Adobe Creative Cloud for $16.58.

Amazon is offering a yearly subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud for $199 a year. That’s only $16.58 per month to gain access to ALL current Adobe applications.

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Special Adobe Creative Cloud plan for Photographers.

We previously wrote about the advantages and disadvantages of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. We also discussed using Adobe Lightroom with other Cloud solutions.

If you don’t need all the Adobe Creative Cloud bells and whistles, consider their photography plan which includes Photoshop CC + Lightroom 5 plus feature updates and upgrades as they are available, 20GB of cloud storage for file sharing and collaboration, and a Behance ProSite.” All for $9.99/month when you sign up for a one-year plan.

Until now, the only way to get a similar deal was having a Photoshop CS3 (or later) registered license. That requirement seems to be gone. Do your math or check with your accountant, the end of the year is often a great opportunity to upgrade your gear and apps.

Click here to get the special deal.

Upgrading to Adobe Lightroom 5 and Creative Cloud. Worth it?

Question: Should I get Lightroom 5? Answer: It depends.

Whether it’s worth upgrading to Adobe Lightroom 5 depends mostly on three things: workflow, system and cameras. (more…)

Streamlining Adobe Lightroom • NEW Weekly “Tips and Tricks” Series.

 
The more photos we take, the more photos we need to edit, and the more we need to retouch, back up, search and find. Digital imaging has been great in many ways, like instant review and approval, but it is not making our lives any easier when it comes to time spent in front of the computer.

Photographers need constant access to our photos; we need them to put portfolios and proposals together. After every assignment we need to retouch and deliver the files. Clients will invariably request changes, other versions or different resolutions. When a job is completed, we often need to update our website and blog and start putting new proposals and presentations together.

To make things event more interesting, with recent developments in telecommunications, our clients are expecting that we deliver files right away, and from any location. That is a challenge that we did not have before. All this put together is what I like to call the “constant image cycle”.

Challenge 1
• The more photos we take the more tools we need to manage, organize, and find them.

Challenge 2
• Need to constantly access images to get assignments (proposals, portfolios, presentations, etc.), edit shoots (select best images, retouch, etc.) and deliver final assets.

Challenge 3
• Photographers are expected to deliver images almost instantly and from any location.

All these “challenges” rely on the same non-renewable resource: Time.

I have been a Lightroom user, beta tester, instructor and evangelist since version 1. Actually, I remember beta testing the very first version under the secret code name “Shadowland.” I now use the software almost every day.

After all these years and playing with the app almost every day, I have discovered many great ways to streamline my workflow, mostly by using Lightroom as a database. Starting next week, I’ll be sharing a weekly tip on this blog. Some tips might be familiar to veteran Lightroom users; some approaches might be entirely new. Some will help you to get things done quicker, while others will entirely replace outdated steps. I hope you join me on this project, and as always feel free to ask questions, comment on the tip of the week, and suggest improvements.If you are interested in other topics, please let us know here (and get a chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card!).

UPDATE 20130115 Tip & Trick #1, and Tip & Trick #2.

UPDATE 20130214 Tip & Trick #3, and Tip & Trick #4

If you have specific questions or want to learn more, we are now offering vir­tual one-on-one ses­sions to give you cus­tomized solu­tions and per­son­al­ized train­ing no mat­ter where you are in the world. Sign up now!

Adobe Photoshop CS6 • Updates and Workarounds.

Back in April, when Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta was released, the company dropped offi­cial sup­port for Win­dows Vista, but it continued supporting Windows 7 and XP users.

A couple of months later, Adobe gave an “advanced warning” that 3D feature upgrades in Photoshop CS6 would no longer be supported with Windows XP. Additionally, Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP.

Even though it is ancient, Windows XP is still the best selling Microsoft OS, and makes up nearly 40% of their market share (after having peaked at 76.1% in January 2007), it is somewhat expected that Adobe’s software developers now insist on the latest upgraded versions of Windows OS (Windows 7 and 8) to run their applications.

This is what Adobe had to say:

Photoshop CS6 already demonstrates that relying on a modern operating system, graphics cards/GPUs and graphics drivers can lead to substantial improvements in 3D, Blur Gallery and Lighting Effect features not available to Windows XP customers. The team hopes that by providing this information early it will help you understand our current decisions around operating system support and where we we’re headed with future releases of Photoshop.

We encourage all customers who are currently using the 3D features in Photoshop CS6 Extended to begin upgrading their video card/hardware now so they can fully take advantage of future Photoshop innovations as soon as they are available.

Creative Cloud members will also be required to update their vRAM to at least 512 MB in order to access 3D features found in Photoshop CS6 Extended.  If they don’t update, they’ll see the following dialog box:

Click here to keep reading  (more…)

Adobe discontinues support for CinemaDNG on Premiere Pro.

 
We have watched this comparison test between Blackmagic’s Cinema Camera (4:2:2 10-bit image), and Canon’s 5D Mark III (4:2:0 8-bit image) way too many times.

 

And here’s a low-light comparison between Sony’s FS100 and Blackmagic. We believe the footage speaks for itself.
 

We are seriously considering getting Blackmagic’s amazing camera next month when it finally becomes available. Because of this, we are extremely surprised and dissapointed by Adobe’s sudden decision to drop support for their own CinemaDNG format on Premiere Pro. CinemaDNG is one of the many features we really like from the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. This is Adobe’s statement:

“The Cinema DNG Initiative has been discontinued and is no longer hosted on Adobe Labs. The CinemaDNG format continues to be an open format, and its development is not limited to Adobe. CinemaDNG files can still be opened by any current Adobe application that includes the Camera Raw plug-in (note: which is NOT the case fro Adobe Premier Pro) for importing DNG files.”

Right after our NAB 2012 wrap-up report (where we highlighted Blackmagic’s Camera AND the announcement of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6) Adobe had this to say:
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Adobe Creative Suite 6: is your current system supported?

 
As part of Adobe’s Photoshop CS6 Public Beta announcement, the company said that it will continue to provide official support for Windows XP, and Windows 7, but will be dropping official support for Windows Vista. As you might know, Lightroom 4 is no longer officially supported on Windows XP. For Mac OX OS, Adobe is officially ending support for Macintosh systems that are not 64-bit capable. Premiere Pro CS6  requires Mac OS X v10.6.8 or v10.7, and Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, but it is not clear if Windows Vista and/or XP will be supported. We have been beta testing Premiere Pro CS6 for several months and I can tell you this: it is sweeeeet!!! Actually, most of our “Conversations with Friends” have been edited on CS6.

If you are just getting started with video and want to explore a video editing application, you could also consider Premiere Elements 10.  Elements is a slightly less powerful, but still very capable version of Premiere Pro with an easier-to-use interface. It is important to know that Premiere Pro is a 64-bit only software and requires a computer with a 64-bit processor and 64-bit operating system. Premiere Elements 10 includes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions to run on both systems, but the 32-bit version won’t be able to access more than 4 GB of RAM. The same is true for the old Final Cut Pro 7 and older.

If you are curious about which NVIDIA graphics cards are better for Adobe’s CS6 Suite, go here.

Tomorrow we will show the quick and easy way to tell if your Mac has a 32-bit or a 64-bit processor.
Questions? Comments? Please post them below.