As most of you will know, Adobe release its latest Creative Suite (CS5) a couple of days ago. Personally, I only use Photoshop and Dreamweaver. For the casual photographer, the CS2 or CS3 version of Photoshop is probably more than you ever need. So are there reasons for upgrading (or reinstalling)?
First, Adobe doesn't really support the older versions of Photoshop anymore, or the operating system you run at this moment has some issues with an older version. So an upgrade will happen sooner or later. But apart from compatibility issues with the OS, there are some new features available for the (casual) photographer. The following features are the ones I'm most interested in;
- Easier ways of doing complex selections
Basically a tedious job in every earlier version, so I have my reservations on this feature.
- Content Aware Fill
Create-photos-in-Photoshop-instead-of-by-using-a-camera feature.
- HDR Imaging
Let's see if it beats Photomatix Pro.
- Automatic Lens Correction
I now use PTLens on the photos that need the correction.
- 64bit support (!!!!)
A feature that's long overdue.
- Better Black and White conversion
I mostly use Nik Silver Efex Pro at the moment.
In this post I'll be evaluating Photoshop CS5 on some of the points I mentioned above. Others will become a separate blogpost later on. For the moment, I'll be starting with 'upgrading' from CS4 to CS5, and see if that goes well (after I've cloned my MacBook disk with SuperDuper! to make sure I can always go back if things go sour).
Another thing that I need to check out is compatibility with earlier versions of Action scripts, and (older) plugins. Just check the CS5 or Photoshop tag for all the related posts about Photoshop CS5.
Most of the regular iPhone / iPod Touch users already know that there's no sign of porn or erotica to be found in the Apple App Store. Reason for this is (according to Steve Jobs);
You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.
So no porn for the iPhone (at least not the jailbraked versions), or is it? It seems that Apple facilitates the biggest 'app' for getting your porn 'fix'. The app is called 'Safari'. The good old browser. The application that made the Internet for what it is today. As an alternative you can use iTunes to provide you your 'fix'.
Note that eventhough I'm talking porn/erotica here, you can project this to any piece of content.
Before continuing, I must warn you. The complete article might have some explicit pictures, so continue at your own risk. I can't and won't be held responsible for the consequences.
Not being able to fly has its advantages. In response to the widespread chaos caused by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano (pronounced as 'whatever'), Lonely Planet is offering 13 of its European iPhone guides for free (as in 'free beer').
Oké. Day 2. After the successful installation and configuration of CentOS with Adobe Coldfusion, I needed to install MySQL as a database. So, I started the virtual machine, and found out why Linux will (probably) never cut it as a common desktop environment.
X11 - No DesktopYesterday I (properly) shutdown the system (which had the GNOME Desktop), and today it started with some back to the 60's desktop. Every icon gone. All that I'm left with was a terminal window, clock, and a FireFox window. This environment is the basic X11 desktop.
A while back I figured out how to install Adobe (could have been Macromedia back then) Coldfusion MX on an Ubuntu linux server. This config still runs as it should, but in the mean time several things have changed in the world of software. I've been leaning towards Centos 5.4, and Adobe released Coldfusion 9 somewhere in 2009. These two 'events' made me decide to combine the two.
Before I continue, I must warn you that the Coldfusion installer is still broken..... So there's some manipulation of code involved.
Since the new 'server' is going to run in a virtual environment I started in a VMWare Workstation. This way I could make snapshots of my progress. This made it easier to start from scratch. The problem with Linux and me is that I tend to reinstall the OS when things go haywire. So VMWare is a safe way out in this case.
Photoshop CS5 HDR interfaceInitial experiences are not really positive, but that can be related to my experiences with Photomatix. A quick glance at the controls available, it should be able to produce similar results. ;)
