PopPhoto Flash

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

Letter of the Week: Busted!

To:  POP Editor
Subject:  Busted-Digital Tool box -May 2009

I can appreciated the work required to create a realistic looking shadow, however, had the image really been taken with an on camera flash, the shadow would be below the subjects and not above.  That is, of course, unless the photographer, in the dark, realized he might need separation between sujects and turned the camera up-side down.  I think, Not!

--Bill Becker

 

When Bob Bowen talks about his composites, he often mentions what he refers to as “cartoon physics.” Sometimes he’ll make an aesthetic decision that upon first glance seems more real, or is more pleasing to the eye, even if it isn’t exactly what would happen in real life.

--Debbie Grossman
Senior Editor

Tip of the Day: Should your Printer and Paper Match?

Q: Do I need to use the same brand paper as my printer?

A: If you don’t know much about color management and you want your prints to match your calibrated screen right away, go with your printer’s brand of paper. But if you’re interested in learning a little bit about paper profiles, go ahead and try a third party paper. You’ll need to visit the paper company’s website and download the right profile. Then, when in Adobe Photoshop, choose the one you downloaded, and be sure to turn off color management in your printer driver.
—Debbie Grossman
Senior Editor

At PhotoPlus: X-Rite’s ColorMunki Photo

This morning I met with X-Rite, who showed off some improvements to their excellent ColorMunki Photo. The single device profiles not only your display, but also your printer and digital projector. What makes the Munki unique is its robust software: You can tweak your printer profile according to the very image you’re trying to print. So if you do a lot of portraits, the software will engineer a color target specific to the range of skin tones in a given photograph, and use that information to help you print them even more accurately. It also comes with color picker software that helps you develop color palettes based on your photos and the new Digital Pouch program, which will ensure color-accurate viewing when you share your images with friends who have also calibrated their screens. All in-all, a great device for keeping all your color in line.

—Debbie Grossman
Senior Editor

Tip of the Day: More Megapixels for Bigger Prints?

Q: The pixels are visible when I make prints over 12x18-inches from my 6.3MP camera. Do I need to get a camera with more megapixels to make bigger prints?

A: Before you go shopping for an upgrade, try setting your camera to shoot RAW, not JPEG. Then convert those files to TIFFs, use Adobe Photoshop’s Image Size (set to Bicubic Smoother) to upsize, and then sharpen while viewing your photo at 50%. Chances are your prints will look pretty good when you check them out at least six inches away.
—Debbie Grossman
Senior Editor

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.

Little Orphan Photo

Who would have thought that the most heated debate yet at the 2007 Microsoft Pro Photo Summit would be the one over the soon-to-be-passed federal copyright law on "orphan works," photos floating on the internet or in print with no photographer’s name attached.

It’s not news that lots of photographers are concerned about their copyrights. But what happens when an art director, publisher, or advertiser finds an orphan work and wants to use it? According to the proposed law, essentially such photos are free to use provided the user makes a good-faith effort to find the picture’s maker. If the photographer turns up after the fact, he or she must be paid “reasonable compensation.” Sounds decent enough.

So why all the debate? Many photographers in the audience (and one on the panel) not only are wary of the roomy term “reasonable compensation,” but distrust corporations to seek them out and hand them money. And should they find an instance of unauthorized usage of their images, they point out that it’s not easy for photographers, in business for themselves, to fight a big company in court.

While there are a lot of strong feelings all around, we want to know how photographers can use technology to protect their work and police it to the utmost. We also wonder whether, the way photographers have had to learn to accept the move to royalty-free stock photography, pros now will need to loosen their grip on their photos. Where do we go from here?

For more on the debate, check out the American Society of Media Photographers' take on the subject. Or, for all the gory details, visit the U.S. Copyright Office's website.  —Debbie Grossman, Associate Editor

From the Front Lines: Microsoft Pro Photo Summit

It was kind of an exciting moment when my shuttlebus pulled into Microsoft’s headquarters for this year’s Microsoft Pro Photo Summit. No sightings of Bill Gates yet, but there has been enough fancy coffee to do the town proud.

So far, a few hours into the conference, non-caffeine-based highlights include:

•Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, David Vaskevitch, holds up the iPhone and quips “Somebody did a good job marketing this thing.”
•A demo of the dazzling Photosynth site: It takes multiple images, analyzes them for their key matching points, and makes them into a three-dimensional model. You can spin it around, zoom in on interesting areas, and check out the high-resolution images that reside on those points. If you’re on a PC, check it out.
• Gigapixels! You can use Microsoft’s HDView to display your super-high resolution photos. And if you don’t make your own, zoom in close on theirs here.

—Debbie Grossman
Associate Editor