Photoshop

My photoshop experience is just beginning: with CS3. I balked at the expense for quite some time (and still do), but on the other hand, when you start to accumulate a significant investment in lenses and other gear, it starts to seem silly not to invest in an good image processing tool. I have been getting by with the GIMP for quite some time, and it is ok for many things, but it is time to dive in with photoshop. My biggest complaint is that I cannot run it under linux.

Linux, Wine, Lightroom, etc.

Some people do run photoshop under linux using the "wine" emulator. There used to be a 10 step tutorial written by a fellow who did this with CS2 under ubuntu, but it seems to have vanished, as such things so often do. Some googling will probably turn up other such things.

Another thing to investigate is lightroom, which is some kind of a cross between adobe camera raw and bridge. While I am still getting paid by the university I should be eligible to get it at educational pricing (around $100), which is a good deal (although 100 bucks is a hundred bucks!). However, a friend did this, tried it, and decided he had wasted $100 and now works with bridge + camera raw + photoshop.

Installing, Licensing, registering

The rules, once you have paid your hard earned money, is that you are allowed to install photoshop on two computers (the intention being a workstation and a laptop). If you are like me and have a windows desktop and a Macbook, you are sadly out of luck.

And what do you do if you upgrade your computer and want to reinstall and activate what would seem to be a third copy of photoshop. You get a 30 day grace period to do the activation, and I am told that you can get away with two activations in a 6 month period (they understand that people upgrade and repair computers). If you get into some mess with a flakey hard drive and a bunch of reinstalls, you will have to call them and explain what is going on and work things out.

Another tip on this business of migrating photoshop is that you can go to the photoshop help menu and select deactivate to abandon a copy on a computer being replaced or upgraded (this was with older photoshop versions circa 2008, but still seems to be the case with CS5 in 2011, but I haven't tried it yet). The license says you can install two copies, but can only use one at a time.

People who want to use photoshop with Wine under linux have worked out some of the technical details, see this link.

Support, Camera Raw, sad tales

In December of 2010, I poked around on the Adobe Site looking for the update to Camera Raw (namely 4.6), since my CS3 shipped with Camera Raw 4.0. I couldn't find it on their site, and called up tech support. Tech support had an automated thing that called me back after half an hour, and connected me with an nice Indian fellow who I could barely understand who informed me that CS3 was "no longer supported". Well, that is something for a product I spent almost $200 for (CS3 had a "lifetime" of about 1.5 years and people who bought it near the end of that span got only a few months of "support" and then were told to upgrade to CS4. Anyway, in January of 2011, I do a google search on Camera Raw 4.6 and it happily leads me to the Adobe website and provides me with Camera_Raw_4_6.zip. I guess Google beats adobe tech support hands down.

The Digital Darkroom

If you have ever read the 3 book set on photography by Ansel Adams, you realize that darkroom work was just as big a part of his photography as cameras and taking pictures. This is still how it is and should be, and anyone who is not paying attention to this part of the game is severely restricted. Remember that Adams did things like dodging and burning, contrast adjustment, cropping, and so forth in the darkroom. Using a tool like photoshop provides for many more possibilities (including the potential for things that ought not to be done). People were doing things that ought not to be done back in film days too don't forget, with double exposures, and solarization, and other kinds of manipulation, so this all cannot be blamed on the digital era.

It has been pointed out to me that you can spend as much or more than you spent on photoshop, buying books about photoshop. There do seem to be some good ones out there, here are some suggestions:

Rob Sheppard has cranked out a number of books (of which I have two). He has a style and approach that I find I can quickly agree with.

I don't have the lightroom book, and it looks like it is not yet available, but coming out in July of 2008 for $24.00.

Scott Kelby is a noted photoshop author and has written a pile of photoshop books. After initially rejecting his book after flipping through it, I bought a copy of: Adobe Photoshop CS3 for the Digital Photographer. I am delighted with it, and heartily recommend it.

The book: The art of Raw Conversion, by Uwe Steinmuller And Juergen Gulbins, is said to be "probably the best book on how to shoot in the raw format, managing color space and image work flow." I found a used copy on Amazon for $5.99 and just ordered it!!

Bruce Fraser (who recently died of lung cancer), wrote (or co-authored) two highly recommended books:

I am told he was involved in developing the new sharpening algorithms used in Photoshop CS3.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]