Adobe Introduces Creative Suite 4 Product Family

For immediate release

Radical Workflow Breakthroughs, New Levels of Flash Expressiveness and Integration Anchor Adobe’s Biggest Software Release

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sept. 23, 2008 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 product family, a milestone release of the industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Delivering radical workflow breakthroughs that bring down the walls between designers and developers — and packed with hundreds of feature innovations—the new Creative Suite 4 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production. With new levels of integration and expressiveness for Flash technology across the entire product line, Adobe’s biggest software release to date includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design editions, Creative Suite 4 Web editions, Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, as well as 13 point products, 14 integrated technologies and seven services.

Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection CS4 combines virtually all of Adobe's new design and development applications, technologies and services in a single box — the most comprehensive creative environment ever delivered.

“Designers and developers are shaping the way that people consume information, share ideas, sell products, tell stories and create memorable experiences — in print, online and via mobile handsets,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe. “Whether you’re creating a rich Internet application, a video or a best-selling magazine, Adobe Creative Suite 4 delivers powerful cross-media technologies that have the ability to elevate products, brands and ideas above the clutter.”

Adobe Creative Suite 4 offers unprecedented choice among editions and stand-alone products, with comprehensive support for the most cutting-edge workflows for virtually any design discipline. Customers can choose from six suites or full version upgrades of 13 stand-alone applications, including Photoshop® CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, InDesign® CS4 (see separate releases), Illustrator® CS4, Flash® CS4 Professional, Dreamweaver® CS4, After Effects® CS4, and Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4.

A simplified workflow in Adobe Creative Suite 4 enables users to design across media more efficiently by making it easier to complete common tasks and switch between mediums without leaving a project. InDesign CS4 includes a new Live Preflight tool that allows designers to catch production errors and a newly customizable Links panel to place files more efficiently. The revolutionary new Content-Aware Scaling tool in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended automatically recomposes an image as it is resized, preserving vital areas as it adapts to new dimensions. An expanded version of Dynamic Link in CS4 Production Premium enables users to move content between After Effects CS4, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, Soundbooth® CS4, and Encore® CS4, so updates can be seen instantly without rendering.

Designers using the Adobe Creative Suite 4 product family will be able to gain unprecedented creative control using the new expressive features and visual performance improvements in Adobe Flash Player 10 to deliver breakthrough Web experiences across multiple browsers and operating systems.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 brings 3D center-stage providing the ability to paint, composite, and animate 3D models using familiar tools. Flash CS4 Professional now offers the ability to apply tweens to objects instead of keyframes, providing greater control over animation attributes. Also in Flash, the new Bones tool helps create more realistic animations between linked objects. With a searchable library of more than 450 dynamically updated device profiles from leading manufacturers, Adobe Device Central CS4 (see separate release) enables users to easily test mobile content designed using many of the Creative Suite 4 products.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 significantly expands access to services* available to creative professionals and developers who want to collaborate online. Adobe ConnectNow, a service of Acrobat.com, can be accessed from InDesign CS4, Illustrator CS4, Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Extended CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks® CS4, and Acrobat® 9 Pro, allowing real-time collaboration with two colleagues or clients. Designers can also share color harmonies with Adobe Kuler™, which is now accessible from within InDesign CS4, Illustrator CS4, Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Extended CS4, Flash CS4 and Fireworks CS4. Other online resources include: Adobe Community Help for technical questions; Resource Central for accessing video and audio product-related news and tutorials, as well as Soundbooth scores, sound effects, and other stock media; and Adobe Bridge Home, a customizable resource for tips, tutorials, news and inspirational content.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 and its associated point products are scheduled to ship in October 2008 with availability through Adobe Authorized Resellers and the Adobe Store at www.adobe.com/go/gn_store . Estimated street price for the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium will be US$1799, US$1699 for Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium, US$1699 for Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, and US$2499 for Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection. Adobe plans to offer tiered upgrade pricing from previous versions. For a limited time, validly licensed customers of eligible versions of Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Production Studio and Macromedia Studio will be able to upgrade to Creative Suite 4 for the CS3 upgrade price. For more detailed information about features, upgrade policies, pricing, and international versions please visit: www.adobe.com/creativesuite .

Adobe Flash Player 10 is currently available in beta as a free download from Adobe Labs at www.adobe.com/go/astro with general availability expected by the end of the year. Adoption of the previous update to Adobe Flash Player 9 set all-time records by achieving over 80 percent reach on Internet enabled desktops in less than six months and Flash Player 10 is expected to achieve a similar adoption rate.

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information - anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com .

Video Training Review: Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color With Deke McClelland From Lynda.com.

Written by T. Michael Testi

Based on the device-independent CIE specification from 1976, Lab color is often thought of as a high tech, labor-intensive color space. In many cases, Lab color performs certain types of color modifications more quickly and with better, more effective results than RGB. In Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color, Deke McClelland explores how to use Lab color "to make bad photographs great and great photographs even better." He demonstrates image manipulations that are best suited to Lab, and walks through a typical, non-destructive Lab correction. Deke also shows how to correct lighting, apply selective color modifications, and reverse the effects of color cast.

Your trainer for this library is Deke McClelland. In 1985, Deke McClelland oversaw the implementation of the first personal computer-based production department in Boulder, Colorado. Deke McClelland is a well-known expert and lecturer on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and the broader realm of computer graphics and design. To date, he has written 85 books that have been translated into 24 languages, with more than four million copies in print. This library is divided into five lessons and runs six and a half hours.

Lesson 1, "What Lab Color Is" begins with defining what Lab color is. Designed decades ago, Lab color has been available in Adobe Photoshop for over 10 years. Unlike the RGB and CMYK color spaces, Lab color is an optional color space but is often overlooked or considered too difficult to use but can save time and can make your images look better.

Here you will learn not to fear the Lab mode, you will learn why color is 3D, how to mix Lab colors, as well as other explanations of what Lab Color is. You will learn about the hue/saturation color wheel, the Lab color wheel, the different channels between the three color spaces, and how channels blend in Lab mode.

Lesson 2, "What Lab Color Can Do", at least according to McClelland, is "blow your mind." It will have a profound effect on your images, it will surprise you with its power, and it will just simply amaze you. This is where you will see how bad becomes great, and great becomes better. You will see how to favor yellow to balance skin tones, drop out the blues, correct a very bad image in Lab, sharpen luminance independent of color, and sharpen for effect and blur away noise.

Lesson 3, "A Typical, Nondestructive Lab Correction" now focuses on more realistic problems — not making the bad great or the great better, but rather how to make the okay or average image much better. You know those images where the colors are drab, the contrast is lackluster, or other problems where the image does not live up to what you saw when you pressed the shutter release. Here you will see a more typical scenario in which you convert an image to Lab and apply adjustment layers, turn the image into a smart object and sharpen it and turn that into an RGB image to resolve the chromatic aberrations — all without harming a pixel.

Lesson 4, "Correcting Color Cast and Lighting" examines images with bigger issues; color casts, blown highlights, and other lighting problems. Here you will learn how to identify a color cast, how to adjust for it, how to brighten shadows, how to dim highlights, and how to bring out all the details that your image has to offer.

Lesson 5, "Selective Color Modifications" is more selective than corrective. This is helpful when you want to use an image and selectively change the color of, say, a shirt and produce different color versions. You begin by changing the color of a car without any masking and then move on to changing a shirt and tie color using a mask created by a Lab/RGB cross-pollination technique.

Once again Deke McCelland's conversational style and wit makes this a very easy to understand topic for such a complex one, and it is extremely entertaining as well. While there are a lot of camps on whether one should use the Lab color space or not, I think that if you are serious about bringing out the best in color in your images, then you owe yourself this opportunity to learn and really understand it. It is for that reason that I very highly recommend this video.

You can get Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color two ways. One is as a DVD training package Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color and the other is part of the online training experience at Lynda.com. The DVD Training Package is $99.95 USD and contains everything you need.

The online training Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color comes in three flavors. A monthly subscription at $25 USD gets you all of the videos that are available online (approximately 30,768 videos on 458 topics at this time) or you can save a little with an annual subscription at $250 USD. A premium subscription at $375 USD per year gets all the videos as well as all of the exercise files. Take note that the exercise files are not included with the monthly or annual subscriptions. They are included only on the DVD and premium subscriptions.

You can use Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color as a training program for the individual student, and it's also good for the college or vocational teacher looking to supplement their educational materials. It is of benefit to anyone who needs help understanding the Lab color space. You can also try out some lessons for free at Lynda.com.

Software Review: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

Written by T. Michael Testi

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is the much anticipated second version of Adobe's highly praised photo management and editing system. Photoshop Lightroom 2 adds new editing tools as well as enhances the existing environment, while at the same time reduces the dependence on Adobe's Photoshop.

On the outside, Photoshop Lightroom 2 retains much of the look and feel of its predecessor, while providing many workflow improvements that will have current users singing its praises. As well as the expected improvements to existing functionality that one would anticipate in a version two product, there are also a lot more features to improve your importing, processing, managing, and the showcasing of your images.

Before we look at the improvements and enhancements, what do you need to run Lightroom 2? You will need Windows XP SP2 or Vista on an Intel Pentium 4 - 1.4 GHz or higher, or Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 on PowerPC G4 or G5, or Intel Based Processor, 1GB RAM 1 GB hard drive space, 1024x768 display, and CD-ROM Drive.

For those who are new to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I find that there is still some confusion between Lightroom and Photoshop. The basic difference it that Photoshop is an image editing program. It has the big guns to do just about anything you want to an image. What it doesn't have is true image management, organization, and workflow processing that a photographer might want and need. Sure, it has Adobe Bridge, and that works great to a point, but for someone who is a photographer; whether professional or hobbyist, it really is not enough.

That is where Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 comes in. It has all of the things that Adobe Bridge was missing; these include things like advanced file management, enhanced printing capabilities, and easy web output. Lightroom then adds much of those image processing capabilities that Photoshop contains and are used by photographers. It puts it all into a single package.

Does that mean that you no longer need Photoshop? For some that answer would be yes. In fact Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is the better choice, especially for those who do not do a lot of advanced processing. For others, Lightroom is a better way to get to that point where they send their file to Photoshop for additional enhancements.

So what is new with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2?

• Local Adjustment Brush - gives you a more flexible method to apply more accurate enhancements by targeting a specific area of a photo for dodging, burning, as well as other local adjustments. Make exposure, brightness, clarity, or other enhancements exactly where you want them.

• Multiple monitor support - now can take advantage of a second monitor attached to your system. You can configure your workspace to manage image workflow and presentation more effectively. You can open a view of say your Library module in a second monitor while working on printing in your first monitor.

• Extensible architecture - gives you the accessibility of the wide range of plug-ins to help you quickly and easily transfer your images to your favorite sharing sites and photo labs.

• Volume management - allows you to manage and organize your images across multiple drives and continue to work with the high-resolution previews; even when your originals are off line. A Volume Browser lets you check the status of local and networked volumes at a glance.

• Smart collections - can be created based on metadata rules that you specify. Smart collections automatically stay up-to-date with the photos that meet the criteria that you specify.

• 64-bit processing support - lets you utilize the advanced memory handling capabilities of the latest Mac OS and Windows based systems.

• Improved organizational tools - now lets you sort and filter large volumes of photos using powerful metadata filters that let you quickly find the photo that you want.

• Better nondestructive photo editing - lets you adjust and enhance color, exposure, and tonal curves nondestructively on more than 190 camera raw file formats, as well as JPEG, TIFF, and PSD files.

• Enhanced Photoshop CS3 integration - now works with Smart Objects, panorama stitching, High Dynamic Range (HDR) functionality, multiple layer workflow and more. Your work in Photoshop is automatically updated in Photoshop.

• Improved Batch Processing - lets you quickly import large volumes of photos from cameras or camera cards, and automatically renaming files, organizing them into folders, and making nondestructive adjustments.

• Enhanced Output Sharpening - will help you improve the appearance of your photos with enhanced algorithms that can automatically sharpen photos when you export files or output print and web creations.

• Better printing - now gives you more ways to quickly arrange a photo for printing multiple sizes on one or many pages, with more flexible and customizable templates to better use your paper and ink resources. You can create picture packages that contain one photo in a variety of sizes on a page.

There are a lot of improvements in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. To begin with, the better disk-based management and volume monitor. Now there is a more disk-based browser to the folders where your images are so you can more easily see where everything is. It will even let you know when your disk is getting full.

Then there is the smarter keywording. Key word suggestions are now much more intelligent. When you use a lot of words in combination, Lightroom remembers and by using one, the other common ones are moved to the top of the list.

I love the localized adjustments in the Develop module. You can paint an area in which you want to make your adjustment. Once you have your area brushed in, you adjust it further to intensify or reduce the effect. The fact that you can open your files in Photoshop as Smart Objects to tweak your Lightroom adjustments is wonderful. You can merge multiple exposures to a single Photoshop HDR. Select multiple images to merge as a panorama. The list goes on.

While I was disappointed that third party filters were not included in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, there is a little crack in the dike, in that there is an export module plug-in framework that will let you export your photos to a website, assuming there is a plug-in available. Adobe has even created an exchange site for those who want to list their plug-ins so perhaps this will be a feature in the future.

Overall, I think that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is a significant upgrade or new purchase. The upgrade is $99, and as a new purchase it sells for $299. If your focus is photography, this upgrade really expands on the base functionality of version 1 and makes it a must-have, in my opinion. While I will continue to use Adobe Photoshop for my heavy duty work, when dealing with photos, my first stop is always Lightroom.

 

Technorati Tags: Lightroom 2,Photography,Software,Photoshop

Book Review - Real World Color Management: Second Edition by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy, and Fred Bunting

Written by T. Michael Testi

No matter how much thought and preparation a photographer, artist, or designer puts into the color scheme for a project, unless that color is transposed to the correct output, all of the work is for naught. If your results do not meet the expectation, you may as well not waste your time, money, and energy.

The goal of Real World Color Management, the revised second edition, is to ensure that you know everything that you need to know about color management so that whether your final output is print, web, or film, your expectations will be met and you will achieve the color fidelity that you need to get your job done. Real World Color Management Second Edition is 608 pages in length, contains 18 chapters and divided into four parts. I will highlight the breakdown of the four parts

Part I, "Introduction to Color Management," encompasses the first four chapters and it lays the groundwork for the remainder of the book. Here you will explore topics such as what is color? Computers and color, color management, and examine what profiles are. While you don't have to be a color expert to use color management, you do have to have understanding of the fundamentals to understand the problems that color management addresses.

You also must understand the fact that computers know nothing about color except what people tell them. Because computers understand numbers, to get devices to understand what you mean when you say "red" you must learn to communicate to these different electronic devices with kind of numbers that they understand. To do this you will learn about color management and how they relate to device profiles; a file that correlates device color values with corresponding device-independent color values that represent the actual color that people see.

Part II, "Building and Tuning Profiles," explains the fact that color management succeeds or fails based on the accuracy of the profiles that we use to describe the way our color reproduction devices behave. In these next five chapters you will look at real world techniques for creating, evaluating, tuning and maintaining device profiles. You start by learning about measurement, calibration, and process control. Then you learn about building display profiles so that you can see the correct color on your display.

Next you will see how to build input profiles; a profile for an input device such as a digital camera, or scanner, because until you are sure that what is coming in is correct there is no way to really measure what is going out. Then you move on to the output profile which is what is used to calibrate devices like printers, or profiling devices. Next you learn how to evaluate and edit your profiles. By learning to evaluate, you see how far off you really are from the desired output. Getting good profiles requires attention to detail and persistence. Getting a great profile takes even more work.

Part III, "Applications and Workflow," now gets into the fact that color management is only useful if it can be integrated into a working production system. Here the final nine chapters look at color management workflow both from an analytic standpoint and the then from a practical standpoint. You begin with the major principles that govern how you configure your applications from capture through editing to final output. Next you see how the flow works through your operating system and how things are handled there.

Then you will spend several chapters looking at how products like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, CorelDRAW, and QuarkXPress handle the color technology. Next you will learn how to automate process' using scripting to speed up your work, and finally you will pull it all together by building a working color management workflow

Part IV, "Appendices," contains supplementary material that gets to more detail than would be possible if trying to contain them within some a chapter. One item is getting into the down and dirty details of an ICC profile structure. Here you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about building a profile. Then you are provided with workflow template that you can use to model you own workflow around. Finally there is a twenty page glossary of terms that give better understanding to the terms used throughout the book.

Real World Color Management is not for the timid who wants to get better prints without any work or thought. In fact it is subtitled "Industrial Strength Production Techniques." But, if you are willing to spend some time and effort on learning these techniques, it is probably the most thorough, and easy to understand book on color management on the today.

Granted the Real World Color Management is a couple years old, but it still retains the fundamental knowledge that you need to produce high quality profiles. The other thing is that you do not have to read every word and learn every theoretical discussion to get a lot from this book. Getting the basics from part I, learning to calibrate and do print profiles from part II and discovering a workable workflow from part III will fill many needs. The nice thing is that when you want to learn more, it's here. I very highly recommend Real World Color Management.

Software Review: Adobe Photoshop Plug-in - Silver Efex Pro From Nik Software

Silver Efex Pro is the latest addition to Nik's collection of digital photographic filters and effects for Adobe Photoshop. This is a brand new product that is aimed at creating dynamic black and white images by offering the traditional tools of the darkroom while including the flexibility and precision of digital photography.

Not only is Silver Efex Pro a black and white converter, it contains Nik's premier U Point technology that gives you pinpoint control over what you want to do. No longer are you limited to working with global changes and masking to accomplish your goals. Rather, now you can precisely control specific areas of your image with a couple of clicks of your mouse.

What do you need to run Silver Efex Pro? System requirements are Windows 2000 Pro or better, Mac OS 10.4 or better, 512 MB, and Photoshop 7 through CS3 on Windows, CS2 and CS3 on Mac, Photoshop Elements 2.0 or better on Windows, 4.0 and 6.0 on Mac, or any image editing software program that accepts Adobe Photoshop Plug-ins.

Basically, the Silver Efex Pro workflow works like this. Launch Photoshop, open an image, and open Silver Efex Pro from the filter menu, which will open the Silver Efex interface. By default, the Style Browser with sample thumbnails of your image will appear on the left hand side of the interface. On the right side are the enhancement controls.

Once you select the style from the left that most closely represents what you want to accomplish, you can use the enhancement control options on the right to make global adjustments to the image. These include controls to adjust the brightness and contrast, and structure sliders.

Next you can use the U Point Control Points to selectively control where each filter is applied to the images. This allows you to control the effect without having to use selections and/or masking. By placing Control Points on an image, you can control brightness, contrast, and structure to fine tune certain areas of your images independently of the rest of the photo.

The next set of controls are the Color Filters. These work much in the same way that traditional color filters work when used with panchromatic black and white films; objects of the color of the filter are lightened while objects the opposite of the filter's colors are darkened.

Then you have the film type selection. Here you get 18 different film types based on the most popular black and white films. These include ISOs from 32 to 3200 and film types from manufacturers like Agfa, Ilford, Kodak, and Fuji. For each you can control grain, sensitivity, and tone curve.

Finally, you have the Stylizing section which gives you control adding tints, tones, as well as allowing you to dodge and burn the image. Here you can add a classic vignette, burn the edges, or perform an unending set of task by using the collection of stylizing tools, or creating your own new looks.

If you are using Adobe Photoshop, you also have the ability to use a powerful selective tool. This gives you access to Silver Efex Pro and allows you to brush filter effects into your image using any brush available in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Layers and masks are created allowing you to apply enhancements to precise areas of your image.

While it is easy to like the preset styles, what makes this so strong a feature is the ability to modify and add styles to your collection so that when you get something that you like, you can use it again and again. You can also export the styles as individual styles such that you can share amongst friends as well. You can even fine tune a style and use the update feature. If you have Dfine 2.0, Viveza, or Color Efex Pro 3.0, the installer will update the existing Selective tool which lets you access all of these plug-ins from the same Selective tool.

Nik Silver Efex ProI think that Sliver Efex Pro is another great addition to the photographer's tool box. I love the ease of use and the flexibility that this plug-in gives me. What would take a lot of work traditionally in Photoshop is accomplished in a fraction of the time. Want to see more? Check out the series of lesson videos that Nik has put together. Better yet get the 15-day free trial and play with it yourself.


At $199.95, Silver Efex Pro will pay for itself many times over, but from now until September 15, 2008, every copy of Nik Silver Efex Pro sold in North America will include a free sample pack of Gekko Fine Art Collection inkjet papers from Pictorico. This includes two sheets each of 4 paper types: Award winning Gekko Green (Glossy), Gekko Blue (Luster), Gekko Red (Cotton), and Gekko Black (Matte). If you want to do black and white and do it with spectacular results then I highly recommend Silver Efex Pro from Nik Software.

Software Review - Adobe Photoshop Plug-in - Dfine 2.0 From Nik Software

Written by T. Michael Testi

Dfine 2.0 is the long awaited update to Dfine 1.0; the Noise Reduction product from Nik Software that is redefining noise reduction for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. That leads to the question "What is Noise?" Noise is the unwanted imperfections created by digital cameras as they try to capture the digital image. The amount of noise that is generated is determined by the quality and type of image sensor that created the image.

Dfine is a plug-in to Adobe Photoshop and other image editing applications; ones that support Photoshop Plug-ins, that can help you reduce noise in your images. Its goal is to reduce noise while still maintaining the detail and sharpness and therefore improving the quality of every image. Dfine will help fix problems due to fast or high ISO speeds as well as low light levels. It even works on JPEG artifacts.

So what is new with Dfine 2.0? Well first we have U Point® Technology; a dynamic and flexible technology that provides photographers a new way for editing digital images with out layers, masks or selections. It does this by using algorithms which consider relationships between color and light. It was first featured in Nikon's Capture NX Software. This allows you to reduce noise only where needed by using U Point Control Points
There is also Selective Functionality. This can be done three ways. As said before, it can be done by using control points. It can also be done by using Color Ranges; this is done by selecting to reduce noise within individual color ranges and is generally best done when working in a batch process. Lastly there is the Selective Tool. By using the brush tool in Photoshop or Elements, you can manage layers and layer masks.

Dfine has added a brand new reduction engine that provides noise reduction while retaining a great deal of detail. This can reduce the need to purchase camera profiles and it fine-tunes images by using automatic camera profiling.

Finally there is an updated interface. This will allow you to resize and in general, more easily incorporate Dfine into your workflow. You can see from the image below the redefined interface.

The program is very easy to use. Effectively you measure the noise and choose your method of reduction; whole, color range, or control points. You can then preview the image's detail before and after noise reduction with a variety of methods. Once you are happy with the reduction, click OK and your changes will be applied

I like Dfine 2.0's simplicity and ease of use. It takes a complicated process and brings it into your workflow without impeding it. If you want to see more you can watch some of the lesson videos or you can get a 15-day free trial. If you are already sold on Dfine, you can purchase it new for $99 USD and $69.95 USD for the upgrade from version 1.0.

 

Technorati Tags: Nik Software,Dfine,Plug-in,Photoshop

Software Review - Adobe Photoshop Plug-in Color Efex Pro 3.0 From Nik Software

Written by T. Michael Testi

Color Efex Pro 3.0 is the latest update to Nik's collection of digital photographic filters and effects for Adobe Photoshop. Version 3 has been updated for speed, a new interface, and something called U Point technology.

Color Efex Pro 3.0 contains four different types of enhancements; traditional filters, color correction, retouching and creative enhancements. It contains 52 filters that contain over 250 unique effects, and with the fact that you can combine them, it makes the possibilities limitless.

System requirements are Windows 2000 or better, Mac OS 10.4 or better, 256 MB RAM (512 MB Recommended), and Photoshop CS2, CS3, Photoshop Elements 4.0, or any image editing software program that accepts Adobe Photoshop Plug-ins.

Basically, the Color Efex Pro 3.0 workflow goes like this. Launch Photoshop, open an image, and open Color Efex Pro from the filter menu which will open the interface. By default, the filter list will appear on the left hand side of the interface. This is an alphabetical list of the available filters. They are categorized by topics such as portrait, landscapes, etc. Since there are three versions of Color Efex Pro the number of filters may vary. The standard edition contains 15 Filters, the Select Edition contains 35 filters, and the Complete Edition contains 52 filters. You can check out which filters are available from the Nik Website

Once you select your filter, you are given options to make adjustments to the filter. Then you can use the U Point Control Points to selectively control where each filter is applied to the images. This allows you to control the effect without having to use selections and/or masking. By placing Control Points on an image, you can control color, tone, and light on your image. These might be sky, skin, clothing etc.

Essentially you take this Control Point and drop it on the image. You can then adjust the area and the opacity of the image. You have a 0% control point that begins at no opacity and has not filter effect, and you have full opacity which fully enables the filter. You can then see what the effects of the Control Points from the modes pull down menu.
After setting your values and Control Points, you can then preview the image either side by side or in a split view mode. Once you are happy with the effects, you can then press the OK button and the effects will be applied to your image.

Another new feature is the interface which now features a much larger preview than before. To many people, this alone would be worth the price of upgrade over version 2. Color Efex Pro 3.0 now can use the full screen of your monitor.

The new Selective tool automates the creation of layers and layer masks within Adobe Photoshop. You can pinpoint your filter by simply brushing on the filter effects to your image. Color Efex Pro 3.0 handles the layer masks behind the scenes. It is also great for Wacom Pen Tablet use as well. This effect is only available in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

I think that Color Efex Pro 3.0 is a great addition to the photographer's tool box. The new filters, which include Bleach Bypass, Cross Balance, Film Effects, Film Grain, Glamour Glow, Low Key, High Key, Polaroid Transfer and Tonal Contrast, along with the enlarged preview, and the Selective tool are well worth the upgrade.

As advertised Color Efex Pro is very fast and very easy to use. Because of the U Control Point and Selective tools, you don't have to be an expert at using layers and layer masks; granted you won't have as much control as you would if you did, but this is so much faster. The biggest downside to Color Efex Pro is that it will take time to learn what works and what doesn’t. Color Efex Pro is highly recommended.

 

Technorati Tags: Nik Software,Plug-in,Color Efex,Photoshop