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Thread: Huge Photoshop CC upgrade!

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    BPN Member Kerry Perkins's Avatar
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    Icon14 Huge Photoshop CC upgrade!

    Adobe yesterday launched a major upgrade to Photoshop CC and it looks really good. If you have been on the fence about signing up for Creative Cloud, now is the time to act! They have extended the pricing of $9.99 per month to everyone for Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5, so it's a great deal IMO. This upgrade leaves the previous versions in the dust. To me, the most exciting thing they have added is the ability to make a selection based on parts of the image that are in focus, so if you shot a bird with a blurred background it is pretty easy to select the bird using Select | Focus Area. This gives you a window with tools to add or subtract from the selection and it seems to work pretty well. There are also other major upgrades, which you can check out here - http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/features.html

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    Thanks for the heads up Kerry, I had forgotten about the release. Will check it out!

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    Hmmm...I'll have to think all over about this. Still hate the idea of a monthly fee that can be increased anytime.

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    True but at least Adobe says this is the price, not just a limited time offer.

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    BPN Member Kerry Perkins's Avatar
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    Nancy, I held out to the bitter end but I realized that, regardless of what I do, this is just "what is" now and it's not going to change. I have been using Photoshop since v1.0 and I am likely going to be using it forever. I understand your reservations, but the fact remains that there will never be any updates to any versions other than the Creative Cloud version and I hate to be stuck with obsolete software. At least Adobe listened to their users who refused to pay $29.99 per month for PS and LR, and have now made the $9.99 pricing available to everyone. I have kept CS5 and CS6 for a couple of plugins that weren't updated for the new versions, but I really feel the need to keep my software up to date. I also feel that Adobe has made significant improvements to both Photoshop and Lightroom so it's not like they are just telling you to upgrade without adding any value to the products. If you look at it in historical perspective, you ended up spending about the same amount for major upgrades every couple of years as you will spend on the monthly fee so I don't think it's a bad deal at all. They also offer other perks like cloud storage and an online community for sharing your pics if you like.

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    Apologies, Kerry -- I hate to be a curmudgeon here, but as someone who already has CS6 and LR, there is very little that is new in CC -- somewhat evolutionary would be a better description. Selecting something contiguous that is relatively well defined (in focus) can be done pretty effectively with the Quick Selection tool and a little tweaking of the mask. And Topaz ReMask will make very sophisticated selections. The motion blur correction has gotten mixed reviews. (How far can an image like that be salvaged with any quality?) And the thing about being able to do the ACR corrections on a PS image can be done with 2 clicks if you use Lightroom. (If you don't it's somewhat interesting, but of course you're not working with the tonal range of the real raw image. A lot of this stuff is just repackaging. Convenient, yes, but since I had CS6 I'll wait till I can't run it any longer or they introduce some new feature that I actually can use. Much of what are major changes now are for web designers and workgroups, and I think the emphasis will stay there. We photographers are in a very small corner.

    CS6 will only be obsolete when they come up with a feature I want and don't have now. Sure, someday I'll have to cave in, but I see no reason to do it now.

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    BPN Member Kerry Perkins's Avatar
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    Hi Diane, no worries - it is good to hear both views of a topic and many people agree with you. I'm an incurable "early adopter", something I picked up in my six years at R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering. I'm still not happy with the subscription model for software, but it seems to be the way the industry is going.

    I've often wished that Adobe would combine LR and PS and just give us one killer app that does everything, and the optimist in me (small as it may be) believes that this may happen one day. If there were layers in LR it would almost be there. One thing I definitely like about PS CC is the ability to use the Camera Raw module as a filter.

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    I'm an incurable early evaluator and almost always a late adopter, so we can meet in the middle! If I hadn't had CS6 and LR, I would be in your boat.

    My main issue isn't so much the subscription model -- I've come to accept that it's going to be that way. But I don't think it favors development. (They already have your money, so why turn around and spend it on you?) So if/when they develop something I want, then I'll adopt. My main issue is misleding marketing. Many people can see what the product is and what they need, and I'm sure you are one of those, from your background. But many others will just swallow the bait of what looks like a Great Thing.

    I doubt LR will ever bridge the gap to PS, except possibly someday with a weak layers thing. See: OnOne Perfect Layers, which is far from what PS can do. And some plug-ins such as Nik will run from PS, returning a flat TIFF. I wish there would be a photographer's scaled-own version of PS. I need and use a small portion of what it there, but it's way more than I could get in Elements.

    The Camera Raw filter thing is a little more sophisticated in its workflow, but not in its features, for anyone who uses LR. For many years I have had the ability to close a PS image, go back to it in the LR folder from which I opened it in PS, and make adjustments right there. Of course in neither this approach nor the CC thing, is one adjusting the full tonal overhead of the raw file, and when I open it again in PS with those adjustments, I have a flat TIFF. And of course I can open it back as a Smart Object and go back to the raw adjustments.

    That "new" feature is very handy for web designers and the like who want a fast workflow. I'd rather go back to the raw file itself, or do the equivalent tweaks in my layered PS file. For many others who don't want to (or know how to) do much in PS, it gives them an easy workflow without going to too much trouble, and that's fine.

    I'll get off my soapbox now and get back to working on images!

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    Hey guys, I love this back and forth discussion! So difficult to do in a written format. Anyway, thanks very much Kerry & Diane for your observations and explanations of how you use Adobe. The info is very helpful to the rest of us who do not know the inner workings of these programs.

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    Grrr... resisted the force for a long time (CS6 user)-will have to check it out to see if I need to conform... TFS Kerry!

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