Posted 10/13/09 at 10:30:00 AM by Paul Lily

You could buy a used car -- albeit not a very good one -- for the same scratch it takes to pick up a copy of Adobe Photoshop, the de facto standard in high-end photo editing software. Or a pair of GTX 285 graphics cards for that killer SLI setup you've always wanted. We could go on, but at $700 for a piece of software, Photoshop's MSRP hardly needs put into perspective. In short, it's expensive.

It's also powerful, but don't worry if you don't have a handful of Benjamins laying around. Thankfully, you can perform a lot of the same photo editing tricks for free with GIMP. Short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP is the open source (and no-cost) equivalent to Photoshop, and like it's paid counterpart, GIMP can be a little overwhelming at first. That's where we come in.

Like swimming, it's best if you just dive in. To help give you that push, we waded through the gazillion tutorials floating around the Web and brought back a sundry collection of groovy tips and tricks that, along with some touches of our own, will have you learning the ins and outs of GIMP while having fun doing it. We'll show you how to make lifeless photos pop with detail, how to tap into the Force and add a lightsaber to any pic, make your own custom brushes, and much more.

Hit the jump to start editing photos like a pro!

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Posted 08/26/09 at 02:54:46 PM by Andy Salisbury

In an attempt to save some face, Microsoft has come out and publicly apologized about changing the race of a person used in a promotional image.

The picture in question shows three businesspeople, one black, one Asian and one white for a pitch of Microsoft’s business productivity software. The same image on Microsoft’s Polish site had a white person’s head placed over the black man’s, but the hand remained its original color.

“We are looking into the details of this situation. We apologize and are in the process of pulling down the image,” said a Microsoft representative.

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Posted 08/07/09 at 10:37:09 AM by Paul Lilly

Adobe has announced it is discontinuing its Photoshop Album Starter Edition software, which resides at the bottom of Adobe's image-editing products. No new product is taking its place, and instead Adobe is encouraging users to move their photos to the company's online Photoshop.com web portal.

"As part of our commitment to providing customers with a free photo-editing solution, we have created Photoshop.com, an exciting new online service that lets you upload, organize, edit, store (up to 2GB free), and share your photos," Adobe wrote in a note to its customers.

Then note went on to list steps for exporting photos from Photoshop Album Starter Edition to Photoshop.com, as well as asked customers to "consider an upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7," essentially a stripped-down version of Photoshop CSx  with a much lower price tag.

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Posted 03/18/09 at 12:30:38 PM by David Murphy

The competition between open-source projects and retail applications is a never-ending struggle.  Even when two products aren't in direct competition -- like Adobe's Photoshop versus the GNU Manipulation Program -- there's still an underlying push and pull for your attention and resources.  The struggle only deepens when the retail version of the two programs approaches an inexpensive or free pricing model.  Open-source is an alternative, but when is it the better alternative?

Open-source software developer Patrick McKenzie wrote a post recently about the various ways retail software developers can out-develop open-source alternatives to their products.  While it was geared toward the perspective of an open-source creator, he nevertheless gave some good insight as to what differentiates quality open-source projects from the muck.  And a number of his points apply to some of the very applications we've recommended in our weekly freeware/open-source roundups.

Click the jump to find out how the best open-source applications get their crowns!

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Posted 03/11/09 at 01:00:00 PM by Florence Ion

For more than a decade, Adobe Photoshop has been the de facto image-editing program used by professionals and art students alike. But there are plenty of casual users who only dabble with Photoshop for simple tasks, such as photo resizing and cropping -- oblivious to the sheer power of Photoshop's graphics manipulation abilities. These decidedly non-power users (and we know some of you are included in this group) can do so more with this versatile program -- and we're here to show you how. 

Whether you've just installed Photoshop for the first time or know your away around a the Tools toolbar, we put together a few of the most essential Photoshop skills to get you started on your photo editing endeavors. Before you know it, you'll be fixing up your grandmother's torn-up black and white wedding photos and airbrushing the heck out of yourself for your Facebook photo.

Read on to get started!

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Posted 12/19/08 at 11:45:32 AM by Gordon Mah Ung

 A fast car won’t make you turn better laps at Laguna Seca. A pair of $200 sneakers won’t help you outplay Lebron James, and installing Photoshop CS4 won’t make your photos magically better. While that may be true, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 7.0 will almost certainly make the average person’s photos better. Now in its seventh iteration, Elements 7.0 uses the guts of the extremely powerful Photoshop and tries to make it friendly to everyone.

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Posted 10/17/08 at 06:19:38 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Adobe began shipping its Creative Suite 4 (CS4) this week, and perhaps the most significant new feature from a typical Maximum PC reader's point of view is the support for GPU acceleration in Photoshop CS4 and other components, including Bridge CS4, After Effects CS4, Premiere Pro CS4, Acrobat 9, and Flash Player 10.

Photoshop CS4 uses OpenGL 2.0 GPU acceleration for the following features:

• Smooth Display at ALL Zoom Levels
• Animated Zoom Tool
• Animated Transitions when doing a One Stop Zoom
• Hand Toss Image
• Birdseye View
• Rotate Canvas
• Smooth Display of Non Square Pixel Images
• Pixel Grid
• Move Color Matching to the GPU
• Draw Brush Tip Editing Feedback via GPU
• 3D Acceleration
  • 3D Axis
  • 3D Lights Widget
  • Accelerated 3D Interaction via Direct To Screen

To learn more about which GPUs make the grade, and the role memory size plays in performance, join us after the break.

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Posted 10/17/08 at 12:25:18 PM by Paul Lilly

Nvidia's latest videocard release takes aim at the graphics professional rather than the hardcore gamer with its new Quadro CX GPU. The new card comes just in time for those planning on jumping onto Adobe's Creative Suite 4, as the Quadro CX has been designed with the suite in mind, which Nvidia claims will give uses the "ability to create rich, stunning content in a faster, smoother, and more interactive way."

The Quadro CX comes with 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit memory interface capable of 76.8GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Dual Link DVI comes standard, as well as support for OpenGL 2.1, Shader Model 4.0, and DirectX 10.

The customized GPU allows Photoshop CS4 to offload real-time image rotation, zooming, and panning, as well as instantaneous view changes. But such goodies won't come cheap. MSRP has been set to $2000. Ouch!

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