Barry Wazzy (wazzy88) of deviantART is what you’d call “good at Photoshop.” He’s made a collection of absolutely gorgeous poké balls, mostly realistic-looking, as well as even made a few Okami-themed poké balls, because why not? Check them out after the break.

The above video is your reminder of the age in which we live, where we have a piece of software that can be used in such a way to digitally draw a girl and manipulate said drawing to the point where it looks like a real person. Photoshop and the people who use it are impressive. Take that, painting.

CSI has made somewhat of a meme (no, not the sunglasses) out of image ENHANCEment, and people knowledgable on the subject have done a lot of work to explain to us that it is not how image enhancement works. Adobe, ever the photo-editing pioneer, is aiming to change that, and with the unveiling of their new unblurring algorithm, it seems that they have taken great strides toward the CSI fantasy.

The unblur feature was shown at Adobe’s MAX 2011 where it was used to clarify a blurry picture of a crowd at what appears to be a mall. The algorithm actually calculates the movement of the camera during the time the shutter was open and uses it to retroactively correct the blurring that occurred. Impressive. Perhaps as shocking as the unblur feature itself was the crowd’s reaction. Immediately after the demonstration, there were first gasps, then applause, then several shouts of “That’s impossible” and “H-how does it do that?” No word on when the feature will be available to the public, but it has to take some serious computing power. Still, it’s an incredible advancement. We are living in the future, my friends.

Video after the jump. Watch it. Really. It’s a little shaky, but the crowd reactions alone are worth it.

If you thought the idea of Pokémon was always a little weird, well, it just got a little weirder. Remember how the ghost Pokémon would always scare the characters out of their wits despite being sort of cute? Well, just imagine if it had been these bad boys instead and it makes a little more sense. Stephen Lefcourt took it upon himself to make some Photoshop images of what several Pokémon might look like in real life and though he’s only done a handful so far, who knows what others may pop up on his flickr down the line. Check out the rest of these curiosities after the jump and be careful in that tall grass.

That’s one way to make vegan food actually taste good: The bloggers at QuarryGirl busted VegNews, “the nation’s premier print and online vegan magazine,” running photographs of prepared ‘vegan’ recipes that, upon examination, were in fact Photoshopped stock photos of recipes containing meat. In the photo side-by-side above, which is probably the most egregious of the bunch, VegNews took an iStockphoto of a barbeque ribs dinner, photoshopped out the bones, and called it “vegan spare ribs.”

QuarryGirl:

it’s sad, then, that the pictures we’ve been drooling over for years are actually of MEAT! Veg News has written tens (possibly hundreds) of articles extolling the virtues of a vegan lifestyle, while purchasing rock-bottom priced stock photos of MEAT, EGGS, DAIRY and other completely non-vegan things.

VegNews, for its part, has issued a statement [pdf], which explains that “it is simply not financially feasible for VegNews at this time” to custom-shoot every food spread, and that there are not enough stock photos of vegan food for them to use. “We would love nothing more than to use only vegan photography shot by vegan photographers, and we hope to be there soon.”

(QuarryGirl via TDW via Giz)

I hope this starts a trend: Artist Mike Ruiz ran the Mona Lisa through Adobe Photoshop CS5′s mindbending content-aware fill tool, which generated its best guess as to what the space behind Mona held. He then sent the resulting image to a Chinese oil painting manufacturer to lay to canvas. This is the result. Art historians will no doubt be interested to learn that there were apparently a lot of shrubberies in the background.

See also: Andy Baio’s viral video backgrounds.

(via Gizmodo | Artist’s page)

Adobe and Apple may have had their past squabbles over Apple’s refusal to make the iPad run Flash, but Adobe isn’t vindictive. The video above, taken at Photoshop World 2011, shows that Adobe has been hard at work developing an incredible Photoshop app for the iPad. Adobe currently offers an app called Photoshop Express for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, but this looks an order of magnitude better.

This app isn’t obviously underpowered like Photoshop Express, nor does it merely attempt to port over the features of desktop Photoshop without regard for platform: Rather, it knows and behaves like it’s a touchscreen app without being reduced to a dinky toy. No word on when this will be released or what it will even be called. This probably wouldn’t meet many needs of hardcore graphic designers with a pixel-by-pixel attention to detail, but it certainly gives the lie to the tired line about the iPad being a device for consumption and not for creation.

(via Drawn)

NASA generally releases some fairly pretty pictures of things that we humans who don’t have NASA-style funding wouldn’t ever be able to see. Well, it turns out NASA doesn’t necessarily see the things they’re releasing pictures of either, at least, not how they look in said released pictures. From HubbleSite:

Hubble images are made, not born. Images must be woven together from the incoming data from the cameras, cleaned up and given colors that bring out features that eyes would otherwise miss. In this video from HubbleSite, online home of the Hubble Space Telescope, a Hubble-imaged galaxy comes together on the screen at super-fast speed.

(HubbleSite via Gizmodo)

Thankfully, this picture of a kitty dyed to look like a Pikachu isn’t real, it’s an impressive Photoshop job. Knowing that this kitty wasn’t put through the abuse of an extensive dye job, I can now not feel so terrible for thinking it’s adorable.

(Huush Little Honey Hive via Neatorama)

There’s A Demo for Super Smash Bros if it Were on a GameBoy Now (Kotaku)

If DC Comics Were Actually Little Nemo Stories (io9)

Papa Sangre: A Videogame With No Video(Boingboing)

Meanwhile, In Sweden… (Hoebeler6)

Bungie’s Holiday Greeting Card (GameInformer)

Photoshop Tutorial Rap (College Humor)

Play Us Off, Keyboard Robot! (New Scientist)

(pic via DC Women Kicking Ass.)