Touch apps for Photoshop 12.0.4 or later
Mix color swatches, select and manage Photoshop tools, and paint watercolor images using three iPad apps. See Using Adobe Color Lava, Using Adobe Nav, and Using Adobe Eazel.

Easier interface management with live workspaces
Automatically store task-specific workspaces that reflect your workflow, and quickly switch between them. See Save and switch workspaces.

Intelligent selection technology
Extract subjects from backgrounds more quickly and accurately, creating realistic composites. See Refine selection edges.

Content-aware filling and healing
Easily remove image elements and replace them with content that seamlessly integrates into its surroundings. See Content-aware, pattern, or history fills and Retouch with the Spot Healing Brush tool.

HDR Pro
Apply greater tone-mapping power, creating high dynamic range images that range from photorealistic to surreal. Or apply an HDR look to standard images with the HDR
Toning adjustment. See Merge images to HDR and Adjust HDR toning.

Extraordinary painting effects
Take advantage of realistic painting effects, mixing colors on the canvas and simulating bristles to produce results that rival traditional painting media. See Paint with the Mixer Brush and Bristle tip shape options.

Puppet Warp
Radically transform specific image areas, while anchoring others in place. See Puppet Warp.

Automated lens correction
Quickly fix distortion using installed profiles of popular lenses, or custom profiles of additional models. See Correct lens distortion and adjust perspective.

Easy extrusions with 3D repoussé
Convert 2D text and artwork into 3D objects, and then extrude and inflate their surfaces. See Create 3D repoussé (Photoshop Extended).

Enhanced 3D performance, workflow, and materials
Quickly optimize performance with dedicated 3D preferences. Get faster previews and rendering with the improved Adobe Ray Tracer engine. Apply materials interactively with Material Load and Drop tools. See 3D panel overview (Photoshop Extended) and 3D Materials settings (Photoshop Extended).

Streamlined creative reviews
Collaborate with colleagues and quickly get client feedback with CS Review, an online service that accelerates the review process. See CS Review.

Integrated media management
Take advantage of improved watermarking, web galleries, and batch processing in Adobe Bridge CS5. Access assets directly in Photoshop using the Mini Bridge panel. See Adobe Bridge and Mini Bridge.

State of the art Camera Raw processing
Remove noise in high ISO images while preserving color and detail. Add creative effects like film grain and post-crop vignettes. Or precisely sharpen images with minimal artifacts. See Correcting lens distortions in Camera Raw, Sharpening and noise reduction in Camera Raw, and Vignette and grain effects in Camera Raw.

Dozens of customer-inspired productivity enhancements
Boost your efficiency with countless workflow improvements. Selected highlights let you:

• Create layers by dragging files from Windows or Mac OS. See Create a layer from an existing file.
• Straighten images with the Ruler tool. See Straighten an image.
• Protect detail with the Sharpen tool. See Sharpen image areas.
• Apply a graduated neutral density filter. See Apply a gradient fill.
• Reverse the direction of a clone source. See Retouch with the Clone Stamp tool.
• Customize defaults for layer styles. See Change style defaults to custom values.
• Paste in the same relative location, or into or outside selections.
  See Understanding the copy and paste commands.
• Store image-specific print settings. See Print images.

New GPU-accelerated features
Harness increased hardware power with features like brush previews, a color sampler ring for the Eyedropper tool, and a Rule Of Thirds grid for the Crop tool. See Choose a color while painting and Crop an image using the Crop tool.

Faster performance with cross-platform 64-bit support
Complete day-to-day imaging tasks at least 10% faster on 64-bit versions of Mac OS and Windows. See Memory and performance.

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Simpler Web viewing: Remember when the Web was add less and clutter-free? A browser add-on called Readability takes you back to those times by stripping any page down to its main article. No ads. Minimal navigation menus. Almost no clutter. It’s great for creating printer-friendly pages, and for distraction-free reading.

Isolation booth: For distraction-free writing in Windows, I love WriteMonkey. While you write, this minimalist writing app hides all of the formatting menus and just about everything else by expanding to full-screen mode and filling your screen with the soothing background color of your choice.

Intelligent notepad: At your PC or on your tablet or phone, Evernote lets you capture Web clippings, text notes, audio notes, and pictures. It then syncs them across all your devices, and indexes them so they’re easy to find later.

Mind mapper: When you want to capture complex ideas, few methods are as effective as a mind map for visualizing the many related parts of a project. Xmind gives you simple, powerful mind-mapping tools that rival those of the most expensive apps around.

Office alternative: Want a powerful productivity suite without the expense of Microsoft Office? Oracle’s free OpenOffice.org has a robust word processor, spreadsheets, databases, and presentations with support for Microsoft Office file formats.

Screen sharing: Whether you’re the unofficial tech support person for your company or the go-to techie for your family and friends, LogMe­In Free simplifies the process of sharing your screen with a remote user or of taking control of that person’s screen in real time.

Search simplifier: An alternative to the ubiquitous Google, newcomer Blekko takes a hand-curated approach, relying on slash tags that allow you to refine your searches and get more-relevant results. To see re­­sults for “Windows tips” sorted by date, for instance, type Windows tips /date.

List manager: To-do lists don’t have to be complicated. For simple, effective lists that you can share with friends and access from any mobile browser, try 37Signals’ Ta-da List.

Easy presentations: Need to whip up a snazzy presentation fast? Log on to SlideRocket via your Google account, and use its slick templates to embed images, Flash objects, videos, and audio. Then export your presentation as a PowerPoint slideshow or PDF.

E-mail postponer: When you get an e-mail message that you need to act on but don’t have to deal with quite yet, NudgeMail serves as a smart snooze button. Forward the message to, say, tomorrow@nudgemail.com or June2@nudgemail.com, and the e-mail will reappear in your inbox when you do need to see it.

File converter: Want to convert a MOV video file to WMV format, or a Word document into an ePub book for your e-reader? Online Convert transforms a wide selection of formats, and it doesn’t require you to download or install any new software.

Streamlined PDF viewer: Adobe’s Acrobat Reader has evolved dramatically over the years, and it has grown a little bloated along the way. For quicker PDF viewing that won’t hog your system’s resources, give the free Sumatra PDF a try.

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Instant organization: Instead of clicking around in Windows Ex­­plorer to find where Windows hid your newly downloaded MP3 file, try DropIt. This open-source utility lets you set up folder associations for specific file types. Just drop files on the big target icon on your desktop, and DropIt will automatically whisk them away to their appropriate (and easy-to-find) destinations.

Cleaner desktop: Stardock’s Fences lets you create separate areas on your desktop to organize unruly desktop icons into a manageable system. Keep programs in one fence and Word documents in another, for instance, or group them any way you like.

Complete removal: No list of great free tools would be complete without Revo Uninstaller. Windows’ built-in Programs control panel simply isn’t as good at removing the bits and pieces of programs that you want to banish from your hard drive.

Smart dock: The Windows 7 taskbar isn’t bad, but Stardock’s ObjectDock replicates the slick Mac OS X dock interface, complete with snazzy magnification animations, for Windows users.

Virtual machine: Oracle’s VirtualBox lets you run multiple virtual machines on your PC, so you can have multiple instances of Windows, Linux, or any other OS installed. It keeps a working image of a machine as a backup. Then, if things go horribly awry, you can delete the damaged image in favor of the backup.

All-in-one uncompressor: If you’ve ever asked “What’s a .rar file?” you need 7-Zip. It supports all of the essential file compression formats-and more than a few obscure ones, too-so it can unpack anything you download. The utility adds file management tools to Windows’ context menus, too, enabling you to zip files, unzip files, and convert file formats on the fly.

FTP essential: People who transfer lots of files still rely on the old File Transfer Protocol to move their bits around. FileZilla re­­mains one of the best FTP clients on the market, and it’s still free.

Display manager: DisplayFusion gives you multiple-monitor management powers that Windows doesn’t, such as the ability to display different background images on each screen or to span an image across two monitors. It also packs hotkey combos for automatically ar­­ranging your desktop, and it lets you set custom behaviors for your apps.

Easy-launch Web apps: If you spend most of your working life in Web-based apps such as Google Docs and Gmail, Mozilla’s Prism browser plug-in for Firefox can restore your sanity. By turning your favorite Web apps into separate applications that launch from Windows’ Start menu, the utility enables you to cut down on the number of mouse clicks required to get to the tools you need, while at the same time eliminating browser-tab clutter.

One keyboard, many PCs: I have three computers on my desk, running any of three operating systems: Windows, OS X, and Linux. But the free Synergy utility lets me use a single keyboard and mouse to control all three PCs, regardless of their OS. When my mouse pointer reaches the edge of a screen, Synergy uses the Wi-Fi network to take over the next machine. It’s the closest thing to magic that your PC is likely to encounter.

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These four free downloadable applications are designed to make handling your photos and videos easier and more effective.

Photo viewer: Whether you want to view TIFF pictures, MOV videos, or Flash animations, IrfanView is an indispensable freebie. Bonus: It includes a healthy array of photo-editing tools, too.

Image organizer: If your hard drive is littered with photos scattered across various locations, Fotobounce will round them up, organize them, and give you an easy way to share them with your friends.

Power editor: For most nonprofessionals, Adobe Photoshop is expensive overkill. Paint.net is jam-packed with powerful photo-editing features, and it’s free.

Magic eraser: Who’s the weirdo standing behind Aunt Marge in that Disneyland photo? (No, it’s not Uncle Fred.) Get rid of the interloper with PhotoWipe, a tool that lets you mark any object in a picture and automatically erase it without a trace.

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In photography, ‘exposure’ means the amount of light that falls onto the sensor of your digital camera. In modern cameras the exposure is usually set to automatic by default and, most of the time, it can be left there and will produce beautiful pictures. There are times though, when the camera lets us down or we want to produce a particular effect and it would be nice to understand what is going on ‘under the hood’.

Getting a ‘correct’ exposure means recording as much of the relevant information in the scene as possible. In the shot on the left, the important information is the bird. The sky has gone completely white as it was much, much brighter than the bird. If I had let the meter expose for the sky, the bird would have been rendered as a black silhouette.

Even when the exposure is ‘correct’ the problem with all cameras is that they cannot record the entire range of contrast (black to white) that the eye can see. Especially when you take into account that the eye is constantly adjusting to cope with high contrast. On a sunny day if you look into the shadows of a scene then into the bright areas, the iris in your eye will quickly adjust so you can see detail in both.

Faced with the task of recording as much information as possible, the camera will try to average out all the light levels and expose accordingly. As burnt out highlights are normally considered uglier than black shadows, the camera, left to it’s own devices, will normally err on the dark side. Which is no good if you are shooting against a bright background. It’s the subject you want to see, and you don’t really care if the background is white.Auto Exposure Modes

The camera manufacturers have come up with all sorts of ingenious metering systems to try to help, there are now multi mode metering systems, which give you a choice of ‘center weighting’, ‘spot metering’ or ‘multi spot metering’ on many of the better cameras, but none can guarantee to give you what you want every time.

A common use for this technique is when you are taking a close up shot of two people and there is space between their heads, if you’re not careful the camera will focus on the wall or trees behind them. If the background is very dark or very light this can alter the exposure significantly and result in faces that are too dark or too light.

Skin tones are what most meters are set up to consider an ‘average tone’, they are also usually the part of the picture that we most want to get right. If I am photographing a group of people in difficult circumstances, like bright sunlight for instance, I will often move close in to the group and take a light reading from someone’s face or, if we are all standing in the same type of light, I will take a reading from the back of my hand. This is no good, of course, if the subject is in bright sunlight and I am in the shade.
Manual Exposure

Now it’s time to turn that dial away from ‘program’ mode and have a look at the dreaded ‘manual’ mode. There are also a bewildering array of other choices such as ‘aperture priority’, ‘shutter priority’, ‘exposure compensation’ etc., but once you understand the basics you will be able to select the most suitable mode.

The amount of light falling on the film is governed by four things.

• The amount of light reflected from the scene which, if you are outdoors, you can do very little about.
• The ‘shutter speed’ which is the amount of time the shutter is open, measured in fractions of a second.
• The ‘aperture setting’ which is the size of the hole through which the light enters. If you look at the lens of your camera you will see a diaphragm in the middle of the glass which the camera adjusts according to the light. This does exactly the same job as the iris in your eye. Aperture settings are measured in ‘f stops’.
• The ISO setting. This is the ‘sensitivity’ of the sensor. (see ISO Speed)

The shutter speed and aperture settings have other quite separate effects on the photograph which we will discuss in another article, but for the purposes of exposure, making the picture darker or lighter, they are interchangeable. Make the hole twice as big and open the shutter for half the time and you will expose the sensor the same amount.

Why use manual exposure?

The advantage of manual exposure is that the settings do not keep changing as your scene changes. Let’s suppose that you are taking close up photos of cars passing by. Some of the cars will be black or dark colors and some will be light colors or white. If you are filling the frame with almost nothing but car, the meter will be trying to render each car as mid gray. Although it will probably not succeed, what you will notice is that the background is a different shade in each photo.

I often have to take portraits of people, some are wearing very dark clothes and some are wearing white. If I am not careful with my exposure settings will be affected by the clothes.

Although it is by no means always necessary to use manual exposure, an understanding of how it all works will save a lot of disappointment. Below are some links to other articles covering various aspects of exposure.

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Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Master Collection software enables you to design and develop amazing work, collaborate effectively, and deliver virtually anywhere. Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Master Collection software delivers a comprehensive toolset for designing across media. Explore exciting enhancements that include new ways to create interactive content, breakthrough performance, and integration with new Adobe CS Live online services to boost productivity.

What’s new in CS5 Master Collection
Interactive design without writing code
Design sophisticated interactive content and create functional interfaces in new Adobe Flash® Catalyst™ CS5 without writing code. Transform your unique vision into compelling online experiences and deliver perfect project files to developers.

Innovative vector drawing and painting
Quickly and accurately represent depth and distance using new perspective tools in Adobe Illustrator® CS5. Precisely control stroke width, arrowheads, and dashes. And use the new Bristle Brush to draw with the expressive quality of watercolors, oils, and pastels, but with the scalability of vectors.

Interactive documents and presentations
Create memorable documents and presentations complete with interactivity, motion, sound, and video in Adobe InDesign® CS5. Enhance page layouts with rich media using new motion presets for easy animation creation. Take advantage of support for FLV and MP3 audio file import to engage and excite your audiences.

Extraordinary image editing
Use the Mixer Brush and Bristle Tips in Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended to explore lifelike, naturally textured painting. Add dimension to your imagery with 3D extrusions using Adobe Repoussé technology, and make precise image selections more quickly and easily with new Truer Edge selection technology.

Comprehensive reach of the Flash Platform
Realize your vision online with the capabilities of the Adobe Flash Platform. Use Flash Catalyst CS5 to design interactive content without writing code, Adobe Flash Professional CS5 to create free-form, expressive content, and Adobe Flash Builder™ 4 to develop rich Internet applications.

Tapeless workflows in video production
Work natively with pristine tapeless footage in Adobe Premiere® Pro CS5 and Adobe After Effects® CS5. Edit tapeless media formats using industry-leading tapeless workflows to keep from wasting valuable production time transcoding or rewrapping.

Industry-leading performance enhancements
Work up to ten times faster with very large images in Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended and more fluidly on HD projects in Adobe After Effects® CS5 and Adobe Premiere® Pro CS5 thanks to native 64-bit support. New GPU-acceleration quickens work in Photoshop, the new Adobe Mercury Playback Engine speeds up effects processing and rendering in Adobe Premiere Pro, and Dynamic Link is now dramatically faster.

Expressive motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects
Rotoscope in a fraction of the time with the revolutionary new Roto Brush in Adobe After Effects CS5. Isolating moving foreground elements from their backgrounds with automatic transparency is now dramatically faster.

Crisp graphics for web, interactive, and mobile delivery
Create clean, sharp artwork that aligns accurately — and automatically — on the pixel grid in Adobe Illustrator® CS5, eliminating fuzzy graphics for the web or mobile devices.

Online feedback with Adobe CS Review
Streamline your creative reviews from within Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended, Illustrator® CS5, and InDesign® CS5 using Adobe CS Review, part of CS Live online services. CS Review provides easy-to-use annotation tools and commenting viewed in the context of your design.

Adobe Story integration for script collaboration
Accelerate media creation with Adobe Story, part of CS Live online services. Streamline the flow of script data into pre-production, production, and post-production to create more engaging experiences.

Adobe BrowserLab integration for web testing
Preview websites on multiple browsers and operating systems directly from Adobe Dreamweaver® CS5 using new BrowserLab, part of CS Live online services. Avoid buying costly test hardware and maintaining testing labs.

Acrobat.com integration
Enhance communication around the globe using Acrobat.com, part of CS Live online services. Convert files to PDF, store and share files, create documents and presentations online, collaborate, host meetings, and more.

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A simple rollover swaps in the state directly under the top state and involves only one slice.

1. Ensure that the trigger object is not on a shared layer.

2. Select Edit > Insert > Rectangular Slice or Polygon Slice to create a slice on top of the trigger object.

3. Create a new state in the States panel by clicking the New/Duplicate State button.

4. Create, paste, or import an image to use as the swap image on the new state. Position the image beneath the slice you created in step 2. Although you are in state 2, the slice is visible.

5. Select State 1 in the States panel to return to the state that has the original image.

6. Select the slice and place the pointer over the behavior handle.

Note: You can select the slice while in any state.

7. Click the behavior handle and select Add Simple Rollover Behavior from the menu.

8. Click the Preview tab and test the simple rollover, or press F12 to preview it in a browser.

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New Plugins

Custom Image Sizes

Causes WordPress to create custom sizes for your images when you call wp_get_attachment_image() and related functions

Hello in all Languages

Hello in all Languages displays a “hello” word translated to the official language of the country the visitor’s IP belongs to.

Chibipaint for WordPress

This plugin integrates the java applet “Chibipaint” with WordPress. This allows the user to draw and save their drawings directly to the server. Features included are editing and mass deletion, editable preset and user-defined templates and canvas sizes.

NdB_UserHidden

Ndb_UserHidden hides parts of wordpress posts for unidentified end users. By surrounding private text with [hide] and [/hide] tags you can force guest users to register and login to view member-only content. This plugin is interesting for webmasters that want to expand their user base for newsletters and other purposes. For download sites it will force users to identify themselves before downloads are shown.

WordPress Tweeter

WordPress Tweeter is a plugin that will update your twitter account every time you make a new post on your blog. You will be able to use your own tweet template.

Updated Plugins

WP Minify

This plugin helps you easily integrate the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating and review plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, multi ratings, templated rendering, has a widgets build in and extensive shortcode support. Plugin can be integrated with comments for making a review website.

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator (TOCC) automatically generates a highly customizable dynamic site wide table of contents that is always up-to-date. All entries are navigable making your site very SEO friendly. TOCC can be configured to display static pages, blog entries and forum comments.

NextGEN Gallery

A photo gallery management plugin

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator

Email and normal links are obfuscated, hiding them from spambots. It automatically encodes each link, then uses JavaScript to decode and show them. Disabled JavaScript users get access to obfuscated links too.

Hikari Titled Comments

Hikari Titled Comments enables each comment to have a title, so that commentators can give a subject meaning to their comments

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The Photoshop scratch disk is your hard drive. Photoshop uses your hard drive as temporary “swap” space, or virtual memory, when your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation. If you only have one hard drive or partition in your computer, then the scratch disk will be the drive where your operating system is installed (the C drive on a Windows system).

Setting Up Scratch Disks
You can change the scratch disk location and add multiple scratch disks from Photoshop Preferences. Many power users like to create a dedicated hard drive partition for the Photoshop scratch disk. Although Photoshop will function with a single scratch disk on the system partition, you can improve performance by setting the scratch disk to be the fastest drive in your system. Other useful guidelines for setting scratch disks are to avoid using the same drive where your operating system is installed, avoid using a drive where the files you edit are stored, and don’t use network or removable drives for a scratch disk.

Delete Photoshop Temp Files
If Photoshop is shut down improperly or crashes in the middle of an editing session, this can leave fairly large temporary files behind on your scratch disk. Photoshop’s temp files are typically named ~PST####.tmp on Windows and Temp#### on Macintosh, where #### is a series of numbers. These are safe to delete.

Clear Disk Space
If you’re getting an error message that the scratch disk is full, it usually means you need to clear some space on whatever drive is defined as the scratch disk in Photoshop Preferences, or add additional drives for Photoshop to use as scratch space.

Defragment Your Hard Disk
It is also possible to get the “scratch disk is full” error, even if the scratch disk drive has free space. This is because Photoshop requires contiguous, unfragmented free space on the scratch disk drive. If you are getting the “scratch disk is full” error message and your scratch disk drive does show a good amount of free space, you may need to run a disk defragmentation utility.

Scratch Disk Errors When Cropping
If you are getting a “scratch disk full” error when attempting to crop an image, it’s likely that you inadvertently have size and resolution values entered in the options bar for the crop tool, or you entered values in the wrong units. For instance, entering dimensions of 1200 x 1600 when your units are set to inches instead of pixels is going to create a huge file that could trigger the scratch disk full message. The solution is to press clear in the options bar after selecting the crop tool but before dragging a crop selection.

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