Design Talk

Camera Raw 4.6 and the DNG Converter 4.6 has been posted to Adobe.com for Mac and Windows.  This release adds support for raw formats from the following 15 camera models:

Michael Tapes from RawWorkflow.com has teamed up with the guys from Imagenomic (known for Noiseware) to create the very cool--and free--Instant JPEG From Raw utility.  It doesn't interpret or convert your raw image data; rather, it just pulls out the JPEG preview embedded by your camera*.  It can optionally downsample these JPEGs to a lower resolution as well.  Check out a quick [more]

Continuing a bit of a theme:

In this cycle our goal was to unlock the power of Bridge.  Bridge was already a highly capable, feature-rich application, so instead of slathering it with new features, our first task was to get more people to discover and use what's there.  That meant changing the bang for the buck: raising the discoverability & usability of existing features while lowering the barriers to use (speed, launch time, memory usage).  We also wanted to add some key features that would help photographers

A couple of folks have written to ask whether it's possible to upgrade from Photoshop CS3 Extended to Photoshop CS4 (the non-Extended version), or whether once you've bought Extended once you can only buy Extended in the future.  The short story is that you have a choice.

Among the comments on my list of details polished in Photoshop CS4, a number of people wished for a similar list for Illustrator & suggested that the Illustrator team start a blog.  As it happens, my friend & former Illustrator PM Mordy Golding runs the great Real World Illustrator blog, and he's posted some illuminating resources:

I'm a perfectionist, and I deeply, viscerally want to smooth & polish every aspect of Photoshop.  Doing it all in any one cycle is impossible, but I'm proud to say we've put a ton of effort into sweating the details in CS4. 

• From the Big Picture:
  
  • I've never thought of London as a great-looking city, but dang if Jason Hawkes' London from Above doesn't offer a fresh take.
  
  [more]

At Photoshop World I demonstrated Photoshop running a plug-in that houses Pixel Bender, Adobe's new cross-platform, cross-application technology for running filters silly fast on GPUs & CPUs.  Because it also runs in the upcoming Flash Player 10 (due in conjunction with CS4) and in After Effects, I expect Pixel Bender to usher in a whole new era for Photoshop filters.  It radically lowers the barrier to entry (all you need is a text editor--which Adobe [more]

A release candidate of Lightroom 2.1 is now available on Adobe Labs.  Tom Hogarty writes,