Lunacore Photoshop Blog

Adobe released the beta of Photoshop CS3. This beta which can be downloaded from Adobe Labs is free for all licensed users of either the Photoshop CS2 (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Creative Suite 2 Standard or Premium (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Production Studio Standard and Premium (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Video Bundle (full, upgrade, and education) or Adobe Web Bundle (full, upgrade, and education).

If you’re not a licensed user of any of these products, then you’re only allowed to try out the product for 2 days.

Some of the new features/improvements:

- Auto align layers
- Auto blend for stitched images
- Smart filters (non-destructive filters (including Shadows and Highlight) which you can combine with a mask)
- Quick selection tool
- Device Central 1.0
- Adjustable Cloning and Healing with preview overlay
- Zoomify (Google maps style zoom interface for web based images)
- Improved Curves
- Enhanced Channel Mixer (filter presets)
- Refine Edge (to modify the edge of any selection)
- Refined interface (see examples below)
- Enhanced Brightness/Contrast
- New advanced Black and White conversion tool
- Improved print window
- 2 new blend modes: Lighter Color, Darker Color
- Enhanced Photo Merge function
- Enhanced Merge to 23-Bit HDR
- New Bridge version
- Improved vanishing point with multiple, adjustable angle perspective planes
- Camera Raw 4.0

For more detailed information and issues, check the release notes for Photoshop CS3.

There is also a Photoshop CS3 forum that you can visit here.

Visit MacWorld.com for a video interview with Photoshop’s senior product manager John Nack. At the end of the video Jason shows off some of Photoshop CS3’s new features.

Note: you can also download the complete interview on that same page. If you have problems with the file that you downloaded, then rename the extension .mov to .m4v

Also don’t forget to check out the web site of Photoshop guru Russell Brown, who just finished a few Photoshop CS3 video tutorials:

- CS3 Smart Filters
- CS3 The All New Photo Merge
- CS3 Converting Color to Black & White
- CS3 Auto-Align and Auto-Blend Layers
- CS3 The New Clone Source Feature

Also worth mentioning is that Lynda.com offers a free preview video training for Photoshop CS3 by no other than Deke McClelland.

My experience with Photoshop CS3 on a E6600 Core2Duo PC is that it runs fast and reliable, which is very positive considering it’s still a beta.
The redesigned palettes are something we all need to get used to, but I predict that in the long term most users are going to appreciate the changes. For now the feature I enjoy the most is smart filters.

I’m not a huge fan of copying photographs myself, but when someone achieves excellent results like this and is also willing to describe in text and pictures how she did it (important!), then that’s enough reason for me to mention it on the blog. The image was not traced, done in several layers and a tablet was used.

Note: the image that’s on this page is rather large (over 2MB), so be aware of that if you have a slow internet connection.

If you think that some Wacom tablets are pretty large, then think again, because the Conoto Graphics Tablet (or sometimes called AO+ Pen Table) is huge! You can read about it at Officeoftomorrow.org.

Also check out this video link.

Since we’re talking about tablets; if you think the beautiful Wacom Cintiq is too expensive with a $2500 street price, then you might consider to build one yourself (if you’re pretty technical) using the guidelines on this site.

Lunacore opened a new section called Reviews. The first review is a review of Neat Image, a product to remove noise, film grain, JPEG artifacts, moire patterns, color banding, etc.

Since Photoshop is closely connected to photography, I felt the need to share an interesting site with you.
Mike Hollingshead is storm chaser from Nebraska who has taken numerous pictures of several storms he chased and shares some of them on his web site ExtremeStability.com.
When I first saw some of his images I was extremely impressed. These are the kind of images that encourage me to be creative, either with a camera or Photoshop.
I wish you all a wonderful weekend.

Creating convincing water in Photoshop in not always an easy task for many people. However Photoshopcontest.com offers a well done tutorial that shows you how to make some pretty realistic looking water, check it out.

Driverheaven.net offers a simple way to test the speed of your current configuration of Photoshop.
You can download the test here and compare your results on this page.

Tests like these can be useful to find out how much hard- and software changes affect the overall performance of Photoshop. Feel free to check out related blog articles.

It’s time again for Scott Kelby, Dave Cross and Corey Barker to be your host at PhotoshopTV.

Subjects

- A quick way to keep only part of your image in color and make the rest black and white
- How to make a rose from scratch.
- A finishing touch using textures and the Displacement Map

To-Do List

- Check out the latest offerings at the Great American Photography Workshops
- Get the latest news reviews at PhotoshopNews.com
- Say hello to our pal, master photographer, Dave Black

Enrique at Photoshoproadmap has listed 5 plugins with a unique approach/concept:

- Altia PhotoProto
- Filter Forge (already discussed in two of my previous blog entries)
- AVBros. PageCurl Pro
- Knoll Light Factory
- Digital Element Verdant

Check it out at Photoshoproadmap.

Tim Shelbourne has written a good Photo to Pencil Sketch tutorial, that shows again that it’s often not just a matter of using a single Photoshop filter effect to create descent results. Tim has managed by using a brush to create one of the better sketch effects out there.