Basics are fine — and we like what it does there — so our real gripe is that there’s no adjustment for white balance, which is notoriously shitty on the G1. But hey, it’s free in the Android Market right now. [Adobe]

Very few Gizmodo readers were even born when Rockwell painted his last Saturday Evening Post cover, but we all know them. You hear that name and suddenly you can picture those overly detailed, cartoonishly dramatic but ultimately kinda corny depictions of American life. Well, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, written and compiled by Ron Schick, has given me immense newfound respect for the man, for the meticulous photography, the real people and the unintentionally hilarious DIY props and sets that he required to make his painted fantasies of Americana come true.

The book is not about painting. Rockwell’s oil-on-canvas work feels like an afterthought for Schick, who mostly documents Rockwell’s photography and art direction. Throughout the book, you see a painting, then you see the photographs he took to make that painting. In most cases, many shots comprise the different elements, and are joined together only in paint. It’s almost sad: Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country’s collective consciousness, may never have taken place. Even people facing each other at point blank range were photographed separately, and might never have even met.

The photos are as memorable as the paintings: There’s a little boy whose feet are propped up on thick books, a walking still-life; there’s a naked lady who ended up a mermaid in a lobster trap; there are men and women in various states of frustration, concentration and bliss, whose facial expressions defined Rockwell’s style. These were mostly not agency models, but friends and neighbours who were pleased to help out, but not always thrilled by the finished product.

Since Rockwell was one of the most commercially successful artists of all time, you can imagine the rights to all of his images (paintings and photos) are carefully managed. The publisher was kind enough to let us show you the book cover plus two additional pairings, below. I encourage you to buy the book ($US26.40 at Amazon) — what you see here is just a quick lick of the spoon:

Going and Coming, 1947
You’ll notice the book jacket shows a painting of a family embarking on a summer vacation—Granny, Spot and all—coupled with a photo of a similar scene with far less action. There’s a kid sticking out of the car in both, but many family members are missing. This is because they were photographed separately, in Rockwell’s studio, and painted in where needed. (You’ll also notice that the photo on the jacket is reversed—the car was pointed in the other direction but I suppose that wouldn’t have looked as cool.)

Circus, 1955
What I liked about this picture is that you get to see how ridiculous Rockwell’s sets could often be. He needed real faces, but he could fill in the rest. Hence piling chairs up on top of an old desk to simulate bleachers at the circus. Good thing nobody fell off the back and sued ole Rocky for millions—that twine used to hold the little girl’s chair in place doesn’t look OSHA certified. If the geeky looking fellow in the front looks familiar, it’s because Rockwell himself served as a model for his paintings all the time.

The Final Impossibility: Man’s Tracks on the Moon, 1969
Yep, here’s proof that the moon landing was faked. At least, Rockwell’s commemorative portrait of it was. NASA loved his work, so they loaned him spacesuits and helmets whenever he wanted, and for this, he got permission to photograph his models moonwalking around an Apollo Lunar Lander, with a black tarp doubling for infinity and beyond. Remember, this is when Apollo was new and the Cold War was in full swing, so getting access to the latest NASA toys took clout.

Behind the Camera covers many aspects of Rockwell that I had not known about previously. He was an outspoken civil rights activist, and many of his paintings dealt with race relations. There is a painting of two murdered men, one black and one white, accompanied by an almost absurd photo of two very alive guys lying side by side, eyes closed, on a carpet. There’s another painting of a little black girl being walked to school by US Marshals, and the many different closeup shots Rockwell required to paint the extreme detail of the tense, potent—and fabricated—moment.

I wish I could run a gallery of 100 shots from this book, because each page startled me in a different way. Meeting the real people behind the paintings, and learning that every painting was composed of masterfully planned photographs—always black and white, since the artist let his imagination add the color—I will no longer take Norman Rockwell for granted. In fact, I’m gonna kinda worship him from now on. [Amazon sales page; Little, Brown product page]

We have featured Star Wars-World War II photography and classic art medleys before, but I like the superhero theme (I know, there’s some Star Wars too, like Darth Vader with Joseph Stalin. How fitting). I don’t get what the hell Batman is doing with Fidel Castro? [Melman and the Hippo via Format Mag]

If you’re a student and you head to the Update Adobe website, you can grab up to 40% off the price of Adobe creative software. According to Adobe, the saving will help you: “Create, cash-up & beat the pirates with Adobe”. I’m not entirely sure what the incentive is for students to “beat the pirates” though – maybe Adobe is secretly training an army of design ninjas? In any case, it’s a pretty good saving for those of you still paying for education.

[Update Adobe – Thanks Ben!]

First Place—Brian Garten

Second Place—Jairo Filho

Third Place

Offensive PS3 Ads Gallery

According to authors, their software can take any rough sketch, with the shape of each element labelled with its name, find images corresponding to each drawn element, judge which are a better match to the shapes, and then seamlessly merge it all into one single image.

PhotoSketch’s blending algorithm analyses each of these images, compares them with each other, and decides which are better for the blending process. It automatically traces and places them into a single photograph, matching the scene, and adding shadows. Of course, the results are less than perfect, but they are good enough:

The authors of the program—Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir and Shi-Min Hu at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore—presented it at Siggraph Asia 2009. An event that will be remembered forever in the History of Humanity as the day in which a million of dorks were finally able to put themselves in X-rated positions with Megan Fox. [PhotoSketch—Thanks Brice]

Why Do Benchmarks Matter?

Benchmarks typically measure the performance of the bottlenecks in your system. Benchmarks of your car measure its speed, braking and cornering. Benchmarks of your mechanical toothbrush measure the percentage of plaque it can remove from your teeth. As you attempt to test more complex systems, it becomes increasingly more difficult to create accurate benchmarks. These days, computers can be very difficult to test accurately.

On paper, making a great benchmark seems simple — it should be a quantitative test that measures something meaningful, delivers correct results and produces similar results when repeated in similar circumstances. However, in the real world, it can be difficult to find a test that fits all three criteria. Worse, it’s relatively easy for anyone with an agenda to change the starting variables enough to manipulate a benchmark’s results. It’s more important than ever for you to know the difference between good and bad benchmarks — especially if you want to avoid being hoodwinked.

There are dozens of examples of benchmark shenaniganry over the last decade, but I’m going to pick on Nvidia. In 2008 Nvidia famously claimed that then high-end quad-core CPUs were overkill, and that the GPU could do everything the CPU could do better and faster. As is frequently the case, there was a demo to sell the point. Nvidia was showing a video transcoding app that used the power of Nvidia GPUs to convert video 19x faster than a quad-core CPU. However, the application used for the CPU part of the comparison was only able to utilise a single core on the CPU, an unusual situation for video conversion apps even then. When the exact same test was run using an industry-standard software that could use all four CPU cores, the performance difference was much less dramatic. So, while Nvidia created a benchmark that really did work, the results weren’t indicative of the actual performance that people in the real world would get.

The Lab vs. The Real World

There are two basic types of benchmarks: synthetic and real world. Even though we tend to favour real-world benchmarks at Maximum PC (where I am editor-in-chief), both types of tests have their place. Real-world benchmarks are fairly straightforward — they’re tests that mimic a real-world workflow, typically using common applications (or games) in a setting common to the typical user. On the other hand, synthetic benchmarks are artifices typically used to measure specific parts of a system. For example, synthetic benchmarks let you measure the pixel refresh speed of a display or the floating-point computational chutzpah of a CPU. However, the danger of relying on synthetic benchmarks is they may not measure differences that a user would actually experience.

Let’s look at hard drive interface speeds, for instance. Synthetic benchmarks of the first generation SATA interface showed a speedy pipe between SATA hard drives and the rest of the system—the connection benchmarked in the vicinity of 150MB/sec. When the second generation SATA 3Gbps spec was introduced, tests showed it was twice as fast, delivering around 300MB/sec of bandwidth to each drive. However, it wasn’t correct to say that SATA 3Gbps-equipped drives were twice as fast as their first-gen SATA kin. Why not? In the real world, that extra speed didn’t matter. If you tested two identical drives, and enabled SATA 3Gbps on one and disabled it on the other, you’d notice minimal—if any—performance differences. The mechanical hard drives of the era weren’t capable of filling either pipe to capacity—a higher ceiling means nothing when nobody’s bumping their head. (Today, SSD drives and even the large mechanical disks can saturate even a SATA 3Gbps pipe, but that’s a topic for another day.)

So, real-world benchmarks are perfect, right? Not necessarily. Let’s look at the Photoshop script we run at Maximum PC to measure system performance. We built a lengthy Photoshop script using dozens of the most common actions and filters, then we measure the time it takes to execute the script on a certain photo using a stopwatch. It’s a relatively simple test, but there’s still plenty of opportunity for us to muck it up. We could use an image file that’s much smaller or larger than what you currently get from a digital camera. If we ran the script on a 128KB JPEG or a 2GB TIFF, it would measure something different than it does using the 15MB RAW file we actually use for the test.

So, how do we know that our Photoshop benchmark is delivering correct results? We test it. First, we run the benchmark many times on several different hardware configurations, tweaking every relevant variable on each configuration. Depending on the benchmark, we test different memory speeds, amounts of memory, CPU architectures, CPU speeds, GPU architectures, GPU memory configurations, different speed hard drives and a whole lot more; then we analyse the results to see which changes affected the benchmark, and by how much.

But by comparing our results to the changes we made as well as other known-good tests, we can determine precisely what a particular benchmark measures. In the case of our Photoshop script, both CPU-intensive math and hard disk reads can change the results. With two variables affecting outcome, we know that while the test result is very valuable, it is not, all by itself, definitive. That’s an important concept: No one benchmark will tell you everything you need to know about the performance of a complex system.

Making Your Own Photoshop Benchmark

Once you get the hang of it, it’s never a bad idea to run your own benchmarks on a fairly regular basis. It will help you monitor your machine to make sure its performance isn’t degrading over time, and if you do add any upgrades, it will help you see if they’re actually doing anything. Just don’t forget to run a few tests when your computer is new (and theoretically performing at its peak), or before you swap in new RAM or a new HDD or other parts. If you forget, you won’t have a starting data point to compare to future results.

If you don’t own an expensive testing suite like MobileMark or 3DMark, don’t sweat it. If you have an application that you use regularly and can record and play back macros or scripts, like Photoshop, you can build a script that includes the activities you frequently use. We run a 10MP photograph through a series of filters, rotations and resizes that we frequently use as one of our regular system testing benchmarks at Maximum PC.

To make your own, launch Photoshop and open your image. Then go to Windows —> Action, click the down arrow in that palette to select New Action. Name it and click Record, then proceed to put your file through your assorted mutations. Always remember to revert to the original file between each step, and make the final action a file close, so you can easily tell when the benchmark is done. Pile in a lot of actions: As a general rule, you want the total script to take at least two minutes to run — the longer it takes, the less important small inaccuracies on your stopwatch work matter. When you’re finished assigning actions and have closed the file, click the little Stop button in the action palette to finish your script.

Once finished, make sure your new action is highlighted, then click the menu down arrow in the Action palette again and select Action Options. Assign a function key, which will let you start your benchmark by pressing a keyboard shortcut. (We use F2.) Then, open the Action palette menu again, and select Playback Options. Set it to Step-by-Step and uncheck Pause for Audio Annotation. Once that’s done, ready your stopwatch. (Most mobile phones include one, in case you aren’t a track coach.) Load your image, then simultaneously start the stopwatch and press the keyboard shortcut you just selected. Stop the stopwatch when the file closes. We typically run this type of test three times, to minimise any human error we introduce by manually timing the test. If you want to try the same script we use at Maximum PC, you can download it here.

Gaming Benchmarks

Additionally, if you’re a gamer, there are tons of games with built-in benchmarks. These help you know what settings to run in games to maximize image quality without sacrificing framerate as well as measure the impact of use on your computer’s overall speed.

Check out Resident Evil 5 benchmark, which includes both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 modes. Running this test is easy—simply install it and select DirectX 9 or DirectX 10 mode. (Remember, you’ll need a Radeon 4800 series card or newer or a GeForce 8800 series card or newer and be running on Vista or Windows 7 to use DirectX 10 mode.) If you want to compare performance over a period of time, we recommend the fixed run, it’s simply more repeatable. If you’re trying to tell what settings to use, the variable mode isn’t as consistent, but it shows actual gameplay, which will be more representative of your in-game experience. Once you’re in the game, you’ll want to change to your flat panel’s native resolution and do a test run of your benchmark. For a single-player game, we like to choose settings that will minimise the framerate drops below 30fps. For multiplayer, we sacrifice image quality for speed and target 60fps. After all, dropped frames in a deathmatch will get you killed.

The Practical Upshot Like everything else, there are good benchmarks and bad benchmarks. However, there’s absolutely nothing mysterious about the way a benchmarking should work. In order to know whether you can trust benchmarks you read online, you need to know exactly what’s being tested — how the scenario starts, what variables are changed and exactly what’s being measured. If you can’t tell that a test is being run in a fair, apples-to-apples manner, ask questions or try duplicating the tests yourself. And when someone doesn’t want to share their testing methodology? That’s always a little suspicious to me.

Will Smith is the Editor-in-Chief of Maximum PC, not the famous actor/rapper. His work has appeared in many publications, including Maximum PC, Wired, Mac|Life T3, and on the web at Maximum PC and Ars Technica. He’s the author of The Maximum PC Guide to Building a Dream PC.

First Place

Second Place

Third Place

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Unportable Gaming in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I’ll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

If the proposed law passes that, incidentally, is currently supported by over 50 politicians, every Photoshopped human on everything from advertisements to news stories to product packaging would require the footer: “Photograph retouched to modify the physical appearance of a person”.

Advertisers who fail to include the footer would be fined $US55,000 or up to 50% of the cost of their campaign.

The law itself is being driven on by arguments that Photoshopped images can “lead people to believe in a reality that does not actually exist, and have a detrimental effect on adolescents”. And while that’s a fair point, the skeptic in us might see this as the lame excuse of someone not committed enough to rigorous cosmetic surgery. [Telegraph via ars and Image]