Photoshop World, Day 1: Cool Keynote, Great Sessions

I am at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, attending Photoshop World 2007. The last time I attended was in 2004, and I was ready to get back to the event.

HIGHLIGHTS

The keynote. I was really impressed to see John Loiacono, Adobe’s Senior VP of Creative Solutions, deliver the keynote this year. This is the same person who announced Adobe Creative Suite 3 to the world a week ago. Along with that we had a demo of Photoshop CS3 Extended by John Nack, the Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, and it impressed the crowd who hadn’t seen the media event (for those who have been watching the CS3 news and previews, it starting to become old news). The high point of the keynote was when a member of the Adobe Labs team came up and wowed the crowd with some bleeding-edge technology that won’t be ready for the world until CS4 and CS5 (can you believe it?!) including a 3,000-megapixel image of Boston. The man was able to zoom in from a panoramic view to a close-up of a Starbucks, so close the words on the doors were (almost) legible! For more information, visit xrez.com.

The Guru Awards. I submitted some entries this year but nothing was selected as a finalist; this is in contrast to 2004, when I submitted without really thinking and ended up winning a Guru and being a finalist for another. I think the quality of entries this year are much, much better than in 2004—the Photoshop community in general is improving their work quality.

OPINIONS

There’s a lot more people at Photoshop World than in years past. I knew this was the first year they actually sold out, and it shows: the classrooms are gigantic and the crowds of people are thick.

Not a whole lot has changed from three years ago. Most of the instructors are the same and Scott Kelby is still Scott Kelby, and that brings a goofy energy to the whole show. It feels a lot like the San Francisco show I attended in 2004.

The sessions teach different stuff. I would bet that almost half of the classes are devoted to digital photography and Photoshop Lightroom. Another 40% is devoted to Photoshop and the other 10% is video and CS2. NAPP believes that all designers are photographers now, which is true for many people, and Adobe has really pushed hard to build that market in the last several years with Camera Raw and now Photoshop Lightroom. It’s a fundamental change in the industry and certainly a good one overall, but it has altered Photoshop World as much as it has the professional photography industry.

The Photoshop sessions teach the same stuff as three years ago, or at least similar stuff. Subjects like sharpening, masking, color correction and productivity have changed little over the past few years, at least according to the instructors who teach the same techniques they did years ago. For example, even with new sharpening tools like Smart Sharpen, Deke McClelland is still teaching much of the same sharpening techniques I saw in 2004. I don’t expect instructors to change what they teach just to keep it fresh, but with advances in Photsohop one would expect new things to learn. Maybe the Photoshop engineers aren’t putting out new features that make the old techniques inferior.

TOP TEN TIPS FROM PHOTOSHOP WORLD

When I attend these conferences, I like to leave my readers with a collection of tips from the instructors:

10. Remember that the screen mode ignores black; the multiply mode ignores white; and the overlay mode ignores 50% gray. When creating a new layer, the New Layer dialog box allows you to fill it with the ignored value. (”Blend Mode Magic”, Michael Ninness)

9. Retouching is done best by taking your time—and a little bit of careful retouching is always better than a lot of poor retouching. (”Skin, Skin, Skin”, Katrin Eismann)

8. The “More Accurate” option in the Smart Sharpen dialog box is only useful on photos with absolutely no noise—in almost all cases, it will give no benefit for the added time it takes to use it. (”Sharpening Reinvented”, Deke McClelland)

7. Click the circular dot in the thumbnail of an image in Lightroom in order to add it to a quick collection. (”Lightroom Session”, Tim Grey)

6. When creating art in Photoshop, play with filters and learn new ways to create elements by using old tools in new ways. (”The Art of Photoshop”, Bert Monroy)

5. After Effects will take Photoshop files in many different easy ways: drag-and-drop, or double-click on the assets area in After Effects to select your files. (”Your Photoshop Is In My After Effects”, Rich Harrington)

4. Create an easy vignette by creating a layer full of 50% gray, set the layer mode to Hard Light, then apply the Lens Correction filter with some vignette adjustment. (”As Easy As 1, 2, 3″, Ben Willmore)

3. To add copyright information to your photos quickly, create a metadata template in Photoshop and then append the metadata in Bridge. (”Photoshop Killer Tips for Photographers”, Scott Kelby)

2. Vanishing Point 2.0 is a feature new to Photoshop CS3 that allows multiple planes and depth layers. (”Photoshop CS3 Beta One-on-One”, Deke McClelland)

1. To intensify colors, convert an image to Lab color mode and then increase the steepness of the a and b channels’ curves by dragging their endpoints toward the center in equal amounts. Do this do a duplicate layer and you’ll be able to mask the layer later to control where the intensification happens. (”Photoshop Finishing Touches”, Dave Cross)