Adobe Photoshop World Asia 2006 (Part 2)
I was early today. I reached Suntec @ around 8:10AM and I was one of the earlier attendees.
I found the event at level 2 of the Convention Centre. It was easy to spot. The staff were all wearing red tees. Registration was simple, and I got a nice freebie set.
- A tin of Adobe Creative Suite™ Coasters
- Six Stories, an A4 case studies file containing information on Adobe and its products
- An Adobe ball point pen with an Adobe logo.
Venturing deeper into the compound, I was immediately greeted by staff of sponsor booths set up by Epson, Wacom, Generic Technologies. It wasn’t very big. But the stuff they are promoting are quite impressive. I was particularly attracted to the 21 inch Wacom Cintiq Tablet. I gave it a try and I felt the drawing experience screen was quite real. Pressure sentivity and all that, all customizable. Further in, the Epson booth was boasting about their Stylus large format printer. I forgot what model it is but it only printed to A1, so I’m not sure if it’s a large format. Right at the end, the corner is photolibrary.com’s booth. They are giving away thick stock photo catalogs and magazines, must have costed alot, but it was really impressive.
Conincidence! I met 2 of my camp friends, both doing creative work and we went on together.
The speaking began at 5 minutes past 9. Only 1 door to the ballrooms was opened, everyone was rushing in through a bottle neck like toothpaste out of its tube. Then more doors were opened for the crowd. We didn’t managed to get a really good seat. But it was comfortable.
First to speak was Adobe Systems events and promotions manager Tan Wee Ling. Just a simple opening speech.
Photoshop Geeks
The real show started with the morning Creativity Track with Ton Frederiks, Senior Application Engineer, Adobe Systems Benelux, Holland and Marianne Young, Solutions Engineer, Adobe Systems, South East Asia.
Adobe Bridge™
The latest file browsing feature in CS2. It reminds me of Apple Aperture™. Ton and Marianne touched on the flexibility and speed of Bridge. It allows searching of Metadata / exif / XMP which you can create for your images in Bridge. I’ll leave you to explore the features of Bridge at Adobe Bridge™.
DNG™
Another topic they brought up is that DNG (Digital Negative) would be the standard RAW file format in time to come. As there are more than a hundred exitsing different types of RAW formats, each proprietry to its respect camera manufacturer, it simply does not make sense to keep Adobe products updated with the support of the possible, thousands of different formats in let’s say, 10 years time. So DNG would a generic format which will be supported by more and more camera manufacturers.
After giving a presentation on some of the cool features Bridge offers, they went on to demonstrate some Photoshop techniques, hidden features, tips and tricks useful to Adobe Photoshop™ Users. I learned some really cool stuff like making soft selections using the Quick Mask feature and applyign filters on Selections. I feel mastering the art of making selections in Photoshop is vital for Photoshop users, they were constantly teaching selection tricks from time to time throughout the show. They also touched on features such as History Brush, the new Spot Healing Brush, painting masks, the new Extract filter, Match colors and distortion with Displacement Maps.
Smart Objects
Another really smart new feature with Photoshop CS2 is Smart Objects. It works a little like embedded image links in Illustrator. Resizing a smart object is done non-detructively. It only resizes the preview and does nto actually alter the pixel information of the image. Therefore the image’s resolution is maintained.
Following that is a new feature which allows us to map layers to a perspective grid / Vanishing Point and this skews the layer perpectively correct.
In past versions of Photoshop, Warping is restricted to text but in CS2, we can do that to images as well, without changing the original images, again this is through Smart Objects.
We had a 1-hour lunch break. Lunch wasn’t provided of course. Refreshments were served, coffee and cookies for those who need a caffeine boost.
Photography Track
After Lunch, it was more on photography enhancements. A few number of people had left but I stayed and it was worth it.
Adobe Lightroom™ Beta
Looks like an essential tool for photographers with alot of features which allows the manipulation of images in a very photographer-friendly way. It is currently in Beta and free for download. I won’t elaborate much, it does what Photoshop does, in a simpler way. However it does not replace Photoshop. Check it out here or download the Beta to try it out.
After giving demos of the various features offered by the Adobe Creative Suite™, Tod and Marianne continued to awe us with their expertise in manipulating images with techniques like seperating Duotones into seperate channels and different ways of converting a colored image into a black & white image using the Channel Mixer and working in LAB color space, without losing image information instead of using desaturation or changing documents to Greyscale color space.
Following that was a demonstration by some Printmaking Master which was so-so.
I didn’t win the lucky draw. The grand prize was a copy of Adobe Creative Suite was more than S$1600. Better luck next time.
Overall I think this is a really good show + it’s free. I will definitely go for future shows.
Pictures
I had uploaded some images on my fotologue. Have a look, though the images are pretty screwy due to my lousy camera.
LINKS
Adobe Photoshop World Asia 2006
Adobe Bridge™
Adobe Lightroom™
Adobe DNG™
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