Macs Are Great!

Adobe will be releasing their Creative Suite 3 on April 20. I’ve spent some time in the last few days trying to figure out which update, if any, I should buy. I’m leaning toward the Web Standard CS3 Upgrade, for Mac of course. I do own Photoshop too, but i do not use it much.

I use Dreamweaver quite often, and some of the integration features described as included in this release sound like they might be useful. When I use Dreamweaver on my Intel iMac it must run under Rosetta. This does not have much effect except for making it take a long time to start up.

More than anything, I’m hoping Adobe has cleaned up some of the annoying bugs in Dreamweaver. The one that gets me the most is the way it randomly changes login criteria for one of my sites and causes me to sync a file to a different site than the one I am editing. I’ve developed a certain sigh of exasperation that my partner recognizes as indicating that I’m using Dreamweaver. It does have some opportunities for improvement.

[tags]Adobe, CS3, software, Mac, OS X, Dreamweaver, upgrade, wish list[/tags]

written by Steve Rider

I own registered copies of both Adobe’s recently released Lightroom and Apple Aperture version 1.5. After using Lightroom for a week or so, I find that I like it much more than Aperture, and it also seems to be a superior tool for working with photos.

The user interface for Aperture is butt-ugly, dreadful, very unpleasant to look at, and this is quite unusual for an Apple product. Adobe Lightroom, on the other hand actually seems to have a better user interface than I typically expect in an Adobe application.

But the user interface is not the only consideration, obviously. Anyone who has ever used a computer knows that programs and operating systems sometimes have unexpected user interface issues.

The main concern when comparing these two programs is the way they let the user work with large batches of photographs, and the usefulness of the tools they provide for working with your photos. Lightroom has some fascinating capabilities, things I had never even imagined that a photo app could do. In Lightroom you use the Develop tab to modify images, it offers a right-hand sidebar to access the most the photo manipulation options, such as:

• Vignetting – adjusts for dark corners caused by your lens
• Chromatic Abberations – colored shadows around objects, also caused by lenses
• Vibrance – color intensity and differentiation
• Individual level adjustments for 8 different color bands
• A number of Histogram adjustment tools
• Display of the Histogram with individual peaks shown for different colors

And there is more. I’ve been amazed at the amount of improvement I’ve been able to achieve in various types of photos using Lightroom. I wonder if I’ll even bother using Aperture or even upgrading it as new versions appear.

If you are really into photography, like I am, and you are considering the purchase of one of these programs, do give Lightroom a try, we think you’ll be very pleased. As of the date of this blog entry, Adobe is offering Lightroom at an introductory price of $199. The software license allows you to install the software on 2 computers per license. Lightroom is available for both Windows and OS X, while Aperture is OS X only.

Have you used either of these? What is your opinion?

[tags]Software, Review, OS X, photo software, Apple, Aperture, Adobe Lightroom[/tags]

written by Steve Rider