Welcome to my technology blog!
Hey! It looks like someone forgot to tell Amazon.com that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom now goes for $299. There was an introductory price of $199 from February (when the product shipped) until the end of April. But it appears that Amazon still has some of those $199 boxes left. So while they have supplies left of the introductory sku’s you can get Lightroom for only $199.49. However, you’d better hurry as it says "while supplies last!".
I’m here in Austin Texas which is the second stop of the Adobe CS3: Creative License Tour. We have another standing room only audience of over 450 people. We’re having a great time learning all about Creative Suite 3. As part of my keynote address I do this live blog post by shooting a shot of the audience and then I process it in Bridge/Photoshop CS3 Camera RAW, from there I move the image into Adobe Contribute CS3 to combine it with this text and hit publish.
I’m joined by Lisa Forrester who’s covering Design Premium, Kyle Thompson who’s covering the Web Premium Suite and Kevan O’Brien who will be wrapping up the day with the brand new Production Premium CS3. By the way it’s 80• and sunny 🙂 I hope to see you at one of the upcoming cities
I’m here today at the Hynes Convention Center in downtown Boston attending the Scott Kelby Photoshop Lightroom Tour. I’m fielding questions on Lightroom during the breaks and learning some pretty cool tips. The Lightroom product manager Tom Hoggerty is also here and promises to show a sneak peek of what’s coming in the next update. Scott is presenting to a sold out crowd of over 500 people. If this is any indication of where the industry is going, it certainly points to the success of Lightroom and the importance of digital photography workflows.
Scott starts out with a live photo shoot of a bride and then goes right into the Lightroom workflow covering the Library, Develop, Slideshow, Web and Print modules.
I’m here presenting at the Adobe CS3: Creative License Tour in Chicago. Part of my presentation involves doing a live post to my blog using Adobe Contribute CS3. The audience here has been great and we are having a blast learning about all the new CS3 products. We have over 550 people here at the beautiful Navy Pier in Chicago. I hope to see you in the upcoming cities.
We had to bring in more chairs! What a great response to CS3.
The Navy Pier location was great for this type of event, although finding the correct room/hall was challenging for some.
I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity for a few shots right outside our presentation area of this rustic looking lighthouse.
The New Adobe Contribute CS3 is an EXCELLENT way to update your blog! I’m now a believer. Although I’ve been doing this blog since February 2006, I still feel relatively new to blogging. I only started my blog because Apple had come out with iWeb and it seemed like an easy way to get started with a graphical tool (see my original iWeb blog here). However, after a few months I started to feel like iWeb just wasn’t powerful or flexible enough for some of the things I wanted to do. Even simple things like post dating a blog entry didn’t seem possible with iWeb. Sure you could change the post date and time, however the minute you posted the entry it was live on your site regardless of what time and date you set it for. It wouldn’t even allow me to chose a different template for my site without starting over again.
Then Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack turned me on to Contribute and I kept it in the back of my mind until about a month ago. I started experimenting with Contribute also because my web hosting company made WordPress blogging available at no additional cost. Contribute is compatible with many of the popular blogging engines such as Blogger and WordPress. I like Contribute for blogging because it lets me create blog entries offline and post date them to appear at the exact time and day that I specify. It lets me work in a WYSIWYG environment. It also doesn’t restrict me to only use Contribute. I can still post entries if I’m out and about (away from my computer) from any web browser. I can much more easily use tables, insert images, add video including Flash Video, audio and format my text. Not to mention easy bullets, numbering and indents.
No software product is perfect and I do have a few wishes for the next version. I would like to have interactive spelling. While Contribute does have spell check, you run it after you’ve typed all your text. That seems so 1995. Grammar checking also would be nice. However, even with these minor omissions, Contribute CS3 is a solid tool for Blogging and for Web Designers to allow their clients to update their own web sites (it’s original mission). It even lets Mac users update their .Mac hosted web sites. Contribute CS3 is available as a stand alone product or as a part of the Web suites.
After a very successful public beta (over 500,000 downloads), Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 was released in February 2007 with an introductory price of $199 (as a thank you to the community and to those who help test and build it). That’s $100 off the retail price of $299. That introductory deal is over after 4/30/07. So if you have a remote interest in Lightroom, you should probably go ahead and buy it now to save $100.
Also check out this recent review. Scott Kelby has also started his nationwide Lightroom Live Tour. Find out the details here.
Adobe is really getting into this whole Public Beta thing. Now you can download the NEW After Effects CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3 as a public beta. This is great especially for intel Mac users who want to check out the apps before they buy (the Windows version is there too). Also you can give your feedback to help make the app better. These apps are due to ship next quarter, but you don’t have to wait to start playing.
Just head over to labs.adobe.com and download them.
Also note that the Creative Suite Design and Web Suites are now shipping!