September 23, 2008 – CanonBlogger

Before the release of CS4 in Adobe’s announcement this morning, I happened to see a post in the NAPP member forums of someone thanking the Photoshop Guys for their top ten of the new features for the latest edition of Photoshop Creative Suite 4!

So, for those who want the early bird news, here’s a hint of what Adobe will be talking about later this morning:

Better scrolling with less jaggies as you zoom in and out of images.
The Adjusment Panel – Adobe has added a dedicated panel for your layers adjustments
On-screen image adjustments – you can now control hue/saturation, Curves and Black and White adjustments directly on your image
Camera Raw saw some significant upgrades because now you can apparently do post-crop vignettes, apply gradient filters, and yes, that’s right, also the very-Lightroom like adjustment brush!
Addition of the vibrance slider to CS4 – this previously was in LR and camera raw, but not as a layer adjustment in CS3 – they’ve ported that element over to the inside of CS4! Yay!
Tools improvements for the eyedropper, dodging, burning, the brush engine is more responsive, and the clone and heal now allow for vanishing points
Customizable GUI – that’s right, you can now customize your own panels in CS4! The Configurator 1.0 feature (flash-based) allows you to create and use your own customized panels! Truly amazing.

Kudos to the NAPP staff for taking the time to put all this together – 17 video tutorials in all – (and this is just proof positive that membership has its privileges…because by learning from those on the cutting edge means you are getting cutting edge technology too! I am not sure if it’s publicly viewable, or if it’s a members-only thing, so will refrain from providing the links to the CS4 features they talk about, but I must admit, this does have me more buzzed about the announcement than I was before. Make sure you stop in to Adobe to watch it as I am sure there will be much excitement across the blogosphere about this!

Anyway, back to the regular blogging – I’ve got some announcements of my own to share, but they kinda pale in comparison…

For those that have been visiting the blog, you know that Podpress, my plugin of choice for putting out podcasts has been broken for some time as the developer has not released an update that makes it compatible with WordPress 2.6 Well, since it has been several months now, I am officially parting ways with it as my method for publishing.

Thanks to the folks over at Blubrry, I have been successfully able to implement a new alternative to embed podcasts into the native feed that already exists for CanonBlogger. So, in the interests of getting the content posted to iTunes and to those feeds that had not been updated from web references, I am going to spend the next few days providing some video content updates. The expanding ease of the .mov format not only in this interface, but also for portability purposes also seems to suggest that I am going to stick to that format exclusively for the foreseeable future.

For those that had been coming to the blog for their content, you will already have seen this video, but for those who have been waiting on the feed for new multimedia, this will be new material. Today, I am re-publishing the tutorial on reducing noise in your images. Enjoy! For the rest of you, see if you can tell the differences between some clouds shot with and without a circular polarizer. Share your thoughts in the comments on which one is with and which is without.

Image A:

Clouds

Image B:

Clouds

A few of the Creative Suite 4 Features!

Eureka! Tutorial Tuesdays Triumphant Return!