Lexar joined forces with Adobe to provide special discounts on Photoshop Elements 8, Premiere Elements 8 and Photoshop Lightroom 2. All Lexar Professional CF memory cards will offer $100 off the purchase of Lightroom 2, and $30 off Photoshop / Premiere Elements 8.
I’ve always been a fan of Lexar Compact Flash cards and at least the $100 offer for Lightroom 2 (currently around $250 at Amazon
) is generous. As always, I’d check out Adobe’s upgrade eligibility first, but this promo would currently be the avenue I would take, if I wanted to get a full license of Lightroom.
The new offerings and promotions from Lexar and Adobe will begin in November.
Adobe finally made its move to the iPhone by releasing Photoshop.com Mobile. As so often, corporate policy seem to have trumped market requirements and thus, they missed a great opportunity to grab market share quickly.
In principle, Adobe made the right move. Release a good, but not best-in-class, app with the most commonly requested features and price it at an irresistible price point: Free. Use the app to get into the minds and hearts of consumers, then use the Adobe brand and mind-share to convert these consumers to where they can make money: Photoshop Elements, their consumer product. Clever strategy that makes a lot of sense to me.
On the feature side, there is enough for a quick fix, but a lot missing for power users. You can correct exposure, tint, saturation, add soft focus or apply one of many filters. It would have been great to not only let me rotate at 90 degree angels, but also freely rotate my images. Crop and flip are also supported. This is clearly good enough for consumers. No levels, curves, masking, brushes, transparency aso. for Pro’s, but then Professionals are not the targeted audience for this app anyway.
100% crop - Photoshop.com Mobile shows slightly less noise than Photogene after Exposure compensation
I expected Adobe to be at least on par with Photogene and PhotoForge with regards to photo editing algorithms and I was not disappointed. Their corrected images looked the same or slightly better to me and also seemed a little bit less noisy. No complaints at all in this department.
Where Adobe plundered it, though, is with regards to Online features. You cannot upload to Facebook or Flickr, just to Photoshop.com. While I understand the corporate reasoning behind it, it’s not where the iPhone market is. Nor do I want to upload and organize my images on yet-another-online service. As mighty as Adobe is on the software side, Flickr and Facebook is where the online photo action is. Just not in this iPhone app.
If you do not mind editing in one app, then saving your photo back to your iPhone and uploading it to Flickr or Facebook from another app, Photoshop.com Mobile offers excellent price-performance on the iPhone. If you feel the need to upload from within your photo editing app, this one is not for you.
Verdict: Recommended.
Price: free from iTunes.
According to John Nack at Adobe, Infotrends recently surveyed 1,026 professional photographers in North America and found that more than four times more photographers use Lightroom to process RAW images than Aperture. Even on the Mac, Lightroom users outnumbered Aperture users by a factor of almost 2:1.
Why is Lightroom so much more popular than Aperture? I don’t know for sure, but I see four reasons:
- Many photographers already use Photoshop. Photographers might have given the initial nod to Lightroom simply due to familiarity with Photoshop and the Adobe brand.
- At its heart, Apple is a hardware company. While it has had a pretty good track record with its pro applications, Apple might be perceived as more likely to abandon them than Adobe, given that Adobe is purely a software company. Of course, Apple has deeper pockets than Adobe, but software is playing a second fiddle there. Maybe even a third fiddle these days given the success of the iPhone.
- Adobe is the custodian of many de-facto public domain photo formats, including TIFF and DNG. There is simply trust in Adobe to keep continuing this role and thus keep continuing to be focused laser-sharp on the photography market.
- Adobe has many existing relationships with camera manufacturers, thus they are able to provide support for new camera models very quickly. Of course, a number of the camera manufacturers are afraid of Adobe’s market power, but then, so are they of Apple’s, let alone Apple’s track record of not really caring that much about its ecosystem.
Personally, I’m not a professional photographer, but there were two more reasons why I ended up in the Lightroom camp: I got my Lightroom 1.0 license for free as part of Adobe’s acquisition of Pixmantec, the developer of Raw Shooter Pro, which I used before. Plus, I keep continuing to travel with a Windows laptop, thus I need Lightroom on both the PC and the Mac. And that rules out Aperture.
Why do you use Lightroom or Aperture?
If you want to learn Photoshop with the help of your iPhone, here’s your chance.
This week only, RHED Pixel offers Understanding Photoshop – Quick Fixes for just $0.99. For that price you get a 165 MB download that is full of training videos and quizzes. Specifically, Understanding Photoshop includes:
- 17 training videos edited specifically for the iPhone or iPod Touch, including zooms and close-ups of the action
- Every lesson includes hands-on files that you download to your computer, so you can try your newly learned techniques at home
- Interactive quizzes
- Search and bookmarking your progress
- Photoshop quick reference guide
- Interact with the trainer with comments and a Twitter client.
The application was developed with host Richard Harrington who is well known in the Photoshop world. He has written over 20 books on digital photography and design, is a contributor to Photoshop User and Layers Magazine, an Adobe Certified Instructor and a member of the Photoshop World Instructor “Dream Team.”
Both Joe and I are pretty fluent in Photoshop, so we passed on this app. But this might be a good app for you, if you like to use your iPhone as a learning tool, maybe even while you travel.
Price: $0.99 from iTunes – only this week!
