Adobe expands Photoshop Photography Program to everyone

Adobe has extended - and expanded - a deal to Photoshop photographers who seek a streamlined and low-cost alternative to the £45 per month Creative Cloud membership.

The company has announced that beginning Wednesday, and ending on 2 December, its Photoshop Photography Program is now open to everyone, whether or not they now own or ever have owned Photoshop.

Adobe insists that it is not simply luring people into Creative Cloud at an introductory price in order to jack up the price later. This £8.78 subscription price is ongoing and includes Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, 20GB of server space, and a Behance Pro website. The bundle offers the latest versions of Photoshop CC and Lightroom, including feature updates and upgrades as they are available, just like a regular Creative Cloud subscription.

When this offer debuted in September, only owners of Photoshop CS3 and higher were eligible for the deal. Now, everyone can get into the act until the beginning of December.

Upon expiration, the Photoshop Photography Program will continue to be available for £8.78 per month to owners of previous versions of Photoshop Extended, or Creative Suite, version CS3 or later (CS3.x, CS4, CS5.x, or CS6). That offer expires 31 December 2013.

This Photography Program provides Creative Cloud benefits plus Lightroom at half the price that Photoshop subscribers once paid for that subscription alone. The deal requires an annual commitment with monthly billing, just like other Creative Cloud subscriptions.

More information is available on Adobe's website.

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Adobe expands Photoshop Photography Program to everyone

Adobe has extended - and expanded - a deal to Photoshop photographers who seek a streamlined and low-cost alternative to the £45 per month Creative Cloud membership.

The company has announced that beginning Wednesday, and ending on 2 December, its Photoshop Photography Program is now open to everyone, whether or not they now own or ever have owned Photoshop.

Adobe insists that it is not simply luring people into Creative Cloud at an introductory price in order to jack up the price later. This £8.78 subscription price is ongoing and includes Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, 20GB of server space, and a Behance Pro website. The bundle offers the latest versions of Photoshop CC and Lightroom, including feature updates and upgrades as they are available, just like a regular Creative Cloud subscription.

When this offer debuted in September, only owners of Photoshop CS3 and higher were eligible for the deal. Now, everyone can get into the act until the beginning of December.

Upon expiration, the Photoshop Photography Program will continue to be available for £8.78 per month to owners of previous versions of Photoshop Extended, or Creative Suite, version CS3 or later (CS3.x, CS4, CS5.x, or CS6). That offer expires 31 December 2013.

This Photography Program provides Creative Cloud benefits plus Lightroom at half the price that Photoshop subscribers once paid for that subscription alone. The deal requires an annual commitment with monthly billing, just like other Creative Cloud subscriptions.

More information is available on Adobe's website.

View the original article here

Adobe Generator for Photoshop CC aims to make designing websites easier and better

Adobe has created a new tech for automating export from Photoshop, and it's first real-world use is for exporting site mockups as site assets for developers.

If you use Photoshop CC to mock up websites or screen designs – or otherwise need to extract images from layered comps – help has arrived with Adobe Generator. This just-launched open-source platform technology, powered by a JavaScript API, is included among an array of updates and improvements to Photoshop in the new 14.1 version.

Adobe has already put Generator to work, using it to create two new plug-ins for Photoshop CC. One automatically delivers image assets in real-time, thus saving the time and effort of extracting, cropping, sizing, and exporting each image by hand – creating a workflow to rival the increasingly popular Mac-based web design tool Sketch. The other links Generator to Adobe's new Edge Reflow CC Web tool (as in the screenshot below), which specialises in creating responsive Web designs that adapt content to different screen sizes. With a single click, designers can insert assets directly into Edge Reflow, thus reducing tedious manual labour.

This technology automates real-time generation of image assets directly from the layers and layer groups in your design comp and lets developers use JavaScript to create customized plug-ins to Photoshop CC.

Adobe has released the Generator and the image asset generation features as open source projects to encourage developers to create additional tools and services to integrate with Adobe CC.

The Generator platform lets you tag layers and groups in Photoshop CC, which are then automatically saved and updated in real time as individual files in the formats you specify. You can export layers as JPEGs, GIFs, or PNGs with a variety of options such as scaling for Retina displays, various compression levels, and more. Changes are previewed in the browser.

From creating comps and images for multiple devices to controlling and updating how those assets look across screens of various sizes and formats, Generator promises to offer an easier and faster way for designers to communicate, test, view, and change the behavior of their designs—not to mention speeding up mundane, time-consuming production tasks. Just enable Generator in the Photoshop prefs and then enable it in specific documents.

Generator, as well as a slew of additional updates to Photoshop CC, are available immediately to Creative Cloud members. Creative Cloud costs £39.06 plus VAT, though if you own a copy of Creative Suite CS3 or later you can get it for £22.78 for the first year – an offer Adobe originally said would expire on July 31 but has been extended until December 3 (and probably beyond, experience tells us). You can get a subscription to Photoshop CC alone for £14.65. Last week, Adobe announced a bundle of Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 for £7.50 plus VAT.

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Adobe adds new video tools to After Effects, Premiere Pro & more

Features added to Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, SpeedGrade CC, Prelude CC , Media Encoder CC and Story CC Plus.

Adobe is to preview new tools for its video post-production applications at this year's IBC trade show in Amsterdam from Friday. This is the first time these tools have been updated with new features since the Creative Cloud was launched in June. Expect to get your hands on them in October.

The Mask Tracker is a new tool for After Effects that allows you to create a mask around an area of your footage and then have AE automatically track that area frame-by-frame throughout it. This should speed up tasks with footage featuring a moving camera, such as adding bloom to lights or rotoscoping out unwanted elements.

Adobe says it has made editing in Premiere faster, with improved multicam, enhanced closed captioning capabilities, new monitor overlays and audio monitoring features.

OpenCL support allows effects and processing to be accelerated by a wider range of graphics cards – including AMD's. Support for GPU processing of the Cinema DNG format allows real-time playback. There's also support for UltraHD, 4K and higher resolutions, high framerates and more RAW formats.

Users can move multi-track timelines back and forth between Premiere Pro CC and SpeedGrade CC – allowing you to quickly apply looks to entire projects as well as individual clips. The results live 'live' inside Premiere Pro through support for SpeedGrade CC's Lumetri Deep Colour Engine.

The new SpeedLooks feature allows users to match the colour spaces even across different camera formats, according to Adobe. You can also work with multiple masks and linked mask layers.

New Sync Settings in Adobe Media Encoder CC let users now sync application preferences between multiple computers via Creative Cloud.

The forthcoming Prelude CC Live Logger iPad app allows users to log notes, events, and other data on their iPad while shooting, including the ability to sync with timecode on set via supported wireless timecode generators, and then sync metadata to footage via Creative Cloud.

New production planning features in Adobe Story Plus provide scheduling and reporting tools for managing productions efficiently, making it easier to modify and share lists between productions and users.

Adobe has also announced updates to Adobe Anywhere, a server-based version of Premiere Pro that uses the desktop software almost as 'thin client'. Your media lives on the server – and edits, effects and the like are processed there. The aim is to make working as part of a post-production team easier with asset management taken care of – as well as tapping the power of the server for higher-performance than using a desktop or, especially, a laptop.

The update offers early access to support for After Effects CC using the same set-up. Users will also be able to edit media in Premiere Pro CC while it is recording to a file – a capability Adobe says is important for sports and live broadcasters.

Adobe is previewing an upcoming Adobe Anywhere iPad app at IBC. This enables users to view productions and play back sequences on the Anywhere server from the field or a remote location.             

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