October 22, 2009 @ 10:18 pm
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta is available now for download. The list of new and improved features sounds very promising — basically, it’s a lot of speed improvements, better export settings for web and slideshow, improved watermarking, and much-improved noise reduction.
To really introduced what’s new in Lightroom 3 Beta, Adobe has uploaded 3 videos which you can take a look at here (or via the embedded videos below).
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
October 17, 2009 @ 11:59 am
It doesn’t seem like I’m the only one who has had problems opening multiple files in Adobe Photoshop CS4 while running Snow Leopard.
In Photoshop CS3, I was able to drag multiple items into the Photoshop icon in my dock and have them all open up at once. I could do this with regular Finder items and items from within Bridge and other Adobe apps as well. But in Photoshop CS4, this functionality is sporadic at best. If I’m dragging 5 items, let’s say, sometimes Photoshop will only open 1 and other times it’ll open 3 or something. The number seems to be random.
I don’t really know if it’s a problem with Adobe or with Snow Leopard since I never ran CS4 under Leopard to see if that functionality worked there. But for now, it’s a pretty major inconvenience that I hope Apple or Adobe get fixed soon.
September 18, 2009 @ 8:10 pm
The Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) comes in a variety of bundles for people working in design, production, web, and just about anything in between. Unfortunately, because there are so many bundles, it sometimes is hard to know which bundle fits your needs best, so Adobe makes it incredibly easy to choose the right version with this handy page.
But sometimes even filling out the Suite Selector form is tedious, so Adobe makes a Master Collection of CS4 for those who feel safer owning almost EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF SOFTWARE ADOBE MAKES.
Last night, I got the Master Collection from Adobe and promptly installed it and was completely floored by the amount of applications present in this 7GB+ file. Seriously, everything is here whether or not you need it. There’s apps here that I had no idea Adobe even made.
For a partial rundown of the major apps, here’s a handy list.
September 17, 2009 @ 10:02 pm
I have new toys to play with today so excuse me for just a second. :)
August 13, 2009 @ 12:50 am
The Future Stack has a page of amusing dialog boxes of crash reports for Adobe After Effects that really make me want to take the time out to fill in the problem description space more often.
July 16, 2009 @ 10:57 am
I honestly haven’t noticed this in my heavy usage of Lightroom, but a software analyst named Lloyd Chambers has discovered that Adobe Lightroom doesn’t fully make use of all CPU cores during the photo exporting process.
Chambers found that if a photographer wants to produce JPEG or TIF images from the originals in the program, the fastest way is to divide the batch into thirds and export each third separately. Using a modern Mac Pro system, exporting a test set of photos took 351 seconds as one batch and 189 seconds divided into three batches running at the same time.
“The big disappointment is the sluggish performance importing and exporting files, which are tasks that are key to efficient workflow–tasks one has to do over and over. Most of the ‘juice’ of a Mac Pro goes untapped,” Chambers concluded. “You have to load it up with more than one job to force more of the available CPU cores to be used. Lightroom should do this automatically!”
Many, including myself, aren’t making too big of a deal about this since the speed overall and the reliability of Lightroom has never been a problem. However, I think it would be nice to have the option to utilize all CPU’s to their max capacity (even if it does mean that the rest of the computer becomes almost unusable during the exporting process). Anyway, I’m gonna try that rule of dividing batches into thirds when I do my next export. I want to see how fast it will get on my MBP.
