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 Courtesy Adobe What use is a keyboard shortcut if it doesn’t save you time? Precious little.
It is a surprise then that some default shortcuts rely on so many keys you could type War and Peace in the time it takes to select them. Fortunately, the maximum Photoshop actually uses in the default set is ‘just’ 4. So, if you have a few gigabytes of unused neural ram or you want to make a name for yourself in serious nerd circles why not make up a series of 4 key ‘shortcuts’ and demonstrate your typing dexterity and masochistic tendencies? For the rest of us mere mortals the only remedy here is practice and more practice.
Todays ‘shortcut’ falls into the War and Peace category. To get to the Keyboard shortcut panel ‘all’ you have to do is type: -
Cmd+Opt+Shft+K (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+Shft+K (PC)
Why not try it if you’re feeling bored? In all seriousness, keyboard shortcuts can be your friend with judicious use and this panel can be a very useful place to visit.
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After much trailing of new features across the blogosphere in recent weeks, the mothership has reached close earth orbit (if not actually landed) in the shape of the latest incarnation of the industry leading CS suite of software from Adobe. The glossy official introduction can be seen at http://cs5launch.adobe.com/. The word ‘launch’ is appropriate as the latest imaging goodness is not actually available to pick up from your retailer of choice just yet. You can however pre-order online. The UK store indicates a mid-May shipping date with free delivery available up to 12th May.
As usual, Adobe offers a plethora of upgade routes with the putative savings increasing the larger the suite you purchase.
 Courtesy Adobe There is an interesting error in the store. In one part of the store if you click on the Photoshop Extended version the store will add in the standard version and charge you accordingly. Don’t get overexcited because you are not actually getting a discount. To avoid this problem, check the box image displayed by the store to see if you are getting what you want. The extended version is largely deep blue as opposed to the predominant white of the standard version. I suspect this will be remedied very shortly before misled customers actually receive the standard version instead of the extended version. Not a massive issue perhaps but strange that it got through. Maybe there are just too many options even for Adobe?
This latest upgrade of the CS suite has been a truly massive enterprise with every element of the extensive and rapidly burgeoning suite of programs getting a major facelift. In addition, completely new functionality has been added to take the end user even further from the details of actual code.
What then do the Adoberati get for their hard earned mullah? Happily it looks as though this odd numbered upgrade will be of sufficient interest to get those who baulked at the CS4 version to pony up. Looking at the main focus of this blog, namely Photoshop and its variants, the list of improvements is very extensive.
There has been much oohing and aahing over the additional intelligence to be found in the elite Content Aware Fill option, with Photoshop now providing an amazing ability to extrapolate images into blank areas and behind cropped parts of the image. While the first samples shown on the web look very impressive, repetition of some larger elements in the background can clearly be seen in some areas. This however should be amenable to remedy with some cloning. Significant time saving is still likely using the tool.
Speed improvements are indicated from a number of changes, including the use of cross platform 64bit processing support (especially as the MAC version of CS4 did not have it at all), new GPU accelerated features and a range of user suggested productivity improvements such as the ability to save 16 bit Photoshop format images as 8 bit Jpegs in a single step and a straighten button on the ruler tool options bar.
Camera Raw has received an upgrade to version 6 and a raft of improvements of the incremental rather than revolutionary kind. Noise removal, sharpening and vignetting, to mention just a few, have all been improved significantly. HDR has been upgraded to HDR Pro with greater user control and ability to generate HDR effects from single images.
Additional online services are available through CS Online such as CS Review (where work can be reviewed online with colleagues). Adobe states that these services will be complimentary for a limited time, without specifying what that time is. (There are no indications yet as to what the possible charges for this service might be or whether early adopters will be able to carry on using the service free.) I guess the time to charging will shorten in direct proportion to the service’s popularity. You take your pick and the risk of waiting.
Adobe has extended the UI customisation options yet again. You can massage the interface into your own image in many additional ways with an Adobe Labs tool, the Configurator 2 panel utility. With this you can even add in video tutorials and email to your customised panels. But does it allow you to order pizza?
Image manipulation has taken many steps forward with the Puppet Warp adding an interesting and potentially very useful addition to the armoury of those wishing to bring some life to their images. Automated lens correction will definitely speed up image editing with vignetting, chromatic aberration and lens distortion options available. If the specific lens/camera combination does not ship with the software, online searching will be available.
For all the 3D tech heads amongst you, Photoshop Extended also gets many improvements to provided additional 3D functionality. Better rendering performance is promised with an upgraded ART(Adobe Ray Tracer) 2 engine. Additional materials ship with the programme and more may be located online.
Bridge gets the workover with a mini Bridge panel available in Photoshop, easy batch conversion to Jpeg, flexible batch renaming and faster navigation between open folders, amongst other improvements.
All in all Photoshop has moved on significantly. Field testing will sort the wheat from the chaff but this first look at the detailed specs suggests that CS3 and CS4 users will find spending their spondulicks on this upgrade almost irresistible.
Courtesy Adobe F12
Short and sweet is the theme for today. This shortcut will get you back to whence you came in a fast and easy way. Pressing F12 on your function key area of the keypad (both Mac and PC) will revert the image you have been working on to its original state.
Another good shortcut to get you out of a mess.
Why not try it?
At last.
After much speculation the latest version of Aperture has arrived – during our absence in Canada – and the new baby is looking good.
 Courtesy Apple The new features Apple has added appear to address most, although not all, of the main feature requests from users of Aperture 2, including greater local editing and the use of the 64 bit goodness incorporated in Snow Leopard.
The addition of Faces and Places was expected, given their presence in iPhoto for some time. For many users these options will add some really useful ways of accessing their database of images.
Elsewhere, Brushes is targeted at helping photographers take their editing to the next level within Aperture by providing an intelligent, non-destructive environment for local editing that will heavily reduce the need to leave Aperture for other image editing software.
Altogether, there are some 200 plus reported improvements in some 16 categories from UI changes to data organisation. Many of these changes are under-the-hood modifications focussed on speeding up the archiving and retrieval processing as well as quickly getting your images to the editing point you want.
I can’t wait to try all the new features and will report back on the testing and give our rating of Aperture 3 shortly.
Some reports are already filtering through of some users’ real world experiences. While many seem to have no issues there are many reports of major memory leak issues, leading some computer systems to be reduced to a crawl. This is an issue that really should not have made it through beta testing. Other reported issues include some with Airport Extreme and Time Capsule base stations, adjusting file sizes on email export and the upgrade process itself when the software may unexpectedly quit. Apple has already posted a work around for the last problem at http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3231.
Courtesy Adobe Working with your layers and want to quickly change the order of the layers without clicking and dragging?
Here’s how to send a selected layer 1 place down the stack press : –
Command + [ (Mac) Ctrl + [ (PC)
To bring a selected layer 1 place up the stack press: -
Command + ] (Mac) Ctrl + ] (PC)
Why not try it?
Courtesy Adobe Today the humble Option (Mac)/Alt (PC) key comes to your rescue when in dire need within Photoshop CS4.
Have you ever played with all the sliders and options in a menu box and wished you could extricate yourself quickly from the mess you have just generated? Happily there is just such a solution, and you don’t need to leave the box either.
When you are in a menu panel which has a Cancel button, pressing the Opt/Alt key changes the Cancel button to a Reset button. This is immensely useful if you want to quickly reset things to what they were before you changed anything in the options box.
Why not try it?
The latest rumour doing the rounds about Aperture 3 is probably the most interesting and positive, since the October 2009 flurry in the Apple blogger doocot . A Dutch site suggests that a book on the said next version of Apples pro-photography package will be available in mid-February.
The well known Apple blog, www.tuaw.com, has listed a post from Dutch website www.onemorething.nl. This suggests that the book will be available in mid-Feb.
Great excitement mounts as we wait to see if the software will be announced during the upcoming Apple event on the 27th Jan 2010 in San Francisco.
After a two year wait for an upgraded Aperture, we are expecting something extraordinary. The main focus of the event is likely to be the launch of the heavily rumoured new iTablet. It it bears any resemblence to all the hype this would be an excellent platform for displaying images. With Snow Leopard’s 64 bit goodness waiting under the hood to show its full prowess an updated Aperture would be an ideal application to demonstrate all that latent power.
We are salivating already. Bring on the 27th.
 Courtesy Sony
Once more into the breach dear friends. Sony has announced an enlargement to its portfolio of DSLRs with yet another mid to low price point camera in the quickly burgeoning Alpha product line. The 450 offers some 500 series features with a well endowed 14.2 megapixel (effective) CMOS sensor, up to 7fps continuous shooting and a stunning battery life, producing up to 1000 images from one charge. Throw in HDR processing in-camera with an advanced Bionz processing engine and we have yet another excellent Sony product. The auto HDR brings cameras that little bit closer to the dynamic range of the human eye by combining two shots with different exposures. This feature can accept images with a difference of up to 3 EV.
Sony has addressed the issue of sensor noise with a user selectable ISO range of 200 – 12,800. Whether this entire range will be usable is a significant test issue. The quoted ISO range will depend upon the application of noise reduction in three basic steps at the sensor. At one level the sensor is designed to reduce noise on a photocell by photocell basis. This is followed by a two stage application of noise reduction, before and after the analog to digital conversion. Sony claim that users will be able to shoot handheld shots by candle light. Testers will no doubt be trying to do just that.
Like all other Sony Alpha cameras from the very first model, the Alpha 100, this latest DSLR incorporates its Steady Shot, in-camera stabilisation system, which is claimed allows up to 4 stops of shutter speed improvement when hand held. The camera accepts Sony Pro Duo and Pro-HD Duo memory stick formats, as well as SD and SDHC format cards.
With Live View this camera has brought many great features into an entry level camera. Pricing is still a moot point but Sony has long adopted a price conscious approach to the Alpha range in light of the great range of competitors aiming for the same price environment.
 Courtesy Adobe Adobe has just released a free iPhone app, the snappily entitled Photoshop.com Mobile, which, as the name suggests, is tightly integrated with Photoshop.com. The app has a limited range of editing options that include Cropping, Rotating, Flipping, Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White and Sketch, Soft Focus and a small range of Filtering options. It prompts you to select a pre-existing image or to take a new one. It also allows you to Save and Upload your images to Photoshop.com, where a free 2GB of online storage is available. Unfortunately, the Upload function on the edit menu is a bit flakey, however, the dedicated Upload button on the main menu page worked perfectly well.
The editing options, while limited in range, do what they do very well, although filtering is a bit of a mixed bag. All the editing functions are very well presented and allow you to work easily by dragging on the image. The Save function saves an edited JPEG version of the image back to your camera roll by adding it to the end of the existing images and incrementing the last image number by 1.
Although based in the UK, I was able to register for this US optimised site with a small bit of toing and froing. Fairly quickly, I was able to upload any images on my iPhone camera roll to the Photoshop.com site – on which a number of additional edits are possible. The app also allows you to check what you have online at Photoshop.com and all in all is a great – (did I say it was free?) – addition to iPhone photographic functionality.
It gets a well deserved 4 stars from us.
As we quickly approach the end of 2009 there is still no sight of anything from Apple relating to Aperture 3. This, and the fact that Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta is already out there in the wild and being tested by the same community targeted by Apple suggests either that Apple is preparing a huge advance in its DAM software or it is preparing to let it sink slowly beneath the waves.
Evidence supporting the first option is limited. The advent of Snow Leopard suggested that the benefits of the underlying 64 bit architecture improvements alone could improve the performance of Aperture significantly on suitable machines.
The arguments in favour of Aperture being left to wither on the vine includes the lack of a faster response to new DSLR camera models coming out suggests that Apple is losing some interest in keeping all its pro photographer users happy. There is little to no Aperture feedback from Apple in any forum and some Aperture forums have simply disappeared from view.
In short, we are in a black hole about Aperture 3. I am not about to jump ship to Lightroom yet but am having a look at what Lightroom version 3 beta offers. I suspect that if Apple does not provide some positive information about Aperture 3, in lieu of the production of an actual new version, within the next 3 months their market share may drop to 3% of total market share and possibly 6% of the mac only market share.
Aperture however still remains a tremendous application that facilitates roundtrips into and out of Photoshop. It happily manages all my image resources and provides a secure backup process for peace of mind. Its wonderful non-destructive processing gives me freedom to experiment in complete safety. Now, if it could be a lot speedier, have more local correction options, gradient filter etc.
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