Month: September 2008

Photoshop CS4

I have been beta testing Photoshop/Bridge CS4 over the last few months and I’m pleased to say there are some real improvements to the stability, speed and usability of the programs.

Most of the improvements benefit high end rather than production retouching (rotating canvas, content aware scale etc), I have used these tools for real retouching jobs and been suitably impressed.

On the downside metadata handling has not been improved (The same “Multiple values” bug when appending keywords and captions as per CS3) and there is still no central configuration system for all the varied settings.

As far as I can see all my client CS3 actions run without modification on CS4 – will check this when I recieve the retail code.

I will contine to support CS3 for the forseable future so dont feel you will be left behind if you don’t upgrade. Workflow and retouching workshops can be held with either CS3 or CS4.

Stephen

VAT Calculator (updated)

I originally posted this in 2005 but noticed recently from the log files that the original file was moved some time ago in a reorganisation.
I have restored the file so the link works now:

As some of you know, I use Visual Basic to make custom windows programs. Most of these programs are highly specialized and written to fit into a specific workflow. Occasionally I write something a bit more general. VAT-calc is a tiny application that presents just three fields. You can enter a number into any of these fields and the other fields update to provide the missing figures. So for instance if you know the price including vat then just enter this figure in the inc field and the program will show you the VAT exclusive price and the VAT value. All very useful stuff if you are VAT registered.

You can buy vatcalc from the store link on this website.

Image investment

One of the main problems in delivering high technical quality images to the market has been the cost of suitable digital cameras.

Affordability has been pretty poor in the last few years but with the resourgence of competition between Nikon and Canon nobody should be very far away from at least 12megapixel bodies which I consider to be the minimum requirement for high end stock.

Canon today released details of the 5D MKII which with 21mp and a price of £2300 means that anyone earning a reasonable amount from stock can up the quality of their shots and potentially get sales from bigger (and better) repro uses.

It goes without saying that technical quality isnt the end of the story, but I have retouched too many fantastic images that were too small for even full page use….

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0809/08091705canon_5dmarkII.asp