You may recall the announcement last month on Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac. It’s now available for pre-order via Amazon.com. Here’s the link to the product page.
Adobe Photoshop CS3 for $299
[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]
Nik Software Dfine® 2.0 Brings Revolutionary Noise Reduction
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…]
Nik Software Showcases New Color Efex Pro™ 3.0 at PMA 08
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…]
Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 10, 2008 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the highly anticipated Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 6 software for Macintosh® is now available for pre-order at www.adobe.com/go/buyphotoshop_elements_mac or Amazon.com.
Photoshop Elements 6 software for Mac® combines power and simplicity so consumers at all experience levels can easily achieve outstanding results with their digital photos. In advance of its early Q2 2008 ship date, the Macintosh community will get its first peek at the new product features during the Macworld Conference & Expo, Jan. 14-17, 2008 in San Francisco (Booth #S1302). [Read more…]
28 Great Adobe Lightroom Resources
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]
Edit your photos! On Flickr!
Flickr’s got a new feature that enables users to edit photos that are already in their Flickr accounts – with no downloads in between. Flickr does this through a new partnership with Picnik, which I’ve raved about before and love as an online editing tool. Read more about this cool new feature on the Flickr blog.
[tags]flickr, picnik, online, photo, editing[/tags]
7 Alternatives to Flickr
Before we talk about what the alternatives to Flickr are, let’s first consider what flickr does for us. Flickr is great for sharing photos for free. It’s definately the biggest photo sharing community on the web.
The community features on Flickr are very deep and part of what makes Flickr so successful. Groups are one of the easy ways to get involved in the Flickr community. Groups revolve around a general topic that’s usually related to the kind of photos that users take or the kind of gear that they use. You can share your photos in the groups’ pools or engage in discussion in forums with the groups.
Still, there are some limitations to Fickr’s free accounts that detract from its usefulness. When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 100MB worth of photos each calendar month. This is a bandwidth limit, and not an amount of space that you have on Flickr servers.
Flickr also allows you to create sets for photos from a particular event or just photos that you want grouped together. I’ve put together sets for things like the 2007 Tour de Georgia and 2007 NORBA Showdown at Sugar. With a free Flickr account you’re limited to only 3 sets.
If you spring for the pro account at $24.95 per year, you get a whole lot more:
- Unlimited uploads (10MB per photo)
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited photosets
- Archiving of high-resolution original images
- The ability to replace a photo
- Post any of your photos in up to 60 group pools
- Ad-free browsing and sharing
Considering what you get, this is quite a bargain. For some reason, I’ve never upgraded. Perhaps it’s because Smugmug is my service of choice. Before we get into that though, let’s take a look at the other alternatives to Flickr.
DeviantART is probably less like Flickr than any of the other alternatives listed here. Check out what’s been popular lately at DeviantART.
As you can see, DeviantART is more of an art community than a photo sharing site. And it is a very active community with tons of chat rooms and forums to chime in on. You’ll even find a forum dedicated to reports of other’s who ripoff an artist’s work.
Part of DeviantART’s mission:
Most importantly we intend to take our time to do it right. For the first time in history there is connection and communication between artists and fans on a massive scale. deviantART represents a breakthrough for the promotion and exposure of otherwise stranded artists in all corners of the globe. Our job is to make sense of the possibility, and craft it in a responsible manner.
DeviantART offers both free and Choice memberships. The Choice membership is $29.95 per year and offers a number of upgrades:
- Get up to 120 Deviations per page when browsing
- Browse with No Ads
- Browse Way Back all the way to 2000
- Customize 20 slots on your front page
- Download art to your Mobile Phone with deviantMOBILE
- Make journals with Polls, Forum, Shoutbox, and even CSS
If you have crazy Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator skills or you use some other program to manipulate your photos extensively, then the DeviantART community may be for you.
Zooomr reminds me a lot of Flickr. It has many of the same photo sharing features, like SmartSets (think Flickr sets, but smarter) and Groups. Additionally, with Zooomr you get unlimited bandwidth, file storage and uploading and . . . it’s all free. One thing Zooomr does that Flickr doesn’t is the Zipline. Basically, Zipline allows you to keep in touch with what your contacts are doing, as they’re doing it. Uploading is also simpler with Zooomr. The interface is as intuitive as a Mac and you get great and simple visual feedback on your uploads, file by file.
You can also get a pro account with Zooomr. While you can’t do any better than unlimited for your photo sharing options, you’ll get some increased functionality from Zooomr’s social aspects.
Zooomr also has a more liberal stance on censorship issues than we’ve seen in the past at Flickr:
- Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
- The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
- The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
- Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
- Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
- The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.
If Zooomr looks like your thing, add me as a contact when you join.
Fotki seems like it’s really trying to outdo Flickr, and may be succeeding in some areas. While Fotki is easy to use, it has a lot of different options that can be overwhelming at first. One rather popular feature that’s prominent on the front page is free unlimited photo hosting for websites, blogs, emails and auctions.
For sharing, the free account is a little limited with only 50MB of storage space. Move up to the $30 pro account and you get unlimited storage space for your shared photos. Additionally, premium users can use Fotki as a selling platform, and Fotki only takes a 15% cut from prices that you set. Also, it’s one of the few photo hosting sites to offer its members FTP access.
You can order your own photos from Fotki for as little as $.09 for a 4×6 print. And there’s always an abundance of photo contests going on for members to participate in. Every premium user also gets a Journal, which is essentially a Fotki user’s blog.
PBase does not offer a free account option. You get 500MB of storage for $23 per year and you can get 1500MB for $60 per year. Additional storage can be added at any time in increments of 500MB. You can create an unlimited number of galleries from your photos stored on PBase’s servers.
PBase offers StatCounter, Google Analytics and Extreme Tracking capabilities for each of your galleries. There is also a PBase forum community that users can participate in. PBase users also publish a professional looking magazine, aptly named PBase Magazine, that has a pretty cool history.
I’ve never used PBase, but I see a number of users in photography forums that are PBase zealots. It strikes me as a cult-ish (in a good, “Apple” kind of way) community that you’ve got to be in to understand. If you’ve got more input on it, please feel free to drop in a comment.
Photobucket is a media management site for photos and video. It allows one click publishing to sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and Xanga. It is clearly geared toward the social media user. You can use Photobucket to create slideshows of photos and video mashups.
There’s a 1GB space limit for images and video clips in free accounts. That’s not much when you consider file sizes of photos these days. Additionally, free accounts are limited to 25GB of monthly bandwidth. That’s quite a lot bandwidth for photos; however, I’m not sure how long that would hold up if you’ve got a lot of video clips on there.
Gotcha’s for free accounts:
Uploaded Image files must be 1 MB or less. Images with a display size up to 17 screen (1024 x 768 pixels) can also be uploaded without a file size limit. Image files will be resized to meet the Photobucket constraints.
Uploaded Videos must be 5 minutes or less in play length and 100 MB or less in file size. Videos longer than 5 minutes will be truncated to meet the Photobucket time constraints.
For the Photobucket strip, show, and collage Slideshows, only 10 images may be loaded at a time per Slideshow. For Photobucket stamps, users may have between 4 and 16 images depending on selected size.
That’s some pretty harsh limitations for anyone serious about photography. However, you can go pro for $25 per year, which gives you 5GB of storage space and “unmetered” bandwidth (presumably, that means unlimited). Pro users also get FTP uploading capabilities. Image size is capped at 5MB for pro users. Canon 5D users need not apply here (Converted RAW images from my Rebel XT frequently exceed 5MB).
In sum, Photobucket is a great site if you’re into posting low-res images on your social media pages or personal blog; however, serious photographers would be better served by paying their annual dues to Flickr or one of the other alternatives.
Photo.net is very different from Flickr. Where Flickr is very much a one-size-fits-all service, Photo.net will likely only appeal to serious photographers. It is a huge community of amateur and professional photographers with a variety of skill levels and photographic experiences.
You can upload your photos and submit them for comment and critique. Likewise, you can comment and critique fellow photographers’ submissions. You get your own gallery to post photos into. You get a few more features by making a $20 donation each year.
Additionally, you can participate in the very active (and moderated) forums. I’ve learned a lot from photo.net over the past couple of years. I still find myself reading the forums and asking the occasional question when I need some advice on a particular matter. If you’re new to photography or you simply want to learn more, photo.net is probably one of the better online resources out there.
SmugMug is my personal favorite for sharing and hosting images on the web. There’s no free plan to choose from; however, it is well worth the price of admission for me. The basic user plan is $39.95 per year. Power user accounts are $59.95 per year. Pro accounts are $149.95 per year.
SmugMug keeps 4 backup copies of each photo in 3 states. You get unlimited storage in all plans. Your can see your photos without registering, and without spam. The handful of times that I’ve needed to contact support, they’ve gotten back to me with a real answer within minutes.
Pro users (I’m one) get the ability to sell photos and set their own prices. I don’t sell a lot of photos; however, I share tons. I use SmugMug to share photos on this blog and with friends and family. I can make galleries private or password protected and even limit the size of photos that are viewable by others. SmugMug also allows you to employ right-click protection to keep the pervasive use of downloading curbed. I know there are ways around it, but it’s not as easy to do as Flickr.
The print quality that you get from SmugMug is surprisingly good. Printing is outsourced through EZ Prints and you get the option to use auto-enhancing or your own true color adjustments. It’s not on par with the likes of MyPhotopipe.com, but it beats the heck out of Wal-Mart.
If you think the more polished look of SmugMug is your cup of tea, you can use this link to save a little on whatever account you sign up for. (Disclosure: I get a credit as well.)
Conclusion
This post isn’t meant to draw Flickr users away, but to share some sites that have a little different take on things. I love Flickr. I’ve had a Flickr account longer than other web-based photo account/membership. That said, I hope this post has opened your eyes to some useful alternatives to Flickr. This is by no means an exhaustive listing of all the photo sharing sites out there. If you’ve got other sites that you use, feel free to drop in a comment and give the rest of us an overview of what makes your site a good alternative to Flickr.
Adobe Lightroom 1.3
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]
7 Free Online Photo Editors
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:
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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.
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.
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.
“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 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.
_________________________________________
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.
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]
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