Lightroom 3.4 (Mac|Win) & Camera Raw 6.4 (Mac|Win) are now available for download, adding support for the following cameras:
Canon EOS 600D (Rebel T3i / Kiss X5 Digital)
Canon EOS 1100D (Rebel T3 / Kiss X50 Digital)
Fuji FinePix S200 EXR
Fuji FinePix F550 EXR
Fuji FinePix HS20 EXR
Fuji FinePix X100
Hasselblad H4D-40
Kodak EasyShare Z990
Nikon D5100
Olympus E-PL1s
Olympus E-PL2
Olympus XZ-1
Samsung NX11
The releases also add support for dozens of new camera profiles, add new tethered camera support, & fix a number of bugs. For a complete list, see Tom Hogarty’s post on the Lightroom Journal.
A few weeks ago I mentioned Tych, a free panel for creating diptychs, triptychs, and other multi-image layouts in Photoshop. Now the nice folks at Faded & Blurred have produced a four-minute tutorial on using it:
Ah, now this is cool: DI Magazine is leveraging the Photoshop Touch SDK, making their tablet-based tutorials capable of driving Photoshop actions. Check it out:
Philip & team have really embraced Configurator, distributing interactive panels with the magazine, and I love to see them taking this next step so quickly. I’m eager to hear what readers think.
Thanks for all the feedback regarding the just-announced Adobe Nav, Eazel, and Color Lava. A few quick thoughts:
Please remember that these efforts are just part of a bigger picture that has yet to be revealed. I’ve seen comments along the lines of “Nice, but I want Lightroom for tablets”; “Why are you doing these apps instead of making improvement X to Photoshop?”; “I’d like to see more support for Android”; etc. The feedback is welcome, and none of these things are mutually exclusive.
“Nav is one of the most exciting of our three new applications IF you think beyond Nav itself,” writes Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes. “We’re showcasing one of the most powerful pieces of the new Photoshop SDK – the ability to drive Photoshop from a device.” See the rest of his comment for more perspective.
You can indeed watch these videos via HTML5 on an iPad. Here’s a link to all of them plus a few I haven’t yet gotten to blog. For some reason embedded Adobe TV vids don’t work on iOS devices, but I’m told a fix is in progress.
Join Adobe Creative Suite Evangelists, Terry White (Design), Greg Rewis (Web), Paul Trani (Flash Platform) and Jason Levine (Digital Video & Audio) to learn more about the new features in Creative Suite 5.5 and get your feature related questions answered. This a great opportunity to see our very latest technology in action and to find out how it could benefit you. The Evangelists will be covering a range of features across multiple products so there will be something for everyone. Please RSVP and we hope to see you then!
In case you can’t attend live, the session is to be recorded for later posting.
Having devised Adobe Configurator, I’m clearly a fan of tailoring large, complex apps to be more “everything you want, nothing you don’t.” The newly announced Adobe Nav fits in that vein, enabling use of a customizable toolbar on a tablet. Designer Geoff Dowd offers a quick tour:
I’m expecting apps like this to work best for people who have a hardware dock (e.g. the little keyboard one can get for an iPad) at their main work areas. A dock lets you can plug in the tablet, then forget about battery drain or propping it up yourself.
Photoshop gets used in a huge variety of ways, from editing tiny icons laying out multi-hundred-layer Web designs* to wrangling gigapixel photos. The optimal settings depend on the work you do. Now the Photoshop performance team has posted a white paper on Photoshop CS5 performance, explaining various cache & GPU settings, discussing the impact of 64-bit and multicore, and more. Hopefully you’ll find it helpful.
* Web guys: Try the “Tall & Thin” option (yes, there is such a thing) under Preferences->Performance.
Last year engineer (and DJ) Christoph Moskalonek & I were talking about what viscerally pleasing creation experiences one could bring to tablets. Having just shipped some great paint-mixing technology in Photoshop CS5, we hit on the idea of mixing colors with multitouch input, then sending the results to Photoshop. In this video clip, Christoph shows the outcome of that investigation:
I’ve seen a bit of misinformed concern that the arrival of Creative Suite 5.5 applications means that in order to keep getting Camera Raw updates, one must upgrade Photoshop (of which there’s no 5.5 version) and/or obtain a subscription. That’s not the case: Camera Raw 6 will support Photoshop CS5 for the entire cycle. Now you have more options, not fewer.
Apropos of the blending modes panel I mentioned the other day, Russell Brown has put together a quick video demonstrating some uses for this panel. He also demos a panel that sets the stack mode of Smart Objects (good for running the “tourist remover” trick on video, etc.). Download the panels here.
If design & layout is more your thing, check out Russell’s tutorial on the use of Cameron McEfee’s GuideGuide panel (see previous for info, and download here).
Adobe evangelist Mike McHugh shows off the unique interface, watercolor-style drawing chops, and Photoshop CS5 integration in Adobe’s forthcoming Eazel app:
As an alternative to paying upfront for Photoshop and other Adobe applications, you can now subscribe to them. This video nicely summarizes things in under four minutes:
For detailed questions, please see the subscriptions FAQ on Adobe.com.
I’m pleased to say that the Photoshop team has announced three new iPad apps that work closely with Photoshop CS5:
Adobe Color Lava allows you to mix colors on the iPad, creating custom color swatches and themes to transfer back into Photoshop.
Adobe Eazel lets digital artists create rich realistic paintings with their fingertips. These paintings can then be sent directly to Photoshop CS5 for compositing or for taking the artwork further.
Adobe Nav allows you to select and control Photoshop tools using the iPad as the input surface, customize the toolbar, browse and zoom in on up to 200 open Photoshop files or easily create new files.
Here are some glimpses of the apps in action, plus perspective on what it means:
Lightroom PM Tom Hogarty points out that the Adobe Certified Expert exam is available for Lightroom 3, as are certifications (and re-certs) for Photoshop CS5 and many other Adobe apps.
Photoshop lets you select more than one layer at once, but unfortunately it doesn’t let you simultaneously change the blending modes of those layers (good JDI suggestion). Scripter Mike Hale has whipped up a panel for Photoshop CS5 (made with the help of Configurator 2) that plugs the gap. (An earlier version remains available for CS4 as well.)
Tych Panel is an extension to Adobe Photoshop that automates diptychs and triptychs creation. It supports an arbitrary number of layouts using the compositing feature making it the perfect tool for your photo blog… Tych Panel is released as open source and can be used, modified and redistributed in any way you want.
From planning to chaos (“We’re screwed”) to literal tears of joy, Photoshop team members talk about the single toughest cycle in the app’s long history. Just watching it is an emotional roller coaster for me, bringing back first heartburn & then the great pride and gratitude I have to have been associated with this team. I think you’ll find it time well spent.
My own minor footnotes:
Having our names on the splash screen is a big deal to the team, going way back. After my name first appeared there, my mom carried a printout for years until it finally disintegrated in the depths of her purse.
Many of the engineers in the video have long associations with Apple, some having worked there. Russell Williams, who talks about Carbon vs. Cocoa, was a Mac OS system architect before joining Adobe.
At one point during conversion, the splash screen was literally drawing upside down. You can’t make these things up.
Designer Neven Mrgan got after Photoshop for its disparate range of UI sliders. That’s one of the things we intended to rectify via the too-ambitious “AHOD” process described in the video. Such controls include a great deal of subtle, custom behavior upon which customers depend, and it just wasn’t feasible to swap them all out in one release.
In case you’re wondering, AHOD wasn’t a rewrite effort that would make Photoshop magically twice as fast, etc. Rather, it was aimed at architectural changes that would make the codebase more efficient to develop. Such work remains underway, just not in a do-or-die, one-cycle shot.
Come check out Zorana Gee, Photoshop Product Manager and author of “3D in Photoshop: The Ultimate Guide for Creative Professionals”, talk about 3D workflows. This is a must-see presentation!
She’ll demonstrate an overview of the 3D capabilities in the latest Photoshop by targeting workflows, such as compositing a 3D object into a photo and how to create a 3D logo/text using Adobe Repoussé.
As part of this presentation, we’d like you to send us questions that can be addressed by Zorana. Please post them on the wall related to this meeting in Meetup.
If you’re a Mac user of the FinderPop utility, you might notice that Photoshop CS5 can crash when you choose Select > Inverse or other various menu items. If that’s the case, try downloading the FinderPop 2.3.0.6 Beta as it contains a fix for the problem.
It’s also possible that you’re seeing some weirdness if running OS X 10.6.5 or 10.6.6 (e.g. seeing a “Delete the Adobe Photoshop Settings file?,” tools behaving as if the Shift or Option keys are pressed). Something got broken in the 10.6.5 update, and the Photoshop team is working with Apple on a fix.
People who work in the 3D and film industries and who use the OpenEXR format in Photoshop CS5 will be happy to know that we now offer a plugin which preserves files’ alpha channel on import/export. Out the box, Photoshop bakes the alpha into the layer transparency. Users who are happy with this behavior don’t need to do anything. Others who find that they need to preserve the alpha channel should simply install this plugin to override the default behavior.
This session will show you how to configure After Effects, Premiere Pro, your computer, and your projects so that working and rendering take as little time as possible. Topics covered include memory and multiprocessing settings in After Effects, CUDA processing in Adobe Premiere Pro, OpenGL processing in After Effects, background rendering, and dozens of little tips to make things faster.
Presenters:
Al Mooney – product manager for Adobe Premiere Pro
Paul Young – software engineering manager for Adobe Premiere Pro
Chris Prosser – software engineering manager for After Effects
Todd Kopriva – technical support lead for Adobe professional video products
Honest to God, I kind of live for seeing inventive people like Russell Brown combine the tools we make in really novel, unintended ways. Here Russell uses Pixel Bender CS5, a laser etching machine, a printer, and some old-school artistic media to create digital paintings with real depth:
A reader today wrote, “Can anyone tell me if it’s possible to drag a one-pixel-width diagonal line in Illustrator without it forcing anti-aliasing?”
My suggestion: Try choosing Effect->Rasterize, then choosing 72PPI and no anti-aliasing. If you often need this technique, you can create a graphical style & then easily apply the look to multiple paths. You can also get some funky lo-fi pixel-art looks by cranking the PPI setting way down.
“From its new 64-bit capability on the Mac to details like drag-and-drop file integration,” writes Jackie Dove, “the CS5 upgrade is the most significant and impressive since the Creative Suite started shipping in 2003.” Thanks, guys! [full article]
The Photoshop team has discovered a couple of issues that affect Windows users who installed the 12.0.2 update for CS5 that was released on December 6th, 2010.
Tooltips no longer display on Windows XP.
Photoshop reports that a .dll file is missing on start up or when accessing TWAIN/scanner device on Windows operating systems.
We’re aware of the issues and are working to address the issues in the very near future. I’m sorry these got past us, and we appreciate your patience.
The Adobe Photoshop 12.0.2 update (Mac|Win) speeds up painting performance and fixes a number of problems discovered after Photoshop CS5 was released. The most significant fixes in the update include the following:
A number of potential security vulnerabilities have been addressed
Crashing bugs related to typography & fonts have been addressed
Performance of various features has been improved
Crashes related to opening 3D layers, sharpening, color management, and scanning via TWAIN devices have been fixed
Problems with brush cursors, the histogram progress bar, the display of selection boundaries (“marching ants”), scrolling while using the shift key, and the use of action droplets have been addressed
Intermittent file format problems have been addressed
Metadata-related bugs related to focus distance and Orphea Studio JPEGs have been fixed
In addition you can download a TWAIN plug-in update that includes fixes for multiple document scanning, and a that fixes a crash that could occur when attempting a second scan.
I haven’t tried it & haven’t seen user feedback, but the new VueScan 9 scanning app promises 64-bit compatibility and the ability to create very large scans. If you take it for a spin with Photoshop CS5, you’re welcome to post your impressions here. [Via Jeff Tranberry]
Mac folks, is there anything keeping you running CS5 in 32-bit mode? I ask because the more legacy code we can lop off, the more we can focus on building for the future.
Hey, remember which company makes multiple* 64-bit, GPU-accelerated video tools for the Mac? (Hint: it’s not Apple.)
If you’re a Final Cut Pro user, check out live sessions next week in which veteran FCP users talk about how and why they’ve moved to Premiere Pro–and how you can, too.
I’m pleased to see that Nik Software has updated Silver Efex Pro, Viveza 2, HDR Efex Pro, and Color Efex Pro to run 64-bit-native inside Photoshop CS5 for Mac and Windows. The updates are free, and I’m told that updates to other Nik plug-ins are coming soon.
Building on the success of his Artists’ Brushes for Photoshop CS5, digital painter John Derry has released John’s Dry Media for Photoshop CS5, a $19.95 set of brushes for Photoshop CS5. Here he demonstrates creating a painting from scratch:
And here’s turning a photo into a pastel painting:
“We can all do the stupid demo where you move the puppet around,” says Russell Brown, “but how does this apply to real-world projects?” Russell shows a couple of examples, getting most interesting around the 3-minute mark (demoing the various distortion modes, then correcting lens distortions).
This is getting kind of meta: InDesign magazine has used InDesign CS5 to publish the magazine to iPad, making it available in free preview form. Designed by Monika Wolff and Jennifer Wills of W+W Design, the iPad version features video tutorials on CS5 features and more. Very nicely done. [Via Terri Stone]
Photoshop 3D PM Zorana Gee & lead engineer Pete Falco, working with expert digital artists, have created new new book 3D in Photoshop, together with a free interactive version for iPad. Zorana writes,
Check out the only book of it’s kind that breaks down everything you need to know about working with 3D in Photoshop. Not only is it written directly by the Photoshop 3D Team themselves but also Photoshop masters, like Bert Monroy, have contributed useful and inspiring tutorials that will benefit any designer wanting to learn 3D.
Further, the team has put together a companion iPad app that takes the first chapter of the book (basic 3D concepts) and added interactive animations to each page to help illustrate the concepts. Scrolling across will read as the first chapter of the book plus interactivity and scrolling down will introduce 15 unique tutorials (only found in the iPad app) that show you how to create all the animations directly in Photoshop CS5 Extended.
I meet a large number of people who are intrigued by the features in Photoshop CS5 Extended, but who are unsure about how to dive in and make something useful. Photoshop PM Zorana Gee endeavors to break that logjam with a simple, focused tutorial:
The Plugged-In panel from TypeDNA adds font-browsing/selecting power to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign CS5:
The easy-to-use interface provides several unique tools (Similar Fonts, Font Harmony, Attribute Filters and SmartChoice) . Each tool uses sophisticated character analysis and can be used independently or combined for extremely powerful browsing and font selection. Once a font is chosen, the plug-in sends your choices direct to the document.
Double rainbow ‘cross the sky, oh my God, so intense... Wait, that’s something else–but this is pretty great, too: the Illustrator team has just released the Illustrator CS5 HTML5 Pack, downloadable from Adobe Labs. Highlights include the ability to:
Export named character styles as CSS
Export artwork appearances as CSS
Include selected Graphic Styles as CSS in SVG
Create parameterized SVG (vector graphics tagged with variables)
Create multi-screen SVG (leveraging media queries to serve up design variations)
See the download page or Mordy Golding’s nice summary for more details. You can ask questions & provide feedback on the Labs user forum.
I’m curious to see whether this news makes it onto the Mac sites that’ve beaten Adobe up for a perceived lack of enthusiasm about HTML5 (tough, as it just doesn’t fit that sterile, stupid narrative). The funny thing is that these changes build on the SVG support that Illustrator has been shipping for ten years. Sometimes it just takes a while for the world to catch up.
You might have seen this name pop up recently among CS5 updates. “APE” is essentially WebKit (the open-source, HTML-rendering engine behind Safari and Chrome) plus Flash Player. Or, put another way, it’s Adobe AIR (which is WebKit + Flash) with modifications to support Suite extensibility (e.g. things like Configurator). In any case, you’ll want to download the recent update (if you haven’t already) as it addresses bugs & security issues.
[Update: Thanks to readers for pointing out that the package version number was set incorrectly. The team has re-wrapped/re-posted the plug-in with the correct number (2.1.0). There’s no need to re-download, and sorry about the confusion.]
At Photoshop World this week, performance testing lead Adam Jerugim presented a performance guide with hardware recommendations and information about the CS5 performance preferences. I’ve put his notes in this post’s extended entry.
In case you missed the Photoshop CS5 Ask a Pro demo/Q&A with Bryan O’Neil Hughes, you can check out the recording. In addition, video evangelist Jason Levine has posted part 1 of his SF presentation on DSLR Video Editing for Photographers.
Photoshop CS5 introduced a color sampling ring (see screenshot) that shows one’s previous foreground color as well as the one being clicked. If for whatever reason you don’t like the ring, you can select the eyedropper tool, then uncheck the “Show Sampling Ring” on the Options Bar.
Digital painting pioneer John Derry has just released a Lynda.com title, Photoshop CS5: Painting with the Mixer Brush, going into depth on how to wring the most out of this new tool. And building on the success of his Artists’ Brushes set for CS5, he’s previewing a set of Dry Media Brushes. Should be some powerful, interesting stuff. For more on John’s work and his take on CS5, check out this interview.
As I’ve mentioned previously, pixel rendering in Illustrator CS5 is much, much improved, so I highly recommend it to Web & screen designers (and not as an Adobe employee, but rather as someone who sweated over such details & who regularly cursed Illustrator’s old behavior).
