Photo Club

Adobe has released ‘Release Candidates’ of Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 for immediate download from Adobe Labs. Both provide additional Raw support for the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30 DSLRs. Lightroom is also now available in 8 new languages. The ‘release candidate’ label means the downloads are ‘well tested’ but not yet final versions.

Press release:

Adobe has released Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 and Photoshop Camera Raw 5.3 Release Candidates, both available immediately for download from Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com. The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all customers. The Lightroom and Camera Raw teams would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a wide variety of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.

Both release candidates provide additional raw file support for the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30 cameras. In addition,the Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate provides a solution to a memory leak that affected some customers of the Lightroom 2.2 release.

Adobe is also pleased to announce the availability of Lightroom in eight new languages, including Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, Chinese (simplified) and Chinese (traditional). The Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate available on Adobe Labs includes these additional languages, and Adobe greatly appreciates any feedback the community can provide the Lightroom team.

Source: www.dpreview.com

This is the third of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS4 this fall, they not only released single version products, but also six separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Web Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe Premiere Pro CS4? On a PC you need a 2GHz or faster processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista; on Mac, PowerPC G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.11 – 10.5.4 (Leopard), 512MB RAM, 1024×768 display (1280×800 recommended) with 16-bit video card, 10GB hard drive space for installation and DVD-ROM Drive.

Adobe Premiere Pro is a real-time, timeline-based video editing software application. It has gained acceptance within the film and video industry and has been used in part in such films as Dust to Glory by Dana Brown and Superman Returns for the video capture process and so, as the name implies, it is a professional-level editing package.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 attempts to reduce the complex process that is video production. It does this by including copies of the products Adobe OnLocation CS4 and Adobe Encore CS4 to try to make each step of the video production more efficient and giving you more time to work your story.

So what is new with Premiere Pro CS4?

• End-to-End metadata workflow – will let you add metadata to clips both on set with Adobe OnLocation, and while editing via Premiere. This will give your workflow greater project intelligence as you can use the new speech recognition technology to create text-based metadata that you can use to organize your assets.

• Speech Search – this technology offers you the ability to turn the spoken dialog in your clips into text-based metadata which will make your video searchable. No more hand entering key words. Now through voice analysis, keywords can be automatically added, allowing you jump directly to the frame that you are after.

Adobe has made Lightroom 2.0 available for public beta. The software, that offers a series of enhancements, is at a very early stage and the company recommends its use only for "kicking the tires," and providing feedback about the new features. These include multiple monitor support, the ability to make localized corrections and improved organizational tools.

The beta is available here but Adobe warns that it will not update V1.3.1 libraries (it is designed to run alongside, without interfering with V1.3.1 installations), and that corrections made in the beta are not guaranteed to transfer correctly to the final, production version of the software.

The beta will only operate for 30 days if you are not already a Lightroom user. Existing users can enter their serial number to use the software for the duration of the beta program and can invite others to join the program.

A list of currently known bugs and inconsistencies is included as part of the beta’s release notes.

Adobe has released version 6 of its Photoshop Elements photo-editing and management software for general consumers. The Windows-based program offers a new Photomerge tool for creating a composite image of a group of people, allowing users to swap in the faces and gestures they prefer from a series of group photos. The Photomerge tool for merging panoramas has also been enhanced to blend images more seamlessly. The software’s new Quick Selection tool makes selecting image areas more efficient, its color-to-monochrome conversion has been improved, and its photo gallery creation tools allow users to make Flash-based slideshows to upload to the Web.

The Elements 6 interface has also been updated, with a new dark photo background and three selectable screen layouts for users with different levels of experience. Tabbed sections on the right of the screen divvy up tools into Fix, Create, Share, and Organizer sections, and the program’s guided edit mode shows users all the options at their disposal for a particular type of edit, as well as displaying a preview of editing results.