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I just unboxed and installed Adobe Photoshop CS4, so I’m ready to offer some first impressions on the PC version.

Speed

Photoshop CS4 seems a lot faster than previous versions.  There are many things that frustrated me in CS3 that no longer are present.  In CS3, it was kind of clunky when you wanted to drag a window outside of the main Photoshop window, but in CS4 it’s quick and fluid like you would expect. 

Another performance boost that I noticed is the menu system.  The menus in Photoshop are huge, due to the insane amount of filters and features they provide, so it’s easy to see why the menu system could be a bit sluggish.  Right away, I noticed that the menus load immediately, and the application launches a lot quicker. 

Keep reading for more on the new CS4.

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Barack Obama’s election as the 44th president of the United States has spawned a new malware attack.  Scammers wasted no time sending out e-mails with links to a video of the victory speech he gave the night of the election.  The link takes the user to a site called America.gov, and like many malicious spams before it, produces a pop up claiming Adobe Flash must be updated in order for the video to run.  The download is, of course, malware which steals personal info and sends it to a host machine run by the scammers.

Another version of the attack claims to come from a Spanish news site and has a video actually embedded in the e-mail.  Clicking on it prompts a download called “BarackObama.exe” and if run it sets up a direct link between the PC and the scammers.  Experts are particularly worried about this variation as it is not detected by anti-virus software.

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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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Sections: Computers, Software / Applications, Imaging, Accessories, Web, Downloads, Websites

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.
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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.

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Sections: Computers, Software / Applications, Imaging, Web, Web Apps, Websites

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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Sections: Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps

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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Sections: Web, Web Apps

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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Sections: Computers, Software / Applications, Imaging, Accessories, Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps

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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