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Photoshop Tips and Tricks – I continuously work on my
Photoshop skills and have found some really good videos on YouTube.com from
various people that show how to do neat tricks with Photoshop. I’m adept at most things, but need more work
on layer masks and channels. Here is a
Photoshop page where list things I find during my unending training.
Upgrade to CS5 and Lightroom 3 –
I’ve been getting a lot of email from Adobe on upgrading from CS3 to CS5 and
from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3. On the
Photoshop upgrade I noticed that the price was the same for upgrading from CS2
so I could probably wait for one more version before I had to do it. There was a sale in December so I did it. The upgrade went well. I ordered DVDs for both upgrades. The annoying thing about the CS5 upgrade was
that it was installed from the DVD then it checked on the Adobe site for
upgrades and installed the entire program again! I guess they want you to install using the
Internet… Another good thing was that
all the file structure and previous Lightroom files migrated from version 2 to
3 without any problems. Here are some of
my impressions.
Lightroom 3 – The feel of the program is
exactly the same as the old one. One big
improvement is the dialog box for importing photographs. This has been greatly expanded, has more
options, yet is easier to use. You can
see where the backup will be made and where the photos will be copied. By the way use the “Copy” setting at the top
of the screen. Using “Move” erases the
file in the original location. I like to
do that myself when I’m ready. A small
confusing item is that you only need to give the picture file location. I added the subfolder 2011 for this year’s
photos and it added another 2011 layer into the 2011 subfolder I already had.
Another small change is that you are asked to back up the files
after you finish your session instead of before you start. I always backup the Lightroom files and had
to wait 5 minutes before I could do any work.
When you are leaving Lightroom seems like a better time to back up files
as you are leaving anyway.
Photoshop CS5 – There have been many changes to
CS5 that are readily apparent. One great thing is that the Adobe Bridge CS5 is greatly
enhanced as well and I like it a lot better.
Bridge is a great way to look at your files as they are organized in
your folders. I didn’t use Bridge with
CS3 very much (especially after I got Lightroom 2), but I think I will be using
Bridge CS5 to look at metadata on the photos.
Here are some of my impressions.
Photoshop CS5 has a new healing brush that uses the context of the
photo to make corrections. This has been
mentioned in the ads for CS5 and this is a great improvement, but as with any
of the healing brushes it works really well in some areas and not so well in
others. I had a great photo for a test
of this new feature you can see below.
We were going up the gondola at Lutsen and I took a picture of Eagle
Mountain in the distance, but the gondola cable was in the way.
