Adobe CS4 announcement expected Sept. 23
Just when you thought you just bought (or just finished paying for) Adobe Creative Suite 3, get ready to take out another mortgage for Adobe CS4, which will be publicly unveiled on September 23. AppleInsider conjectures the software will drop in October.
Adobe will be delivering several webcasts that day to showcase the new software to the public. You can register here to participate in the webcasts.
Improvements to Photoshop and Flash are expected to headline the event. Adobe did not release any details about how the software will be bundled, nor any pricing information. Full versions of Adobe CS3 can cost as much as $2,500 for new users, and $160 for those who want to upgrade.
Adobe released preview editions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth in late May.
[istreamplanet Via MacFreaks and cnet.]
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iTunes Doctors Image From Hit TV Show
Don’t believe everything you read… or see.
It’s a time-honored practice to alter photos that don’t adhere to certain political, strategic or social goals. Leon Trotsky was removed from photographs under Vladimir Lenin’s reign. Celebrity magazine covers are notorious for air-brushing starlets to appear thinner, tanner or wrinkle-free. Even news events are skewed when states (just the rogue sort?) send out propaganda of missile tests that supposedly go off without a flaw but instead turn out to be doctored.
So it comes as no surprise that in the world of entertainment and advertising, the original message is made more, shall we say, family-friendly when, for example, all the guns are removed from the movie ‘E.T.,’ or now when the iTunes store wipes out the image of a cigarette from its page for the hit cable TV show ‘Mad Men.’
Yes, the TV show about 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executives peddling the benefits of cigarette smoking had the cigarette removed from the official iTunes page.
While we were looking into the matter, though, the cigarette magically reappeared. Hmmmm. Compare the three images above for yourself. The first is from the ‘Mad Men’ Web site. The second is from iTunes earlier in the day. And the third is current.
Looks like someone in Apple-land has been busy with Photoshop. [Source: Gawker]
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iChat for Windows?
Is this iChat for Windows? Or a slightly clever Photoshop? We’ll know in T-minus 2 days and counting…
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Trackpad gestures in Photoshop
I noticed so many of us use the trackpad as the primary input device.
I though it would be interesting to check out what trackpad gestures can you use in Photoshop. Here is what I found out:
- Hold the Alt (Option) key and double finger track to zoom within the document in and out.
- Hold the Apple (Cmd) key and zoom in and out your entire screen. Useful when you want to show something to a friend across the room.
- Double tap and hold to start making a selection. Once you’re happy with the size just release the trackpad and your selection becomes active after a second.
- Tap with two fingers results in a CTRL-click or right mouse button click.
- Double finger tracking allows you to scroll and pan within your document.
Unfortunately none of the cool stuff that works in OSX standard apps, such as the rotation with two finders, switching between active pages with three finger swipe or zooming by pinching works in Photoshop.
Ideally Apple should allow us to customize what we want each gesture to mean and we should be able to add new custom gestures too.
For example we could add a lot of Photoshop menu shortcuts as three finger gestures. Each new gesture would be drawn with three fingers and the shape would remind the first letter of the menu item. For example:
- Down and right: Levels
- Up, circle and bottom right: Refine edges
- S shape: Save
- Circle: Open, etc.
- Three finger horizontal swipe: Change between document
- Three finger double tap: Exposé application windows
- Three finger triple tap: Exposé all windows
- Finally when you would tap repeatedly on the trackpad with three fingers it would bring up a random stimulating screensaver that will help generate new ideas.
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Photoshop CS4 to include GPU acceleration?
One of the nicest features of the latest round of OS X image editors like Pixelmator and Acorn is their use of GPU acceleration. They use your Mac’s graphics processor to radically speed up various image tools like filters and transformations, etc. Now it appears that the big boys are finally getting ready to play.
TG Daily is reporting that Adobe recently previewed the next version of Photoshop (CS Next / CS4) with GPU acceleration. And as expected it made for an enormous improvement in speed. They they observed “the presenter playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core [Intel] Skulltrail system.”
There was no specific mention of the Mac version (the demo seems to have been done on a Windows machine) and also no discussion of if and how the 32-bit limitation of CS4 on the Mac might affect this GPU assisted performance boost. Nonetheless, the addition of GPU acceleration is a big deal, and perhaps will push Apple into getting more high performance graphics cards into its systems.
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