Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop titles now available in Apple iBookstore

Reading my book on an iPhone

If you’ve always wanted to read a Photoshop book on a tiny iPhone screen, your life is now complete: I just got word that my recent books, such as Real World Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers, are now available in the Apple iBookstore on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. An easy way to find them in the iBookstore is to search for my name, Conrad Chavez.

The books are formatted for easy reading in the iBooks app on iOS devices, and if you want to see what that looks and feels like, there’s a “Get Sample” button you can click to download a free excerpt. Or just look at the pictures here.

Real World Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers: now available

So now you’ve got Adobe Photoshop CS5, and you need to know which new features can bring the highest return to your photography and your studio’s workflow. Lucky you…just grab my book Real World Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers, which is now available.

Real World Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers book coverI concentrate on the needs of professional digital photographers so that you don’t have to wade through explanations of 3D, HTML, or cheesy special effects just to get good, solid images out the door. This book is about Photoshop for pure photography: How to get the image from the camera into editing and then produce the best possible version for the diverse forms of output that your clients demand today, such as CMYK printing, RGB inkjet printing, online photo galleries and sharing websites such as Facebook and Flickr.

Going well beyond a mere description of what’s in the menus and tools, Real World Photoshop still includes the time-tested, fundamental guidance about color correction, color management, and efficient workflow that has made edition after edition a perennial best-seller. You’ll also find valuable tips on almost every page in the book and advice on how to put together a killer Photoshop computer.

Here are some of the new features I cover in this CS5 edition:

  • Mask difficult edges, such as hair, more quickly using improved Refine Edge
  • Extend and optimize image dynamic range with Merge to HDR Pro and HDR Toning
  • Retouch faster with Content Aware Fill and Content Aware Heal
  • Correct lens distortions with new Lens Profiles
  • Select and specify colors faster with the new HUD Color Picker
  • Convert images and upload directly to Facebook, Flickr, and other destinations in one step, using the new Output panel in Adobe Bridge
  • Make the most of the rewritten raw processing engine, dramatically improved noise reduction, and new lens corrections in Adobe Camera Raw 6

How to get yours

Get Real World Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers at your favorite bookseller, at Amazon.com, or at Peachpit.com. Want it as an e-book? Check out Safari Books Online. If you’re a Creative Edge subscriber, you can even start reading Rough Cuts drafts of this and other Peachpit Press books online before they come off the press.

Mac Pro: Why four hard drive bays are great for Photoshop

Apple announced the new Mac Pro tower this week. For a Photoshop user, the Mac Pro’s quad SATA hard drive bays are just as useful as the quad cores of the two Xeon CPUs.

Why would a Mac Photoshop user need to use up four drive bays? Actually, it isn’t that hard. First, we know drive number 1 is the system drive that also contains all user folders and their documents. But I like to keep my photo archive on a drive other than the system drive, partly because it’s huge, but also so that if crazy things start happening to the system drive, my photo archive is less likely to be affected. This also simplifies backing up the entire archive to one of my external archive mirror drives. Right now my photo archive is on an external drive, but if I buy a Mac Pro then the photo archive can go to internal drive number 2 and get some clutter off the desk.

I would use drive number 3 as a Photoshop scratch disk. Photoshop has its own virtual memory that’s independent of the virtual memory that OS X and Windows use, and it’s optimized for how Photoshop must deal with image data. If you want the best Photoshop performance, in addition to having tons of RAM you should also have a separate, fast hard disk that’s assigned as a dedicated Photoshop scratch disk (set this up in Preferences > Plug-Ins and Scratch Disks). Again, another disk inside the machine instead of on the desk.

What about the fourth drive bay? At the moment, I could leave it empty. But when Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) comes along sometime in the spring of 2007, it will include the Time Machine continuous backup feature, which requires a dedicated volume. Why not stick a drive in bay 4 and make it the Time Machine backup drive? That would be perfect.

Those aren’t even all of the possibilities. Some might take two or more of the bays and make a faster or safer RAID out of them, using Disk Utility or a RAID card.

And that’s it…all four internal bays of a Mac Pro quickly used up to help optimize Photoshop and also OS X 10.5 when it gets here. With all the drives that won’t have to sit in external cases on my desk, I might be able to get rid of a whole power strip.