Oh Adobe, stop playing silly buggers!

I've been using Photoshop CS6 for a while now, the other day I went to use the diffuse glow filter only to find it missing (yes I know you cant find something thats missing!)  For reasons best known to themselves Adobe have "hidden" some of the filters, I kid you not!  Theres a little check box in the edit/preferences/plug-ins to show the fissing filters.

Why? what good reason could there be to bloody hide these things, come on adobe, stop screwing around, some people use this software to make a living, wsting time playing silly beggers searching for tools is costing people money.  And while your at it stop changing the interface for the sake of change, it's silly and pointless, your changes to elements 11 have really upset a lot of people.  Time to make you mind up what colour you like I think.

CS6 is it worth the money?

Well I've had CS6 for a while now and is it worth the money.  The full version is getting on for around £900, ir around £190 if you upgrade from an earlier version.
Whats new, theres a better content aware tool, some tweeks to the graphics, a different interface (well slightly different)  A totally changed crop tool, which personally I hate.   Theres some new blur effects, so you can get a tilt shift type effect easier (although it wasn't difficult before)
 It now has a background save feature that might be a get out of jail free card if PS crashes (it auto saves every ten minutes or so (you choose) coulbe be usefull if you spend a lot of time working on tricky images.
It has better brushes, and a wideangle sort of correction tool, that has other uses as well in correcting image angles.  They also added better video support.
Easily the best new feature is the new camera raw, while the look remains more or less the same (they have changed the names of the sliders) the converted works much better, more highlight recovery and better shadow detail, and it works on 32 bit images as well so you can process your combined hdr here.

Is it worth the money?   Well I must admit I still mostly use CS5, one because my plug-ins are in there and it's a pain in the arse to move them all over, and two, I really hate the new crop tool, after years of it working one way it now works like lightrooms.  I do love the new better raw engine but is it really worth £900...  No is probably the honest answer, if you upgrade it's probably a good deal.  Otherwise... you pay your money and you make the choice.

Gimp

I decided it was time I tried out Gimp properly. Gimp is a free open source photo editing software. It's pretty close to the older versions of Photoshop, although it being updated on a fairly regular basis, the version shown here is 2.6 (the latest at time of writing)
So how does it work, well it works very well, although I find it very slow compared to photoshop, it's also a lot more basic. Another issue is it's total lack of raw support, so no raw editing then.
That said it is FREE, and it does the job well, although a bit slower that it's £650 rival.

Plug-ins/scripts/actions

Photoshop has the ability to use add ons, theres
Actions, these are a sort of recording of the steps taken on one photo and played back on another image to get the same effect/style, you can either make your own, buy some or download some of the thousands of free ones available on the internet.

Scripts, these are a sort of more complicated version of an action, much much harder to write yourself (requires knowledge of scripting) but can do things that can't be done by an action.

Plug-ins, these are normally made by others, often big companies and are most often bought (although there are some free ones about) these usually open a new interface and offer all kinds of effects, from sharpening or black and white, to complicated lens correction or high dynamic range.

Photoshop v Lightroom

Which is best for you?
Both is the easy answer. What are the real world differences? Well lightroom does a few things to a lot of images while photoshop does a lot of things to a few images.

Lightroom is really designed to manage and edit your images, but it only has limited editing, theres no layers, no cutting and pasting, limited cloning and healing (poor IMHO) Limited localised ajustment. But what it does have is good colour and exposure editing, and it does batches of images well, something photoshop with all it's amazing features still manages to make difficult.

For me I need both, I use Lightroom for large numbers of images, say a wedding where most of whats needed is a quick tweek to colour exposure, and Photoshop for the tricky stuff like cloning or removing objects from the background, swopping eyes, stuff like that, things Lightroom simply can't do.

Backing up your images.

Now today I'm going to talk about backing up your images. If you haven't already got them backed up now is the time to do it.
I would suggest you have at least TWO different back-ups, don't rely on any one system. I use two external hard drives and dvd's to back up too, ideally one set kept off site (your mums house/work/even the shed) anything that separates it from the house or office so if you have a flood or fire you still have your images.
Why do we need to back up? Simply because all hard drives will fail at some point, they might last for years or they might last days, sadly theres no real way to tell. I have had quite a few either fail totally or get killed by virus's over the years, luckly I keep everything backed up so this far I have been lucky. I do know a few people who have lost all their images because a drive has failed, don't think it can't happen to you.

Resizing in photoshop

A question I often here asked is how do I resize my images for the internet or whatever.

Well heres how.
Open your image in photoshop, go to image/ image size here I wanted 700 pixles on the longest size (the height) the box that opens has the following options, first I made sure it was on pixles, then I checked that scale styles, resample and constrain proportions were all ticked, now I type in 700 on the longest size.
The next step is to choose the resample method, as I'm going smaller it's bicubic sharper, if I was going bigger than the original it would be bicubis smoother (it tells you) Lastly click ok and the jobs done.

Just remember to save as portrait small (or whatever) so you don't save over your original and loose the full size version.