Photoshop questions? Samples of your Photoshop work? Bring either to our next meeting. We'll have an evening of Photoshop show and tell, as well as answers to your questions. Let's see some tough questions and nice work! Please send questions and sample files ahead of time to: dan at weinberg-clark.com

In your opinion, would a Mac Pro significantly accelerate the processing [while printing]? Is the printing engine in Photoshop multiprocessor aware?

I put the question to Photoshop printing engineer Dave Polaschek, and here's his reply:

While Photoshop's printing code isn't multi-threaded & is mostly disk-bound*, another core may be used by the OS for color management if you're printing in "Printer Manages Color" mode. More cores won't hurt.

That said, the disk (or better, disks) in a Mac Pro are significantly faster than the disk in an iMac, which will help since every printed job is spooled to disk. Plus you can put more RAM in a Mac Pro, which will help in preparing the image for printing.

As with most things in Photoshop, the two biggest gains you can get in speed are:

1 - Put in as much RAM as you can afford and the machine can hold. When friends are buying new Macs, I tell them they should have an absolute minimum of 1G of RAM per core, and 2G per core will still be a noticeable improvement over that. For running Photoshop with big images, I've found some operations which run over 10x faster since I moved from 4GB to 8GB of RAM in my quad-core Mac Pro just because it keeps all the images and intermediate data in memory.

2 - Put in the fastest disk (or RAID array - four 500GB disks in a RAID array are cheaper and faster than a 2TB disk, and the default controller in my Mac Pro could do RAID with no new hardware) you can afford after you're done buying RAM. When we do have to read or save a file, or spool something to disk, that fast disk will mean less time spent looking at progress bars.

[Question via Colin Smith]

* In other words, the speed of printing depends on how quickly data can be moved to/from your hard drive.

The Copy Color as HTML in the color panel is awesome. Everyone uses it all the time. However, times have changed and my guess is that most of the people who use this are writing their colors in CSS. So you always have to delete the color="" part after you paste it into a style sheet.

It would be awesome to simply have a "Copy Color Hex Code" option and get #CCFF00 instead of the full color="#CCFF00" tag.

Or, to cover both bases, add to the panel menu:

Copy Color as HTML ---> color="#CCFF00" as it is now

AND

Copy Color as CSS ---> color:#CCFF00

Check out the demonstration video, shot at & around Adobe's Seattle office. (Hello, Fremont Lenin!) It compares the new technique to what's available in iMovie '09 and other commercial tools.

As with all research papers/demos, I should point out making technology ready for real-world use can require plenty of additional work & tuning. Still, these developments are encouraging. [Via]

[Previously: Healing Brush & Content-Aware Scaling on (really good) drugs.]

Let me first mention that these Adobe shutdowns are nothing new. I've worked here for 9 years, and the company has done the shutdowns off and on throughout that time--at least since '01 or '02. I didn't hear the news of this one and say (as DF does) "Uh-oh."

Mr. Gruber reasonably asks, "At a software company, shouldn’t every week be a productive week?" Sure, but I'll bet you know what it's like to work near holidays: it's harder to make progress when lots of your colleagues are out of the office. If that's going to be the case, why not just schedule a break & save a bunch of money on facilities, security, and so forth?**

I'd rather have everyone be gone at once (and thus more likely back at once) than to run at reduced strength for weeks on end.

Gruber also writes,

And I can only guess that on some, if not most, teams, there is subtle (or even not so subtle) pressure to keep working from home on whatever your current project is.

Anyway, my inbox for Monday shows 70 mails, vs. 300+ for a typical day. Clearly somebody is taking vacation seriously. Collectively we're taking it all in stride.

* So why am I continuing to blog? For one thing, I'm drumming my fingers with nervous energy, waiting for a baby to arrive, and I need the distraction.

** For a company of ~7,400 employees, saving a week's worth of summertime energy & other infrastructure expenses translates to real money. Meanwhile Adobe HQ (already the first existing LEED Platinum-rated green building) is upgrading this week to even more energy-efficient HVAC. The 20-story yellow crane I saw yesterday can't do its thing while people are inside/below.

If you haven't seen Flow, check out this 2-minute overview:

For a deeper dive, Dave Cross from PhotoshopUser TV & Layers Magazine has created a solid 10-minute tour that shows the Flash panels in action (also available on Vimeo).

A single-user license for GridIron Flow is $299, and a three-user license costs $399, via the GridIron store. [Update: Use promo code "NACKONADOBE" to save $50.]

[Previously: GridIron Flow saves Adobe designer's bacon]

*Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks

I've gotta meet these guys & learn more about how they manipulate video to create their little mash-ups.

* To quote a YouTube commenter: "When I saw all the cranes piling up the buildings, I though 'OMFG, this guy is nuts! Look at how much time he spent!'" Agreed.

Space is limited, so sign up quickly to walk and shoot with Adobe's digital imaging team:

• San Francisco, CA (Led by Tom Hogarty, Lightroom/ACR Product Manager)
• San Jose, CA (Led by Bryan Hughes, Photoshop Product Manager)
• Seattle, WA (Led by Tina Carter, Digital Imaging Support Engineer)
• Stillwater, MN (Led by Melissa Gaul, Lightroom Technical Evangelist)
• Hamburg, Germany (Led by Sven Doelle)

Enjoy!

Check out the rest of the entry for details on Lightroom bug fixes, as well as DNG format options and & spec updates.