Learn Photoshop Now ..Adobe CS4 will be 64-bit, but only on Windows

By: PhotoshopFasttrack

In a complete reversal of what Windows and Macintosh users might expect, Adobe CS4 includes 64-bit support for the Windows platform, but not for Mac.

According to John Nack, Adobe's Photoshop product manager, Mac OS X users unfortunately won't get 64-bit support until CS5, the next release of the graphics editing software.

Nack attributes this dichotomy to the decision Apple made last year to stop development of 64-bit support for Carbon, a move which he says took Adobe and third-party developers by surprise. Adobe did make CS3 Intel-compatible, but has maintained Carbon as its core architecture.

Nack wrote, in a recent blog entry, "At the WWDC show last June, [Adobe and] other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa [instead of] Carbon".

"We'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa."

As Nack sees it, 64-bit support in Photoshop will offer the biggest speed advantages for working with massive images on systems with RAM of about 32GB and up. However, normal users could see an 8% to 12% performance increase when using 64-bit versions of Adobe's software compared to 32-bit copies.

Unfortunately, this means Mac OS X users are not able to take advantage of the performance gains in CS4, and those who work with massive images will need to use Windows until CS5 is released further down the road.

A Note: Ironically, when Photoshop was initially released back in 1988, the software was available for Macintosh only. The product didn't even ship for Microsoft's platform until 1992, when Adobe ported Photoshop 2.0 to Windows.

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Learn Photoshop Now .. The Save for Web feature

underexposed pix

Normal exposed save for web after photoshop
By: PhotoshopFasttrack

As of version 5 and later, Photoshop includes a very helpful "Save for Web" command. This element enables you to save a copy of your image that is optimized for internet use. "Optimized" means that the image file will be as small as possible, and that the image will use only Web-safe colors. The "Save for Web" option can save images in GIF, JPEG, or PNG format.

Using Save for Web When you're ready to put your image in your web page, select Save for Web... from the File menu. The "Save for Web" dialog appears:

This is where you tell Photoshop how you'd like to optimise your image for the Web. You can select the file format to produce (GIF, JPEG or PNG), what size palette you'd like to use, how to cut down the colours to fit the chosen palette size, how much to dither the optimised image (if at all) and how much to sacrifice image quality to produce a smaller file size.

Image views The four tabs above the image view pane on the left allow you to view the original image, the optimised version (this is the default), the original and optimised versions side-by-side ("2-Up") and the original, optimised and two variations on the optimisation all together ("4-Up"). You can also use the Hand tool top-left to move the view around (if the image is bigger than the view), the Zoom tool to zoom in and out of the image, and the Eyedropper tool to select a colour from the image, to be used by various colour options on the right of the dialog.

Presets There are many options in the Save for Web dialog, and the choices can be quite confusing! Fortunately, there are a list of presets you can choose from to make it easier. Click the Settings: drop-down list (just below the Cancel button) to bring up the list of presets:

Three basic image formats exists in the presets - GIF, JPEG and PNG. The rule of thumb is to use JPEG's for photos and GIF's for all else. For a full guide on choosing the right image format, see Understanding image formats.

Optimizing GIFs If you're making a GIF, you will want to start off with a preset such as GIF 32 Dithered, which works well for most GIFs. You can then fine-tune the optimization to fit your needs. Some of the important optimization options are discussed below.

Color reduction method This drop-down box is located below the Image Format box. The commonly used options here include:

Perceptual: Creates the reduced color palette which favors colors that the human eye is more sensitive to. Selective: Like Perceptual, however better for Web work. Selective is the favored (and default) option. Adaptive: Creates the palette by taking an even sampling of colors from the image's color spectrum. This is generally not as good a choice as Selective. Web: Use this if you need a complete Web-safe color palette (Netscape 216-color palette). These days, this method usually isn't that important as most computer displays support at least 16 million colors. Dithering method This is located below the "color reduction method" box. Dithering involves adding patterned or random dots to the image to make it appear to contain more colors than are actually in the palette, allowing you to use a smaller palette size. The options are:

No Dither: No dithering is applied to the image. Good if the dithering effect looks bad, but can produce severe "banding" of colours. Diffusion: Uses error diffusion dithering, which looks similar to Noise dithering, producing a random-looking pattern of dots. Can produce seams when using ImageReady slices. Pattern: Uses a pattern for dithering, rather than random dots. Can work well for some images, but often produces a rather artificial look to the image. Noise: Similar to Diffusion, but does not produce seams at the edges of slices in ImageReady. Transparency This checkbox is only available if your image does not have its Background layer turned on. It specifies that you want parts of the saved GIF to be transparent. If you deselect this checkbox, the transparent areas will instead be filled with the Matte colour (or white if no matte is selected).

Interlaced This controls GIF Interlacing. If enabled, the GIF will appear gradually as interlaced horizontal lines as it is loaded onto the Web page. This gives viewers something to look at while the full image appears. It does increase the file size, however.

Lossy If you wish to reduce the file size further this slider allows you to remove detail from the image. Use this only if you don't mind reducing the image quality quite severely! A value of 0 will not remove any detail; a value of 100 will remove the maximum amount of detail.

Colors This is where you choose the size of your GIF palette. A palette of 32 colours is often sufficient for web images, but if your image has a lot of detail and looks too fuzzy/blurry/banded with 32, up it to 64, 128 or 256. If your image has very few colours in to start with, or doesn't look too bad with fewer colours, select 16, 8, 4 or even 2! This will make the GIF file size smaller.

Dither If you have chosen a dithering method (see above), this option will allow you control over how much the image is dithered - 0 means no dithering, 100 means lots of dithering.

Matte Matte is the background color you wish to use for your image. If you've enabled Transparency (see above), then the foreground image will be faded at the edges to blend in with the matte color. If you choose the Matte setting of "None", the GIF will have a "hard transparency" with no fading; this is great if you want to be able to use the image on any color background.

If you've disabled Transparency, the transparent areas of your image will be filled in with the matte colour.

Web Snap If you want to use web-safe colors you will want to increase the Web Snap slider. The higher the value of Web Snap means Photoshop will bias your color palette more and more towards web-safe colors.

Optimising JPEGs If you're making a JPEG, start off with a preset such as JPEG Medium, which should work well for most JPEGs. You can then fine-tune the optimisation to suit your needs. Some of the important optimisation options are discussed below.

Quality There are two ways to modify the quality of the compression: the Low/Medium/High/Maximum list, and the Quality slider (for fine control). The lower the quality setting, the more blurry and bitty the JPEG will appear, but the smaller the resulting file size.

Progressive A progressive JPEG is similar to an interlaced GIF (see above). The image will load gradually on the Web page - a low resolution image first, then eventually the full, high-resolution image. Again, great for stopping your viewers on slow modems getting bored, but it does mean a slightly larger file size, and really old browsers don't support progressive JPEGs.

Matte If your Photoshop image has transparent areas, you can fill them with a specified matte color with this drop-down box.

Optimizing PNGs Your options for optimizing a PNG-24 are much the same as those for optimizing a JPEG. Similarly, the options for optimizing a PNG-8 are very similar to those for optimizing a GIF. See the GIF and JPEG sections above for details.

If you really can't be bothered... ...you can always let Photoshop optimise your image for you! Select the little arrow just to the right of the Settings... box and select Optimize to File Size...:

In the dialog window that pops up, choose Auto Select GIF/JPEG then enter your desired file size. Click OK and Photoshop will do the rest for you! If you're not pleased with the results, play with the settings as described in the sections above, or just choose a slightly larger file size and try again.

Saving the image Once you're happy with your optimized image, click OK to save it to disk. The file saved will be a copy of your original image, unless you specifically overwrite the original with the optimized file.

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Colorful Hats

These are some colorful hats displayed in a shopping mall. Simple designs but colorful for girls and boys. I think these hats are designed with no age limit. ( click on image for larger version )

I shoot this photo handheld with Canon 30D with a slow speed of 1/6 second and aperture set 2.8