I know we're a little behind on this one, but I thought I'd give it a shot in the hopes that I'm not the only one: iStockphoto has re-released their screen saver for both Mac OS X and Windows in a 1.5 beta version. The screen saver displays previous Free Images of the Week, as well as the latest front page blog post.

The screen saver can be had from iStockphoto's downloads page, though on my Intel-based MacBook Pro I received an error from the Screen Saver Preference Pane stating that this screen saver couldn't be run - which leads me to wonder if it isn't Intel-ready yet.

Either way, it at least sounds like a handy screen saver to help quench your iStockphoto obsession; anyone have any thoughts on this new version?

Automator World has posted a Photoshop Action Pack for Mac OS X 10.4's Automator, an app that allows you to automate many OS and application functions. The actions you can add to Automator workflows is fairly extensive:

• Add IPTC Captions to Photoshop Documents
• Apply Unsharp Mask to Photoshop Documents
• Apply Watermark to Photoshop Documents
• Assign Color Profile to Photoshop Documents
• Close Photoshop Documents
• Extract IPTC Captions from Photoshop Documents
• Flip Photoshop Documents
• New Photoshop Document
• Open Images in Photoshop
• Resize Photoshop Documents
• Rotate Photoshop Documents
• Save Photoshop Documents
• Trigger Photoshop Action
• Trim Photoshop Documents

The action pack is provided free and looks like a handy addition to any Mac + Photoshop user's workflow.

The O'Reilly Network has taken the wraps off of Inside Adobe Lightroom, a new site featuring articles, a blog and a podcast covering Adobe's professional photo management app. Tips on color correction, adding music to slideshows, how to migrate images from iPhoto  and more are all on the menu, so swing by and find out how much you really didn't know about Lightroom.

[via Daring Fireball]

Boy, these Adobe guys sure know how to bait: check out the inaugural post at Nonprofit @ Adobe. It sounds like the company has put together a Nonprofit Team that will be offering eSeminars, a nonprofit pricing program and the obligatory software tips and tricks.

That one post is all we get for now though. If you have anything to do with the worlds of nonprofit and design, I think Adobe just gave you something else to bookmark.

Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, speaking at a Tokyo news conference Friday, repeated Adobe's position that it won't be shipping a Mactel-compliant version of Photoshop until Spring 2007. Chizen said:

"We are working very hard on making our products Mactel (Mac Intel) compliant. When we ship the new product Acrobat 8 this fall it will be Mactel compliant. When we ship Photoshop and the Creative Suite products next spring they will also be Mactel compliant."

Chizen also indicated that Boot Camp won't have much of an effect on Adobe's plans to make software for the Mac:

"For the majority of our products, writing directly for Mac OS is an advantage and you will see us continue to do so and not work through Boot Camp or the Windows emulator because we think that will not be good for the majority of our customers. However there are some products that we have today that we have not been able to afford to continue to develop to make available on the Mac. A great example being FrameMaker. The majority of FrameMaker users use Windows as an OS but there is a small percentage that want to use FrameMaker on the Mac so they can use Boot Camp."

It's rare, at least personally, to hear about software quirks on machines that have too much RAM, but apparently Photoshop CS2 can exhibit a pause while painting on Macs with more than 4 GB of RAM.

Adobe has posted this Disable VM Buffering plug-in to help remedy the problem, but check out the plug-in's details page for more information on whether you should install it.

[via John Nack]

Earlier today, Apple released Boot Camp, a utility that allows the painless install of Windows XP on the new Intel Macs. TUAW has been covering this announcement quite a bit today, but one of the interesting questions that has been posed is: what's going to happen to third party software? Or, the more specific question pertaining to TUPW here is: does Adobe still have motivation to release CS3 for Mac OS X?

While we wait for an official statement from Adobe or a post on the less formal Adobe Blogs (how about it Mr. Nack?), I think C.K. has pretty much hit the nail on the head at TUAW: While Boot Camp might be great for those who want or have a need to run both Mac OS X and Windows XP on their Mac, those who are going to are most certainly not in the majority of the Mac-using base. In other words: there's still a huge Mac OS X market out there (which doubled in the U.S. last year), and in all likelihood, 3rd party apps that ride the fence like Creative Suite and Office aren't going anywhere.

A second version of the fantastic and free Photoshop CS2 Automator Actions has been released - and I am once again smitten. If you aren't familiar with Automator, it's an application Apple includes with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger that allows you to, well, automate the Mac OS X operating system. Think: "like actions in Photoshop, but for my entire OS." Automator allows you to easily drag and drop actions to create workflows that move information and files in and out of multiple programs, manipulating it along the way. As icing on the cake, Automator actions that you create can be shared with anyone else using Tiger, opening the doors for über-automation with your colleagues in the workplace. Check out Apple's Automator details page for more information if you need help wrapping your head around the concept.

This suite of Photoshop actions from Complete Digital Photography brings Photoshop into the automation party, offering a list of actions, options and features far too long to list here. The total list of Automator-enabled actions is now up to 68 with version 2.0, and new actions include, but are not limited to: Change Resolution, Color Balance, Dust and Scratches, Maximum/Minimum, Open Raw Data, Polar Coordinates, Posterize, Radial Blur, Resize Canvas, Smart Blur, Threshold, and much more. A series of bug fixes has been implemented as well, but check out the post at Complete Digital Photography for the full details of how these actions can fit into you Tiger Photoshop Automator workflow, and make sure you download the right set for either CS or CS2.

Photoshop Automator Actions 2.0 is donationware, and I urge you to toss at least a few dollars into the hat if you take a liking to these most excellent tools.

Over on DownloadSquad last September I found out that Adobe assured the Mac community
of a Photoshop Elements 4.0 release. Today, they made good on their promise and announced the new version, available for pre-order ($89.99) and shipping early March.

For those interested in Photoshop's updated little brother, its list of new features includes:

• Quickly retouch specific areas
• Get realistic skin tones
• Easily isolate objects from backgrounds
• Order prints online
• Fine-tune your camera's raw files
• Make quick fixes
• Know where your photos are
• Share photos online

At a quick glance: I'm impressed that a consumer-level version of Photoshop includes such pro features like RAW support. Check out Adobe's product page for more information on Photoshop Elements 4.0.

[via PhotoshopNews]

Trevor Morris, of GFX^TM, has raised the bar for defining the phrase "too much time on one's hands" by producing a 4-page PDF containing (what I assume is) every keyboard shortcut for Photoshop CS2. As you might guess, he had to use some pretty small type to fit all the available keyboard shortcuts on only four pages, including editing mode-specific ones. For those not living on the bleeding edge of Photoshop/CS versions, it seems he's created documents like this for every Photoshop version back to 5.0, so take your pic.

[via creativebits]

iStockphoto is back at the widget game again, now with a shiny new/updated set of widgets aptly titled the iStockWatcher Widget Suite which run on the Yahoo Widget Engine, a.k.a. Konfabulator. The three widgets go a little something like this:

• iStockwater 2.0.6 (green): their original account widget updated for the latest Yahoo Widget Engine
• iStockwater Lite 1.0.1 (pink): for keeping an obsessive eye on your downloads
• Downsample Calculator Widget: calculate the precise dimensions for downsampling for iStock, complete with drag and drop support.

Enjoy the new toys.

Oops. Not only was a Lightroom tutorial movie (QuickTime link) somehow leaked in the Adobe Lightroom Forums, but some clever viewers noticed an as-yet unseen crop button (pictured) in the lower left of the movie, betraying an upcoming second demo of this most excellent of pro photography apps.

Availability of this second beta is yet to be announced.

[via PhotoshopNews]

Alien Skin Software has released a new plugin set called Exposure, which can reproduce the look and feel of specific types of film stock. "Simulate the warmth and softness of real world film, both color and black and white. Reproduce realistic film grain, and simplify your digital photography workflow." Check out their examples page for a wide variety of one-click film effects, tonal shifts, color cast manipulation and other tricks up Exposure's sleeves.

Exposure sells for $199, is available for both Windows and OS X, including Tiger, and works with Photoshop CS or later, Photoshop Elements 3.0 or later, Fireworks MX 2004 or later, as well as Corel Paint Shop Pro 9.0 or later or Windows.

[via MacMinute]

I finally got around to playing with the Lightroom beta over the last couple of days and I have to say: it's fantastic. I'm running it on the latest version of the 15" PowerBook G4, with a hi-res screen, 1.67 GHz G4 and 1.5 GB RAM, and it runs quick. App startup time is virtually nil, and the whole thing just feels zippy. It offers a great array of features centered around this image comparison/organization paradigm, and some of them are the type of tools where, upon using them, I never even realized I was missing. Some of the toolsets are simply a sort of remixing of the tools and palettes found in Photoshop, offering a very different and handy UI for accomplishing the same kinds of editing, touching up, print preparation and comparison tasks. If you haven't checked out a demo yet, I highly recommend you do (as long as you're on OS X; a Windows demo is still pending).

The differences and similarities of Lightroom to Bridge are very interesting, as I mentioned John Nack covers in one of his posts. First and foremost, I think, is Lightroom's use of an all-encompassing Library (in ~/Pictures/Lightroom) for organization, with not much in the way of a system file browser to be seen. Upon importing images to work with, you have the choice of leaving them in whatever folder structure they are stored, or you can copy/move them into Lightroom's library. This stands quite in contrast to Bridge's more "file browsing and organizing" approach, allowing you to browse the file system and add individual folders to a "favorites" list for easy retrieval. I'm not saying either system is bad or good; I just wanted to point it out for those who might have an organizational preference for one paradigm or the other.

But of course, Lightroom isn't really meant to be a pro version of Bridge - it's an image comparison and touch-up/editing tool, and at those tasks it excels. I think the new and remixed UI of editing tools is a dream to use. I honestly don't want to be gleaming with Lightroom appreciation here, but I haven't really run into any complaints yet. Of course, I'm not a six-figure photographer with gobs and gobs of images from photoshoots to crunch through, so I'm anxious to see more serious run-throughs from those more pro than I.

FocalBlade is a Windows and OS X-compatible plugin offering an array of automated, semi-automated and highly customizable tools for sharpening and blurring photos, as well as adding soft focus and glow effects. It also offers batch processing, 8 and 16-bit RGB and grayscale editing and radius thresholds far above and below other tools of its kind.

A demo is available, along with more samples of the plugin's abilities. FocalBlade works with most Photoshop plugin-compatible applications like Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact, Photo-Paint, Fireworks and Photoshop Elements, so if it earns a place in your toolbelt, it only costs a mere $49.