at Internet users wishing to edit images on the fly from within their browsers. There are many existing products that do this already such as Picnik (my personal favourite) which could be seriously threatened by Adobe’s upcoming product.

Check out the screenshot and learn more about this on John Nack’s blog.

[via TechCrunch]

Microsoft Expression Design was recently released as part of the Expression Studio package from Microsoft, that serves designing standards based on Web sites, rich user experiences on the desktop, or managing digital assets and content. Expression Design features dynamic live effects with expanded workflow, innovative vector drawing tools and non-destructive effects that you can apply to either vector or imported bitmapped images. You can read more about the application’s features here. Expression Design is avalible for  free trail download, or purchase Expression Studio for $599.

Vecteezy is newly emerging index of free vectors that are always avalible for direct download. The site is updated daily, and feeds its index of vectors by having users submit them in Adobe Illustrator extenstion, so they would be losses and ready for you project work or for any other use. The site now holds pretty much of an impressive set of various types of vectors. Make sure you pass by and check them out.