Nack started at Adobe in mid-2000, and initially worked as a product manager on LiveMotion, a competitor app to Macromedia Flash. Two years later, he changed gears and joined the product team with which he’s most closely associated, taking up the roles first of senior product manager and eventually principal product manager for Adobe Photoshop.

Under Nack’s guidance, Photoshop underwent significant growth. Adobe Camera Raw — now a key part of the app — debuted as an optional plugin for Photoshop some four months after Nack came onboard, and the following year marked the arrival of the first Photoshop Creative Suite release. It was to be the first of five major updates during Nack’s time on the Photoshop team.

He finally moved on to new projects within Adobe in May 2010, shortly after the release of Photoshop CS5 and CS5 Extended. Since then, Nack has been principal product manager of mobile products for the company, working on apps like Photoshop Touch for Android and iOS devices. And now, just shy of four years after taking the helm and guiding Adobe’s mobile software development, he’s made the decision to leave the company for Internet giant Google.

As yet, Nack’s new role at Google hasn’t been disclosed, although we do know that he’ll be joining the Google+ Photos team. Of course, his departure from Google brings an end to the John Nack on Adobe blog — but we wouldn’t be too surprised to see a replacement pop up — perhaps on Google+. And as he notes in announcing his move, his Twitter and Facebook profiles will continue, as well.

The post Photoshop guru John Nack departs Adobe for Google+ Photos team appeared first on Imaging Resource.

Artificially applying a tilt-shift effect to a photo is a quick and dirty way of creating an intimate sense of scale – of making a scene feel like it’s been shot in miniature with a very shallow depth of field. Its popularity with aerial photography and cityscapes has lead to it being a widespread digital tool, and one that has even found its way down to free apps like Instagram. But one person decided to make the biggest subjects you can imagine seem tiny – by tilt-shifting galaxies.

Reddit/imgur user ScienceLlama put together a gallery of eight different NASA astrophotography images, edited in Photoshop to create a tilt-shit effect. He took images of stellar objects that are unfathomably large, and by fooling our brain with a tilt-shift, made them look like tiny recreations. We’ve included a few below, but for the whole set click through to that link above.

If you’re entranced by these edits, he posted some higher resolution ones on Reddit, suitable for desktop backgrounds and the like.

Of course, these images aren’t even close to what an actual limited DOF would look like in an astronomical setting. These treat the scene as if it were on a simple plane, with just the middle area in focus, and things both closer and further away blurred. In reality, you’d have to map out where each star in the image is, its distance from the Earth, and then blur each one an appropriate amount to properly simulate distance and depth of field.

But we still think these photos are pretty neat anyway.

(via UniverseToday, FStoppers)

The post Tilt-shifted astrophotography makes a huge universe feel tiny appeared first on Imaging Resource.

Adobe has pushed out an update of camera compatability across a range of its products, bringing support for an array of new bodies and lenses for Lightroom, Photoshop CC and CS6, as well as DNG Converter. Photoshop CC has also received some new editing features, which unfortunately don’t seem to have been passed on to CS6.

Both Lightroom 5.3 and Adobe Camera Raw 8.3 share additional support for the following cameras and lenses:

Cameras

• Canon EOS M2
• Canon PowerShot S120
• Casio EX-10
• Fujifilm XQ1
• Fujifilm X-E2
• Nikon 1 AW1
• Nikon Coolpix P7800
• Nikon Df
• Nikon D610
• Nikon D5300
• Nokia Lumia 1020
• Olympus OM-D E-M1
• Olympus STYLUS 1
• Panasonic DMC-GM1
• Pentax K-3
• Phase One IQ260
• Phase One IQ280
• Sony A7 (ILCE-7)
• Sony A7R (ILCE-7R)
• Sony DSC-RX10

Lenses:

• Apple iPhone 5s
• Canon EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM
• Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS STM
• Canon Mount TAMRON SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD A011E
• DJI Phantom Vision FC200
• Nikon 1 NIKKOR AW 11-27.5mm f/3.5-5.6
• Nikon 1 NIKKOR AW 10mm f/2.8
• Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 58mm f/1.4G
• Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR
• Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 DC HSM A013
• Sony 16-35mm F2.8 ZA SSM
• Sony 24-70mm F2.8 ZA SSM
• Sony 70-200mm F2.8 G SSM II
• Sony E 16-70mm F4 ZA OSS
• Sony E PZ 18-105mm F4 G OSS
• Sony E 20mm F2.8
• Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS
• Sony FE 35mm F2.8 ZA
• Sony FE 55mm F1.8 ZA

Lightroom 5.3 now has support for tethered shooting with the Canon T4i. Adobe Camera Raw has brought the following new features for Adobe Photoshop CC:

• Auto straighten: You can automatically straighten a picture in three ways: (1) double-click on the Straighten Tool button icon in the toolbar, (2) with the Straighten Tool selected, double-click anywhere within the preview image, and (3) with the Crop Tool selected, press the usual command key (on Mac) or control key (on Windows) to temporarily switch to the Straighten Tool, and double-click anywhere within the preview image.
• Whites and Blacks now support Auto Levels-like functionality via shift-double-click on the sliders.
• Added separate Auto Temperature and Auto Tint feature. Shift-double-click to invoke “auto temperature” and “auto tint” separately.
• Added feature to set the background color of the work area and toggle the visibility of the hairline frame around the image. Context-click outside the image in the work area to select an option from a popup menu.
• Added option-click shortcut in Synchronize, New Preset, Save Settings, and Copy/Paste (Bridge) dialog boxes. Option-click a checkbox to check that box exclusively. Option-click again to toggle previous checkbox state.

As well as Camera Matching color profiles for a suite of Olympus cameras:

• Olympus E-5
• Olympus E-M1
• Olympus E-M5
• Olympus E-P1
• Olympus E-P2
• Olympus E-P3
• Olympus E-P5
• Olympus E-PL1
• Olympus E-PL1s
• Olympus E-PL2
• Olympus E-PL3
• Olympus E-PL5
• Olympus E-PL6
• Olympus E-PM1
• Olympus E-PM2
• Olympus STYLUS 1
• Olympus XZ-1
• Olympus XZ-2
• Olympus XZ-10

You can update your versions by using Adobe’s in-app updaters.

The post Adobe releases Lightroom 5.3, Camera Raw 8.3 appeared first on Imaging Resource.

A month before public availability of its controversial, subscription-only Creative Cloud product line, including the next-generation Photoshop CC, Adobe has issued a release candidate version of the Photoshop Camera Raw 8 plug-in. As the company promised at the Creative Cloud launch, Camera Raw 8.1 also compatible with the existing retail release of Photoshop CS6.

The move is a little unusual, as in the past, Camera Raw updates have typically only functioned with the latest version of Photoshop, a fact Adobe justified by stating that it wasn’t feasible to provide timely updates for Camera Raw that would interoperate with older Creative Suite products. An upgrade to a new camera, therefore, required a simultaneous update of Photoshop if you wanted native raw support, rather than to first pass your images through DNG Converter.

The release of Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 8.1 with simultaneous support for Photoshop CS6 and CC — at least, once the latter becomes available — might seem to fly in the face of the earlier statement, but there’s a reason Adobe needed to provide an overlap with Photoshop CS6. Perhaps in recognition that many users — and especially, photographers — will not wish to pay an ongoing subscription to the entire Creative Cloud suite simply to access Photoshop, Adobe plans to continue to offer the older version as a perpetually-licensed product, rather than a subscription one. Since it’s still available at retail, Adobe therefore needs to keep it up to date with the latest camera releases — and that means retaining compatibility through Camera Raw 8.

While the Camera Raw 8.1 release candidate will work with CS6, though, it’s important to note that customers buying the earlier version of Photoshop will not be able to access the new features provided in Photoshop CC — even those which are a part of Camera Raw itself. Instead, the new features are locked away as exclusives for Creative Cloud members, and those using CS6 will simply receive the new camera and lens profile support. That means no radial gradient tool, “automatic upright” skew / tilt correction, overhauled spot removal, vignetting, or using Camera Raw itself as a filter.

The new Camera Raw 8 includes improved perspective control — but only when used with Photoshop CC. Owners of Photoshop CS6 will receive its new camera / lens support, but nothing more. (Note: Camera Raw 8.0 shown.)

It also isn’t clear if there will be further updates to Camera Raw through the remaining sales life of Photoshop CS6, or whether at some point Photoshop CC may get Camera Raw updates that CS6 fails to receive. Speaking to the point, Adobe’s Tom Hogarty — principal product manager for Camera Raw, DNG, and Lightroom — noted only that:

“I don’t have a timeline for how long this camera raw support will continue for Photoshop CS6 but I want to be consistent with our past policy of providing raw support for currently shipping products.”

The removal of Creative Cloud features from Camera Raw 8 when used with Photoshop CS6 will doubtless irk some customers, but it does follow past precedent. Even with perpetual licenses, the company typically reserved significant new features for the subsequent major release of Photoshop / Creative Suite, rather than making them available immediately, and indeed that’s largely what’s happened to date with Creative Suite 6 unless you had a Creative Cloud subscription.

Of course, in the past you could get the new features while retaining a perpetual license, but that’s no longer possible — a point that has inspired more than one petition requestion Adobe to change its new policy.

Be that as it may, it’s certainly good news for CS6 owners that they continue to receive new camera support, enabling them to draw further life from their existing purchases, and owners of older Photoshop releases can still use DNG converter — itself updated in release candidate form — to access the new camera support.

Newly-compatible cameras in Adobe Camera Raw 8.1 RC and DNG Converter 8.1 RC include the following:

• Hasselblad H5D-60

• Olympus PEN E-P5

• Olympus PEN E-PL6

• Phase One IQ260*

• Pentax Ricoh GR

• Panasonic LUMIX DMC-G6

• Panasonic LUMIX DMC-LF1

And lenses include:

• Canon PowerShot G1 X

• Canon PowerShot G15

• Hasselblad HCD 4.8/24

• NIKON COOLPIX A

• NIKON COOLPIX P330

• Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR

• Pentax HD PENTAX-D FA645 MACRO 90mm F2.8ED AW SR

• Pentax HD PENTAX-DA 560mm F5.6ED AW

• SIGMA 30mm F1.4 DC HSM A013 (Canon and Sigma mounts)

• SIGMA 17-70mm F2.8-4 DC MACRO OS HSM C013 (Nikon mount)

• SIGMA 19mm F2.8 DN A013 (Olympus and Sony mounts)

• SIGMA 30mm F2.8 DN A013 (Olympus and Sony mounts)

More details and the updates themselves can be found on Adobe Labs.

The post Adobe Camera Raw 8.1 release candidate supports Olympus E-P5 and more, saves the goodies for Creative Cloud members appeared first on Imaging Resource.

Adobe doubled down on its Creative Cloud suite of imaging and design products today by announcing its latest creative software products will be named after the subscription-based service. Previously called Adobe Creative Suite and including such standout imaging programs as Photoshop CS and Premiere Pro CS, the new software package will be called, simply, CC. Each program in the collection will include that CC suffix after the title including Photoshop CC, Premiere Pro CC, and Adobe Bridge CC.

The announcement came at Adobe’s annual MAX conference in Los Angeles, CA, with the company noting that all of the suite’s new features will be available in Adobe’s online Creative Cloud starting in June.

UPDATE: Adobe has confirmed that the new CC suite will only be subscription-based. There is still some confusion, however, on how this will affect photographers who are only interested in the Photoshop CC app and not the entire cloud-based suite of software products. In a blog post, Jeffrey Tranberry, Adobe’s Chief Customer Advocate for Digital Imaging products, notes that Photoshop CC will be offered as a single-app membership for an introductory price of $9.99 per month, based on an annual membership. This price, however, is only being offered to those “loyal” customers who already own Adobe CS3, CS4, CS5, or CS6.

A “regular” single-app membership for any of the programs in the Creative Cloud suite is $19.99 per month, according to Adobe’s membership plans page. A full Creative Cloud membership for an individual is US$49.99 per month, based on an annual membership. Those Adobe customers who already own CS3 to CS5.5 can get their first year of Creative Cloud at a discounted rate of US$29.99 per month.

Students and teachers can purchase Creative Cloud for $29.99 per month. Promotional pricing will also available for some customers, including CS6 users. A team version of Creative Cloud, which adds 100GB of storage, is priced at US $69.99 per month per seat.

New Photoshop CC features
There are also, of course, a bundle of new features being offered with this latest Adobe software, and Photoshop CC has some noteworthy new upgrades. For starters, Photoshop CC will have the new Camera Shake Reduction feature that we reported on last month. As its name suggests, Camera Shake Reduction helps counteract the blur you see in images effected by camera shake. In a demo video we posted last month, the feature seemed fairly effective in reducing camera shake blur caused by either shooting with a slow shutter speed or a long focal length.

Other notable features in Photoshop CC include the following:

1) Revamped Smart Sharpen features a new sharpening algorithm, which minimizes the halo effect and the sharpening of noise, which can distort an image.

Photoshop CC’s revamped Smart Sharpen feature.

2) Intelligent upsampling, which lets you enlarge a small image while helping preserve detail and sharpness without adding significant additional noise. According to Adobe, this upsampling feature works for either enlarging small images, such as from a smartphone, or for taking an already large image file and blowing it up for a poster or to use on a billboard.

Photoshop CC now offeres “intelligent upsampling” for enlarging images while preserving detail.

3) The new Camera Raw 8 lets you apply image edits as a filter to any layer or file in Photoshop including video files. Camera Raw 8 also adds new editing tools including Radial Gradient, which lets you add focus anywhere in image. There’s also a new “automatic upright” tool to correct perspective distortion, such as in wide angle shots of cityscapes or landscapes; and revamped spot removal, letting you paint in any shape to remove artifacts, where previously you were limited to just a dot-shaped tool for spot removal. With Camera Raw 8, you can also create vignettes in an image.

The new Camera Raw 8 includes improved perspective control.

4) Photoshop’s “extended” features, including 3D editing and image analysis tools, which were previously only available in Photoshop Extended, are now included in Photoshop CC.

5) Speaking of 3D, Photoshop CC also offers improved 3D painting, with live previews of 3D models that Adobe says are 100 times faster than previously.

6) Designers should like the new “editable rounded rectangles” feature in Photoshop CC, which lets you resize shapes, edit them and then re-edit them before or after they’re created. You can also edit specific corner radiuses in rounded rectangles. Adobe says this is one of the most requested features from designers working on graphic-based layouts in Photoshop.

Designers should like the new “editable rounded rectangles” feature in Photoshop CC.

7) Multi-shape and path selection lets you select multiple paths, shapes, and vector maps at the same time in Photoshop CC.

8) Conditional actions in Photoshop CC lets you automate many routine image processing jobs based on rules you set up.

9) There’s also expanded Smart Object support in Photoshop CC, letting you apply the Blur Gallery and liquify effects to images nondestructively.

The post Adobe announces new Creative Cloud-branded imaging software including upgraded Photoshop CC (UPDATED) appeared first on Imaging Resource.

Adobe has just confirmed to Imaging Resource that it is, in fact, phasing out the traditional, shrink-wrapped, boxed versions of its Creative Suite and Acrobat products. (The potential switch had been reported on several tech and photo sites.)

Instead, Creative Suite customers — including all you Photoshop users — now will need to download the products and updates electronically via Adobe.com. (We hope your Internet connections are fast!)

Here’s a quote on Adobe’s new electronic sales approach emailed to us by a spokesperson:

“As Adobe continues to focus on delivering world-class innovation through Creative Cloud and digital fulfillment, we will be phasing out shrink-wrapped, boxed versions of Creative Suite and Acrobat products. Electronic downloads for Creative Suite and Acrobat products will continue to be available — as they are today — from both Adobe.com, as well as reseller and retail partners. We are in the process of notifying our channel partners and customers, as plans solidify in each region.”

While this sort of change was perhaps inevitable, we do have to say we’re going to miss having the “hard copy” of the software program on our shelf as a backup.

But what about you guys? Are you going to miss having Adobe’s physical DVDs around or is this a good way to get rid of the clutter in your lives? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Adobe says so long to shrink-wrapped boxes for Creative Suite products appeared first on Imaging Resource.

Last night, Adobe revealed updates to a couple of its Creative Suite 6 applications — Photoshop included — that enabled support for HiDPI, Retina-branded displays as seen in the latest MacBook Pro notebooks from Apple. Today, it turns out that Retina support isn’t the only change made in Adobe Photoshop CS6 but it’s the only change you’re going to receive in the near future unless you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber.

Launched alongside Creative Suite 6 last April, Adobe’s Creative Cloud is a subscription service that aims to lower the initial barrier to entry for Creative Suite apps, while simultaneously creating an ongoing revenue stream for Adobe. With Creative Cloud, instead of paying full price for individual Creative Suite apps or app bundles, you opt for a monthly or annual subscription that gives you access to one or all the apps in the suite.

Alongside today’s announcements, Adobe has revealed that in just seven months, it has already reached almost a third of a million paying Creative Cloud members. Those 326,000 individuals are part of a total userbase of over a million Creative Cloud accounts, with the remainder being free accounts that are entitled to 2GB of storage space, file syncing, and product trials, but who for whatever reason have not yet opted to pay for full Creative Cloud membership.

Healthy growth notwithstanding, Adobe is still intent on emphasising Creative Cloud’s advantages, and one way it’s doing so is by providing a degree of exclusivity for Creative Cloud customers. As well as the Retina display support that’s being made available to all Photoshop CS6 and Illustrator CS6 users, there are also further updates to Creative Suite 6 which, for now, at least, are being offered only to Creative Cloud subscribers.

That places customers who’ve paid full price for retail bundles in a rather unusual situation. Features available to a new customer immediately upon starting a relatively affordable subscription will not yet be available to those who’ve potentially already invested thousands of dollars in a single CS6 bundle. The goal is clearly to persuade those customers to simply go with a subscription, and that strategy may well work on the next major release. (For the time being though, it would be illogical to start a subscription for software whose full version you already own.)

But to be fair to Adobe, the company did make clear from day one that it intended to ship new “point-product features,” as it terms them, to Creative Cloud customers before they’re subsequently made available to retail customers in subsequent Creative Suite updates. And while the new features will be helpful, they’re not likely to be critical — at least, with the exception of the HiDPI update that’s already been made available to all customers, regardless of their Creative Cloud status.

So what else is new for photographers in today’s updates? The Blur Gallery and Liquify tools in Photoshop CS6 now have Smart Object support, and the Crop tool has been refined. There’s also support for conditional actions, enhanced 3D effects with more illumination control and shadow preview, plus the ability to import color swatches and export CSS markup.

There are also significant changes to Creative Cloud itself, as well. For one, it’s now possible to enroll teams in Creative Cloud together, instead of having to license team members’ machines individually. Each team member will also receive a more generous 100GB of cloud storage, instead of the 20GB that comes with individual subscriptions. Pricing per user for teams is set at US$70 per month, with a required annual subscription commitment, although customers owning CS3 or later get a discounted price of US$50 per month. There’s also a new desktop sync app, Creative Cloud Connection, which aims to make light work of file syncing between team members.

And there’s more, besides. Adobe will be detailing some of the changes today in the free Create Now Live event, starting at 10AM Pacific / 1PM Eastern. You can sign up to watch the event on the Adobe website.

The post More Adobe CS6 updates revealed along with new Creative Cloud subscription options appeared first on Imaging Resource.

For photographers, the latest-generation Apple MacBook Pro notebooks are mighty appealing thanks to their extremely high-resolution displays. All those extra pixels let you see more of your images on-screen at once without discarding the fine detail. Even if you fit your image to the screen, you’re still looking at a full five megapixels of detail, more than double that provided by even the best MacBook Pro models from 2011.

There’s a catch, though. Your software has to support Apple’s Retina HiDPI displays to take full advantage of all those extra pixels, and until now a key tool in the photographer’s arsenal hasn’t done so. Today, that changes, with the announcement by Adobe of an update to Photoshop CS6 that brings support for Retina displays, fulfilling a promise made last August.

Retina support in Photoshop puts an end to blurry interpolation of images displayed in Photoshop, not to mention the surrounding buttons and icons that make up the user interface. Instead of a 1,440 x 900 pixel display that’s been scaled to fit a 2,880 x 1,800 pixel screen, your images will take advantage of every screen pixel, and the surrounding UI elements will be sharper and easier on the eyes as well.

Adobe’s updates to Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 bring support for Apple’s high-res Retina-branded displays.

Today’s update to Photoshop CS6 is mirrored by one for Illustrator CS6, and follows in the footsteps of last months’ preliminary HiDPI support in Photoshop Lightroom. Non-linear video editing app Premiere Pro has also been updated in the last few months to provide HiDPI support, meaning that we now have progress in all the core Adobe apps targeted at professional photography and videography. No news yet on when HiDPI support will be extended to the rest of Lightroom — currently it’s restricted only to the Develop module — nor when we can expect to see HiDPI support in Adobe’s consumer-oriented apps.

More details on the Adobe Photoshop.com blog.

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In his Digital Imaging Crawl Space, Adobe Product Manager in Digital Imaging Jeff Tranberry has documented his hardware and software recommendations for tuning Photoshop CS6 for faster performance. But Jeff has tuned the recommendations, too, addressing them to different uses of the program so you know what factors really matter for how you use Photoshop.

Titled How to tune Photoshop CS6 for peak performance, the document covers the 64-bit architecture option of the software, memory, hard disk storage (which includes the startup drive, scratch disks and data drives), CPU, graphics cards, monitor and a 19-step procedure for setting Photoshop up.

The tips cover both Windows and Macintosh installations. And the page links to Jeff’s recommendations for earlier versions of Photoshop as well.

If you’ve ever wondered which graphics card to buy, how many hard disks to use, how to set up caching in Photoshop or what the purge command does, this quick read is for you.

The post Tranberry revs Photoshop CS6 over the red line appeared first on Imaging Resource.

With the Adobe Photoshop CS6 beta out, that may change though. A video from Adobe France’s Stéphane Baril and Jimmy Thirion at GoPro’s French distributor, Xtreme Video, shows how easy PS CS6 makes it to defish video from the GoPro without plugins or complicated calibration. In a matter of a couple of minutes, Stéphane sets up a correction from scratch, simply by using the Adaptive Wide Angle filter. The source video needs some straight lines to key off as you’re configuring the correction, but once you’re done this can then be reused on other videos shot with the same camera and focal length, without the need to set everything up all over again.

It’s a pretty cool trick, and one we’re sure will make defished GoPro video a much more common sight! Courtesy of Stéphane and Vimeo, here’s the full story on how to defish GoPro footage yourself, with the PS CS6 beta:

(Via John Nack on Adobe)

The post Taming the GoPro’s a snap, for Photoshop CS6 appeared first on Imaging Resource.