Scott Kelby Teaches to over 1,300 Photoshop Users in NYC

It must be some kind of record–over 1,300 people attending a one day Photoshop CS3 workshop, but that’s how many people were in attendance to Scott’s Photoshop CS3 Power Tour stop in New York City yesterday. The last stop of the year for Scott’s tour will be in Washington DC later this month.
The irony of this particular workshop is that Scott actually mentioned Adobe Photoshop Lightroom during the session in the morning and it seems a large number of attendees didn’t know what Scott was talking about. Since Scott’s been on tour doing the Lightroom Tour as well, he had just assumed everybody knows about Lightroom.
Apparently not.
So Scott is going to be devoting an entire special segment of Photoshop User TV to the question: Bridge and Camera Raw vs. Lightroom on November 19th.

Brace yourself for Adobe’s Photoshop overhaul

Adobe Systems wants to transform its flagship Photoshop software with an interface customized to the task at hand, a potentially radical revamp for software whose power today is hidden behind hundreds of menu options.
A new user interface will help Photoshop become “everything you need, nothing you don’t,” said Photoshop product manager John Nack, describing aspirations for the Photoshop overhaul on his blog Monday.
“We must make Photoshop dramatically more configurable,” Nack said. “Presenting the same user experience to a photographer as we do to a radiologist, as to a Web designer, as to a prepress guy, is kind of absurd…With the power of customizability, we can present solutions via task-oriented workspaces,” Nack said.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom offers a very task-specific interface, with editing modules changing according to broad categories of work.
In comparison, Photoshop today is unwelcoming and unhelpful. “Today, if a user walks up to Photoshop and says, ‘What do I do?’ the app kind of shrugs, stubs out a cigarette, and says, ‘I dunno–you tell me.’ That’s not real cool, and we can do better,” Nack said.

Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash

John Nack writes about the the development of Photoshop and compares it to a Johnny Cash recording One Piece At a Time singing about the building of a Cadillac from 20 years’ worth of evolving, mismatched parts. John Nack says: “I’ve gotta say, I know the feeling.”
He goes on to say “In fact, I sometimes joke that looking at some parts of the app is like counting the rings in a tree: you can gauge when certain features arrived by the dimensions & style of the dialog.”
But later in his post he says “The good news is that we’ve been plotting the solutions for a number of years, chipping away at the problem. Good stuff comes to the surface in bits and pieces, but we haven’t quite turned the corner–yet.”
Read his entire post at Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash

Call for Entries: The Photoshop User Awards

Scott Kelby posts a blog entry on his Photoshop Insider blog about the Photoshop User Awards “Call for entries”.
The “Call for Entries” goes out today for the 2nd annual worldwide “Photoshop User Awards” competition, (sponsored by Photoshop User magazine), and if you’re this year’s “Best of Show” winner, we’re sending you and a friend on a trip to beautiful Maui, Hawaii (including round-trip airfare, hotel, and daily expenses) to get you totally inspired to have your work featured as the cover art for an issue of Photoshop User magazine.
Check out the Photoshop User Awards web site for more info.

Photo of ‘extinct’ tiger sparks controversy

XI’AN — A newly-released photo, which Chinese forestry authorities say proves the continuing existence of wild South China tigers which have been thought to be extinct, has sparked heated controversy from Internet citizens, questioning its authenticity.
The digital picture, purporting to be a wild South China tiger crouching in the midst of green bushes, was released by the Forestry Department of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province at a news conference on October 12.
Zhou Zhenglong, 52, a farmer and former hunter in Chengguan Township of Shaanxi’s Zhenping County, photographed the tiger with a digital camera and on film on the afternoon of October 3, a department spokesman said.
Experts had confirmed the 40 digital pictures and 31 film photographs are genuine, the spokesman told reporters.
But dozens of netizens expressed doubts about the authenticity of the digital picture — the only one of the 71 taken to be released at the news conference — after it had been posted on the Internet, especially in on-line forums discussing Photoshop (PS) technologies.

Lightroom, Aperture cautions with Leopard

As Leopard gets out into both the developer and user communities, we’re seeing a few cautionary notes from developers regarding compatibility and performance. Recently, Apple and Adobe issued advisories regarding their respective image management and catalog applications, Aperture and Photoshop Lightroom…

Adobe’s Platform Changes The Game In Applications

Adobe Systems wants to blur the line between Web and PC applications with a new computing platform that aims to change the way digital information is presented — and perhaps give Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows some future competition.
The Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR, will let developers build and deploy rich Internet applications on the desktop. Applications made with AIR can run online or offline, and can run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux PCs.
AIR combines the speed of desktop applications with the up-to-date data capabilities of the Web, backers say. AIR applications run outside of the Web browser, so they aren’t constrained in their design.
This month at a conference for Web developers, Adobe ADBE showed off AIR applications created with a test version of the software. The first official version of AIR is due out early next year. Companies with AIR applications in the works include eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) EBAY, FedEx (NYSE:FDX) FDX, SAP SAP and Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) YHOO.
AIR can be used to design consumer and business applications.