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Adobe Adds Photomerge, Recompose, More in Photoshop Elements 8

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:49:45 -0500

This week, Adobe announced its eighth generation of Photoshop Elements for both PC and Mac, and this time Mac users need to wait only a month for the latest version.

PSE 8 for Windows Adds Easy Smarts

Adobe's new Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows adds a number of features for easier photo editing, including:

Photomerge Exposure, which builds upon the powerful Photomerge feature in earlier versions of PE to enable you to combine the properly-exposed areas in two otherwise-identical photos into a "single, perfectly-lit photo." The example Adobe demonstrates uses two photos of friends posing in front of a floodlit building, one with and without flash. It'll be interesting to see how Photomerge Exposure does with a pair of RAW images optimized for bright and dark areas.
Recompose, which allows you to intelligently stretch a photo to fit in a particular frame without distorting the main subject. The example Adobe uses converts a landscape-format photo into a square photo, but inquiring minds (like mine) are wondering about converting 4:3 photos into 16:9 photos (and vice-versa).
Smarter, faster quick fixes for exposure, teeth whitening, bluer skies, contrast, and more with better previews.
Get more online storage (20GB versus 2GB), tutorials, artwork, and templates by upgrading to (or buying up front) Photoshop Elements 8 Plus.

PSE 8 also adds better photo management:

An enhanced Organizer with Auto-Analyzer technology automatically tags photos by type (closeup, high contrast, and more).
People Recognition technology for automatic tagging of people in both video clips and photos.
Automatic media synchronization across computers.

Compare PSE 8 for Windows to PSE 7 and PSE 6 here http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/upgrade/?view=compare.

Mac Users Get Even More Goodies

The Mac version, due out in October, has all of the features of PSE 8 for Windows, and also adds:

Adobe Bridge CS4 technology for photo management
PhotoMerge Scene Cleaner to remove unwanted elements from a series of similar photos
SmartBrush and Touch-Up brushes for retouching

How to Try, How to Buy

Adobe, which has sometimes been laggard in providing trials of its latest Photoshop Elements editions, is on the ball with Photoshop Elements 8, offering information, free trials, and special rebate or prerelease offers for PSE 8 for Windows, PSE8 for MacOS, the companion Premiere Elements 8 for Windows, and the Photoshop Elements 8/Premiere Elements 8 bundle for Windows. Note: you must have (or sign up for) a free Adobe account to download trials.

Illustration adapted from Adobe website illustrations of product cover art.

Google Reaffirms Its Commitment to Linux with the Launch of Picasa 3

Justin Kerr — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:02:13 -0500

Many Windows users have been running Picasa 3 for the past several weeks now, but Picasa development for Linux has always seemly lagged behind. This all changed on Thursday with a public beta release of Picasa 3 with support for all the major Linux distributions. According to the feature overview, the new version includes many of the new editing and retouching features missing in the previous version as well as a tighter integration with Picasa Web. For Linux users looking to further automate the process of importing photos you will also appreciate the auto detect feature that runs each time you plug in your camera. In a blog post by Google Software Engineer Lei Zhang he reminds the Linux community of Google’s commitment to their platform. Some of its largest contributions have been in the form of patches for the open source WINE project with over 2700 fixes. WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is an application for Linux which allows users to execute programs written for Microsoft Windows. Want to learn more? Check out the November print edition of Maximum PC on sale now for an excellent how to guide on using WINE for gaming in Linux.

Windows Live's Third Wave Now Ready to Try

Mark Edward Soper — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:06:05 -0500

Windows Live has come a long way since it was first introduced as a Microsoft brand in 2006. The first wave bolted Hotmail, Messenger, and Spaces into a single download. In last year's second wave, tools like SkyDrive, Events, Photo Gallery, LiveWriter, Calendar, and Family Safety joined the family, along with support for mobile devices. This week, Microsoft rolled out its third wave, adding a new member to the Windows Live family and new features to several existing programs. We've already told you about the new features in Hotmail, so here's what else that's new:

Movie Maker beta joins the Live family, getting an easier to use interface and support for publishing your creations to popular video-sharing sites. Note that this Live product is for Windows Vista only, and requires an ATI Radeon 9500 or NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 or better GPU.
Messenger beta adds customization options as well as drag and drop photo sharing during chats.
Photo Gallery beta adds face detection to make it easier to tag people in photos, but don't confuse this with Google's Web Album's new face recognition feature. Photo Gallery also displays photos from friends in your gallery view.
Writer beta adds WYSIWIG previewing, photo border and tilting options, and support for publishing videos to MSN or YouTube, so you can more easily add videos to your blog.
Toolbar beta maps addresses and provides directions, provides custom buttons for one-click access to favorite websites, and adds Smart Menu popups with more information for selected text.

There are also betas of new versions of Family Safety and the Microsoft Outlook Connector.

Although Windows Live continues to leave 64-bit Windows XP out of the loop, it works with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and with 32-bit Windows XP SP2 and above (except for Movie Maker). Grab complete system requirements and Movie Maker release notes here. Keep in mind that you can download individual programs as well as the Live suite. To keep track of what's happening with Windows Live, check out the Windows Live Wire blog.

Illustration courtesy Microsoft Windows Live.

Picasa 3.0 Beta: More Speed, Better Photo Repairs and Better RAW Support

Mark Edward Soper — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:44:07 -0500

This week, Google unveiled a public beta of its Picasa 3.0 photo-sharing software. Picasa 3.0 offers a huge number of new and improved features that will appeal to both point and shoot and DSLR users. I was particularly impressed by the following:

A new photo viewer that integrates with Windows Explorer and supports PNG, TGA and RAW formats as well as JPEG, TIFF, BMP, and GIF. The preview window displays thumbnails of other photos in the folder for faster navigation and offers one-click editing in Picasa, one-click uploading, or a one-click slideshow. Even on my less than swift single-core laptop, it displays Canon CR2 RAW files much faster than Windows Live Photo Gallery does. Google tested Picasa 3.0 on systems with up to 1 million photos, and it shows.
The ability to display image metadata for RAW files from within Picasa.
The enhanced photo collage creator with six preset designs along with easy drag and drop repositioning and image rotation. It's so good that I wonder if Microsoft Research's new AutoCollage 2008 (which costs $19.95) can compete.
Improved photo editing tools such as the retouching tool (good for removing scratches and dust) and the tuning tool, which features highlight, shadow, fill light, color picker, and color temperature controls. If you don't want to learn (or pay for) Adobe Photoshop Elements, you can do quite well in fixing less-than-perfect photos.

Here's the photo viewer in action:

And here's the same picture after editing in Picasa:

Picasa 3.0 also adds better integration with the improved Picasa Web Albums utility, better text handling, and much more. Learn more about the new features in Picasa 3.0 at the Picasa blog, or download it and give it a try.

Adobe Lightroom 2 Adds 64-Bit Support, Better Interface, and More

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:18:56 -0500

Adobe has released Lightroom 2. Lightroom enables users to view large numbers of RAW or other format photos at a time and to work with photos in groups for editing, tagging, printing, or exporting.

What's New in Lightroom 2

Lightroom 2 adds the following features to the original Lightroom, according to CNet:

Panorama creation and merge to HDR when used on a system that also runs Photoshop CS3
New metadata API that permits third-party applications like Flickr to work with Lightroom metadata
Styles to create JPEG-like images from RAW files
Dual-monitor support
Metadata filtering to help find photos faster
Improved image-sharpening technology licensed from PhotoKit that improves picture quality for printing
Smart Collections uses tags to create photos by rating and tags

Additional new and enhanced features listed on the Adobe Lightroom 2 website include:

New local adjustment brush (touch up specific areas of a photo)
New extensible architecture through plugins
New volume management enables you to work with high-resolution previews even when the original images are offline
New print package support
Enhanced nondestructive photo editing and batch processing

However, the biggest news is 64-bit Windows Vista and MacOS X support.

To learn more about Lightroom 2 and how it relates to other Adobe software, see the Lightroom FAQ page.

Cha-Ching! How Much to Buy (and Try) Lightroom 2

First-time buyers will pay $299 for Lightroom 2. Upgrading from Lightroom 1.x is $99. A free 30-day trial is also available.