Thursday, February 28, 2008

Adobe Photoshop CS3

By Brian K. Duck, Product Review Editor

Introduction
For years, creative professionals such as designers, photographers, and prepress specialists have relied on Adobe Photoshop software to help turn imagination into powerful imagery. But Photoshop has also become the digital imaging standard for a wide array of other professionalsincluding people working with motion graphics for film and television; 2D and 3D design imagery in manufacturing, architecture, and engineering; and medical and scientific professionals dealing with specialized images. To best meet the diverse needs of all these professionals and more, Adobe now presents a choice of two versions of the software Photoshop CS3, and Photoshop CS3 Extended.

Both new versions help increase your productivity with streamlined workflows for every imaging task, getting you from start to finish faster. New palette management maximizes your workspace, and additional preset capabilities let you store even more of your favorite settings for reuse. The unrivaled editing power of Photoshop is enhanced with new live, re- editable filters; improved color-correction features including better brightness, contrast, and monochrome conversion; cloning and healing preview overlays; and improved perspective-based editing. And breakthrough compositing stems from new features that automatically align and blend multiple image layers, automated selection tools, and more.

Photoshop CS3 Extended builds on top of the digital imaging standard, by starting with all of the new features and enhancements in Photoshop CS3, and adding specialized features and tools designed especially for professionals in film and television, manufacturing, architecture and engineering, and medicine and science.  New 3D and motion support includes time-based cloning and healing on new video layers; 3D model visualization and texture editing; and export of 3D models from 2D images. And comprehensive image analysis comes from new 2D and 3D measurement tools, and support for DICOM images and MATLAB processing routines.

What’s New in Photoshop CS3 covers the features and enhancements that are common to both new versions of Photoshop, including:

Increased productivity and streamlined workflows—Photoshop CS3 comes with a wide array of new features and improvements to existing ones, but if there’s one thing you will notice immediately, it is this: Compared to previous versions of the software, Photoshop CS3 is just faster. As of December 1, 2006, beta versions of Photoshop CS3 are performing 40% faster than Photoshop CS2 on Intel-based Macs. The new Photoshop also gets you there faster with streamlined workflows stemming from new preset capabilities, redesigned palette management, and compatibility with the newest systems—including native Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on PowerPC and Intel processors, and Microsoft® Windows® Vista™.

Unrivaled editing—How do you improve on the kind of editing power and performance that are the professional standard in digital imaging? By going the extra mile in protecting the ultimate quality every step of the way, and by making even more of the features professionals rely upon live and re-editable. With Photoshop CS3, you can now apply, adjust, add, and remove filters at will, without starting over. Enhancements to color correction include easier, more powerful monochrome conversion, an improved Curves adjustment, and cloning and healing tools that now feature preview overlays and multiple source points.

Breakthrough compositing—Whether it’s a peak-to-shore panorama or creating that one perfect shot from a series of images, Photoshop CS3 makes compositing faster, easier, and better. Speed compositing by automatically aligning and blending layers. Make an image selection with one stroke of a brush. Perfect any selection edge in a easy-to-use, intuitive dialog box. 

Posted by Brian Duck on 02/28 at 09:34 PM
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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

O’Reilly News for User Group Members- February 2008

Get 35% off from O’Reilly, No Starch, Paraglyph, PC Publishing, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Rocky Nook, SitePoint, or YoungJin books you purchase directly from O’Reilly.
Just use code “DSUG” when ordering online or by phone 800-998-9938.
Free ground shipping on orders of $29.95 or more.

Also, view these links for upcoming events:

         

Posted by Brian Duck on 02/26 at 12:49 AM
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Thursday, February 21, 2008

WeibeTech’s Drive eRazor

by Brian K. Duck, Product Review Editor

What is Drive eRazer?
WiebeTech’s newest hardware solution completely erases all data from a hard drive quickly and easily. Stand-alone operation. No computer required! Faster than software.

Why use hardware?
Drive eRazer is faster than software programs, and Drive eRazer doesn’t tie up a computer. What’s more, it’s far easier. Simply connect it to a drive and flip a switch. No computer needed.

How fast is it?
Faster than software. A conservative estimate is 35MB/s. A 250GB drive would be fully erased in under two hours.*
Drive eRazer is faster than software programs, and Drive eRazer doesn’t tie up a computer. What’s more, it’s far easier. Simply connect it to a drive and flip a switch. No computer needed.

Ok, so I received a review unit from WeibeTech to try out.

First off the appearance and purpose of the unit is to safeguard data without using a dedicated computer to reformat disks. I’ve actually got a G4 setup in the basement for just this purpose.  It’s appropriately named “LabRAT” and is used for little else!

Why? Over the last few years, I’ve accumulated 3 different removable drive systems, two of which use (P)ATA drives. One of these the BayDock 800 was offered by Weibe and reviewed earlier. (It appears to be offline, the review may have been posted prior to the adoption of Expression Engine as our content management system, I’ll see if I can republish it later.)

Parallel-ATA drives MUST be formatted before installing in the Macintosh, the older OS would simply not mount an unformatted drive. No explanation was offered to the user.
(The Serial-ATA (SATA) drives are less of an issue because you are asked after installing and rebooting if you’d like to format the drive. Some of this functionality coincides with the release of Leopard, the lastest version of Mac OS X.)

However, with the Drive eRazora new drive can be prepared without a dedicated computer, and dropped into a tray ready to mount and use!

Posted by Brian Duck on 02/21 at 11:06 AM
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Thursday, December 13, 2007

Get the Last Word on Mac OS X Terminology

by Adam Engst, Publisher of TidBITS and the ‘Take Control’ series of eBooks.

We Mac users sling technical jargon around every day, but if you’ve ever felt uncertain about what a term actually means, help is here in “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” The ebook is a mad romp through over 500 Macintosh- and Internet-related terms. You’ll learn how to figure out if your optical drive can write to a double-layer DVD, why 404 and 501 are interesting numbers, how to work with the three main types of dashes that you can type on a Mac, and much more. We’re not talking about some dry old dictionary here - these definitions are loaded with useful tips, practical advice, humor, and empathy. If you enjoy the serendipity of discovering useful tips in unexpected places, you’ll love this ebook.

Order Here:
Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon

Written by veteran Macintosh authors Andy Baird and Sharon Zardetto, the 191-page ebook extends the familiar Take Control design with handy alphabetic navigation tabs on every page, oodles of custom graphics, and over 2,000 internal links. Want to learn more about a particular entry? Margin icons link to hand-picked external Web sites, TidBITS articles, and other Take Control titles. Save 10% off the $15 list price right now with the MUG discount embedded in the link above.

Still not sure? Check out the free 39-page sample to see what we mean!

Posted by Brian Duck on 12/13 at 07:09 PM
News • Operating Systems • Permalink

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Five new Take Control eBooks Launch You into Leopard: Save 30%!

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is finally here, and we can now share with you the fruits of an incredible amount of work over the last few months: five of our most popular ebooks completely updated for Leopard, and they’re all available right now, led by Joe Kissell’s essential ”Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard.” Once you’ve installed, our other ebooks will help you customize all of Leopard’s new features, share files much more elegantly than in the past, and manage your fonts with Leopard’s new font activation capabilities.

To the thousands of you who pre-ordered our Leopard ebooks, thanks!

You can now click the Check for Updates link (or red starburst) on your pre-order PDFs to download the full versions. If you haven’t yet ordered, we have three options for you:

1. Buy just the ebooks you want individually. They’re all $10, except for the 217-page “Take Control of Fonts in Leopard,” which is $15. If you’ve bought the Tiger or Panther versions of any of these ebooks,
click the Check for Updates button in your copy to save 20%. MUG members can - as always - save 10% with the links in this message, but the bundles are a better deal.

2. Buy our core “Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard” and “Take Control of Customizing Leopard” titles for $15, saving 25%. This bundle is linked on the left side of these books’ pages on our Web site.

3. Buy our “I Love Leopard” bundle of all five ebooks - over 650 pages in all! - for only $38.50, saving 30% off the cover price. Again, the bundle is accessible from the left side of each book’s Web page.

You can read more about each of the ebooks on our Web site, but if you really want to know…

Posted by Brian Duck on 12/01 at 07:21 PM
News • Operating Systems • Permalink
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