I attended the SPGA luncheon the other day, where Brian Wood from Evolve Computer Training gave a cheerleader’s promo of the new Adobe Creative Suite. The SPGA meets on the 75th Floor of the Bank of America Tower (like an old Seattlite, I still call it the Columbia Center), with a view of half of Puget Sound. I always bring my camera to these meetings.
Adobe is trying to get us to buy all their programs at once. They’ve tied together the functioning of In Design, Illustrator and Photoshop to accept all of each other’s files with the native capabilities attached. The model is Microsoft Office Suite, which is supposed to apply mix and matching of disparate documents into one (I’m still on Word 97, having never seen a need to upgrade. The newer versions only annoy me, and I got rid of an upgraded version because I hated all the stuff that got in my way. I am Microsoft marketing’s nightmare. But that’s another blog entry.)
There’s some cool new manipulation tools in the new Photoshop that I’ll never use, like Vanishing Point (extend a skyscraper by copy and paste! See the perspective match in 3D!) and red-eye reduction (a Photoshop Elements tool). But being able to manipulate multiple layers at once may someday be useful, if I ever composite an image rather than just use tonal adjustment layers. The noise filter is vastly improved, but it will not read EXIF info to apply noise profiles the way that Noise Ninja will.
There is no more File Browser. Or, as Brian says, "It’s File Browser gone crazy!" Now it’s a separate entity called Adobe Bridge. The idea is that you use Bridge to manage all your artwork no matter which Adobe program you are working in. One intriguing, and perhaps alarming new element in Bridge is Adobe Stock Photos. It’s a direct link to a separate Royalty Free image collection, managed by Getty. Will this suck away market share from other venues, like the agencies that represent my work?
Now, RAW conversion: you can make adjustments to batches of selected files now, rather than make one adjustment and backtrack to apply it to other files. Loading of RAW images is supposed to be much faster. I could not get an answer on how large the preview pane is going to be in Bridge; right now the only way to see enlarged portions of an image is in the RAW converter, not the browser. It makes serious editing in Browser a tedious chore (and why I vastly prefer Photo Mechanic for the initial edit). I am waiting to see if the new Bridge is going to be a serious editing tool.
Upgrading is a no-brainer, though I have no need for anything in the suite except for Photoshop. I’ll report more when I have my hands on the program.
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