Thanks for everyone who came to visit us at the Photoshop & You pop-up experience in San Francisco. I met a ton of amazing users, fielded a ton of great questions, and worked through some very satisfying “Photo Fixes” helping to restore ancient photos for grateful customers.
We also had several great evening events with fun photo-shoots with Lightroom/Camera Raw team members Phil Lu, David Auyeung and Zalman Stern as well as special guests Rikk Flohr and Ben Willmore (who lightpainted more than a hundred guests).
Specifically, the Photoshop and Lightroom teams have been testing our applications since Lion became available to developers. Our teams worked closely with Apple to address/fix issues that were discovered while testing Photoshop CS5. Earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop (CS3 and CS4) were also tested with Lion, with issues that were discovered being documented and addressed by working closely with Apple.
The known Photoshop specific issues are that PPC based droplets and versions of Photoshop CS2 and earlier will not be able to run on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) due to the lack of Rosetta support in 10.7.
I recommend that Mac users of Photoshop CS2 upgrade to Photoshop CS5 soon in order to be within the 3 versions back in order to enjoy discounted upgrade pricing.
If you do encounter issues not already documented, feel free to report them on our feedback site.
Finally, Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) includes some exciting new features such as Autosave, Resume, Versioning, Full Screen Mode, and more multi-touch gestures. Since many of these features require new code in order to work properly, the Photoshop and Lightroom teams will investigate which ones make sense to our customers for inclusion in future versions of our products.
The Photoshop development team has updated the Photoshop Touch Apps. Eazel now has a new image gallery for easier access to paintings, Color Lava lets you capture images with the iPad 2 camera and build color palettes with them, and Nav lets you transfer images directly from your iPad to Photoshop CS5. The updates are available through the Apple App Store.
Adobe Senior Creative Director Russell Brown highlights the new features in the video below:
This is a guest post by Daniel Koestler, an Adobe applications developer. This post will explain how to connect your Flash, Flex, and AIR apps to Photoshop using the Photoshop Touch SDK. The author created the Photoshop Touch SDK for AS3 with help from Renaun Erickson, an Adobe developer evangelist. This part of the SDK is a SWC distributed in the freely available download.
This article will tell you how to create a new project, connect to Photoshop, and send simple commands back and forth. There are additional resources at the end of the article, which will guide you through more advanced steps.
What is the Photoshop Touch SDK?
Adobe Nav uses the Photoshop Touch SDK
The Photoshop Touch SDK is a collection of APIs that allow virtually any device to connect to and control Photoshop, using any Internet or WiFi connection. For the first time, you can interface with Photoshop directly, and use this to create mobile, desktop, or web applications that are tailored to the needs of creative professionals or casual-creative users.
The Photoshop Touch SDK is available for free from Adobe, and works with Photoshop CS5 12.0.4 and above. It also includes a SWC library, which contain the APIs that this article covers. This SWC library, called the Photoshop Touch SDK for AS3, allows you to write very simple ActionScript 3 code in any Flash, AIR, or Flex application, and saves you from doing tedious socket-level work. As you’ll hopefully discover, these AS3 APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, and will allow you to leverage the portability of Flash, versatility of Flex, and power of ActionScript 3 to help you realize your vision for designing creative apps.
Sample Code
As you follow along, you may want to refer to the sample code, which contains a project that’s been created by following this blog post. See the Additional Resources section for information about an upcoming ADC article, which will also cover more advanced topics.
The depth and spread of tools and features in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended software make the two editions applicable to a variety of work environments and suitable for a wide range of tasks by image-makers of all skill levels, from enthusiasts to professionals. In some environments, Photoshop is employed in a dedicated, standalone fashion, while in others, it is a pivotal part of a larger suite of programs. Making sure that your computer meets the minimum system requirements is an essential first step in ensuring that all features function correctly. Optimizing your Photoshop CS5 setup to suit your work environment and the tasks you regularly perform is the next step. All users will benefit from such optimization, but those who work with video, 3D content, or other large files—or those who process multiple files at once—will see the greatest performance gains. This paper provides guidance on best practices to optimize Photoshop CS5 performance with a combination of careful hardware selection and informed program setup.
What type of Photoshop user are you? Determining how you typically use Photoshop will help you make more informed decisions about the best ways to optimize your setup. For instance, the photographer who regularly processes high-resolution images will greatly benefit from increasing the amount of system RAM available to Photoshop, whereas the designer who works with 3D models will obtain far better performance by installing a faster video card containing more video RAM. So, itemize the tasks that you regularly perform in Photoshop and then use the recommended setup details contained in this paper as the basis for optimizing your system.
Essential hardware
Computers are built with a variety of components. Each performs a different function, and together they affect the overall performance of Photoshop. The following sections describe system components and the roles they play in the image-editing and enhancement process.
We recently posted a plug-in for Mac OS and registry keys for Windows allows you to save large PSD and PSB images in Photoshop CS5 without compression. The resulting size of your image is much larger. However, saving the file can be much faster (20x in some cases), if you have a fast hard disk and enough disk space to hold the larger file size.
Get more information and download the plug-in and registry keys from the following knowledge base document:
The Photoshop team recently posted a video called “Behind the Splash Screen,” above, which chronicles some of the history behind the development of Photoshop CS5.
Back in June of 2010, I sat down and started writing out my experience as a lead on the “Carbon to Cocoa” effort in Photoshop CS5. I thought I’d share that experience now. Below is what came out:
Lightroom 3.4 and Camera Raw 6.4 are now available as Release Candidates on Adobe Labs. The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers. The final releases of Lightroom 3.4 and Camera Raw 6.4 may have additional corrections or camera support.
I get a myriad of questions about camera support in Photoshop and Lightroom so I thought I’d try and answer them in this blog post.
I just got a new camera and Photoshop CS5, or Lightroom 3, does not recognize the raw files. What do I do?
First,make sure you have the latest updates for Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. (The process to update Lightroom is similar. Launch Lightroom and choose Help>Check for Updates…) It’s always a good idea to have the latest updates installed.
Third, if your camera isn’t on the list of supported cameras check on Adobe Labs for a release candidates of the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in or Adobe Lightroom. A release candidate is a very close to done version of the plug-in that Adobe shares with the community prior to full release for additional testing.
Finally, if your camera came out within the past 90 days, be patient, as you may need to wait for the new camera support. Adobe goes through a rigorous process of adding support for and testing of each new camera raw format. Adobe generally releases updates of the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in and Lightroom to provide new camera support about once a quarter, or about every 90 days. Feel free to drop us request or vote for specific camera support on our Feedback Site.
What if I own an older version of Photoshop like CS2, CS3 or CS4? Or Lightroom 1 or 2?
A lot of people ask, “Why do I have to buy a new version of Photoshop or Lightroom just to get the latest camera support?”
The answer: You don’t have to. Adobe provides backwards compatibility for the latest cameras for FREE in Photoshop CS2, CS3 and CS4, as well as Lightroom 1 and 2, through the Adobe DNG Converter.
There are other benefits to using DNG besides backward compatibility if you haven’t explored those:
The metadata, keywords and raw adjustments are stored in the file – along with a processed preview of the image. This makes the file portable and keeps your metadata safe and secure.
DNG files are smaller than the original raw file, which will save you disk space and time in the long run.
DNG is an openly specified file format which means the file format isn’t going away. If you use another raw processor that supports DNG, you don’t have to worry about compatibility or portability of your metadata.
Note: Julieanne goes through the process of converting your raw files to DNG using the Adobe DNG Converter around the 7:12-9:44 point of the video.
You suck, I still want an update for the the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in for Photoshop CS2, CS3, CS4 or Lightroom 1 & 2
The problem with supporting Adobe Camera Raw plug-in updates for legacy version of Photoshop and Lightroom is camera manufacturers insist on creating a new proprietary raw format each time they come out with a new camera – and new cameras are coming out faster and in greater volume. If camera manufactures either settled on a single raw format for their brand of cameras or just used DNG it would make compatibility a non-issue.
It’s untenable to keep updating previous versions of the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in going back to CS2 to support new cameras/raw formats in a timely fashion. Using the DNG converter is the fastest way to deliver backwards compatibility to ALL users (CS2, CS3, CS4, Lightroom 1 & 2, as well as 3rd party apps that support DNG). This allows us to support the greatest number of customers and cameras as possible.
What if the computer that Photoshop is on is not connected to the internet?
You’ll need to find a computer that is connected to the internet, and download the update to an external drive or media that you can move to the computer that’s not on the ‘net:
I'm a Product Manager in Digital Imaging focusing on Customer Advocacy. Prior to my current role I spent 10 years on the Adobe Photoshop Product Development Team. I am a huge nerd.
The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
