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Photoshop Nostalgia: Which version was your first?

Hongkiat.com has up a great history of Photoshop in the form of screenshots. From the Welcome screen to the Workspace, it's amazing how much has evolved. I nearly got misty-eyed. I guess, considering the hours a day I spend in the program, it's not surprising that I'm a little attached.

My first version was 5. Which was yours?

--Debbie Grossman
Senior Editor

Want the new Photoshop? You might need a new Mac.

Not so long ago, Apple announced that, with the release of their upcoming OS upgrade to Snow Leopard, they'll no longer support machines using the PowerPC processor. Yesterday, Adobe announced that it will follow suit. If you're a PowerPC Mac user and you want the next version of the Creative Suite, you'll need to go Intel before you upgrade your software.

Why now? With the transition to 64-bit on the Mac side, Adobe simply doesn't have the resources to do all that coding. Not to mention that the youngest PowerPC machines are four years old, and the assumption is that folks who are hesitant to upgrade their computers are less likely to upgrade their software. John Nack has more details on his Adobe blog, or you can check out the official FAQ.

--Debbie Grossman
Senior Editor

Photoshop Vandal

Subway posters in Berlin featuring Britney Spears, Leona Lewis and Christina Aguilera have been creatively defaced with large stickers that make the poster look as though it’s opened in a Photoshop window.

Feminist commentary on the standards of beauty? General griping about deception in advertising? Guerilla ad campaign for Adobe? Whatever the artist/vandal’s intent, the posters have served as springboard for many discussions about the use, misuse and prevalence of altered images, definitions of perfection, that you can’t always trust what you see. Plus it’s pretty clever.

You can see a gallery of the doctored ads here.
And read more about it here.

—Kathleen Davis
Assistant Editor

Hands on Review: Sharpener Pro 3.0 by Nik software

Nik’s Sharpener Pro 3.0 is designed to give you more control over sharpening your photos during post processing. Sharpener Pro 3.0 works as a plug in for Adobe Photoshop, Apple Aperture and other Photoshop compatible applications. In Photoshop, Sharpener Pro 3.0 will show up in your filters menu as a plug in and in Apple Aperture you access it through the Images menu.  A new window appears with most of the controls on the right side of the screen.  You have to scroll down to access all of the options. 

You can set up to ten presets. Sharpener Pro 3.0 has both a RAW sharpener and an Output sharpener so you have more control over your sharpening. One of Sharpener Pro 3.0’s strengths is being able to specify your output method. If the method you use does not show up you can add it. You can use the creative sharpening menu determining the sharpening for the whole image or use the U Point technology control points to select a section of the photo you would like to sharpen. 

Your sharpening can also be based on various color ranges you select.  All three of the sharpening approaches are based on what the program refers to as Structure (s), Local Contrast (lc) and Focus(f).  Structure controls and enhances along fine lines, edges and texture.  Local Contrast controls the contrast on the fine lines and edges.  Focus applies to areas that are out of focus and either increases or decreases the focus in those areas depending on how you set it.  When working on your photos the main screen allows three views, fit to screen, 100% or 300%. The smaller window works as a loupe.

(More after the jump)
 

My Trip to the Adobe Factory

Last week, I went on a top-secret mission to Adobe’s home in San Jose, California, to learn the secrets about some upcoming versions of its famous software. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you any of them. Yet. Before I could see anything, I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. So until it’s legal to spill the beans, I’ll share with you some of the non-secret highlights of my exclusive tour.

Adobe headquarters is located in beautiful downtown San Jose. The environmentally-friendly building is actually LEED certified, and everyone seems to be into doing things green down there. I was even picked up from the airport in a hybrid SUV! Every office has a big garbage can for recyclables and a tiny clip-on garbage can for food waste that actually gets composted.

In the courtyard of the building there’s a basketball court and a bocce court. I was jealous. Additionally, Adobe employees not only get health insurance for themselves and their loved ones, but also for their pets. Here at Pop Photo, we don’t even allow people to photograph their cats!

In the bowels of the building, there’s a long room where Adobe tests its software on every possible printer/computer configurations. Engineers have to make sure it’s going to work!

Kelly Castro works on the Lightroom team, and is also an incredible photographer. He’s been doing a series of gritty, black-and-white portraits of men, several of whom also work at Adobe. Here he is shooting Photoshop Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes.

More after the Jump

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2: First Look

Get even more control with local adjustments, gradient masks and a healing brush in Adobe’s RAW workflow solution.

$299, street www.adobe.com

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 freed photographers to work in RAW without laboring in Photoshop, but its major drawback was that it limited you to global fixes. Not anymore. The biggest improvement in Lightroom 2 ($199 as an upgrade from 1) is the local adjustment brush for working on one area of your photo at a time. This time, keywording and collecting are easier, a new gradient tool mimics a graduated filter, and sharpening is more useful—now you can sharpen on export, not just when you print. As with Camera RAW, Adobe will no longer be adding new cameras to Lightroom 1, so if you get a new camera, you’ll have to buy this upgrade right away.

After the Jump, some screen shots of the cool new features.

Tutorials Added To Adobe Design Center

Adobe's Design Center is a good resource for free tutorials on Adobe products including Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom. Now that they have just added some new video tutorials, it's a good time to check them out. Some of the free tutorials provided include correcting an image in Lightroom, editing multiple images with Camera Raw and designing websites using Photoshop. For tutorials on some of the most powerful and complex photo editing programs, video tutorials are extremely helpful. And if they're coming from the source, you know they're going to be accurate. For all of the video tutorials for the entire CS3 suite, check the video workshop directory here.
—Matthew Panzarino
Contributing Blogger

Adobe Teases Free Image Editor

John Nack of Adobe has posted on his blog a piece about an upcoming online image editor from Adobe called Photoshop Express. The editor looks a lot like Adobe's current Lightroom and may be a sign of a new standard look and feel. The editor is designed to be a free online component that doesn't replace traditional programs yet provides a way to quickly edit and correct images using a web-based applications. There are other web-based photo editors, try Picnik or Picture2Life, but the entry of the world's biggest photo editing software company makes the arena much more competitive. And if the program offers a cohesive feel that mirrors their current programs it should be pretty easy for current users to pick up when it's released.
—Matthew Panzarino
Contributing Blogger

Adobe Master Collection

Adobe has released the final two products in its line of CS3 products, the Master Collection and the Production Premium. The Master Collection includes every product that Adobe has released in its CS3 line and the Production Premium is aimed at working designers.

If you haven't yet purchased Photoshop CS3, these packages offer a way to get some of the other tools that it offers. The Master Collection seems to be something of a collector's edition, bundling together many products that all but the most versatile of graphic designers will never use concurrently. The Master Collection has a street price of $2,499 and the Production Premium streets at $1,699.

—Matthew Panzarino
Contributing Blogger

Sort it Out: Which Software to Get

You have a hard drive full of pictures: vacation shots, family gatherings, studio work, the list goes on.  How do you go through them all?  Where do you start?  There are some amazing programs out there to help you get organized.

A user friendly and cost efficient approach is Camera Bit’s Photo Mechanic software ($150). As a browser, it isn’t for editing your images but for sorting and organizing them—you can tag them, color code them or rate them and can add metadata to each file. You can sort by a variety of ways and rename the files.  Everyone has their own work flow but the key is you can sort through the images quickly, easily and organize them in an orderly way.

Adobe’s Lightroom has some of the same attributes but goes a step further with image processing.  Lightroom’s price tag has recently gone up from the short-term introductory price of $199 to $299.  The unique thing about Lightroom is your edits are not done to the actual files but shows you what the changes would look like almost like one of those computerize aging  programs you see yourself age right in front of your eyes.  To read more about Adobe Lightroom, check out our reviews here, and here.
—Melissa Macatee
Contributing Blogger