MacDirectory Magazine

REVIEW PHOTOSHOP CC > RAW POWER FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS WORDS BY RIC GETTER finally, there's a nifty Camera Shake reduction filter that smartly can reduce motion blur from a photo. It does fairly well and lets you pick out areas of blur for it to base its calculations on, but as you would expect, it does have its limits. Whether they're trying to create the most realistic image possible or the most surreal, photographers most often turn to Photoshop. The latest release, Photoshop CC offers some noteworthy new features. For photographers, what are arguably the most impressive benefits come from Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) 8.1 and the many new ways Photoshop CC takes advantage of raw-format images. Cloud Power With Adobe CC, the Cloud has come down to the desktop and is now as close as your menu bar. Adobe's recent acquisition of Behance means that you can share projects and portfolios. TypeKit offers access to a $7,000 font library, which is not limited to only your Adobe products. Creative Cloud also offers 20GB of storage and the ability to save Photoshop's settings to the Cloud so you can work in a familiar space virtually anywhere. Raw files are the corollary of the film negative. As in the days of film, you can change and adjust your digital image in any way you like, but the raw "negative" preserves all the original information of the image. Your changes are non-destructive; no pixels are blended out of existence as they are when you work outside of raw and you can always modify or remove your settings changes later. When you open a raw file in Photoshop, you'll be greeted by the newly expanded ACR 8.1 window. This is where many of our favorite new Photoshop features reside. The Radial Filter lets you apply a host of color and exposure settings to a circular or oblong region of the image (think vignetting on steroids). The Healing tool is now a full-fledged brush, so you can patch and correct different areas of the image with brushstroke precision. You can also perform smart perspective corrections in the ACR window. With a new option, Photoshop will look for the lines that should be horizontal or vertical and do the straightening for you (or at least make a really good guess to get you started). What is possibly the biggest news in ACR 8 for Photoshop is that you can now apply camera raw filters as Smart Objects in discreet layers within an image. A wider selection of filters can be applied to Smart Objects within layers. Among these, the Liquefy filter in particular stands out. Areas liquefy in real time, regardless of brush size. Sharpening Smarts Photoshop CC makes a few breakthroughs in its sharpening technology. The redesigned Smart Sharpen tool seemingly watches over your shoulder as you apply sharpening effects. It is context and content 46 MacDirectory As would make sense with their subscription model, the Photoshop Extended is the only CC version available. Though it will launch in Snow Leopard, Adobe reports that Mac OS versions earlier than 10.7 have not been fully tested. Now, nearly all the features of Photoshop CC support Retina displays (ACR 8.1 is Retinaready as well). Though the move to a subscription-only model for Adobe CC has been controversial, its many benefits can make it worth the move, particularly if you're a photographer who's primary focus it its flagship product, Photoshop. Product > Made by > Price > Adobe Photoshop CC Adobe Systems (Adobe.com) $49.99/mo. ($29.99/ mo. Upgrade from CS3 – 5.5 until 7/31/2013 System Requirements > Mac OS 10.7 or later; aware, with an uncanny ability, for example, to pick out the foreground object that needs to be sharpened without generating noise or unwanted texture in the soft background. The technology also improves how Photoshop up-samples images. A new Preserve Details option in the Image Size dialog interpolates, straightens and smooths the image as it's enlarged. And Pros > Cons > Rating > occasional Internet access; 512MB of VRAM for 3D features Powerful Camera Raw integration; Better cloud integration; Useful feature additions Only available through subscription

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