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For many people just getting into digital photography, the world of photo editing can seem a tad overwhelming. Hewlett Packard offers some help in the foray through the forest of editing your precious snapshots and helping you turn them into all they can be, even if it didn’t happen exactly the way you wanted right from the camera.

The Adobe Photoshop program, a perennial favorite among many photographers is rather tried and true. It’s used by everyone from magazine layout staff and professionals to the Joe Schmoe who captured his son playing flag football at the weekend game. However, if you are first wading into the waters of photo editing...granted, the program may seem a little daunting, especially for those not familiar with any kind of editing or publishing software. 

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Internet users usually hit a brick wall when trying to search for content that is embedded in Adobe Flash media. Content of this type, whether in SWF or the more common FLV format, are never really available for web-crawling search engines to access. Well, not anymore.

Adobe is teaming up with search giants Google and Yahoo start indexing Flash content and run the Adobe Flash Player on their servers at runtime. Initially, this will mean not only the ability to search Flash content but better search returns for your queries.

The jury is still out whether this move will have huge or limited impact, initial signs bode well, especially when one realizes that there is a wealth of training, e-learning, and marketing content all on the Flash medium.

Google will begin offering Flash search capabilities within the week while Yahoo plans to do so in a future update to Yahoo Search.

Read [InfoWorld]

Don’t look now but Adobe’s free Photoshop Express is gradually becoming a powerful online image editing tool. They have just introduced some new features, which include a slide show feature. This slide show works similar to other online slide show applications such as SlideShow and the slide show tools found in Flickr and Photobucket. Users can also choose to embed the Photoshop Express slideshow on websites, blogs, and social networks.

Aside from the slide show feature, Photoshop Express has also recently introduced the ability to interact directly with photo-sharing community such as Flickr. This feature, as we previously mentioned enables users to take photos in their accounts from Flickr, edit them in Photoshop Express then export back to Flickr. Sounds neat eh? Wait, there’s more. Users can also easily save a copy of their edited photos and then tinker with the copy instead of the original. Hence users are assured that the original copy is intact even if they mess up the new version.

Via [Switched]

Adobe is up and about this past few days. After launching Photoshop Express, here comes Adobe announcing that it’s AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), a cross operating system runtime used for developing various web applications that run both online and offline. Adobe AIR for Linux joins Windows and Mac in giving users with a rich interface to develop their applications.

“Adobe’s decision to join the LF is a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source, which demonstrates its leadership and foresight in the software industry,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “Adobe’s membership will contribute to our goal of increasing even more application development on Linux with a specific emphasis on Web 2.0 applications.”

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Adobe’s highly buzzed launch of Photoshop Express has been well-received, for the most part. However, some users have been appalled by a discovered clause in Adobe’s full terms of service for Photoshop Express, which reads:

“8. Use of Your Content. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such
Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.”

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Adobe Photoshop maybe a little late with this but still it still is Photoshop, so no matter how delayed they are in releasing the web version of the widely used image editor, it should definitely receive quite the number of users. Released as Adobe Photoshop Express, this free Rich Internet Application offers users with the basic Photoshop editing functions in a fast loading Flash-based web environment. Users are allowed to upload up to 2GB of photos for editing, touching up and sharing. Edited photos can also be uploaded or downloaded to various social networking sites such as Facebook.

For expert Photoshop users, Photoshop Express may be a letdown as it made their favorite photo editing tool to within reach of the non-technical users. The web based tool has become your ordinary, drag-and-drop, point-and-click web application. A user can quickly crop and rotate photos, remove red-eye, jazz up photos, adjust white balance, sharpen, do soft focus plus other image editing manipulations. 

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A couple of weeks after getting rejected by Apple’s Steve Jobs saying that Adobe Flash Lite is no good for Apple’s iPhone, Adobe may have found a new ally in Microsoft. Windows powered mobile phone users will soon be treated with interactive content running on Adobe Flash Player as Microsoft has licensed the Adobe Flash Lite. The Flash Lite is Adobe’s mobile version of the widely used Adobe Flash player. Microsoft has also licensed the Adobe Reader LE.

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Over the years that Adobe Photoshop has had to mature into a professional product, it has gained impressive features with each new release.  The release of Photoshop CS3 is no exception.  Before I get into the details of the software, I must disclaim – I tested it on a Dell laptop with 1GB of RAM, and an 1.86 Ghz Intel Pentium M processor.  Any issues with performance that I mention may very well be due to my PC, and not the software itself.  Now that I got that out of my system, lets get the show on the road.

Panels

With the release of CS3 comes many user interface enhancements.  One of the most frequently used ones are the new Panels.  Similar to previous versions of Photoshop, Panels are the tool boxes on your screen that hold the most frequently used options and styles – such as Layers, Paths, Swatches, and Channels. 

The improvement of these tools not only is due to the content in the Panels, but also how you manage their appearance in your “workspace”.  Similar to the older Macromedia products such as Dreamweaver, you can now click the arrows in the top right of the Panel to make them minimize.  This is extremely helpful for those of us that do not have gigantic monitors, and need to get those Panels out of the way so we can work with an image.  Here are a few screenshots of the different ways you can view your Panels:

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Adobe has announced that their updated Adobe Production Studio software suite will ship mid-2007 for both Mac and PC. Part of Adobe’s Creative Suite family, the graphics, audio and video software collection will include After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, Encore DVD, Soundbooth and Dynamic Link. The applications are all meant to work seamlessly with each other, essentially creating a complete home video production “studio.” It’s a podcasting YouTubing junkie’s dream. Soundbooth, the suite’s audio app, will replace Audition in the new release but will continue to be developed as a stand-alone Windows product. The price was not indicated, though the current version of Production Studio ver. 1.0 retails for $1699, the Pro version ($649 to upgrade), and $1199 for the Standard release ($499 to upgrade). Adobe will demo the new suite at Macworld 2007.

Let’s hope it ships in time to use for projects entered in the 2007 Adobe Design Achievement Awards (ends April 27, 2007).

Press Release [Adobe] Read [Moji Blog]

Adobe released their beta version of the Photoshop CS3 software last Friday and the reviews and screenshots are already starting to trickle in. The CS3 beta includes support for Apple’s Intel-based systems in addition to PCs. Photoshop CS3 beta also includes a pre-release version of a major upgrade to Adobe Bridge, as well as a preview release of the all-new Adobe Device Central. Photoshop customers can use Adobe Device Central to design, preview, and test compelling mobile content created specifically for smaller screens. This new tool, integrated in the Photoshop CS3 beta, simplifies and accelerates the creation of mobile content through a preview environment and built-in device profiles.

For Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta, recommended system requirements are as follows. For Macintosh: Mac OSX 10.4.8 or 10.5, 1 GHz PowerPC G4 or G5 processor, Intel based Macintosh. For Windows: Intel Xeon , Xeon Dual, Centrino or Pentium 4 processor, Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or higher, Microsoft Windows Vista. Both platforms require 512 MB RAM and a 1024x769 resolution screen.

Photoshop CS3 beta will expire soon after the launch of Photoshop CS3 in Spring 2007. Details on final pricing, system requirements
and availability have yet to be determined. The software can be downloaded at: http://labs.adobe.com

Check out more pics and see the roundup [Wired]