Woah!

What a busy few weeks it has been! I spent 6 days visiting my family back in the UK (I even got sunburned!); non-teaching work has been booming; milady destroyed micomputer and I had to spend 5 days getting everything back to relative normality, and I've been so lethargic due to fighting off an infection, the heat, and some troubled sleeps.

I'll have a few images and videos of my time spent in Brighton to upload shortly, hopefully within the next few days. For now, though, I wanted to talk about Photoshop CC

I currently own Photoshop CS6, having effectively skipped to it from CS3 which served me well for a number of years. The pricing for Photoshop is very steep and not really something you can just go out and buy, like most other software. So when you see that the new Photoshop CC is only $30 / 100zl a month, it's easy to think it's not that steep, especially when you consider that CS3 back in 2007 was $650 / 2100zl (that's a lot of mulch to hand over).  What's important to consider, though, is that the license for CC is on a per-month basis. That is, if you stop paying, whether now or in 5 years when you've invested $2000 / 6400 zl, you lose access to that software. Certainly, it could work out being cheaper in the long run, when you factor in that updates are a part of the license fee, so you continue to receive updated versions of PS through CC, and you'd have to subscribe for a little over 2 years roughly to invest the same amount as a full retail copy. However, it's an extra thing you have to pay at the end of the month and those sorts of things add up, don't they? I'd much rather save up a bit and shell out in one lump sum and OWN the software, indefinitely.

Anyway, my rant about CC licensing over, I wanted to say that I'm currently using the trial version. As much as I have no intention of paying the CC subscription, the new features are quite delicious and, if they are a taste of things to come, it's very tempting.

. One of the new features in CC is the ability to open Camera Raw as a filter (which can be used as a smart filter, non-destructively, if you convert the layer to a smart layer). Naturally, you won't get the same benefit if you use it on a non-raw file as if you'd use ACR on an actual RAW image, but the tools do work very well.

This one was a 5 minute job to simulate a wider-angle shot, using the new Lens Correction interface (more on that soon), I simple leveled it out, increased distortion and in a not-so-precarious way, used a mixture of content aware fill / scale to fill in the edges, then slightly cropped to keep the width the same while reducing the height, changing the aspect ratio to give it more of that illusion. (Though, the canvas size IS wider, hence content aware). Certainly not something I'd add to my portfolio, or even print, but not bad.


... to be continued! It's 7am, I should sleep :/