Photoshop Insider

Wednesday News Update!

By Scott on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 9:49 am | updates.

12 Days Left!

It’s Wednesday, and you know what that means? OK, I’m not sure either, but in the meantime, here’s some news:

There’s only 12 day’s left to pick up Adobe Lightroom at Adobe’s special introductory price of $199 (US). On May 1st, it moves up to it’s normal price of $299. You can buy it direct from Adobe by clicking here, or from our friends of B&H Photo.
NAPP’s own Corey Barker “The Photoshop Lad’ (who writes the daily Photoshop Blog at PlanetPhotoshop.com), has a really nice video tutorial on a highlight portrait effect that’s pretty slick. I’ve seen a number of different takes on this technique, but I think Corey has nailed it. Check it out right here.
Adobe released some free updates yesterday for Camera Raw 4, and the Adobe DNG Converter. You can download them right here (for Macintosh), or here (for Windows).
Moose Peterson brought this article to my attention (from the Pro Photo Business Blog), and it’s worth a read (even if you disagree with it). It’s called “The Death of Vertical Photos” and it’s about how the days of widespread use of shooting in Portrait mode may be numbered, because of the way today’s Web designers feel photos are best displayed on the Web. At first, I completely dismissed this article, but then I realized how many times recently I’ve purposely shot portraits in landscape mode knowing that the photos would be displayed here in my blog. Anyway, it’s food for thought, and worth a read (just for the record, although the writer makes a good point, I think his scenario is a long way off [perhaps never], for a variety of reasons). Check it out here.
Terry White has just posted a special “Inside Adobe” Creative Suite Video Podcast episode that covers all the products in the Creative Suite 3 Design Premium. This episode is 1 hour 16 minutes long and covers Bridge, Version Cue, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, Device Central and Acrobat 8 Professional. Highly recommended!
Got a minute to see some beautiful photography? (OK, that’s a trick question; of course you’ve got a minute to see some beautiful photography). I ran across this site from photographer Andy Biggs, and I just was really taken with some of his photography, especially his African Landscape gallery. Click here to check out some of his work.
My buddy, and Photoshop TV co-host, Dave Cross is teaching a one-day Photoshop hands-on seminar at the Digital Technology Centre in Sarasota, and it looks really cool, as the day starts with a “How to Shoot for Photoshop” live shoot, and then takes you through the whole process, and ends with Dave’s “Finishing Touches.” Seating is limited (as you might guess), so click here to find out more info or to snag one of the few seats available.
Adobe quietly released some new technology on the Adobe Labs site that is really pretty darn handy. It’s a new Help system called “knowhow” which lives within your applications, and it’s very well designed, very interactive, and I wish I had thought of it first. When you click this link, make sure you watch the little demo just to see how cool this thing really is.

^#1

Concerning the death of vertical, I was thinking about wide angle landscape shots that include a lot of foreground by shooting vertically, but when faced with my own examples, I find shots like:
http://www.rrkphoto.com/cgi/showimage.pl?photoID=d20070115155712
Argh!
Even though shots like:
http://www.rrkphoto.com/cgi/showimage.pl?photoID=d20060825022
are vertical, the same foreground detail could be found by simply lowering my tripod.

Randal R. Ketchem on April 18th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

^#2

Ok, this is what burns me. Back when Adobe launced CS2 and upgraded to Camera Raw 3.0, all to the Photoshop pundits, especially one that lives on a bus, under a bridge, down by the river, were saying “Adobe are the good guys here, they are looking out for us,” when people complained that they had to upgrade to CS2 in order to get Camera Raw 3.0 so that they could use it to process their raw files from new cameras.

Well, in my opinion Adobe has done it to photographers again. By not supporting upgrades to Camera Raw backwardly compatible to CS2, they have in effect created a forced upgrade cycle. The minute you buy a new unsupport (Raw 3.7 or prior) camera, you are forced into getting Photoshop CS3 as well. While you do have the Lightroom option (which will cost you $300) or the option to use the Manufacturers converter, this just goes to show you that Adobe has proven once again that they are looking out for their shareholders interests more than their stakeholders interests.

So when people argue that Adobe is the good guy and can be trusted to promote standards such as DNG, I have to laugh. And those are all the same people who think Bill Gates is evil. At least he has made his company give a best effort to keep backward compatibility for their products and provide converters when the new technology has to make a jump that the old technology can’t, even if it cost them more in development time to do so. When will Adobe learn that they can’t just keep giving us new bells and whistles and expect us to have to or even be able to pay for them. Lotus used to be an undisputed king of their sector of the market until someone with a better model dethroned them.

Alessandro on April 18th, 2007 at 11:36 pm