By Ctein
I need to vent. Indulge me.
Photoshop CS5 for Mac is the worst case of half-baked software development that I have seen in a long time. Honestly, I can only assume its release was driven by marketing rather than engineers and architects. Much as I was looking forward to it, I wish they'd held back another year and done the job right.
Lloyd Chambers has written at great length, eloquently and accurately, on the myriad shortcomings of CS5; I refer you to his website. This is as good a place to start as any, but it's worth perusing the most recent six months of his blog entries for the assortment of important and informative articles he has written on the mess that Adobe has handed us.
Allow me to touch on the highlights that particularly vex me. First, almost everything that was outdated, wrong, or broken in CS4 is still in the same state in CS5. Saving multi-layer PSD files is horribly, painfully slow. For some reason it got a lot worse between CS3 and CS4, and it's stayed lousy. The many filters and other components that didn't work on 16-bit files in CS4 still don't work. Photoshop remains a mish-mash of 8-bit and 16-bit functions (by comparison, the efficient and affordable Picture Windows has been fully 16-bit since, well, forever.)
Photomerge still occasionally gets panoramic images assembled wrong, which means the user interface plug-in (PhotomergeUI) is a necessity for me. It was downgraded to an optional plug-in in CS4; now it doesn't work at all in 64-bit CS5. In fact, an appallingly large fraction of my third-party plug-ins will not run in 64-bit Photoshop, including the three I use on probably 80% of the photographs I work with.
It has been half a year since the release of CS5. I don't know what kind of coordination Adobe does with the third-party developers. I don't know why they didn't write a "compatibility box" within 64-bit Photoshop to allow use of the existing plug-ins, including the myriad important legacy ones that experienced printers use that are no longer under development and so will never be upgraded to 64-bit. Difficult? Yes. I sincerely doubt it was impossible.
Adobe didn't just drop the ball; they tripped over it and then kicked it into the sewer.
Is there a workaround? Sort of. Launch CS5 in 32-bit mode and you'll be able to use PhotomergeUI and all your other critical 32-bit plug-ins. Doing so, you lose a huge chunk of performance, almost a factor of two on computation-limited tasks. Worse, it doesn't let you access the large memory space that becomes available once the 32-bit barrier is broken. Worst, it won't even access memory as well as CS3 and CS4 did; CS5 (32) is back to being limited to 2 GB of RAM.
Where have all the filters gone? Long time passing...On the left is the filter menu from Photoshop CS4 and CS5 run in 32-bit mode. Launch CS5 in 64-bit mode (middle shot) and a whole mess of your third-party filters will be gone. Open up a 16-bit file (right) and even more filters are gone; Adobe still hasn't completed recoding them from their 8-bit form. It's been, what, three generations now?
Where has all the memory gone? Long time ago...Photoshop CS3 and CS4 could directly access 3GB of RAM and make effective use of RAM above that. CS5 in 32-bit mode returns to the primitive memory model of yore.
Remarkably, 32-bit CS5 performs just about as well as CS4; apparently Adobe tightened up a lot of the code. But it's still running probably two thirds as fast as it would if it could indirectly access higher RAM like CS3/4. Even on my MacBook Pro, with its meager 6 GB of RAM, there's a serious performance hit running in CS5's 32-bit mode. On my 12 GB iMac the difference is huge; the "diglloydMedium" benchmark runs 3–4 times more slowly in CS5's 32-bit mode than 64-bit mode.
And meanwhile, my workflow is totally screwed up. At the moment, I'm mostly avoiding using CS5 while I figure this out; that's how many problems it's creating for me.
Okay, done venting. I admit that part of this is the disappointment of a kid who was promised a pony for Christmas and there's only a bicycle under the tree. Once I become adjusted to the situation, I'll may decide it's a really nice bicycle and have some very good things to say about it in future columns. But, right now, not so happy.
Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Thursday mornings.
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Featured Comment by ILTim: "I'm a tool engineer working in high-end 3D CAD programs all day, and this feels a bit similar. Our cad programs range from $7,000 to $30,000 per user, plus a few grand a year in maintenance fees. Some of these vendors are focused only on marketable improvements that the sales team can use, neglecting bugs and poorly performing features that the professionals use day in and day out. It gets old being a user of a system like that, and after migrating to a new system due to a change in employers, I'd never take another job that required me to go back to that old cad system. The one I'm on now innovates regularly, but maintains incredible legacy support for deprecated features and does a truly admirable job with bug fixes. As I advance in my career, these experiences are going to drive the purchasing decisions of my employers, and the company that chased sales via added fluff will never get a dime. Never mind the bashing I give them to colleagues.
"Adobe is not creating Photoshop CS software to sell, they are creating productive, satisfied, and enthusiastic customers by providing them with tools, who in turn create a vibrant marketplace for Adobe. They can ride the brand name for a while, but ultimately by not serving the customers they will find themselves on a crash course.
"I've considered CS for years, but its been too darned expensive. Additionally, there is a lot I don't need there, and I've gotten the impression of stagnation. Then to top it off, the upgrade fees are not trivial.
"I've recently traded in PS Elements for GIMP, Picasa, and other free tools. I'm going to try hard to make them work because the developers are showing more promise than Adobe. Then, of course, there is that whole bloatware issue, the DLM (download manager), the trojan toolbars that come with acrobat reader and flash...I'm very unsatisfied with Adobe lately."
By Ctein
I've written previously (see "Speeding up Photoshop with an External Drive" and "Maximum Photoshop Performance") about configuring software and hardware to get the most out of Photoshop. Well, my long-awaited copy of Photoshop CS5 for the Mac arrived just a few weeks back. And, by happy coincidence, I had a new external hard drive to test out as a scratch drive with it: the NewerTech Guardian MAXimus mini from Other World Computing, purveyors of many fine things Macintosh.
The MAXimus in all its diminutive glory. Looks bigger in the photos
than in real life, really.
Several things made this drive interesting. It's small—very small—about 5 x 3.5 x 2 inches and 1.5 pounds. It is truly a portable drive that can be powered by the FireWire port on your computer (it does come with an AC adapter, in case your machine doesn't have a FW port). It's got eSATA, a must for maximum performance—the FireWire cable can be plugged in to power the unit at the same time you're using the eSATA interface for data transfer.
Oh yeah, it's a RAID; this model, which runs $250, has two 500GB 7200 RPM drives. The MAXimus comes configured as RAID-1 (mirrored), if what you're after is secure storage, but it can be set up as RAID-0 (striped) to provide a full terabyte of really fast portable storage. Of course, that's the route I took. I paired it with the OWC Slim ExpressCard to eSATA Adapter, which lives permanently in my MacBook Pro. At $30, I just had to buy one, and it's a pretty slick performer. The eSATA-to-ExpressCard interface slows things down a bit so one realizes only about half the usual eSATA bandwidth, but it's a heck of a lot better than FireWire 800. Sure wish my iMac had eSATA or an ExpressCard slot. When trying the MAXimus on my iMac, I had to talk to it via FW800—more on that later.
The OWC Slim ExpressCard to eSATA adapter I use every day.
To get an idea of how well this drive performed, I used Lloyd Chambers' DiskTester program. I have found it to be a reliable indicator of real world performance with both SATA and FW connections (USB has issues that result in a poor match between DiskTester's results and normal use—do not use a USB connection for a scratch drive, ever!). I also ran Lloyd's "diglloydMedium," "diglloydHuge," and "Speed1" benchmarks on Photoshop CS4, CS5 (64 bit) and CS5 (32 bit).
The MAXimus drive tested out as faster than any other external drive I've run off my MacBook Pro. Over the entire disk, for all kinds of file sizes, I saw consistent write speeds of 110 MB/sec and read speeds of 120MB/sec. That's configured as RAID-0 and connected via eSATA, of course. When configured as RAID-1, performance dropped in half. Similarly, hooking the MAXimus up through FW800 cost half that peak performance. If you ain't got SATA, there won't be any performance gain configuring this as a RAID-0.
My normal scratch drive for Photoshop clocks in at around 80 MB/sec. Did the jump to 110–120 MB/sec really make a difference? Across the board, in all three flavors of Photoshop, I measured an average 15% drop in the benchmark run times. Assembling some very large panoramas, I saw similar performance gains.
Fifteen percent doesn't sound like a lot, until you realize that I'm talking about generating huge panoramic files that can take 5 to 15 minutes to build with Photomerge on my MacBook Pro with its "paltry" 6GB of RAM. So, this doesn't just save seconds, it saves minutes. 'Course, an SSD would run even faster, but they're still a tad spendy. Understatement. Though I'm told that is going to improve shortly (keeping fingers crossed).
What happened with my late 2009 quad-core 27" iMac? Well, as I said, there's no eSATA, so throughput's cut in half. OWC will retrofit 2010 27" iMacs with eSATA. I'm not sure why they don't offer that service for the late 2009 model. Be that as it may, MAXimus can't pump more than 67 (write)/83 (read) MB/sec through the iMac's FW800 port. Furthermore, the iMac's internal drive is surprisingly peppy, delivering over 100MB/sec on reads and writes.
No surprise, then, that using the iMac's drive for scratch won out. It delivered an average 25% better Photoshop performance than the FireWired MAXimus. That's just not the way to get the best from this little powerhouse.
A faster scratch drive always wins, no matter where it's situated or whether or not it's the system drive. And, if you've got eSATA, the MAXimus is as fast as you can get without breaking the bank.
Ctein
(Photos courtesy OWC)
Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning on TOP.
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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
My laptop screen is sporting the same arrangement of Photoshop palettes
as I use at home when I've got it connected up to my large Apple Cinema
Display. The iPad is sitting in landscape orientation on its iSee stand
with the Pogo pen in front of it.
By Ctein
As soon as I read the detailed specifications for the iPad, I had a suspicion that most people were ignoring one of its more notable features: namely, that it was likely to be sporting the best display that had ever been put into a portable device.
The day they came out, in early April, my friend Mark Richards bought one. He showed it to me that weekend. I pulled up some difficult-to-render photographs from my website and pixel-peeped like mad. The iPad had a near-studio-quality display. (Truth is I've seen studio displays that were worse; I'm just very fussy.) The iPad held gamma well with changing viewing angle, and if it wasn't running full 24-bit color with no dithering, it was faking it well enough that I couldn't tell.
I commented that if only there was a way to run Photoshop on these things, I'd buy one in a minute. When I'm away from home, I'm stuck with doing my photographic work on a laptop computer. Laptop computer displays suck. I don't understand how people can do serious photographic work on them. I make do when I'm in the field, but only for rough editing and corrections; it's impossible to see exactly what's going on in a photograph. The iPad was so much better.
Mark then told me he'd heard that there was a way to tether an iPad to a laptop as a secondary display. I cursed him loudly; that bit of information might cost me mucho dinero. How well a $10 app worked would determine whether or not I'd buy many hundred of dollars worth of hardware.
I finally had a chance to try out the Air Display app on another friend's iPad (thank you, Chris) over my vacation last month in Minneapolis. It turned the iPad into a usable secondary high-quality monitor while running Photoshop on my MacBook Pro. The next day I went to the Apple store and bought one.
The low-end $500 model, with 16 GB of storage and no cellular network capabilities, would have been sufficient. After consideration, though, I ended up buying the 64 GB, 3G model. Why? First, this is more than merely a display. It's a self-contained computer, and it has never, ever made sense for me to buy at the low end of hardware. Second, as someone who hasn't had experience living in the being-connected-everywhere world, I didn't know whether I might care about that. It seemed foolish to get the model without cellular capability lest I discover later that I really want it and wind up replacing the whole computer. Several people impressed upon me that I'd likely find this a mighty useful feature, and they've been proved right. My price ended up nearly doubling, but whatthehell, it's only money.
Then there were the incidentals. An extended warranty (I am very bad with equipment care), a conductive foam Pogo Sketch stylus (fingers are just too fat for working directly on a photograph), and a Contour iSee for iPad (a hard clamshell with a collapsible stand that lets me prop up the iPad in landscape or portrait orientation).
There went a grand, but what did that get me? A portable dual-display rig with a studio-quality display that's touch sensitive, so I can brush directly on the photo I'm working on. Definitely worth it to me.
It's not as functional as a 12" Cintiq; there's no pressure sensitive stylus for the iPad (yet), and screen update is sluggish. But the cheap iPad's half the price, half the volume, a third the weight, and self-powered, and I'll bet the display's a lot better.
Here I'm taking advantage of the touch-sensitive screen on the iPad to
do some burning in on a photograph with a masked curves adjustment
layer.
The combination works well enough. It has occasional idiosyncrasies; most significantly, one has to get used to the lag time in the display update. It's not a problem in Photoshop when using brushes or working with adjustment layers—it can refresh small areas of the screen rapidly. It takes more than a second to do a full display update, so you wouldn't want to use it for anything that requires a decent frame rate or for presenting a slideshow. I do think there's a good chance that performance will improve in the future, as slow response time is the primary complaint everyone has about this category of apps. In the meantime, you should probably do as I did and try before you buy, to make sure you're comfortable with the screen update rates.
iPad color out of the box is acceptable. Not as good as a studio monitor, but close enough for serious work, and much, much better than anything I could get in a portable device before. I can use it for making serious refinements to a photograph, which was, after all, the point.
My efforts to color manage the iPad had mixed results. Profile Mechanic Monitor didn't work at all; every time I ran it I got an entirely different result and it was always bizarre. ColorMunki worked pretty well but not perfectly. The hues and the values are very good in the profile; the color-managed iPad's rendering of B&W photographs matches my prints exactly. But, the chroma is too high. Not by a lot—if I add hue/saturation adjustment layer and drop the saturation by 20 points, it looks just about right.
If I can't figure out how to get a better profile built, I'll just start adding a –20 point hue/saturation adjustment layer as a visual filter whenever I'm working in Photoshop in the field. It may be that I'm being too fussy about this. My Apple Cinema Display, fully calibrated, is about 10 points too low in saturation.
So, I'm a very happy camper and after three weeks I'm still not suffering from buyers remorse. I've got a much, much better portable digital darkroom than I ever thought I'd have.
Oh yeah, and let's not forget that it is an iPad, not just a portable monitor. Maybe it'll even prove useful in other ways. Ya nevva knows....
Incidentally, if readers know of any other large-screen portable devices with near-studio-quality displays, I would like to hear about them. (But please don't tout some netbook or other portable device with the usual lousy screens; sure, they have their uses, but not for my kind of work.)
Air Display creates a wireless connection between the iPad and my
laptop, so I don't have to actually be seated at the laptop unless I
need the big screen. I did my sorting and editing of photographs in
Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW sitting on the comfy bed.
Ctein
Photographs copyright 2010 by David Dyer-Bennet. DDB made these photographs to illustrate this article while we were on a two-day photo trip over July 4 weekend up to Lake Superior's North Shore. They were posed for the sake of clarity and aesthetics, but they are not staged. This was my working setup and these were my working conditions.
Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning. TOP is currently on summer hours, which means late morning for the time being.
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Featured Comment by Steve G, Mendocino: "Ctein: Once again, my Thursday morning is enlivened by useful and relevant information, well presented. That being said, curse you—I'd dismissed the iPad until now."
Featured Comment by Bahi: "Very informative column—thanks. And I really like the pictures…there's something Old Testament about them. Prophet, tablet, etc. :-)"
By Ctein
I've just hit upon something rather cool and somewhat unexpected. Some of you will recall a column of mine from a year or so back called "JPEG...Seriously?" Well, I've found a reason for photographing JPEGs with my Olympus Pen E-P1. I can use them to get much, much better results at ISO 6400 than I could pull out of a RAW file using every trick I know.
(As usual, you can click on any of these illustrations to see them larger.)
Fig. 1. Olympus Pen RAW photographs at ISO 6400 are not lovely things. The full frame is on top, with a 100% magnification crop below. Observe the serious chroma noise, especially the horizontal and vertical stripes. © 2010 by Ctein.
As I wrote at the beginning of the year in "What Tests Don't Tell You," the E-P1 has some serious plaid chroma noise problems above ISO 800. It's great up to there, and then quality just falls off a cliff. ISO 1600 is marginal by my standards, everything above that is crap due to the chroma noise. Figure 1 shows a particularly egregious example of ISO 6400 quality in RAW mode; there's no way that I've found to make this RAW into a palatable photograph.
Now, take a look at the same photograph saved as JPEG in the camera (figure 2) . It's not perfect; there's some large low-frequency blotchiness, but that's the kind of stuff I could dodge or burn away. The chroma quality is not utterly sucking. It's usually not even this bad in most of the ISO 6400 photographs; this is just about the worst example I could come up with.
Fig. 2. The same photograph as in figure 1, but saved as a JPEG in camera. Excellent reduction of the chroma noise, but overall the picture is soft and veiled, and the highlights and shadows are blocked up. © 2010 by Ctein.
I'm truly amazed what the internal data massaging in the camera can do. If I had to, I could live with this as an okay snapshot. I don't much like that overall veiled quality, plus it's rather a shame losing several stops of highlight and shadow detail, most evident in the illuminated and dark stained glass windows and the trees).
So I said to myself, wait a minute...the Olympus can record in RAW+JPEG mode; what if I do that and then mix the two photographs in Photoshop? Start with the JPEG as the base layer, convert the RAW to a grayscale image (which almost completely eliminates the plaid problem), paste it in as a second layer over the JPEG, and set the blend mode to Luminosity (figure 3). I wind up with a photograph that has the clean chroma of the JPEG but retains most of the fine detail structure and tonal range of the RAW file. It's also a lot grainier.
Fig. 3. This layer stack combines a monochrome, noise-filtered copy of figure 1 with the JPEG from figure 2. The result is figure 4.
So, I further said to myself, what if I use my most flexible noise reduction plug-in (Imagenomic NoiseWare) to get rid of majority of the grain in the RAW layer, but not so much that I'm seriously compromising fine detail? Which leads me to Figure 4. Hey, it works! It's grainy, but the grain is even and tight. It's a nice compromise mix of the best characteristics of both source photographs.
Fig. 4. This is not half bad! Chroma noise is much better controlled than in the RAW photograph, but it preserves most of the RAW's detail and tonal range. It also has an acceptable compromise between grain and fine detail. © 2010 by Ctein.
It prints out as a fairly decent 8x10 (Mike's seen prints and Oren and Carl have seen full-size JPEGs, so they can confirm this). Nothing I would call professional quality by my standards, but more than pretty enough. It would be even better if I did a little bit of dodging and burning in on the remaining blotches; I didn't because I'm trying to show what the file really looks like. But, it wouldn't take me long to clean it up a lot more.
Best of all is that I can turn at least 90% of this merging process into a Photoshop automation. Possibly all of it; I haven't experimented with enough photographs yet. Even by hand it's very fast, but an automation would save me a whole bunch of repetitive mouse clicks.
Here are some of the better ISO 6400 results I've gotten out of this new trick (figures 5–7). Is it perfection? Of course not. But seeing as I'd previously decided this camera wasn't any good above ISO 800 I'm a mighty happy camper.
Fig. 5. RAW at the top, merged JPEG+RAW on the bottom. It's a big improvement, and the print looks even better; it's genuinely pleasing. © 2010 by Ctein.
Fig. 6. The merged RAW+JPEG photo combines most of the exposure range of the RAW file and most of the noise reduction of the JPEG. Compare the 100% sections at the bottom, RAW on left, RAW+JPEG on right. © 2010 by Ctein.
Fig. 7. My best result so far, and a genuinely good-looking 8x10 print. © 2010 by Ctein.
Ctein's weekly column appears every Thursday on TOP.
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"First, Olympus has access to much more proprietary information about the sensor and its specific hardware implementation than even, say, DxO does.
"Second, as Andrew Molitor says, the in-camera software (firmware) can be tuned to deal not only with a specific chip design/implementation, but a specific sample of a chip. This is really important because consumer devices, unlike scientific devices, have rather heterogeneous pixels.
"(Scientific devices are usually "grade 0," i.e., zero defects beyond a rather stringent specification. Moreover, scientific devices are generally CCDs, which are usually both more linear in response, and more homogeneous pixel-to-pixel than CMOS sensors. Because grade 0 devices are generally the cream of the crop, selected from much larger runs of devices, they also command very a very steep price premium. Your garden-variety D90 or E-PL1 is not going to contain a grade 0 sensor!)
"The sample-specific dark current calibration done at the factory accounts for variation not only between pixels, but between rows of pixels. On many cameras, this calibration is re-doable through the menus, useful since cosmic ray hits generate new hot and cold pixels over time.
"This sample-specific calibration information is potentially really important when making a zeroed image to start with, prior to application of conventional NR algorithms. This information is not stored in a RAW file, and thus is not available to any of the third-party RAW developers, fundamentally compromising their performance no matter how good they are (unless the dark subtraction is done upstream of the RAW file, which many forum idiots elsewhere deride as not kosher, but which is in fact a great idea, for reasons that now should be obvious)."
By Ctein
About 11 weeks ago I wrote about the insanity-inducing problems I was having getting proper prints under MacOS X 10.6.2: "The Printer/Photoshop/Snow Leopard Hell." The OS update to 10.6.3 didn't change anything nor have I heard that the soon-to-be-released 10.6.4 will. It's still hell out there.
I learned how to live in hell. At this point I have all my printers working properly, with good profiles that behave correctly under Snow Leopard, and I've convinced myself that the prints I'm getting are nearly identical to what my MacBook Pro running OS 10.4.11 produced. It took several steps:
1) Making sure I had the absolutely most current drivers for all my printers.
2) Culling my existing profiles. ColorSync Utility identified which of my ICC profiles were v4.x, and those were banished, as Snow Leopard still will not play nicely with them. That wiped out most of my custom profiles. Happily, Bill Atkinson's profiles for my Epson 9800 were ICC v.2.x. That allowed me to compare prints made with Photoshop CS4 from both my laptop, under MacOS X 10.4.11, and our iMac running 10.6.3. They were very close to indistinguishable. Really, I expected bigger differences from changes in the print engine between the OS versions.
3) Generating new profiles for my Epson R2400 and R800. This is where things started to get "amusing." I set ColorMunki to produce version 2 printer profiles. The prints came out way too dark; my profile was clearly no good. I had something set wrong in the twisty little maze of printer controls that all looked the same. Huzzah, the X-Rite website had several helpful pages:
"Prints not matching either display or compared to canned profiles"
"Prints look too dark using printer driver with Leopard or Snow Leopard"
I needed to give control of color matching to "Epson Color Controls" rather than "ColorSync." I should have caught this; the first test chart just looked wrong. My profiling test chart should have had dark and saturated color patches (figure 1). When the software is massaging the data behind your back, you'll get a result that looks more like figure 2. Many patches are lighter and pastel. You need to find printer driver settings that get you a print that looks more like figure 1...usually. I'll get back to that.
Figure 1. A properly made profiling test chart is going to look something like
this. Note that most of the color patches, especially the ones corresponding to primaries, are dark, saturated, and rich. It's the kind of output your printer will produce when it's just dumping ink on the paper, with no adjustments to get the most accurate color.
Figure 2. If a printer profile is sticking its nose into your profiling process, you get a print that looks more like this. Most of the colors have gotten lighter and many are pastel. If you see something like this you need to backtrack and figure out how to turn off color management, because a target like this is not going to produce a good profile...usually.
Well, once I got the driver settings right, everything went swimmingly. ColorMunki gave me a great looking profile. I don't think it's quite as good as the V.4 profile I generated under 10.4.11; the transitions between primaries are little harsher in my new V.2 profile (figure 3). But it is so very close that I doubt it will make a perceivable difference in any of my prints.
Figure 3. On the left is a print made using my ICC version 4 custom profile printed under MacOS X 10.4.11. On the right, the same test image printed using an ICC version 2 custom profile under Snow Leopard v 10.6.3. They are very close to identical, although I think the latter isn't quite as smooth in color gradations.
So much for the R2400 printer; on to the R800. Here's where things got weird. The very latest Epson driver software didn't present me with the same interface as the driver I had running under 10.4.11. When I tried the X-Rite recommendations, I didn't get a clean, un-massaged test chart; it looked a lot like figure 2. No combination of settings did any better. After wasting far too much paper, I decided what the hell, let's see what happens if I just go with this and generate a profile. I mean, if there's really, truly no way to turn off the driver's color massaging, it's a constant that the profile should be able to take into account, right?
A naïvely hopeful assumption, but in this case it worked! I wound up with a profile that looked just about as good as the ones I'd been running under 10.4.11. Equally significantly, the test prints I made with both the R2400 and R800 looked remarkably similar, which is no small achievement given the very large differences in the ink sets of the two printers.
I still don't understand why I couldn't entirely turn off color management, but the pragmatist in me doesn't really care. It worked.
So I'm good. Well, until Apple decides to finally fix the ICC bug and I decide I need to redo my profiles...or Epson updates their drivers and printer interfaces...or I get a new printer. But at least now I feel that whatever happens I'll be able to cope with it.
So, taking a deep breath and setting aside a good chunk of spare time, I just finished upgrading my MacBook Pro from MacOS X 10.4.11 to 10.6.3. An entirely straightforward 45 minute process, that ended up taking me 14 hours. Sigh, it's still business as usual when upgrading core software, and that business is most assuredly a sadistic one.
Ctein's regular column appears weekly on Thursday mornings.
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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
Amazon's Gold Box Deal of the Day today (in the U.S. only) is Adobe Photoshop Elements 8
Elements has always been a somewhat strange product to me...it's Photoshop with some key features missing, but it's still loaded with complexity and isn't optimized strictly for photographers. It's cheap today, though. A tip: Elements is a nice, inexpensive way to get the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) if your older version of Photoshop doesn't support it.
Mike
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If you happen to still be using Photoshop CS (CS1), you have just a couple of weeks left to upgrade to CS4 for >$200 (Mac
It would be a drag to learn in a couple of weeks that you could have easily saved $400 by purchasing just a week or two sooner.
Mike
(Thanks to AM)
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Featured Comment by Mike Potter: "I am one of those still using CS[1], and have been debating the upgrade path, partly because I've been considering moving to Lightroom 2
By Vlatko Juric-Kokic
You've simply got to love the Internet. I watched the worldwide CS5 launch on the Adobe website. Yes, it was basically a 45-minute long advertisement for Creative Suite (I wonder whether the presenters were all instructed to wear black), but it did show what Adobe considers pertinent new features of the programs. Of course, Photoshop is what should interest photographers the most.
Yeah, the content-aware fill is in Photoshop. You can erase awkward things from your photos. And the warp puppet is in, so you can adjust the pose of your models in post-processing. It was interesting to note that they presented the features in the part of the presentation for "designers." Adobe has either intentionally closed their eyes to the implications for photography or they really didn't think about them.
Speaking about photographic features, there's better HDR creation with quite a nifty ghosting removal. You know, when stuff moves between one exposure and another. Now you can—apparently easily—remove ghosts of moving tree branches or something similar. They also added faux-HDR creation from a single exposure without the need to develop the photo twice, and they added some HDR presets.
They added a more elaborate noise removal and vignetting control in Adobe Camera Raw, as well as an ability to add grain to the photos directly in ACR. Inside Photoshop itself, Lens Correction filter gets a database of cameras and lenses, as well as an ability to upload your own lens profiles online for others to use. (The filter features both distortion and chromatic aberration corrections.)
Finally, mini-Bridge might prove to be the most welcome workflow addition. It seems you don't need to run Bridge and Photoshop concurrently anymore, because the mini-Bridge works as a panel inside Photoshop and you can see RAW photos without switching between the programs.
You can find out more at Adobe.
All in all, it looks like a worthy upgrade. I can't wait to get my hands on it.
Vlatko
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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
Featured Comment by Dave Polaschek: "One thing that hasn't gotten much play yet about content-aware-fill is that it is a great tool for removing dust, hair, water spots, etc. from scanned negatives / photos. Much quicker for me than the healing brush ever was, and cool enough that I bought a tablet to use with it.
"Disclaimer: I'm part of the Photoshop team. I didn't work on that feature, but have had some time to play with it, and am convinced that it's finally time to go back and re-scan all those old family photographs since I can actually get them cleaned up for printing this time around."
Hard to believe, but it's been twenty years since the Knolls let the genie out of the...er, I mean since Photoshop first came on the scene.
Thomas Knoll, John Knoll, Steve Guttman and Russell Brown recently gathered to share some "Startup Memories" and toast their creation on AdobeTV. (I was tempted to Photoshop myself in peering over the railing in the screen grab, but I held off. Photoshop, the product that's now a verb.)
Congratulations to the granddaddy of image editors, and its progenitors.
Mike
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Featured Comment by Matthew Allen: "I'll never miss an excuse to link to this. (Make sure you mouse over the comic for the alt-text.)"
Featured Comment by Kevin: "'granddaddy of image editors'—really? When I were a wee sprog the wisened old gurus (they must have been at least 20) all boasted about their work in Lumena and Ron Scott's QFX. My first photo editing programme was something called Lorraine, IIRC, which Letraset took up and marketed as ImageStudio. Great fun for black and white photos, even if it choked on files bigger than about 50mm square and there were no good, affordable, printers until years after the event. It later begat ColorStudio, which made the serious mistake of coming out about the same time as a half-priced competitor called Photoshop (the developers picked up the wreckage and rebuilt it into what is now Corel Painter). There was also a French programme called Live Paint that came out about the same time which was way faster than Photoshop, although it was more useful for compositing than regular image polishing. But Photomac was pretty comparable to the original version of Photoshop for basic photographic-type work, as opposed to groovy special effects. Point is, in many ways Photoshop is not so much the granddaddy of image editors as the big tough who kicked all the other kids out of the playground. Sadly, its success has made for a much more samey, predictable digital imaging world. Sniff."
Featured Comment by Erlik: "And here's how you do it right: Photoshop masterpieces, from deceptively simple to terrifyingly complex. Not a single overcooked, oversaturated and overly-contrasty image in sight.
"For a good measure, here's also Jearlt Pass by Andy Simmons, sketched way back in Photoshop 7. His gallery site is such that you cannot link to individual images, but is certainly worth looking."
Amazon's one-day "Gold Box Special" this morning is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 for for $188.99
It's a bit difficult to figure out how much of a deal this actually is, though. Lightroom 3 is now in public beta, and if the prices for 3 stay the same as they were for 2 then the "savings" are a wash; adding the upgrade price to today's sale price won't save you anything over buying 3 when it ships. If 3 is going to incorporate a price rise, though, then this might be a good deal. In any event it splits up the cost into less painful chunks if money's an issue. Up to you; I'm just passing the news along.
Mike
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