Things to come

I have been thinking about upgrading my Photoshop CS3 for a little while now. The computers at school have allowed me to get use to the new interface of CS4. I was almost ready to pick it up on JourneyEd.com at an academic price. On a whim, I decided to look around for when the release of CS5 would be. The very first website I found was CS5.org. After looking at the first video that shows off some of the new features of CS5, I decided to hold off on CS4. From the sites speculation on Adobe's usual release times it could be as soon as this April when I could pick it up. Right now it would be nice to move up to CS4, but CS5 looks like it’s bells and whistles look to be a good reason for waiting. So for now it looks like I am holding off from upgrading right now. He’s hoping CS5 will be out in April.

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

What is new in Lightroom 3 Beta - Part 2 - Part 3

An instructors of mine told me that he never looked forward to Photoshop upgrades because he had to almost relearn everything. Once he started to use Lightroom all that changed. He actually started looking forward to updates and upgrades. Everything new that was put in to Lightroom just help to improve the program without changing much of the layout and feel of the program. Well, now it the time to start testing out the next version of Lightroom. The Public Beta was just released yesterday, so do not need to have a previous version of Lightroom to try it. All you need to do is go to Adobe Labs to download it. Some of the new features in Lightroom 3 Beta that are listed on the Adobe Labs site are:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
  
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
  
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
  
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
  
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
  
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
  
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
  
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) have already released some new videos to help get people up to speed with the new changes to Lightroom 3. The videos are demoed by Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski who are great speakers on anything Photoshop and Lightroom related subjects.

If you do decide to use Lightroom 3 Beta it will be valid until April 30, 2010. So it seems like the new version will be out hopefully be fall of next year.