Adobe Slate Test

I'm really intrigued by the new Adobe Slate app. 

This app is fairly unusual in that it runs only on the iPad, and it's a unique sort of web page editor. This is an early release and has some limitations that may disappear in later versions (as mentioned above, it runs only on the iPad, and it lacks text formatting such as italic and bold in text blocks). It includes an exporter that will post each story you create but only to the Adobe Slate server. That said, it has a smooth simple user interface that hides powerful functionality, and a number of very well designed templates, each of which includes tasteful but visually intriguing parallax scrolling effects. Click anywhere on the preview below to go to the story.

The Best New Photoshop CC Feature

The Adobe Camera Raw plugin, possessing a feature set identical to the Lightroom develop module, can now be deployed in a Photoshop work session as an active layer; visible in the layers palette and toggled on and off with the usual visibility "eyeball" button.

Let's say you have an image open in Photoshop ready to edit. You've been working a lot in Lightroom and your reflexes are tuned to the Lightroom develop module sliders and tools. If you were in Lightroom you would switch to the Develop module, tweak some sliders and watch the image respond, but since you're in Photoshop you have to snap into the context of Photoshop's toolset and work with the tools available in Photoshop's very different world. Not a big deal, but a slight conceptual interruption to your train of thought. Well, now there's a very handy and arguably, revolutionary alternative. Here's how to use it:

Open your Layers Palette

(keyboard shortcut: f 7 or Window > Layers to open the palette if it's not already open)

 

Duplicate Layer

then right-click the layer you want to edit and choose "Duplicate Layer…" from the contextual menu that appears.

Filter Menu > Camera Raw Filter

From the Filter menu, choose Camera Raw Filter

The Adobe Camera Raw Dialog will open...

with the same adjustment sliders and tools as the Lightroom Develop Module, although with a different placement of the tools across the top left side of the screen.

Camera Raw adjustments

Here I've converted to black & white by sliding the saturation slider all the way to the left, and added a mid-tone contrast and strengthened the blacks with a moderate move to the right on the clarity slider. Click the "OK" button in the bottom right corner.

Result: back in Photoshop's main screen

The layer with your edits floats above the original layers and can be worked with like any other pixel-based layer. If you want to be able to go back and tweak the adjustments you made, there's an extra step you need to take in preparation before invoking the Camera Raw Filter command. That's the subject of my next tutorial.

The OM-D M-10

The OM-D E-M10 is, at $799 with the kit 14-42 lens, the least expensive of the three OM-D's.

Olympus has had to compromise to reach that price point. The M10 is not weatherproof, and it's in-body image stabilization is only 3-axis rather than the innovative 5-axis system in the more expensive OM's, but it has the same "Adaptive Brightness" feature in the EVF that the top of the line M1 has. It will crank up the viewfinder brightness in bright sunlight, but dim it automatically as the sun sets so you won't be blinded as you shoot into the evening.

The M10 also has wifi to enable on-the-fly image transfers to your phone or laptop.

There's an typically enthusiastic story on Steve Huff's site.