This is not really news or anything, but in case you don’t use Digg and haven’t seen this blogged anywhere before, the PhotoBooth application shipped with newer Macs with built-in iSights works just fine on older Macs. You can’t get this app from Apple even if you are willing to pay for it, but since Sherry has a MacBook, I just copied it from it to my PowerBook G4, it works perfectly fine with my (external) iSight. 😀
I need this coz it might be useful at new year eve parties… 😉
So finally downloaded Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta, took a long time to install, but once it’s installed everything is nice and speedy. It runs A LOT FASTER than CS, my pervious version. (I never saw the need to upgrade to CS2).
The new Camera Raw is much nicer, Bridge works much better than the photo browser in CS. I haven’t done much in it, but here are a few things I’ve noticed so far:
SPEED! CS3 is fast! Even on my PowerBook G4! It runs much faster than CS. When I used Sherry’s Core 2 Duo MacBook I notice a nice speedup from my PowerBook G4, so I bet CS3 now would SCREAMMMM on the Intel Macs. I’m kindda glad it doesn’t crawl on my G4, otherwise I would definitely have to get a MBP… Now I’m not sure if I would really need to upgrade… But it’s of course too early to tell
Liquify filter now works in 16-bit mode! And it’s also quite a bit faster! (yes, I can’t get over the speedup, it’s f’king awesome!!)
My custom shortcuts are gone, which is annoying, I’ll have to set them all up again…
My actions were gone, but I used Spotlight to search for “actions palette.psp” and it found it right away, very nice!
to hide CS3 you still have to do ctrl-command-h, which is still kindda strange to me
Here’s a photograph of model Melody I processed quickly to try out CS3… didn’t do anything special, just some minor skin clean-up, channel mixer conversion to black and white with mostly the red channel, liquify filter to enlarge the eyes and to make the face smaller and longer, USM (unsharp masking) sharpening with 2 different settings, downsize and sharpening again, frame & sign.
CS3 is quite a bit faster on Intel Macs if you have huge files, like if you have a D2x or a 1DsM2, or if you open up your 350D/400D/20D/30D/D40/D50/D80 pics in “larger size” settings in Camera Raw, and if you use complicated filters on the entire image…
SAN JOSE, Calif. ? Dec. 14, 2006 ? Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) will introduce a beta version of Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 software, the next release of the world standard in digital imaging, on Friday, December 15th. Adobe is delivering a widely available Photoshop CS3 beta to enable customers to more easily transition to the latest hardware platforms, particularly Apple?s new Intel-based systems. The beta is available as a Universal Binary for the Macintosh platform, as well as for Microsoft® Windows® XP and Windows Vista computers. The final shipping release of Adobe Photoshop CS3 is planned for Spring 2007. The software can be downloaded at: http://labs.adobe.com , in the early hours Pacific Standard Time on December 15. … ?This is an exciting time for the Mac, and Adobe wanted to ease the move to new Intel-based systems with a preview release of Photoshop CS3,? said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. ?We didn?t want to leave Windows customers out of the party, so the beta is available to everyone in the creative industry’s most passionate user community — no matter what their platform choice. We still have some surprises in store, but this beta gives customers an early chance to see the power of another great Photoshop release, optimized and tuned to run natively on the latest hardware and operating systems.?
Nice! I just read at the FlickrBlog that now pro members get unlimited upload and free members get 100MB limit, up from 20MB!! That’s pretty awesome! I actually have never used up my 2GB monthly limit there, not even when I migrated more than 2k pictures from my old snapshot gallery.
I guess maybe Zooomr had something to do with this, competition is a good thing!
the two gigabyte monthly limit is no more (yep, pro users have no limits on how many photos they can upload)! At the same time, we’ve upped the limit for free account members as well, from 20MB per month up to 100MB (yep, five times more)!
I was reading the discussions on the CS3 post at AppleInsider, I was gonna reply but forum user Chucker posted exactly what I would’ve said… Ming just picked up a MacBook Pro and he’s been running CS2 on it, emulating PPC binaries, and he said it is not slow at all.
Anyone with half a clue easily saw the writing on the wall that CodeWarrior was going away, especially when Motorola didn’t even put any effort into PPC970 support.
Apple had been recommending people to move to Xcode Tools for many, many years.
It is perfectly possible to compile a Universal Binary without Xcode. All you need is lipo, which Xcode calls into anyway, and two compilers (duh).
So I copped the ABR800, the new ring flash from Alien Bees. Ring flashes are not all that useful unless you need to get this specific look in your images, but the ABR800 actually can be used as a regular flash, Paul C. Buff is a pure genius… 🙂 With the included umbrella mount it pretty much works like another AB800 when you mount it on a light stand. I’ve been wanting to add another light or 2 to my studio so I just went with the ring flash.
Sherry and I did a test shoot with the ring flash tonight. I had the camera mounted on the ring light, hand held, my trusty AB800 with gels in the background directly behind the model. The ring flash isn’t very heavy but after over 400 frames my right forearm got a slight bit tired. Metering was also a bit of a pain, the background light was remotely trigger (tripped by the ring light automatically), but since I had to hold onto the ring light, Sherry had to get readings from my flash meter herself. Not only that, the ring flash came with a rather short sync cord, so I have to switch the sync cord to a longer one to use with the flash meter. Some sort wireless trigger like with a PocketWizard system would definitely make things easier, it would at least eliminate all the sync cords!!
Anyway, the images turned out rather well, it was my very first time using more than one light, using gel and obviously using the ring flash.
Learning studio lighting with a single flash was definitely a good idea, it’s much harder with multiple lights. At first I got the gel in the background but could never get any color to show up in the background, took us a while to figure out why – the ring flash was too close to the background and the intensity was set too high so it was lighting the background itself (without gel) so it became white! HAHA!
Here are a few selected photographs I managed to post-process just now… I picked up a softbox as well, but I will probably test that out when I get the umbrella mount from Alien Bees (they are still working on the mount and will ship them out to me free of charge when they’re available) so I can use the ring thing to light the background when I use my AB800 with the softbox to light the model, I’ll probably need to use my reflector also as a fill.
Just actually read the graphs at the Flickr camera finder page, pretty interesting stuff, The 350D is extremely popular, a far second place was Nikon’s entry-level (at least before the D40 was announced) D50. Canon EOS 20D followed the D50 closely and then we have the D70. So pretty much Flickr is populated with mostly low-end to prosumer DSLRs, which is what I would expect.
For P&S cameras the Canon PowerShots dominated the chart!!
Also I find it interesting that most of these top cameras are fairly dated models, the 300D and the 20D are almost 2 years old, the SD400 is more than a year old at least.
Saw this from Flickr Blog, pretty cool. I think they have this feature at pbase and I liked it. Like I could find random pictures taken by a particular camera, even a particular lens. It was semi-useful when I was shopping for lenses… 🙂 Flickr should also display lens info in EXIF and allow some kindda auto-tagging camera and lens info, or somehow make them searchable…
See the most popular cameras on Flickr, search by camera model, check our macro, portrait, night and action shots from each model, see the trends for camera usage by manufacturer and find reviews and pricing information – it’s like a whole, um, camera finder on a web site! If you’re curious about the capabilities of a new cameraphone, how good the little point and shoots are going or what people are using the latest digital SLRs for, it’s a pretty fantastic resource.
Getty Images have released a Map report on “One Life”, a trend toward individual living life…
Ultimately the One Life trend is about focusing on the individual. However unlike the ?me decade? of the a ?70s, the ?greed decade? of the ?80s and the ?lifestyle decade? of the ?90s, the One Life consumer is constantly reminded that consumption comes with a price. Hence the emergence of the ?confessional consumer?.
These consumers are aware of environmental issues, buy organic, recycle but also drive 4x4s, make the most of trips away on cheap airlines and still just about enjoy the pleasure of upgrade culture. Confessional consumption is conspicuous consumption with added guilt. It?s the psychology of consumers who will open up to friends about their ecological ?no noes?. They are ?piecegreen? consumers who pick and choose their environmental moments.
