Adobe Photoshop CS6 goes dark, brings new tricks
Posted Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 11:09 am by Jason Cartwright
Senior Product Manager, Bryan O’Neil Hughes has shown off a sneak preview of Adobe Photoshop CS6. There’s a brand new default look to the interface, this time round it’s much darker. Hughes says it’s designed to allow for a more ‘immersive experience’ that lets the interface to fade away and the images to be the focus point.
Also detailed in the video below are some new features including a new processing tool for RAW support, with many of the features being completely rewritten. Although CS6 is still some time away from release, the new RAW engine is actually the same one used by the Lightroom 4 beta which is available as a free download from Adobe Labs.
There’s also a new rich cursor support, this provides information about brush diameter, hardness and opacity so you’ll know exactly what to expect when using the brush tool. It’s really early days for CS6, so expect there to be plenty more teasers in the lead up to its release, for now enjoy the 2:25 of video.
Adobe focusing on HTML5, ending mobile Flash Player dev
Posted Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 7:20 am by Jason Cartwright
Adobe announced overnight a major shift in direction for their mobile division.
Danny Winokur, Vice President & General Manager, Interactive Development at Adobe says:
Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.
However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.
I find the timing of this change to be quite puzzling. Our mobile devices are now more powerful than ever, with dual core processors. This change seems more like a cost cutting method, rather than one built on solid technical grounds.
Given that there’s not a 1 to 1 replacement of features from Flash Mobile to HTML5, the decision is bizarre. While the majority of mobile Flash Player usage may have been as a video wrapper, which is solved by HTML5’s <video> tag, there’s a lot that isn’t. Developers will now need to develop Adobe AIR or compile to native apps for each platform. It seems premature in my mind, what do you think ?
The comments on the post have now been closed, it seems this decision is fairly controversial.
More @ Adobe
Flash Player 11.2 will do background updates, like Chrome.
Posted Monday, October 31, 2011 at 11:08 am by Jason Cartwright
If you’re constantly annoyed at update messages from Adobe’s Flash Player, there’s an end in sight. Flash Player 11.2 beta includes a new feature.. background updates. This means (if you choose) that Adobe will simply update Flash in the background, meaning your always up to date and avoid any of those pesky security flaws.
This background updating and hassle-free experience has been one of Google Chrome’s greatest features. Now if only Sun Microsystems would implement this with Java, we could all avoid the nearly daily updates from them.
This is clearly a new direction more and more software will move to. Users aren’t interested in maintaining a system, most just want it to work. Microsoft also use essentially the same model with automatic Windows Updates, avoiding user-interruptions. The downside of an automated system is the potential for a bad update to break the application or in this case plugin. While there’s always small issues in software, most large-scale companies use extensive testing to avoid this from occurring.
Overall I think it’s a great change in direction for Adobe and the benefits of simplicity and security, far outweigh any potential risks.
More @ Adobe Labs
Adobe Edge public preview, first real HTML5 designer (Updated)
Posted Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 9:39 pm by Nick Ayre
Adobe have released a public preview of there new “web motion and interaction design tool that allows web designers to bring animation, similar to that created in, Flash® Professional to websites using standards likes HTML, JavaScript and CSS.”
Using my limited knowledge of CSS and web development I gave Edge ago and was surprised with how great the results were. Getting started with Edge is simple, basic knowledge of 
css along with watching the 5min getting started video you’ll have Edge down in 10min. At the moment the tools and options available are limited but effective. You can see the different options available to edit objects.
One of the greatest features of Edge is that it will preserves your original files only adding a few lines to your HTML file. Adobe edge hasn’t been designed to replace their current line up such as dream weaver or flash but to work as an addition. Adobe say they will regularly release updates up keep up with the fast evolving web standards.
Now this is just a pubic preview I can’t wait to see what features they include towards a full release.
If you don’t want to spend the time to download and check out Edge, take a look at this video from Adobe.
Check out the Adobe Edge preview @ Adobe Labs
Adobe CS5.5 now shipping. Trials available
Posted Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 3:11 pm by Jason Cartwright
Adobe Creative professionals rejoice, you now have gigabytes of downloads ahead of you. Adobe’s Creative Suite 5.5 is now available, complete with trials available for you to try before you buy.
Update
Looks like the trials aren’t quite available just yet, the link takes users to a ‘Adobe product notification’ page. Stay tuned.
Update 2
The trials are now available for Design and Production Premium.. looks like we’re still waiting on the full Master Collection.
In this version you get HTML5 support, the ability to publish to mobile platforms and a very impressive video stabilisation feature in premiere. These of course are just a few, there’s plenty of tweaks and refinements across the Adobe Suite of applications.
Don’t forget in this version Adobe are introducing a subscription-based pricing model to allow you to scale developers around project deadlines. This allows you to pay month-to-month, which builds to the overall price of a full purchase, this gets around the sticker shock of an up-front purchase price.
Check out the video below for an overview of what’s new. For all the new CS5.5 videos, head over to tv.adobe.com.
Get it now from Adobe.com
Adobe CS4 details released
Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 6:13 pm by Jason Cartwright
New format support – Finally AVCHD will be supported, along with P2, XDCAM EX/HD. All these will see native support, a long overdue feature that should have really been included in CS3. Some (like myself) have had to resort to work arounds, like expensive 3rd party AVCHD plugins, these will now be rendered redundant with CS4.
The current Adobe Flash Encoder has been expanded to become the Adobe Media Encoder. This should be great for podcasters and video producers in general that provide their content in multiple formats. A set and forget (likely overnight) background task will batch render jobs. Ideally this would be complimented by allowing FTP uploads on completion for the ultimate unattended render job.
Searchable Audio
If you’ve ever tried to find a specific section of the audio during the editing process, you’ve likely spent a long time srubbing through the audio, assuming this feature works as advertised, you’ll now be able to search for a word and the location(s) in the audio track will be identified. Effectively reducing editing time. Any improvements in this area are most welcome.
If you like to apply the same effect to multiple clips, let’s say a dissolve at the start and end of each clip, this has been a very manual task of dragging the effect to the top and tail of each clip. Something very time consuming when u have elements numbering in the hundreds. CS4 ads the ability to apply a default transition to multiple selected clip with a single command, another great time-saving addition.
Multi-track editing
This provides the ability to work on multiple tracks separately, so if your working with vocals, music, etc and want to apply effects and adjustments, these can now be done per layer in CS4. While SoundBooth is the baby brother of Adobe Audition, one of the key features that was left out of SoundBooth was multi-track editing, CS4 remedies this.
Adobe have created a new file format to support the new multi-layer / multi-track audio format. Adobe Sound Document or ASND for short.
This works as outlined above in Premiere CS4.
Audio editing and especially exporting the final product is very much a trial and error process. CS4 allows users to preview how the MP3 compression will sound before exporting, saving time.. I’m detecting a common theme among these improvements – saving time.
New to CS4 is support to paint 3D objects directly inside Photoshop. While details on format support is currently lacking, it’s listed as ‘common 3D formats’. Take from that what you will.
This actually fairly impressive technology that lets you stretch images without distorting important elements in the photo. The example shown is people on a beach, the sand and sea are stretched to widen the image, yet the people are not. This lets the image scale, perhaps to fit a specific area, without visibly distorting the people (which would be very noticeable).
Objects can now be rotated in the 3rd dimension. A natural evolution to being able to create and animate objects in the X and Y co-ordinates, Adobe Flash CS4 ads the Z axis. I’m assuming this can also be accessed via ActionScript. While much of the functionality of Director has been replaced by Flash, the single point of difference has been Flash’s lack of 3D tools, could this spell the end for Director completely ?
Inverse Kinetics (or kinematics) relates to the intelligent connection of joints on 2 or more objects. A simply example would be the limbs of the human body. Elbows and Knee joints for example can’t rotate past a certain point, to bend the arm or leg further, rotation of another joint needs to occur. IK respects this and applies motion based on these restrictions. A great addition for those animating people or equipment.
Another efficiency-focused feature, Motion presets allows commonly created animations to be applied to objects quickly, currently this requires creating the same effect each time from scratch. Created motion presets can also be shared with others.
