Photography News





Adobe CS2 and Camera Raw updates
Tuesday, 16 May 2007 19:10 GMT

Adobe has announced updates to its Camera Raw plug-in and Photoshop CS2.
Camera Raw3.4 adds support for the Canon EOS 30D, Olympus EVOLT 330 and
Pentax *ist DL2 amongst others. The Photoshop 9.0.1 update fixes a number
of problems present in version 9.0.

Adobe Camera Raw 3.4 Update

This new version of the Camera Raw plug-in replaces the original Camera Raw plug-in
that was installed with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0
and 4.0 software. Visit the Camera Raw page for a complete list of supported cameras.

Support for the following cameras has been added in this update.

- Canon EOS 30D
- Leaf Aptus 65
- Leaf Aptus 75
- Olympus EVOLT 330
- Olympus SP-320
- Pentax *ist DL2
- Samsung GX-1S

Adobe Photoshop 9.0.1 (CS2) Update

The Adobe Photoshop 9.0.1 update fixes a number of problems discovered after
Photoshop CS2 (9.0) software was released.

The most significant fixes in the 9.0.1 release include the following:

- Photoshop no longer hangs for several seconds when using painting tools with quick strokes.
- A runtime error that could appear when mousing over a high-res document with the Brush tool has been fixed.
- Documents containing a large number of text layers now open more quickly.
- Problems related to palettes (slow redraw, palettes go white, possible crash) have been addressed.
- TIFF files from certain scanners can now be opened correctly.
- After editing an image in Photoshop CS2 via the TouchUp tool in Adobe Acrobat software, the image no longer gets repositioned.
- XMP metadata from AI and PDF files is now retained in Photoshop.
- Slow performance when toggling layer visibility has been fixed.
- Info palette numbers are now displayed and updated when moving a curve point in Curves via the cursor keys..
- Problems opening certain TIFF and PSB files greater than 2GB have been resolved.
- The Merge to HDR command now functions properly when using high-ASCII characters in user login.

Canadian photographer Karen Ostrom plays with imagination at Contact Festival
VICTORIA AHEARN
The Canadian Press
May 07, 2007

(CP) - A wooden sawhorse, a few photographs and the computer program
Photoshop were all Karen Ostrom needed to create "Smoking Gun."

She turned those basic tools into a herd of horses frantically running from a blaze in an enchanted forest.
The full-room installation is currently on display at the city's Contact photography festival,

"I'm sort of working in a very painterly way on the computer, manipulating and shifting things to get what I want,"
Ostrom explained during an interview at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), a co-curator of the
"photographic culture" feature exhibition running in conjunction with the festival.

"The landscape, the trees really do exist but they don't exactly exist that way, or the landscape is sort of flattened out in certain ways,
and that lake is sort of like that but I've shifted it to make it work with what my idea of this piece was going to be."

"Smoking Gun" is one of 10 international works on display at MOCCA during the festival and is a poignant representation of this year's Contact theme,
"the constructed image," which highlights the influence technology has had on photography.

"It's a global exhibition and within that context, the themes and issues that are being dealt with by the artists also have what I would call a global
resonance to them," said MOCCA director David Liss.

"Issues around environmentalism, for instance, around the human impact on nature, interpersonal relationships between ourselves, the construction
of human identity, so as I say, these global issues are also a major part of the exhibition aside from the ... sort of cutting-edge technology
that has been used to create most of the images in the show."

Most of the pieces at the MOCCA exhibition were shot digitally. All have been tweaked so that what most people see from afar is not what they
discover upon closer inspection.

Everything in Ostrom's piece, funded by a Canada Council grant, was shot in a studio, except for the landscape, which was taken in
Prospect Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., and on her father's property on Vancouver Island.

Ostrom herself is also seen in the panoramic picture that stretches across four cubed, brick walls in the gallery. In one image, she's in a dress
straddling a sawhorse and pointing her finger in the shape of a gun - which stems from her "Gun Series" in which she "restages" historic photographs.

The entire piece denotes a Western theme and plays with the stereotypes of "cowboy and Indian," says Ostrom, who hails from Sidney, B.C.,
but lives in New York City.

"They're sawhorses but you know, I'm expecting the viewer to really believe that they're horses so
I've created this real environment to try to captivate that and to try to convey this panic and this stampede," she says.

"When I was making the work ... and being involved with it so intimately, I felt like it was a real stampede. I didn't step outside of it and think,
'Oh, I'm just putting sawhorses together.' It's that wonderful thing when you're a child that you believe but you also know, you also know it's not (real),
so there's this beautiful transition that I'm playing with that. It's just this nice place to be."

The Contact Photography Festival, now in its 11th year, sees over 500 local, national and international artists participating at over 200 venues across
Toronto and the surrounding area, including public spaces like parking lots, transit shelters and subway platforms.

It continues until month's end. Ostrom's exhibit will be on display until June 3.

Copyright © 2007 The Canadian Press, All Rights Reserved.

Carol Watson's Photography News
By DE Staff | March 29, 2007

Five of Carol Watson's images were selected to appear in the "Homegrown" exhibition, which ran from May 26 until June 25th
at Texas State University in San Marcos. Three were purchased by Austin Bergstrom International Airport for its permanent art collection.

One of Carol's images was selected by Women In Photography International to appear in "Turning SilverÑ25th Anniversary,"
a commemorative book celebrating women photographers from around the world. The 100 images, which will appear in the book, were selected
by a panel of jurors including Joyce Tenneson, Kim Gougenheim, Stephen Perloff, and others.

One of Carol's images will appear in the "People, Places, Things" exhibition at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO.
The exhibition will run during September, 2006. Five images were selected to be included in a group exhibition sponsored
by the San Marcos Greenbelt Alliance. The exhibition, titled "Naturescapes," will run from September 8th until October 27th, 2006 in San Marcos, TX.
One image was selected as the Annual Grand Prize winner of a photography contest sponsored by the on-line magazine Flyfish.com.

Carol's images were selected for publication in two novels: "Treachery on the Bayou" by Elsaida Drain (cover image) and "Mondo Cocktail,
A Shaken and Stirred History" by Christine Sismondo.

She recently presented a lecture entitled, "An Introduction to Digital Infrared Photography" for the Hill Country Photography Club, the Gulf States
Camera Council conference, and for the Austin Shutterbug Club. Carol has been asked to judge the upcoming Sun City Photography Club's
photography competition and exhibition in October.

PWS members, don't be shy! Share your photographic successes with us at editor@photoworkshop.com.

The best of nearly 500 entries demonstrate technical ability, creative vision,
and in more than one case, a pretty good sense of humor.
By PopPhoto Staff
April 2007

Image by Tony Hoffart
Digital Wizard Semifinalist Tony Hoffart's entry. Click image to see a gallery of Digital Wizard 2007 images.
What do a flamingo, a baby, a yellow car, a horse, a supermarket aisle, and Mt. Rushmore have in common?
Aside from being the setup to a cheesy joke, they're all images used by the winners of Pop Photo's fourth annual
Digital Wizard Contest. The Grand Prize: $1,000 and an endless supply of glory.

The rules were simple: Turn out a masterpiece by combining/manipulating/enhancing elements from at least 4 of
the 12 fairly awful images we posted for download. Use only tools that are in your image-editing software;
adding other pictures is forbidden.

Picked as the best of nearly 500 entries, the 10 Finalists shown here demonstrate some technical ability, creative vision,
and in more than one case, a pretty good sense of humor. The Editors chose them from a batch of Semifinalists tapped
for consideration.

We'll publish the five winners and tell the stories of how they were made in our July 2007 issue and announce them on this
page after the issue comes out. So bookmark this page and come back in a few weeks!