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Free upgrades will be available shortly after commercial availability of Photoshop CS3

Press Release: Portland, OR — onOne Software, Inc., announced that they will offer free Photoshop CS3 compatibility updates to their Photoshop plug-ins PhotoFrame Pro 3, Intellihance Pro 4 and Mask Pro 4 software. Users who purchase Genuine Fractals 4.1 or Genuine Fractals Print Pro 4.1 on or after December 18, 2006 qualify for a free upgrade to Genuine Fractals 5 and Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5 respectively, which will be compatible with Photoshop CS3.

“We’ve been hard at work for the past year upgrading our core products for Adobe® Photoshop such as Mask Pro 4 and PhotoFrame Pro 3. As part of that effort we’ve begun taking the necessary steps to make sure our Photoshop plug-in products will be compatible with Photoshop CS3 upon its launch,” said Craig Keudell, president of onOne Software.

“Our goal at onOne Software is to provide our customers with the most advanced digital imaging software products that allow them to spend more time behind their camera’s lens taking pictures and less time sitting in front of their computer screen. We wanted to make these compatibility updates free as a way of saying thank you to our customers who continue to support us.”

Upgrades from previous versions of each product to the most recent version are available from onOne Software or an authorized reseller. The Photoshop CS3 compatible updates will be available via download from the onOne Software Web site shortly after Photoshop CS3 is commercially available in 2007. Users who require a new product CD can purchase a replacement for $9.95.

Update: Here’s a FAQ we have prepared for our customers.

John Nack is on a roll…I can tell it’s holiday time at Adobe because John must be really bored-no engineers to push around. He’s posting a lot of interesting things on his blog, John Nack on Adobe. The most recent post is The Secret Life of Smart Filters.

John talks a bit about the history of how Smart Filters came about and why the previous incarnation called “Filter Layers” was yanked from Photoshop CS1 during development because, well, they didn’t work real good (ok, they sucked on a performance level). Based upon what the dev team learned about Filter Layers, a Photoshop CS2 feature called Smart Objects was born. Now in Photoshop CS3, re-editable filters have reappeared called Smart Filters.

I particularly enjoyed his explanation (defense?) of the name “Smart Objects”:

Okay, about the name: I technically work in marketing, but I hate cheesy names, and making everything “live” this or “smart” that starts to have a whiff of fromage to it. Finding a simple, factual name proved difficult for a feature that’s really general–one that enables, among other things:

• Turning one or more layers into something that can be scaled, rotated, or warped losslessly
• Creating multiple instances, all of which update when one is edited
• Preserving complex vector data & re-editing it in Illustrator
• Preserving raw data & re-editing it in Camera Raw
• Potentially enabling linking to external files
• Potentially lots more that I can’t get into here/now

So, we went with a pretty generic name–”Smart Objects.”

John plans additional posts about the challenges involved in making Smart Objects easier to use, so keep checking his blog…
For additional information regarding Smart Filters, check out Russell Brown’s Smart Filters QT Movie.

Martin Evening’s Favorite Photoshop CS3 Feature?
The new Clone Source palette…

Pubished here is a tutorial extract is taken from Martin Evening’s forthcoming book: Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Photographers, published by Focal Press. In this tutorial, Martin demonstrates some of the key new benefits that can be gained from working with the new Clone Source palette in the newly released public beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3. To find out more about how to use this new feature, read on…

The Clone Source palette is new to Photoshop and useful for photographic retouching mainly because it allows you to see a preview of the alignment of the pixels that you are about to clone with. All the other features, such as the multiple sample points are really of more use for people working in video editing, where it is desirable to store multiple clone sources when you want to clone in exact registration from one frame to another across several images in a sequence.

1. Here is a photograph in which there is a litter bin that I wish to remove. But the tricky thing here is that the bin is just in front of a circular alcove, and this would normally make it less easy to remove. But not so if you use the controls avialable in the Clone Source palette.

2. To start with, I wanted to remove the bottom of the bin. This could be done normally by placing the source point for the clone stamp on the edge of the black line and estimating where to click with the clone stamp so that you can continue painting along the line ‘in register’.

3. By using the Clone Source palette, I can now switch on the Show Overlay option and adjust the opacity, so that with the Auto Hide option turned on as well, when I release the mouse, I get to see a ghost image preview of how the pixels will be painted at the destination point. This takes away all the guess work and makes it much easier to paint with the clone stamp in perfect alignment with the underlying image.

4. I now switched tools and selected the healing brush. And this time I went to the Clone Source palette and set the clone source angle to be 180º relative to the destination. This meant that when I sampled using the pixels from the top right corner of the curve, the preview showed a 180º rotated preview of where the the pixels would be painted at the destination point. Again, the overlay was very important, because I could use it to precisely align the preview with the image below, so that the edge of the circle was precisely aligned.

5. Here is a screenshot showing the healing brush in action.

6. Because I had the Auto Hide option checked still, the overlay was temporarily hidden as I painted.

7. And here is the final result, in which I only had to carry out some minor extra retouching in order to tidy up the remaining parts of the picture.

Overlay blend modes
You can adjust the opacity of the Clone Source overlay and change the blend mode as well. In some instances you may find it useful to work with the Difference blend mode at 100%. The Difference blend mode will show a solid black preview when identical pixels are in register.

About the book
This extract was taken from Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Photographers, published by Focal Press. The new edition of this best selling book should be hitting the streets in Spring of 2007, shortly after the official release of Photoshop CS3.

As a special perk for PhotoshopNews readers, Martin has made his Chapter 1: What’s New in Photoshop CS3 available for free download.

The 21 page PDF, outlines all the new features of Photoshop CS3 and Bridge 2, written from a user’s perspective. It offers an honest appraisal of what will be on offer in this new version of the program, if you really want to know what’s NEW!

Click here to download the PDF(3.2MB)

Martin, if you don’t know, is a London based advertising photographer and noted expert in both photography and digital imaging. As a successful photographer, Martin is well known in London for his fashion and beauty work. Check out Martin’s web site.

Martin also works with the Adobe Photoshop engineering team consulting on new feature development and alpha and beta testing. He worked alpha & beta for Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and was influential with the new Adobe Bridge 2.0 and Camera Raw 4.0.

In addition, Martin is also a principal of PixelGenius where he designed and was product manger for the recently released PhotoKit Color 2. PhotoKit Color 2 applies precise color corrections, automatic color balancing and creative coloring effects. PhotoKit Color offers a comprehensive set of coloring tools for Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 (and soon CS3) for both Macintosh and Windows.

Culled from the Adobe Photoshop CS3 forum FAQs comes an update on known issues with Photoshop CS3.

KNOWN ISSUES:

————————————————————
#1445585: Mac: Installer fails to run when Home directory on non-boot volume
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) If your Home directory is not on the boot volume, create a “Users”
folder on the boot volume
2) Launch Setup

————————————————————
#1446434: Win: Bonjour fails to start and causes installer to fail
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Turn off any firewall software
2) Launch Setup

————————————————————
#1445655: Win: Unregistered dlls on Vista can cause installer to fail
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Launch the Command Prompt from an account with admin privileges
2) Type in the following command and press Return
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\vbscript.dll
3) Type in the following command and press Return
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\jscript.dll
4) Launch Setup

————————————————————
#1443660: Mac/Win: Uninstalling CS3 removes the photoshop-9.jsx file and breaks CS2 Photoshop/Bridge interactions
————————————————————
Workaround:
a) Re-install CS2
or
b) Recover the photoshop-9.jsx file from a previous backup and place
here:
Mac: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/StartupScripts
Win: \Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\StartupScripts

————————————————————
#n/a: Mac/Win: The Adobe Media Gallery (available in the File > Automate menu) is non-operational
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Move the CS2 Presets from Adobe Photoshop CS2 > Presets > Web Photo Gallery to Adobe Photoshop CS3 > Presets
2) Move the WebContactSheetII.plugin from Adobe Photoshop CS2 > Plug- Ins > Adobe Photoshop Only > Automate to Adobe Photoshop CS3 > Plug- Ins > Automate
3) (Intel-based Macs) Select the Photoshop CS3 app and do Get Info on it and select “Open using Rosetta”
4) Launch Photoshop and choose Web Photo Gallery from the File > Automate menu

————————————————————
#1438317: Mac/Win: CS2 version of Bridge/Photoshop launching CS3 versions
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Quit all versions of Photoshop and Bridge
2) Mac: Delete the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Launch/ photoshop/10.0/ folder on your Desktop
Win: Delete the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Launch \photoshop\10.0 folder on your Desktop
3) Mac: Delete the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Launch/bridge/ 2.0/ folder on your Desktop
Win: Delete the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Launch\bridge \2.0 folder on your Desktop

————————————————————
#1442224: Win: Paper size is not remembered
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) File > Print > check on scale to fit
2) Page setup > Select your paper size > Ok
3) Toggle the orientation buttons to force scale to fit to reflect the new paper size. After scale to fit reflects the proper size for your paper you can uncheck it at this point if needed.
4) Toggle centered checkbox on and off if you want the final output centered.
5) Print > Select preferences > set your page setup again to match the settings you selected in step 2 page setup
6) Print

————————————————————
#1425422: Mac/Win: Fixed height palettes turns blank when dragged to the top of a second monitor
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Move palettes away from top of the monitor

————————————————————
#n/a: Mac: brush size cursors are not displayed on Intel-based Macs
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Select the Photoshop application and choose Get Info
2) Select “Open using Rosetta”
3) Launch Photoshop

————————————————————
#1333687: Mac: The Pattern Maker plug-in is not available on Intel- based Macs
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Use CS2

————————————————————
#1356198: Win: Uninstall causes Acrobat 7 Pro and Reader to be automatically reconfigured on Windows XP
————————————————————
Workaround: None

————————————————————
#1382654: Mac/Win: Quality of Image Size resizing is worse than CS2
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Use CS2

————————————————————
#1436700: Mac: Some plug-Ins are not being loaded on Intel-based Macs (AltiVec, PPCCore, Embed and Read Watermark)
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Select the Photoshop application and choose Get Info
2) Select “Open using Rosetta”
3) Launch Photoshop

————————————————————
#1411022: Photoshop may crash on quit when running on older developer seeds of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Update to a later seed of Leopard

————————————————————
#1438449: Non-Photoshop Open EXR files fail to open in Photoshop CS3
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Open the files in CS2 and save out and then open in CS3

————————————————————
#n/a: Mac/Win: Saving out as PDF/X results in error
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Install Acrobat 8

————————————————————
#1435697: Mac/Win: Unable to open a JPEG images larger than 10,000 pixels per side if using Adobe Camera Raw for opening JPEGs
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Turn off the “Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for JPEG Files” preference in the File Handling pane of Preferences

————————————————————
#1422743: Mac/Win: Recovery and Fill Light sliders in Adobe Camera Raw don’t respond immediately on first use
————————————————————
Workaround: None

————————————————————
#1436723: Unable to choose Camera Raw as the format when multiple JPEGs are selected
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Turn on the “Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for JPEG Files” preference in the File Handling pane of Preferences

————————————————————
#1447597: Mac/Win: Grayscale Mix settings in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom are not retained in ACR or reflected in Bridge
————————————————————
Workaround: None

————————————————————
#1439805: Mac: TWAINBridge preventing installer from working
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Launch Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder
2) Choose the TWAINBridge process and click Quit Process
3) Launch Setup

————————————————————
#1439851: Mac: Cannot read BMP format files on Intel-based Macs
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Use CS2

————————————————————
#1443332: Camera Raw dialog box cut-off at 1024×768 monitor resolution
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Set your monitor resolution to something higher than 1024×768

————————————————————
#1448493: Mac/Win: There is a color mismatch between files previewed in Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Use CS2

————————————————————
#1448422: Mac/Win: Photomerge is linearing Camera RAW files and ignoring the adjustments made to the file in Adobe Camera Raw
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Use CS2

————————————————————
#1324277: Cancel on progress dialogs does not work
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Do not click Cancel while a progress dialog is displayed

————————————————————
#1422739: Win: Memory leak can cause Adobe Camera Raw to crash
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Use CS2

————————————————————
#1448400: Mac: Crash at launch due to TWAIN conflict
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Remove the TWAIN plug-in from Plug-Ins > Import/Export
2) Launch Photoshop

————————————————————
#1446337: Mac/Win: Photoshop fails to launch if external drive is set as only scratch disc
————————————————————
Workaround:
1) Hold down the Cmd + Opt (Ctrl + Alt on Win) while launching Photoshop and choose a different scratch disk

John Nack, senior product manager for Photoshop has posted a story on his blog about the relative advantages of multiprocessors (multi-core) and what it means for Photoshop. John, not being an engineer geek himself has enlisted the help of Co-architect of Photoshop (and Photoshop engineer), Russell Williams to shed some light on the subject.

Geek Warning: if reading about CPUs, memory bandwidth and Amdahl’s Law gives you a headache, you might do well to avoid the subject. However, if you are into understanding issues surrounding Photoshop performance, you might want to sneak a peek.

Source: Macworld
Written by Rob Griffiths

Last month, in the first part of my three-part report (parts two and three) on the new Mac Pro, I reported on Photoshop’s performance in Rosetta—both subjectively and objectively (on page three) via a test of the Liquify filter.

I’ve used this same test on other machines—both Windows XP and Macs—so it’s become my personal benchmark. And now that I have the Universal beta of Photoshop to use, I thought I’d update my results for the Universal version. As you look at these results, please keep in mind they’re my own personal handiwork, and not that of the Macworld Labs—here are the official benchmark results.

As background for those who haven’t read the prior articles, I apply a 54MB saved Liquify mesh to the 3,000-by-2,400 pixel version of this image of a space shuttle launch. It’s an intensive filter, and takes a meaningful amount of time to render, so any errors in my hand timing don’t have a huge impact on the results.

And speaking of results, how did the Mac Pro running the CS3 beta do? Take a look…

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You need at least 1GB of RAM, and you’ll go even faster with a dual-core processor, PC World’s lab testing shows.

Source: PC World
Written by Eric Dahl

With Microsoft’s Windows Vista finally released to manufacturers and on the verge of making its way to retail, we can at last get down to the business of examining precisely how well the new OS performs. In our first tests, we discovered that while Vista’s hardware requirements may be steep, it should run just fine–even with the Aero bells and whistles active–on machines that meet Microsoft’s Premium Ready specifications (1GB of RAM, and a DirectX 9-capable graphics board with at least 128MB of dedicated memory).
We installed the RTM (release to manufacturing) Vista Ultimate code on desktop and notebook systems of varying specs and ages, and then we ran a series of benchmarks to answer several key questions about Vista’s impact on performance. Our main findings:

• Vista is generally slower than XP, but it’s better at multitasking on dual-core PCs.
• Your PC should have 1GB of RAM at the bare minimum.
• Aero won’t slow you down if you use a discrete graphics processor and enough memory.
• Apps run slower on the 64-bit version of Vista, but adding RAM closes the gap.

Our conclusions here aren’t the last word on Vista performance, however: When we conducted our tests in November, graphics companies were still fine-tuning their drivers (for example, we decided to drop our Doom 3 gaming tests because ATI’s drivers didn’t yet support that game’s OpenGL graphics API).

Another note: Since we used updated, Vista-compatible versions of our Photoshop and multitasking tests from the beta of WorldBench 6, the results are not comparable with those for XP systems tested under WorldBench 5.
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