By now, most creative professionals in the digital world have heard about Adobe’s latest iteration of the Creative Suite Franchise. CS5 was unveiled last week and is scheduled to ship within the next four weeks.
As with previous releases of the software, purchasing new copies or upgrading old ones comes at a relatively stiff price. Many design studios are currently evaluating the new version to see if and when it is most prudent to make the jump.
Of course, everyone wants to stay at the cutting edge of the latest in technology and software tools. But in today’s difficult economic times, many companies cannot afford to do that. It may not make financial sense for studios and especially individuals to purchase every major upgrade that Adobe releases.
It can be argued that the last version of Adobe CS, version 4, was not a significant enhancement over the one before, version 3. Yes, there some new and interesting features. But was it worth shelling out several hundred or thousand dollars to bring workstations up to CS4 when CS3 was more than adequate?
In our case, at Intrigue, we did something a little different.
When you talk about scripting and/or programming, the average person looks at you with the “deer in the headlights” look. Unless you are a programmer yourself, there is something about this topic that makes most computer users cringe and recoil in horror.
These are people who are very happy to use their Mac or Windows PC as-is to get things done. Even though I’m not a programmer myself, I’ve had enough experience to realize that there are MANY tasks that people do that can be either enhanced, done quicker or done more efficiently through the use of automated scripts.
When I saw the news item the other day, I was blown away. Is it really 20 years since Adobe Photoshop was introduced to the universe? Unbelievable…
In the computing industry, there are a handful of applications that have had major impacts on the world and how people get their creative work done. Photoshop is one of those programs. The impact it has had is immeasurable and it has forever changed the way we look at images in print and on screen. It has gotten so big that “photoshop” has become a verb, for manipulating images. What is amazing to me is that this ONE, almost magical program has created an industry all its own and many careers and businesses have been built up around it. I include myself in that statement as I have found Photoshop to be an indispensable tool.
Have you heard about HDR photography? It’s a concept that’s been intriguing photographers and digital graphics artists in recent years. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range.
According to Wikipedia, HDR imaging was originally developed back in the 30s and 40s by Charles Wyckoff. The techniques have been refined over the years by other individuals. In a nutshell, the basic idea is to take a set of photographs with a range of exposures and combine them into one. After that is accomplished, the image can be “tone mapped”, which allows a digital artist to create an image that would ordinarily be impossible to achieve with a single photograph alone.
A month ago Kodak sent out a press release about their new Nexpress printing press. This press has a very nifty feature that has not been seen before in the printing world. It’s a digital press that lays down what they call “Dimensional Clear Dry Ink”. It’s a special coating – like varnish, or gloss – that creates a raised printing surface to the printed piece.
It’s a 3d effect that you can feel with your fingers, which makes it unlike anything done before. Imagine a photo of an orange. With this new Nexpress and the Intelligent Dimensional Coating Solution, you can actually “feel” the dimples of the orange on the paper. If you hold the paper at an angle, you can see how the light reflects as if it were bouncing off a dimpled surface.
Recently, I wrote about our catalog project that required the usage of multiple metallic, spot color inks. It took some trial and error, but we got things set up correctly to do the workflow and the PDFs turned out ok.
At least so we thought! The printer has been working on processing our files the last couple of weeks and discovered a situation with one section of the catalog that was causing a problem. There were about ten, seemingly random pages in this section that were not separating correctly. They were all created in the same exact fashion with the same exact settings so it was very strange to hear this.
After we heard about the problem, I went to our workstations and verified all the settings just to be sure nothing had accidentally been flipped. But no, everything looked as expected. Nothing amiss anywhere. The settings in Quark were fine as were the settings in Distiller.
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