Photoshop

Full press release below.

Brand-new additions to your Photoshop arsenal. Claudia McCue unveils very handy features exclusive to Photoshop CS5, such as the updated Refine Edge feature that makes selecting organic edges much easier and faster than before.

First chapter free. Get access to the Mediabistro On Demand video library for only $19 per month.

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 Bible (Wiley Publishing) - By Stacy Cates, Simon Abrams, Dan Moughamian
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Making images or parts of images lighter, or brighter, is a commonly needed adjustment. There are many ways to lighten an image in Photoshop. You can use a lightening process that lightens the light and/or dark qualities of an image (the luminosity or luminance) along with the colors in an image.

Photoshop files tend to be huge. If you want to save disk space both on your primary HD and your backup disks there is a very simple trick that can reduce files sizes by more than 50%. Before you save just switch off the visibility of all layers. With the layers switched off, Photoshop will not save layer previews resulting in smaller file sizes. At times the saving is as little as 10%, but in other cases it can be up to 90%.

There are obvious benefits to spending the extra time and effort grouping your layers into folders and naming them appropriately.

For one you will appreciate the organization if you have to work further on the file after considerable amount time went by. Second, your coworkers or your css programmer will appreciate a neat file as well.

There are some less obvious and immediate advantages to such tidy practices. Design is not done on paper or on screen. Design is something you do in your mind. You continuously evaluate your work and make further design decisions while you work. Design is an internal dialogue and the result is your design work.

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 After the Shoot (Wiley Publishing)
By Mark Fitzgerald
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides users a simple way to view photos with full-screen previews and edit images with gesture-based editing. You can transform your photos with basic editing tools like crop, rotate and flip; as well as adjust color with saturation and tint tools, enhance exposure and vibrancy and convert images to black and white.

Sometimes you may want to look at you artwork at different angles. In fact many designers prefer looking at their designs upside down to find mistakes or ideas for further improvement.

You can do this virtually in Photoshop without affecting the pixel information in your image.