Adobe, the worlds leading graphics design software manufacturer, have today anounced teh specs of th eeagerly awaited Photoshop CS4.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is a ground breaking on several levels, first and foremost its graphic card utilization, a first outside the Apple Mac, and defiantely something that should be worrying the ol’ iPod creators.

The graphic card utilization gives Photoshop CS4 a whole new level of graphic manipulation, veiwing and modification power, greatly reducing lag. Mix this is with CS4′s 64bit compatability and its new Pixel Bending technology (Reduces rendering time on special effects) and suddenly CS4 is not only a more diverse, but also a much, much quicker product.

Along with the new speediness you also have Flash compatability now, allowing greater flexibility when creating flash documents and a new host of tools within photoshop!

My allover favorite feature though is content aware scaling, this can stretch and distort an image while retaining key areas. Say for interest stretching an image of a couple walking on the beach, you can stretch the image to the length you want while retainingt he size of the settnig sun and avoiding the couple becoming grotesquely fat!

All in all I love the new Adobe Photoshop CS4 and look forward to buying it on release!

Here’s a list of the top 5 Open Source Image Editors:

Paint

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Project Dogwaffle

Project Dogwaffle 1.2 is a freeware version of the paint & animation program Project Dogwaffle and PD Pro Digital Painter, developed by Dan Ritchie – version 1.2 is based on a subset of version 2.0

Inkscape

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.
News.

Picasa by Google
Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you:

* Locate and organise all the photos on your computer.
* Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
* Share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web: it’s fast, easy and free.

GIMP / GIMPshop

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

For those that are familiar with Photoshop the GIMPshop will be a better option,GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.

Chizen said Adobe laid the foundation for a hosted Photoshop product with Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool it offers through the PhotoBucket media-sharing site.

Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe’s more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.

This of course will be a great move as more and more people are getting aquainted with the power of Photoshop, and with the flurry of photoshop tutorial site around i bet the online version will be a hit.

full article

I remember the good old days when photoshop tutorials were just plain text and some accompanying images to help you brush up your photoshop skills.

But during the closing of last year the trend of video based photoshop tutorials are blooming all over the net, but most of them don’t allow you to download the videos, instead they rely on YouTube and MetaCafe to deliver their tutorials, however at photoshop tutorials you will get to wtahc the tutorials online or choose “Download tutorial” to save the Quicktime or Windows Media Files to your computer to watch them later.

Trick Your Friends By Adding Your Face To A Movie Poster Or CD W – video powered by Metacafe

an excerpt:

Adobe on Tuesday released a beta version of Digital Editions, a Web application built in Flash that is designed to make reading electronic documents easier. The tool acts like a slimmed down version of Adobe Reader, and can even display PDF files.

Digital Editions, unveiled at Adobe’s MAX 2006 conference in Las Vegas, is only 2.5MB in size. It’s not intended to replace the bulky Reader, but rather to extend its feature set. It utilizes the same e-book capabilities Adobe built into Reader, and adds Flash to make digital publications interactive.

more

The exploit affects what’s called Flash remoting – essentially the provision of server-based application services via Flash, as opposed to via HTML, Active Server Pages or some other wrapper. Though an exploit itself has not yet been discovered, Adobe engineers found that a certain form of Flash remoting command sent to ColdFusion servers (another acquired Macromedia technology) triggers an infinite loop process that will not stop itself.

source & more

Flash Player enables organizations and individuals to build and deliver great digital experiences to their end users.

You can download it here.

File size: 1,324 K
Download Time Estimate: 2 minutes @ 56K modem
Version: 9,0,16,0
Browser: Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and CompuServe
Date Posted: 6/27/2006
Language: English

The question is..where is IE support….?

Finacial details were not disclosed,and Verizon will the first wireless operator in the United States to offer mobile phones with built-in Flash technology.

Source & More: eWeek

Microsoft is to introduce it’s own range advanced graphics software set up a potential showdown with Adobe Systems.

Microsoft executives provided technical detail and anticipated ship dates for a product code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) at the Mix ’06 conference last week.

The goal of WPF/E, which should be available in the first half of next year, is to bring a significant portion of the slick look and feel of Windows Vista — the update to Microsoft’s Windows client software — to other operating systems and non-Microsoft browsers. WPF/E software can display video, two-dimensional vector graphics and animations, but stops short of the full 3D graphics and document-rendering capabilities available in Vista, according to the company.

Source & More: CNET