Arts IT Savvy

Today’s IT info session is a repeat of Monday’s session: An introductory look at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Session will be from 1:10pm to 1:50pm in S403, Building 11, Clayton Campus.

No charge or RSVP necessary.  Come along and see what the program is about, how it can be used to keep your photos sorted, and it’s non-destructive editing capabilities.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7 have just been released.  These are cut-down versions of Photoshop (for digital image editing), and Premiere (for digital video editing), however what they have left out 90% of users wouldn’t miss anyway – the Elements packages are still very powerful.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 & Adobe Premiere Elements 7

Also fwiw, CS4 is almost upon us as well.  Included is OnLocation which in CS4 is now able to run on Mac for direct-to-disk capture which is quite exciting if you do a lot of video production.  (I’m leaving it here as a footnote, because it is exciting to all of about 3 people (myself included!))

Adobe have released an online TV channel that may be of interest to some.

This is in addition to a number of video podcasts that are available through iTunes with tips, tricks, techniques and methods on various Adobe products.  There is now so much info out there, to watch it all you’d hardly find time to actually get anything done!

One program that I have found invaluable since its release has been Adobe Lightroom. It is aimed at professional photographers, but is certainly not limited in value to them.

I currently have a photo library of over 18000 images, and Lightroom not only catalogues the collection, making it easy for me to find the image that I want, but also provides a full suite of tools to enhance the images for when I need to use them.

There are colour correction tools, cropping tools, and on and on. I used to use Adobe Photoshop a great deal – pretty much every image I worked with spent some time inside that program to tidy it up, and that step has been replaced in literally 99.9% of cases with the workflow being completed inside Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (to use its full name).

One really beneficial aspect of the program, is ALL the changes you make to the image are non-destructive, and I can’t emphasise just how important that fact is on so many levels.

The point of this entry is that Lightroom 2 is now available – with a swag of new and enhanced features added. Oh, and it is for both PC and Mac.