Adobe

OSX 10.9 …. a Lightroom killer?

This news won’t be new. But Mavericks has shot holes in Adobe Lightroom 5 and Apple Aperture. Both were initially working for me after the update but recently things have gone astray. Lightroom 5 is dead. Booting up the application just launches the splash screen and then its just dead calm. Aperture boots, reads the libraries and allows external editing, but cannot export images; just the eternal wheel of death and today folders began graying out. Likewise Snapseed can’t export to the iPhoto library and can’t ‘save as’. The forums are alive with the sounds of disgruntled users. Today I had to resort to importing images from phone and card into iPhoto, exporting to the desktop and editing in Photoshop. I hope Santa has a fix by Xmas.

Screen Shot 2013-12-09 at 7.21.25 pm

Adobe release Photoshop Touch for iPhone

Today marks the end of a long wait and the wait has been worth it. Photoshop Touch is finally available for iPhone.

You can read the release blurb at Adobe or download the app at iTunes.

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I’ve put together a quick review on the run and you can read it here.

Using Photoshop Lens Blur with depth map

This looks pretty interesting….

– “Using the Lens Blur Filter on an image Sequence in Photoshop CS6
Even with the fantastic new Blur Gallery in Photoshop CS6, the Lens Blur filter is an essential tool when a high degree of control is needed to selectively (and realistically) blur an image. In this video tutorial, Julieanne uses the Lens Blur filter with a depth map to to create a series of images that appear as if they were captured with a tilt-shift lens. Julieanne also demonstrates how to quickly apply this filter to multiple images using actions and batch processing”.

Watch the tutorial here

Photoshop Touch Comparison

So how good is Photoshop Touch? I put it through its paces doing the hard yards of converting an image to black and white against Nik SilverEffex Pro 2. In Photoshop Touch I converted the image to B&W, duplicated the layer, blended the layers using Overlay mode @ 62%, flattened the layers and finalized the image with a shadow / highlights adjustment. Some ‘add structure’ capability as opposed to ‘sharpening’ would certainly lift the game for Photoshop Touch. But, keep in mind that PS Touch is designed to be a pre-processing app that allows you to make some early editing decisions on the go, and then finalize them later;  as Adobe says “Work with images on your tablet, and then take them further on your PC or Mac in Photoshop” @http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-touch.html.

I have to admit that in hindsight I probably could have done a levels / curves adjustment in PS Touch to pull up the mid tone contrast, (would love to see Adobe include an eyedropper/info tool with these) but there you go, can’t catch all the fish at once.

Well, pretty good results for a tablet app.

Check it out.

Here’s a slide-show with the original unprocessed image directly off the phone (using 6×7 app) followed by the B&W conversions.

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Photoshop Touch for IOS

image courtesy of Petapixel

It was a long wait but worth it. Whilst Android users have had access to this for some time, Photoshop Touch has remained painfully out of reach for IOS users, the logic of which defied me completely, given the sheer volume  of the market share for iPads as opposed to Android tablets. However it’s here and comes with an impressive arsenal. The only weak area for me is the 1600px output, but who am I to complain. The rest is more than you could want from a first release. I’ve spent some time this morning putting it through it’s paces and it was certainly better than I had expected, no glitches and some very pleasant surprises.  Good job Adobe.

You can get the blurb material here, here and here

And my run through here

All’s well that ends well, or is it?

At long last the issues with Aperture have settled down and the app is behaving normally. I read periodically on forums that users are still unsure of the viability of installing 3.1. The only caution I would mention is just be aware that once your libraries are updated you cannot revert to a previos version of Aperture, it’s a one way street, and if you get stuck, heaven help you. Having said that the 3.1.1 update has it’s merits and is worth the effort. Although in the interim when Aperture was down I discovered that Lightroom is no lightweight and is a serious contender. Apple beware, Adobe are doing their homework.

The update solution and now obviously the crash solution are posted here for reference.