Tag Archives: Adobe

A Quick Touch On Adobe Lightroom 4

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Using Adobe Lightroom 4 To Retouch A Photo Of Vinh Nguyen

Even though I’m very bad at editing and retouching a photo, I think this photo of me taken with MacBook Pro Mid 2010 model’s iSight was retouched not too badly through the usage of Adobe Lightroom 4 free 30 day trial version.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, therefore different people have different opinions on how a photo should be retouched.  Particularly true when a person who is really in tune with his or her artful feeling, he or she might prefer to have a taste of beauty in a rather unique moment and only in that special moment may bring forth the fountain of artful joy.  So, it doesn’t take a true artist to see that Adobe Lightroom 4 is truly powerful, as it allows the average people like you and me to feel as if even a truly underexposure and out of place photo can be retouched and transformed into something that is rather unique, beautiful, and staying true to the meaning of the eye of the beholder.

Lightroom 4 is the latest Adobe version of Lightroom photography software, and this software specializes in transforming the available details of any photo.  By this I mean you can totally turn a photo which you took at night-time with a camera into a photo that appears as if it was taken in the day-time.  Especially, even after doing such a major transformation of a night photo into a day photo, if doing it right the photo will appear unharmed and might even be more stunning then the raw photo itself.  To tell the truth, I had never experienced Adobe Lightroom software until now, and I have to say I love it even though I’m late to the whole Adobe Lightroom party.  Luckily, according to the video which I will post underneath this blog post, Adobe Lightroom 4 is even more awesome than Adobe Lightroom 3, because there are newer features and better image retouching algorithm(s).

I’ve found Adobe Lightroom 4 is super easy to use.  Tell you what, when I was messing around with Adobe Lightroom 4 free trial version (free 30 days of usage for the full featured Adobe Lightroom 4 which you can download at Adobe official website), it was like I jumped right into a pool without even testing the water — yet I’d found it was intuitive to use (even without knowing about the hidden features).  By sliding the multitude of sliders that designed to manipulate just about any aspect of a photo, I was able to transform a photo into something that was truly fit for my eyes to behold at even though I had zero experience with Adobe Lightroom 4.  That was how easy it was for me to use it.

Nonetheless, I have to admit, if you’re a person who hates to have tons of stuffs staring back at you, Adobe Lightroom 4 first look might be scary to you as it does look like a tool which specializes for the professional photographers only.  Once you get past the hurdle of having, seeing tons of features staring back at you, playing around with one feature at a time can get you really far!  It’s also up to how much patience you have so you can endure each unique moment of pushing ahead with each feature so the eventual AH HAH!!! moment would surface and bath you in the rays of artful joy.  By the way, if you have had experiences with other simple to complicate photo editing software before (even if those photo editing software are completely aliened to Adobe’s photo editing software), such experiences will definitely make it very easy for you to come to like and use Adobe Lightroom 4.

Without further ado, the video right after the break will show you how powerful Adobe Lightroom 4 can be even though the video will only go over how to retouch only one photo.  Yet, within this photo, the video shows Adobe Lightroom 4 can basically manipulate the photo to the point of unrecognizable, but in a very very good way!  Enjoy!

Disclaimer:  For your information, I had no association with Adobe and I don’t even know the person who had made the video above, but my praise of Adobe Lightroom 4 is out of artful joy.

Afterthought:  I forgot to mention that Adobe Lightroom 4 is truly expensive.  Looking at it in Mac App Store, Adobe Lightroom 4 is $149.99.  I don’t think this software is for somebody who has only couple pictures to retouch with.  Adobe Lightroom 4 is more fitting for people who truly care how their photos can be transformed.  Adobe Lightroom 4 does support Mac and Windows!

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Effortlessly Shifting Objects In A Photo Around In Mere Seconds With Photoshop CS6’s Content Awareness Feature

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Photomontage - Composite of 16 different photo...

Image via Wikipedia

Graphic design folks are going to love Photoshop CS6!  The new trick for Photoshop CS6 is content awareness.  By this I mean Photoshop users are going to be able to simply move any object within a photo around in mere seconds.  After moving an object away from its original position, the new photo would look as if it’s the original.  Furthermore, Photoshop users can use content awareness’ extend feature to extend an object such as its length.

Basically, content awareness is a timesaver for graphic designers, because they don’t have to use various tedious tricks to painstakingly shifting objects within a photo around.  Since this painstaking trick is now simply executing in mere seconds through Photoshop CS6, I cannot help but wonder will someone be able to use this technique (obviously Photoshop isn’t for video editing) and apply an automatic process frame by frame for videos?  It might be a stupid, on the fly idea which pops into my head as now, but it’s quite fascinating to me!  Anyhow, check out Photoshop CS6’s content awareness trick in the video right after the break.

Source:  http://gizmodo.com/5885285/photoshop-cs6-can-magically-move-around-any-object-in-your-photos

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Using Adobe Digital Editions To Read eBooks From Local Libraries On PCs and Macs

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By accident, in a venture of trying to work out how to borrow Kindle ebooks from my local library for my Kindle, I got to know of Adobe Digital Editions.  Apparently, Adobe Digital Editions is widely used by local libraries to allow people to read ebooks on compatible devices such as PCs and Macs.  Now, I’m testing out Adobe Digital Editions to read ebooks that I’m borrowing from a local library on Macbook Pro.

You can visit this Overdrive’s link and then scroll down till you see a section says eBook Software, click on Download Adobe Digital Editions link to download Adobe Digital Editions, and the last step is to install it onto your computer so you can begin to use it to read ebooks that you’re borrowing from your local libraries.  Enjoy!

Making Software More Accessible, Adobe Releases Subscription Pricing Plans

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Perhaps, big software companies are feeling the heat of open source software?  Anyhow, Adobe knows the good old days where software just have to be great are long gone.  Instead of sticking to the old pricing model where they force customers purchase one big sum upfront for a piece of software, Adobe is releasing subscription pricing model for its selective software.  It’s certain that they allow customers to subscribe to Creative Suite 5.5.  Customers no longer have to buy the whole software suite, but they can monthly subscribe to each particular sub-piece of software suite or the whole suite, depending on how much more they want to pay per month.  By subscribing to monthly plans, customers will get the most up to date version of Creative Suite as long their plans aren’t yet expired.  Unless I’m wrong, I think you can still pay one time payment of full prices for all Adobe software.

My opinion is that Adobe is heading in the right direction in making its products more accessible for everyone.  Nonetheless, I still think open source software are going to be the biggest threat to Adobe empire.  For an example, personally, I don’t use Adobe Photoshop to manipulate images, because I use Gimp.  Just that example has showed that open source software can be adequate for most users who want to save money and be productive at the same time.  Not only Adobe empire is threatening by open source software, but many other companies are probably facing the same problem.  Still, proprietary software can still be in demands when open source software aren’t capable or useful.  However, there are enough capable open source software out there such as Apache to keep profitable software companies on daily doses of aspirins.

Perhaps, making software accessible in a form of subscription will also be viable for other software company.  Others will look at Adobe for examples.  If Adobe fails to make profits with subscription pricing model, other software companies may not adopt this new model.  Nonetheless, I think it’s very possible that many software companies are going to release their own subscription pricing models soon.  My question to you is, do you prefer to stick with open source software or subscribe to monthly payments for software?  Do you like to pay monthly subscription for software or purchase them at full prices?

Source:  http://www.macworld.com/article/159138/2011/04/cs55sub.html

How Desperate Is Flash?

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Adobe is hyping up its next version of Flash which will be Flash 11.  Adobe promises Flash 11 will come with 64 bit support.  In this day and age, 64 bit support should come by default, and so for Adobe to promise 64 bit support for its next release of Flash should not be a surprise and should not be something that we have to drop our jaws for.  For now, Adobe is releasing Flash 10.3.  This release of Flash 10.3 is to provide additional features for developers, and these new features have to do with audio functions.  These functions are canceling noise and echoes, detecting voice, and automatic adjusting microphone’s volume levels.

Adobe is continuing to push harder in its development of Flash, because HTML5 is the biggest threat yet Flash has to face sooner or later.  HTLM5 is still behind Flash in various features.  Still, give it time and HTLM5 will do just as much as Flash.  I think the biggest threat that HTML5 has going for Flash is not about who has more features, but it’s all about the standard.  Although users do not care about the standard of software development and so on, but in the end the dictation of what is standard of the software industry does translate into the ease of use.  Once HTLM5 becomes the standard, browser users do not need to install anything from a third party such as Adobe and yet they can do pretty much everything with HTML5.  Have a need of playing games over the web?  HTLM5 can handle that for Flash!  Have a need of watching videos over the web?  HTLM5 can handle that for Flash!  Have the need of create a standard HTLM web page but more modern since HTLM5 is more capable than its predecessors, well Flash can’t do that as well as HTML5.  The gist is that users don’t even need to know what is HTML5, because the standard makes HTML5 and the browsers one of the same!

I don’t think Flash will ever gain the upper hand once HTML5 becomes the only standard, but Flash can retain some followers if Adobe upgrades Flash to be more appealing.  How appealing?  How about let start with Flash will be even more efficient in using computer resources — to a point where even a weakest smart phone device out there can still use Flash without a hitch.  I notice my 2010 Macbook Pro’s temperature rises tremendously by just firing up Flash!  Second, Flash needs to be more secure.  I don’t know how secure Flash is now, but I notice too many complaints about how Flash gets to be so insecure in term of computer security.  Here is my proof, and I didn’t have to do much to get the proof — clicking the very first link inside Google’s search results of the keywords “How secure is Flash?” and I get the story “How secure is Flash? Here’s what Adobe won’t tell you.”  About reliability, Flash tends to crash unexpectedly with Firefox 4 beta.  OK, I know it maybe Firefox 4 beta’s fault since this version of the very browser is still in beta, but strangely I don’t see Silverlight and HTML5 have this problem.  If Adobe goes extra miles to make Flash works better than anything else on the market to a point where people prefer to install Flash than using HTML5, then Flash may have a winning chance.  I have to say, I don’t see that will happen!

In conclusion, I have a strong feeling that Flash will lose the popularity contest against HTML5, but if Adobe makes features that we cannot go without Flash — we have everything to gain such as HTML5 will be improved too so it can compete against Flash.  Flash 11 will come out soon, because it has to sink in with everyone fast to prove that even when HTML5 comes out, Flash can still be even more awesome.  Unfortunately, HTML5 is very capable too and so Flash has to have to come up with a miracle.  My verdict is that Flash won’t have a winning chance!  I hope Adobe will prove me wrong, because you and I have nothing to lose but with a better Flash to play with!

Source:  http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20040457-264.html