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Adobe Photoshop CS3 for $299

February 6, 2008 By Eric Reagan

[This post has been updated. See below.]

No, this isn’t some cheap take on a educational software gray market scam. This is the real deal from Adobe.

If you’ve been wanting to get your hands on Photoshop CS3, but don’t really want to shell out $650, then Adobe has got a deal for you. You can upgrade your copy of Photoshop Elements (versions 1.0-6) to the full blown Photoshop CS3 for only $299. This offer is for US and Canada residents only (excluding Quebec for some reason).

What? You don’t have Elements? Get a copy for under $40 at Amazon and then upgrade it. You still come in $300 less that the full retail price.

As far as I can tell, you can only take advantage of this upgrade offer directly through Adobe. So, here’s the link. The offer expires 2/29/08.

Update: As Stephen pointed out in the comments below, Wacom tablets come with Photoshop Elements and the $299 upgrade coupon. So, you can still go cheap and grab a Wacom Bamboo tablet for $83 and still come out under $400 with CS3.

Update #2: Alan pointed out in the comments below that when you click “Order Now” you get a pop-up that says “error: the promotion code you entered has already been used”. I didn’t get that error this morning when I posted this. I called the Adobe sales number on the page linked to above. The rep that I spoke to said I could upgrade for $299 – in fact, he was ready to take my order; however, I told him who I was and that I wanted a link for the product page where we could all order it and he said that he couldn’t help me with that but forwarded me to customer service in India. After 20 minutes and creating a new account at Adobe, I hung up with no progress. Another 20 minute online chat with another sales rep sent me back to customer service in India. My suggestion? Give them a call, along with your serial number and try to upgrade that way. Sorry if this turns out to be phooey. Thanks for pointing out the error message Alan.

Update #3: Fried Toast in the comments below thinks the whole thing is bogus.  I’m still for giving Adobe a call if you want to upgrade and trying it over the phone.

[tags]adobe, photoshop, cs3, elements, upgrade[/tags]

Filed Under: Photoshop, Software

 

Nik Software Dfine® 2.0 Brings Revolutionary Noise Reduction

January 18, 2008 By Eric Reagan

 Pre-PMA Press Release

Las Vegas, NV – January 18, 2008 (PMA 08, Booth #L161) – Nik Software Inc.’s award-winning noise reduction software tool Dfine 2.0 now features Nik Software’s patented U Point technology for selective editing control and a completely new user interface that is easier to use and improves workflow for busy photographers.

“Many photographers have simply ignored or accepted image noise as a part of digital photography due to the complexity of the image editing tools available,” said Michael J. Slater, president and CEO of Nik Software, Inc. “The complete re-design of Dfine takes simplicity and control of noise reduction to an entirely new level, a point recognized when it earned the coveted American Photo Editor’s Choice 2007 award.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: News, Photoshop, Software Tagged With: 2.0, dfine, nik, pma

Nik Software Showcases New Color Efex Pro™ 3.0 at PMA 08

January 18, 2008 By Eric Reagan

Pre-PMA Press Release

Las Vegas, NV – January 18, 2008 (PMA 08, Booth #L161) – Nik Software, Inc. showcases today the latest upgrade to its award-winning Color Efex Pro collection of photographic filters for Adobe® Photoshop® and Photoshop Elements. The new Color Efex Pro 3.0 filter collection now integrates Nik Software’s patented U Point® technology for precise selective editing control, includes new and updated filters offering the widest range of professional photographic enhancements and effects, and features a completely redesigned user interface. [Read more…]

Filed Under: News, Photoshop, Software Tagged With: 3.0, color efex pro, nik, pma

28 Great Adobe Lightroom Resources

December 17, 2007 By Eric Reagan

If you’re an Adobe Lightroom user (or a wannabe), you’ll want to take a look at these books and links:

Links

Free 30 Day Trial – try out LR on Adobe

Adobe Design Center – tons of info from Adobe on how to use LR effectively

Lightroom Keyboard Shortcuts – a simple, but handy chart

Lightroom Journal – blog by Adobe LR crew

Lightroom News – gobs of essential info, updated regularly

Lightroom Killer Tips – one sweet LR blog from “the Photoshop guys”

Photo Presets with One-Click WOW! – Over 80 free presets for LR designed by Photoshop Hall-of-Famer Jack Davis w/ tutorial video

Inside Lightroom – best known for its awesome collection of LR develop presets

Official Lightroom User Guide (.pdf) – the manual

Lightroom Getting Started Guide (.pdf) – again, from Adobe

RawWorkflow.com – instructional videos from Michael Tapes

Layers Magazine – several workflow tutorials, including some nice vids

Getting Photos to Your iPhone – a handy post for iPhoners from O’Reilly

Keyword Tagging – tutorial on Peachpit on keyword tagging in LR

Project Photoshop Lightroom – several great tutorials on using LR

Tethered Shooting – another Peachpit article on tethered shooting in LR

Peachpit Lightroom Resource Center – the best of the rest from Peachpit

Update:

Matt over at Lightroom Killer Tips has aptly noted that I missed Sean McCormack’s Lightroom Blog. Fixed. That makes 29, but what the heck.

If I’ve missed anything else, please leave it in the comments and it’ll go here.

Books

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Martin Evening

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips by Matt Kloskowski

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for Digital Photographers Only by Rob Sheppard

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Workflow: The Digital Photographer’s Guide by Tim Grey

Digital Photographer’s Guide to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom by John Beardsworth

Photoshop Lightroom Adventure: Mastering Adobe’s next-generation tool for digital photographers by Mikkel Aaland

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.1 for the Professional Photographer by David Huss and David Plotkin

Managing Your Photographic Workflow with Photoshop Lightroom by Uwe Steinmueller and Jergin Guelbins

Adobe Lightroom Photographers’ Guide by John G. Blair

The Digital Photographer’s Notebook: A Pro’s Guide to Adobe Photoshop CS3, Lightroom and Bridge by Kevin Ames

[tags]lightroom, resources, books[/tags]

Filed Under: Books, Photoshop, Software, Technology

Adobe Lightroom 1.3

November 16, 2007 By Eric Reagan

Adobe has released a Lightroom version 1.3 update, which is now available for download for Windows and Mac. The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.3 update includes these enhancements:

  • Additional camera support for the Canon 1Ds Mark III, Nikon D3, Nikon D300, Olympus E-3, and more
  • Updated Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard support
  • The import dialog now offers the option to render 1:1 previews as part of the import process
  • The export dialog layout has been enhanced
  • A Lightroom Preview Export SDK is available for developers to create and distribute Export Plug-ins. Further details are located on Adobe Labs.

Lightroom 1.3 also includes corrections for the following issues:

  • Writing XMP metadata automatically has been corrected for performance issues
  • Printing with the native resolution option enabled no longer sets the wrong dimension for portrait oriented images
  • Prior to Camera Raw 4.3 there was the possibility that artifacts in edge transitions could be introduced through the Bayer demosaic and luminance noise reductions algorithms. This has been corrected.
  • The Canon sRAW format and the Fuji compressed RAF formats are now supported.

View the rest of the read me file.

[tags]adobe, lightroom, 1.3, photoshop, update, news, download[/tags]

Filed Under: News, Photoshop, Software

1000s of Free Photoshop Plugins & Filters

November 10, 2007 By Eric Reagan

More plugins than you will probably ever be able to use.

read more | digg story

Filed Under: Digg, Photoshop

Photoshop Becoming More User-Friendly?

November 6, 2007 By Eric Reagan

CNet is reporting on the development process for Adobe Photoshop – it’s gonna get better at interacting with you and me:

A new user interface will help Photoshop become “everything you need, nothing you don’t,” said Photoshop product manager John Nack, describing aspirations for the Photoshop overhaul on his blog Monday.

“We must make Photoshop dramatically more configurable,” Nack said. “Presenting the same user experience to a photographer as we do to a radiologist, as to a Web designer, as to a prepress guy, is kind of absurd…With the power of customizability, we can present solutions via task-oriented workspaces,” Nack said. (Read more. . .)

Photoshop functioning as seamless as Lightroom? I like where this is going.

[tags]photoshop, adobe, lightroom, interface, news[/tags]

Filed Under: News, Photoshop

7 Free Online Photo Editors

November 6, 2007 By Eric Reagan

Interested in taking your photo editing workflow online? Well, don’t get ahead of yourself, we’re not quite there yet. However, if you want to share some family photos or do some fun stuff with photos online, there are plenty of editors out there that can suit your needs. I’m taking a look at seven of the popular editors out there and giving you my short take on their functionality and results. I’ve also included sample images that each editor produced from the same base image.

I’m no expert at post-processing, but I think these images will give you a representative sample of what you can produce with relatively little experience on the particular program. I had never used any of these before this review and I probably didn’t put more than 10-12 minutes of time into each edit (some much less). I got what I thought was the best image out of each program and then saved it. Enjoy!

The Base Image:

Base Test

________________________________

FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer functions quite well. It reminded me that I needed the latest version of Flash to make things happen and allowed me to download directly from FotoFlexer’s site. Additionally, once I restarted my browser my image was up on the site and ready for me to edit. In order to get my image off, I had to register, which was surprisingly painless. FotoFlexer didn’t make me go to my email and click a confirming link, so I got to keep working with my photo.

The editing tool, however, leaves something to be desired. If you want to simply convert something to black and white or do something fun with a photo for your Myspace page, then go for it. It’s an OpenSocial launch partner, so it’s integrated well with Flickr, MySpace, Facebook and Photobucket. The sharpen tool, among others, made my photo look like crap. If you’re used to Lightroom, Photoshop or even iPhoto, take a pass on FotoFlexer.

picnik

The first great thing I noticed about picnik was that there’s no registration required. Next, the site is simply beautiful. The menus are where they should be and even the load screens make sense.

Editing options? Check. The editing tools are great. There are plenty of basic editing tools and many advanced tools that I didn’t expect to see, like exposure and temperature adjustments. In fact, for $25 you can upgrade to the Advanced version and get some fancy highlight and shadow adjustments, fine tuning exposure and sharpening and more. It can really chew up some bandwidth though, so no dial up! Even the save and download features are more than you’d expect. Save in .jpg, .tiff, .png, .gif, .bmp or .pdf and adjust your .jpg compression quality. It also has great integration tools for flickr, facebook, picasa and more.

Phixr

Like picnik, phixr let’s you get right to uploading and editing without any registration hassle. It has a familiar feel if you’re used to Photoshop, with a handy little tool pallete on the left; however, you’ve still got to mouseover the icons to see what each does. Making adjustments is a little clunky though.

Click on an icon and you get a popup window with two thumbnail sized images. When you move sliders inside the popup, the new version only changes after you release the slider – it’s not really “real time” editing. Even the percentages and numbers on the sliders don’t change until you release the sliders. If you can make out the changes on the thumbnails, you click “execute” to update the photo and the popup disappears.

Though Phixr has cool features like sharpen and noise reduction, the preview thumbnails are worthless. Simply put, it’s too complicated for something that should be simple. I actually liked the final results of the photo. It’s just that getting there was not quite as fun as some of the other editors.

Splashup

“Jump right in” – the invitation I received from Slashup. Again, no registration hassle to try it out. Splashup opens in a separate popup window and right off the bat has a very familiar Photoshop-esque layout. You can open an image by uploading from your computer, picking a flickr image or picking one from any other location on the web. The menu has a title bar that will be familiar to you Windows users out there.

Splashup’s editing tools are very powerful for a web-based photo editing platform. It even offers layers. Several of the tools are equipped with sliders that move and edit the image in real-time preview. Unfortunately, the sharpen tool is not one of those. This is where layers came in handy. I merely duped the background layer and then lowered the opacity of the new layer with sharpening applied. If you’re used to Photoshop and need something quick and handy online, Splashup is for you.

Pixenate

Pixenate shocked me with it’s auto-enhance feature – not in a good way though. Most of the photo editors have a much milder auto-enhancer. Pixenate went crazy with saturation and contrast though. Unfortunately, fine tuning the image on my own didn’t really produce the results and experience I was hoping for. Pixenate seems very clunky to me – much like Phixr. Editing options are limited, slow and lack fine tuning. There’s better stuff out there. Keep looking.

_________________________________________

Snipshots

Fast and easy. That sums up Snipshots for me. It’s like iPhoto on the web. The slider tools have a very iPhoto feel and the edits are super fast. I got to where I wanted to be in about 40 seconds. Uploading and saving is very simple. You can get the Pro version and edit RAW files, which is a rarity in an online app. Did I mention it’s fast? Another cool feature is the ability to use shortcut keys, which surprisingly is not a common feature in the photo editors I’ve seen online. Take minute (seriously, a minute) and try it out.

pixer.us

I couldn’t get pixer to work after I uploaded my image on my iMac using Firefox or Safari. After trying it on a Windows machine, I should’ve just taken the Mac incompatibility as a sign that it just wasn’t meant to be.

Pixer.us produced the worst results for basic editing functions of any of the editors I tried. The interface first appeared to be rather slick. However, upon the first move of the slider tools, I came to realize that I’ve got yet another preview window that doesn’t show adustments in real time, so you’ve got to release the slider to see what you’re going to get for every edit that you do. Additionally, you can only undo one previous action and there’s no way to start over short of uploading the image again. (I thought clicking “Original” in the “Undo” menu would do this, but it just took me back to the start page.) The contrast adjustment goes overboard with just a slight adjustment of the slider. I just couldn’t get it to work the way that it should. I’ll pass on pixer.us.

Conclusion

In short, I’m amazed at the quality results you can get from editing your images online. Even the worst of the editors did an okay job of producing a usable image (pixer.us is on thin ice here though). My picks of the litter are picnik and Snipshots. I expect I’ll find the opportunity to use these again.

We’ve come a long way and I expect this market will be booming right along with the social networking boom of late. Google’s OpenSocial will help to prod this movement along. We’ll keep checking up on these tools and eagerly await to see what technology ultimately brings us.

[tags]photo, editor, online, photoshop, post-process[/tags]

Filed Under: Photoshop, Software

Some Lightroom Tips

October 23, 2007 By Eric Reagan

If you use Lightroom, you might find some of these tips useful.  The first two were news to me and I know I’ll be using this one:

if you press Shift-4, rather than just 4, it assigns a 4-star rating to the current photo and then immediately brings up the next photo

Thanks to Nycgraphix for the excellent post.  Enjoy!

[tags]lightroom, tips, help, faq, adobe[/tags]

Filed Under: Learn, Photoshop, Software

The Dave Hill Look

September 25, 2007 By Eric Reagan

Finished

Originally uploaded by O Casasola


Read this thread for the how-to discussion on getting the Dave Hill look.

Shot with a Fuji Finepix S2 Pro. Post-processing in Photoshop.

[tags]dave hill, photoshop, effect, look, photo, pic[/tags]

Filed Under: Photographers, Photos, Photoshop, Software, Technique

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