Posts Tagged
photoshop
At this week’s Adobe MAX event, the firm behind the leading creative apps for Macs and PCs announced that Creative Suite is now dead. Its replacement? Creative Cloud, the new subscription version of Adobe’s apps. They’re still native Mac (or Windows) apps, like you’ve used for years, only this time, you buy them via a $50/month subscription instead of paying hundreds or thousands upfront for a full suite.
That’s not all bad news; if you used to upgrade every year or so to the latest Master Collection, you’ll likely save money with Creative Cloud. But if you used the same version of Photoshop for years without upgrading, it’ll be much more expensive (over time, at least) to upgrade in the future.
Then, though, on the Mac, it’s rather easy to skip Creative Suite these days. There’s amazing image editors like Pixelmator and Acorn, vector apps like Artboard and Sketch, Apple’s own Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for video and Audio, PDFpen and Preview for PDF documents, and more. There’s even Adobe’s own more affordable Photoshop and Premiere Elements if you need just the basics of what Adobe offers.
If you’ve switched, we’d love to hear what apps you’re using instead of Adobe’s staple apps in the comments below!
As a web designer, slicing a mockup or exporting optimized images can be some of the most annoying and time-consuming tasks you must undertake. Granted, some designers and developers don’t do any “slicing,” but at some point, the need to allocate images becomes necessary. Whether that image is part of an element’s background or a slide for a slider, slicing it, exporting it, and optimizing it can take you a some time – unless you decide to get Enigma64, that is.
Enigma64 is a Photoshop plug-in that addresses not only slicing, exporting, and optimizing images, but it also gives you the ability to use Base64 as a method of exporting your optimized image. If your workflow includes some of these steps, follow us after the break to learn more about this incredibly useful plug-in.
Today, we are excited to announce a new site dedicated to Tuts+ Live Workshops and two fantastic new workshops; Professional Photo Retouching with Photoshop and An Introduction to Adobe InDesign. If you’re keen to take your Photoshop or InDesign skills to the next level, this is the best way to do it!
Tuts+ Live Workshops are presented live by experts in their field with a talent and passion for teaching. And don’t worry, we record every workshop. So even if you can’t make it to the live workshop, you won’t miss out. We have two exciting new workshops available, and more on the way, so be sure to join the Tuts+ Live Workshops mailing list to stay posted on upcoming workshops.
For both of the new workshops we’re offering a special price of $49 for early takers. Places are strictly limited and the early bird tickets for our first workshop sold out in 48 hours, so act fast to make sure you don’t miss out!
Photography can often be a troubling trade when little things don’t go according to plan. After all, if you only have one chance to take a photo, you had better get a good one. Post processing has become a big part of modern photography, from amateur tools like Snapseed to more professional apps Photoshop, Aperture, or the increasingly popular Lightroom.
But simply owning Photoshop or Aperture isn’t enough. You must keep it up to date and use the best plugins for your trade. I’ve been doing a lot of concert photography lately, so I decided it was time I got a better way of reducing noise (a high ISO is required with my fairly slow lens). Imagenomic’s solution, Noiseware, seemed most appropriate, so I began with the 30-day trial. During that time, it was useful enough to sell me on getting a full license. Let’s take a closer look at what makes this plugin better than Photoshop’s built-in noise moderation.
Today, we are excited to announce Building a Career Around Photoshop, a live online workshop that will help you take your Photoshop knowledge and skill to the next level.
Attendees can join in each week, download video recordings of each session, take part in homework exercises, and interact with other attendees, live and from the comfort of your own home. During these workshops we will be covering photo editing and retouching, graphic and web design, user interface design, digital art, and much more.
Each weekly session lasts two hours, giving you the chance to receive live training from one of our post popular and talented authors — Martin Perhiniak. It is an amazing investment in your future career, and we think you are going to love everything we have planned!
When it comes to image editors, Adobe Photoshop remains the gold standard for professionals. But for students, the amateur, or anyone starting their career, the $700 price tag (or even ~$200 with a student discount) is likely prohibitive. There are cheaper apps available, such as Acorn and Pixelmator, but they offer far fewer features.
Luckily, there’s GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) a completely free and open source image editor that nearly matches Photoshop’s versatility. It’s long been available on the Mac if you had X11 installed, but never looked the part of a high quality Mac app. That’s all changed with the latest 2.8.2 release of Gimp, which shipped as a fully native Mac app. That’s what prompted us to take a closer look at the most popular Photoshop alternate.
If you’ve ever been editing an image and found your eyedropper wandering outside the application window to all of the colors on your desktop and beyond, I can sympathize. You’re not the only one who’s wanted to extend the functionality of Photoshop’s color picker beyond the application and been frustrated when you just weren’t allowed to do that.
Well, be frustrated no more! Meet Frank DeLoupe, a menubar color picker that will work anywhere. Going by Frank for short, this app gives you Photoshop integration and the ability to copy a color’s code to your clipboard. With so much packed into such a tiny app, can Mr. DeLoupe really do it all, or will Frank fall on his face? (more…)
Time’s a very limited resource, and most of us are looking for ways to share extra minutes off our work whenever we can. Whether it’s with a text-expanding app, a web app, or a snippet library, there’s tons of ways software can speed you up, and it’s always great to find new ways to make your computer help you save time.
More often than not, though, these solutions are all over the place, and while they offer a speedy way to get the results you want, they aren’t very intuitive. For example, there are plenty of web apps out there that allow you to get CSS3 gradients, but in order to get exactly what you want, some require you to edit the code after you’ve mess around with its interface. So, wouldn’t it be cool if you could do it all from one application that you are already using? Wouldn’t it be cool to get almost-perfect results?
Of course it would. That’s why we were excited about CSS Hat. CSS Hat is not an app or a web app, but rather a Photoshop extension that’ll help you concentrate in your code and design rather than worry about vendor prefixes and RGBA vs HEX or the like. We don’t usually review Photoshop extensions, but since many of our readers use Photoshop and need an easier way to make CSS on their Macs, we thought you’d enjoy seeing our thoughts on our review copy of CSS Hat. (more…)
This week we dove deep into the Photoshop CS6 Beta preview and told you all about the great new features and changes (see that article here). This is one of the most dramatic updates Photoshop has seen in years. It sports a completely overhauled interface, lots of functionality improvements such as layer searching and group effects, and some awesome brand new features like Iris Blur.
Needless to say, there are a lot of great things to say about this new version, but oddly enough one topic that’s getting a ton of discussion around the web has nothing to do with any of these new features: the icon. Adobe has been giving us slight variations on the table of elements style icon theme for years and it appears that this time around they’re adding a thick border around the edge, a choice which has sent more than a few users hunting for good replacement options.
Today we want to know what you think of the new icon. Is it a decent evolution of what we’ve seen for the past few years or a hideous beast that you would never consider allowing to reside in your dock? Vote in the poll and then leave a comment below with your thoughts.
Since Adobe announced the beta for Photoshop CS6 a little over a week ago, it has been downloaded more than half a million times. Even if you’ve managed to miss the onslaught of tweets and reviews, the magnitude of eager testers should indicate how anxious photographers and designers were for an update to their beloved software.
A number of articles have been written that overview the new features and changes to CS6. After working with the beta every day for over a week, I will instead try to give my impressions on what features I find most useful and am actually incorporating into my workflow already. Read on to see what features have stood out to me.
