Photoshop to be Free and Online
Also, Mercury May Destroy Us All
Adobe has announced that it will be offering a lite online version of its image editing software for us absolutely free of charge. Of course there’s no telling if this will work or anyone who uses photoshop beyond the casual user would ever consider doing this but it’s certainly going to be an interesting experiment.
In other news, my copy of Lightroom is in the mail. I’ve already changed my workflow for retouching to incorporate some of the tools Lightroom offers. I was on a job a few days ago with Dana Hursey and got to see the full version in action in an actual tethered situation. He and I get along so great because we’re both tech heads and we are both totally in love with Adobe.
We had a lot of fun playing around with it. We were using a Canon EOS Mark II. It crashed a few times during the shoot. One of the set designers said it was probably because Mercury was in retrograde this week:
“Conversations and correspondence could be misunderstood. Internet communications may not connect including Internet banking. Be sure to back up your computer files, because Mercury can cause your computer to crash.“
I’d dismiss this as total bunk except that I once dated a girl who couldn’t wear any electronics because they’d short out. Her computer would inexplicably die every six months. I was present to see several such occurrences happen around her. Now, I have no explanation for this except that she was - well, as we say in the Latin, non compos mentis -so maybe her brain waves were so peculiar that it disrupted electrical systems.
That in mind, I guess I’ll make my decision about whether Lightroom it’s a buggy 1.0 software after March 7th.
So far I think that the time it takes to funnel the image from the camera to being loaded in Lightroom is about 30 seconds too slow but I hope that they’ll come out with some more direct means of importing photos than monitoring an active import folder.
I am totally in love with some of the other features though - particularly the cropping and color tools.
Friday, March 2, 2007
