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Adobe Photoshop Elements 8

Leslie Ayers — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:27:46 -0600

If forced to choose a photo editor to sit down and have a beer with, Elements 8 would be our drinking buddy of choice. It’s friendly, smart, and it seems to know what we want to do with our images even before we do. Unlike with Photoshop CS4, which is certainly the expert in its field and the go-to choice for pro photographers, Elements 8 packs just the right combo of helpful, intuitive tools for average Joes and powerful features that even hard-core Photoshoppers can appreciate.

The first important pro-level addition to note is the inclusion of Bridge CS4, Adobe’s excellent photo-management application, which makes sorting through hundreds or even thousands of photos much more manageable. Rather than compete with iPhoto ’09--which includes some very cool features, such as face- and location-recognition--Bridge is about saving you time and helping you tag and organize photos on your Mac’s hard drive, so you can get back to taking more photos or doing amazing things with them.

New editing modes in Elements 8--Quick, Full, and Guided--let you manipulate your photos quickly, easily, and with minimal fuss. Common touch-up tools such as red-eye reduction and automatic fixes for lighting, contrast, and color are only a click away, while additions like Whiten Teeth (represented by a little toothbrush, natch) are a godsend for beautifying smiles in portraits, family photos, or your Facebook profile photo. In fact, the Whiten Teeth tool is also a great tool for brightening parts of any photo, not just whitening coffee-stained pearlies.

We saved this shot by brightening the baby's face using the Whiten Teeth tool.

For outdoor shots, the Make Dull Skies Blue tool can bump up the color of the sky with a click and a swipe of the cursor across the portion of the photo where the sky appears. These and other insta-fixes are all added as layers to your original, so when you save the photo, it becomes a new PSD file, and your original remains intact, in case you decide later to go in a different direction.

Adobe built Elements 8 with hobbyist photographers in mind, and the app covers several tricky scenarios that most family historians have no doubt encountered. Everybody’s had the experience of revisiting vacation photos and coming upon an image of complete strangers who wandered into the frame. Thanks to the new Scene Cleaner, they’re outta there. As long as you have a couple of similar images, swapping in the background from a clean shot is a simple procedure. What was once a complicated multistep edit has been reduced to a couple of mouse clicks. Scene Cleaner is essentially the opposite of the Group Shot function, which allows you to quickly put together a composite image from multiple shots--perfect for getting everyone smiling and looking the same direction in a family photo. And speaking of family photos, if you’ve ever wished you could make a portrait image landscape (or vice versa) the Recompose tool can easily stretch or compress backgrounds, while maintaining the proportions of foreground objects or people. It’s a powerful tool borrowed from Photoshop, and the results can be stunning.

Elements 8 offers powerful editing tools for hobbyists at a jaw-droppingly low price. In our case, the ability to vastly improve a family photo to the point where we could use it as the focal image in our 2009 holiday greeting card was worth the hundred bucks alone.

Microsoft Announces Silverlight 4 Beta, Adds Chrome Support

Cory Bohon — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:46:32 -0600

Today, Microsoft announced version 4 of their Flash-like software for web browsers.

According to TechCrunch, the software, which is currently in beta, now has support for Google's Chrome browser. The new version also includes support for fluid animations, webcam, microphone, and printing support. TC is also reporting that the software has a 200 percent faster start time than its predecessor.

Silverlight 4 also comes with the ability to take web applications and sites like Facebook and turn them into a seperate application on your desktop, similar to the functionalities of Adobe-AIR.

Silverlight 4 makes it seem that Microsoft is closing in on Adobe and their Flash software that could turn out to be clunky in comparison. You can read the full details and see more screenshots on the TechCrunch website.

Adobe Unleashes Flash Player 10.1 And AIR 2.0

J.R. Bookwalter — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:37:50 -0600

This morning, Adobe Systems made some dreams come true with pre-release updates to two of their key Internet products: Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0. The updates were previously announced in early October and previewed at the recent Adobe MAX 2009 event, but are now available for everyone.

While technically an Adobe Labs beta release, Flash Player 10.1 brings some significant performance enhancements for Mac, Windows and Linux users and their desktop browsers. Sadly, the mobile version of Flash Player is still missing in action, but is expected for Palm’s webOS later this year, with additional devices to be supported in 2010.

Flash Player and AIR both now include multi-touch support (including gestures), a global error handler and long-awaited local microphone access. Additional improvements on the AIR 2.0 front include a native process API, mass storage device detection, open document API, improved socket support and speedier WebKit.

Windows PCs and notebooks also get hardware decoding of H.264 video out of Flash Player, but this feature isn’t yet available to other systems: “H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS,” reads Adobe’s tech notes. “Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.”

Tech blogs have been buzzing this morning with early reports that Flash Player 10.1 still features some major playback improvements for Mac users, however, particularly with full-screen Hulu.com viewing. Using a Mac Pro, Anandtech saw their CPU utilization go from 450% CPU load to only 190%. “With actual GPU-accelerated H.264 decoding I’m guessing those CPU utilization numbers could drop to a remotely reasonable value,” they reported.

Both updates are available now at the Adobe Labs site.

Podcast #114: Apple TV Gets an Update and Adobe Taunts Apple

Mac|Life Staff — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:37:06 -0600

The Apple TV makes its way back into the Apple news cycle with an OS update. The Apple TV also gets to ride the coat tails of the report that Apple is shopping a $30 a month TV subscription service to television networks.

Finally, Adobe gets all passive aggressive on Apple with its latest jab at the iPhone's lack of Flash.

Got a question, but you're afraid to leave a voice message because of Witness Relocation Dept. rules? Drop us a question via Twitter twitter.com/maclife.

This week's Battlestar Applactica picks:

Gowalla - Free

Instapaper - Free

Don't forget, the Mac|Life staff would love to hear your thoughts, comments and ideas for the new podcast. Just leave a message on the Mac|Live question/comment line: (877) 404-1337, extension 622. Please limit the length of your messages to 1 minute max. We'll review these calls each week and feature our favorites, along with responses, on that week's podcast.

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Adobe Taunts Apple, Still No iPhone Flash

J Keirn-Swanson — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:38:56 -0600

While many of us are familiar with the teeny little cube informing us that we've ended up at a Flash-based site on our iPhones, it appears that Apple's intransigence on the software plug-in has irked Adobe.

Go to Adobe's site on your phone to download Flash and you'll get this tight-lipped message:

Despite an announcement at the beginning of the year that Apple and Adobe were going to attempt working together to bring some form of Flash to the iPhone, nothing on the horizon seems to suggest this is any closer to happening. While Steve Jobs thinks full-fledged Flash is too bloated for the iPhone and Flash Lite is too wimpy, no one seems to be talking much about his desired "missing product in the middle."

It's unlikely that Adobe's passive aggressive message is likely to have much of an effect, but it is a nice reminder of where to put the blame for this particular lack on the iPhone.

Adobe Launches Photoshop.com Mobile for the iPhone

Roberto Baldwin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:30:43 -0500

Adobe announced the release of Photoshop.com Mobile for the iPhone today. The new app is free and gives you access to your Photoshop.com gallery and gives you the ability to edit photos on your iPhone and upload them to Photoshop.com.

Photoshop.com users get 2GB of storage. Adobe states the storage equals over 1,500 photos. That's a lot of cat pictures.

The new app allows user to crop, rotate, flip and adjust the color of photos on your iPhone, including the ability to transform the image to black and white.Most of these controls are utilized via gestures. Slide your finger to the left or right to adjust the exposure for example.

Podcast #110: Creating iPhone Apps with Flash and More Mac Rumors

Mac|Life Staff — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:10:32 -0500

Adobe announced that Flash Professional CS5 will allow developers to create native iPhone apps and we discuss the pros and cons of the announcement and ready ourselves for the upcoming swarm of Flash games converted to iPhone games in the App Store.

A Google ad sets the rumor world ablaze with speculation. Macs gain a few percentage points in the American home and we invite you to join our DonorsChoose '09 Challenge.

Got a question, but you're afraid to leave a voice message because of Witness Relocation Dept. rules? Drop us a question via Twitter twitter.com/maclife.

This week's Battlestar Applactica picks:

Annoy-A-Teen - $.99

To subscribe to the Mac|Live podcast series through an RSS feed, click here; if you want to subscribe through the iTunes Store, click here.

Flash CS5 Will Let You Create Native iPhone Apps [Updated]

Roberto Baldwin — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:53:30 -0500

Today Adobe announced that Flash Professional CS5 will allow Flash developers and designers to create native iPhone apps.

The applications are built using the current rules of Apple's iPhone Developer Program. They are designed and built utilizing Action Script 3 with Flash platform tooling. Developers can take advantage of the accelerometer and the multi-touch capabilities of the iPhone using Flash Professional CS5.

This is pretty exciting, especially when you consider the amount of Flash games on the Web right now that are unavailable on the iPhone.

Adobe showcased a few applications that have already been built using Flash Professional CS5 that are already in the App Store.

Fickleblox - $.99

Chroma Circuit - $.99

Updated: If you're interested in joining the public beta of Flash Professional CS5, sign up here. Adobe told us that it would be live before the end of the calendar year. A release date for the CS5 Suite hasn't been set yet. Adobe updates their CS suite every 18 to 24 months.

As of now, there is no word on if iPhone features beyond multi-touch and the accelerometer, like the compass, camera, etc, will be available via the Adobe Flash Professional CS5 developing environment.

If you plan on developing an app using Flash CS5, check out this Adobe Developer Connection blog posting about using the upcoming Flash app to develop for iPhone.The most interesting part is how the porcess works:

How it all works

We enabled this by using the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure. LLVM is a modular, flexible compiler system that is used widely in a variety of projects. The key reason we choose LLVM is its flexibility and applicability to iPhone development.

We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code. We call this Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation—in contrast to the way Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR function on the desktop using Just in Time (JIT) compilation. Since we are able to compile ActionScript to ARM ahead of time, the application gets all the performance benefits that the JIT would offer and the license compliance of not requiring a runtime in the final application.

By doing the compilation step, we allow developers to create applications using their Flash skills and their knowledge of ActionScript 3. In the process, we also expose the APIs that developers are familiar with so they can not only use the ActionScript language but follow the customary app-building model. When you build your application for the iPhone, there is no interpreted code and no runtime in your final binary. Your application is truly a native iPhone app.

We'll keep an eye on this as it unfolds.