Rather than buy a new laptop, I recently decided to recondition a four-year-old Acer to see whether it was up to the relatively light duties intended of it. This laptop had been my workhorse during a period when I was regularly flitting between my home office and business headquarters, and had almost no available space on its 140GB hard disk. The first job, then, was to do some weeding.

Microsoft Office was the first package to go, now that I use Google Docs almost exclusively. I found plenty of dross in the Downloads folder of course, but the real shock came when I looked through the list of Adobe programs installed on this machine and realised that I use almost none of them regularly any more.

When I bought this laptop, I reckon I spent around two thirds of my working day using Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex Builder – with the last of these accounting for the lion’s share. And yet, over the past year, Flash based development has dropped away almost entirely.

The rot began with Dreamweaver, which I’d been using since it was first launched in the mid 1990s. Since I began creating websites using PHP, and especially when WordPress became the basis of most of my web development, Dreamweaver became irrelevant and I’ve not used it for over five years now.

As I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash

Flash was a different matter. In the early 2000s, I moved from Adobe’s Director product to its lightweight cousin (at least, it was lightweight at the time) for e-learning development and created a series of authoring tools and online playback plugins based on it. There’s much to like about the platform, and our perception of what’s possible with rich internet applications was largely shaped, for better or worse, by the capabilities of the Flash player. So I have much expertise invested in my ActionScript knowledge and a big library of code.

And yet, as I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash. In the short term, this means extra work for me as I recreate these sophisticated applications using PHP and jQuery, but I can’t countenance investing time updating software created for a defunct platform.

The irony is that it isn’t Steve Jobs’ famous hatred of Flash that has caused this turnaround – the true villain of the piece is Adobe itself. By abandoning development of Flash for mobile, it eliminates Flash as an option for most websites. One in ten of the visitors to my sites uses a mobile device, a seven-fold increase over a year ago, so I’d be mad to develop in a form that excludes them. Had Adobe continued to improve the Flash platform for Android, I might have persevered – at least for sites that attract smartphone users rather than tablet owners. Perhaps I should thank Adobe, then, for making my decision easy. It’s now either HTML/CSS/JavaScript or app – and Flash makes for a very expensive app development platform.

In fact, the only Adobe product I use day-to-day now is Fireworks and that’s the only reason I’m keeping Web Premium on my main desktop. It’s also hard to see on what basis I would, in the medium term, be likely to upgrade even that one remaining product. Assuming that I’m not the only one re-evaluating in this way, this poses serious questions for Adobe’s future income. I think that’s sad because they’ve played an important role in shaping today’s web. Whilst it is making efforts, with Muse, Edge and updates to Dreamweaver, I can’t help feeling that the momentum is swinging away from Adobe. What I really want is a fully working browser-based versions of Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator that I can pay for on a per-use basis, and unless it has something quite remarkable up its sleeve, I can’t see myself upgrading to CS6.

The good news for me as a businessman is that I no longer need to budget for expensive licences. Adobe’s pricing policy has long been a bone of contention and, given the downward momentum placed on software costs by the advent of apps, Adobe’s looking increasingly isolated. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Web Premium costs £300 more to buy in the UK than the US (and yes, that’s comparing figures net of sales tax). Photoshop is the one remaining crown jewel – heaven help Adobe if a competitor comes along with a compatible application for a fraction of the cost.

Farewell Adobe. Delete.

That’s the kind of feature you expect to find on paid-for software such as Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop Elements, but there’s an app that’ll do the same thing for free on Android and iOS devices – TouchRetouch. Here’s how it’s worked its magic on one of my holiday snaps, with a couple of inconveniently-placed tourists removed from in front of this Cretan ruin:

Here’s the after picture, with those tourists in front of the ruin removed:

If you look closely then you’ll see it’s not perfect – the area of modification is just about evident. Still, it’s extremely impressive for a free app. There’s a paid version available, too, for a mere 62p. Upgrading allows you to output at the same image resolution as the original photo – both of the pics in this post are at 648 x 388 – alongside a Clone Stamp tool for advanced retouching.

Here’s another before and after shot, this time from last week’s LITS. It’s members of the PC Pro team recording our live podcast, and I don’t like the look of that lectern to the right of the stage.

See? Gone:

Once again, it’s not perfect – there’s some pixellation where the app has struggled with the glow of the lamp that was behind the lectern. But even so, for a free app – that’s pretty impressive, right?

Our new tests don’t rely on synthetic measures: we use real, current applications such as Microsoft Office 2010 and Photoshop CS5, as well as a completely new set of responsiveness tests, to get an all-round picture of a PC’s performance.

That means the benchmark scores you’ll see from this day on are not directly comparable with older scores, but they give the best ever insight into exactly what each system can do for you.

The new tests

The new PC Pro Real World Benchmarks are split into three sections, each reflecting a different area of usage.

Responsiveness

With so many netbooks and ultraportables using lightweight processors, it’s vital to know how responsive a system is. We measure this with two new tests. We time how long it takes to open documents and switch between a series of common desktop applications, including the latest versions of Word and Excel, Acrobat Reader 10 and Internet Explorer. We also measure Windows performance, by timing how long the system takes to open, close and move dozens of Explorer windows.

Media

Our media tests expose how capable a system is at using modern software to process music, photos and video files. We start by using iTunes 10 to encode an album into both AAC and MP3 formats. Next, we set Photoshop CS5 to work on a folder of 12-megapixel RAW-format photographs. We adjust the colours and curves, apply some artistic sharpening and blurring and save the results in JPEG format. Finally, we use Sony Vegas 10 to render a short home video shot at 1080p resolution, with a picture-in-picture effect and a crossfade transition. Again, the whole process is timed.

Multitasking

For our multitasking test, we run the iTunes and Photoshop tests simultaneously and then launch our responsiveness tests over the top, giving the CPU, hard disk and memory a real workout. Finally, we time how long it takes the multi-threaded Cinebench 11.5 renderer to produce a complex 3D scene. The multitasking score thus reflects both responsiveness and performance under heavy load – just the information you need if you’re looking for a real workhorse computer.

The Overall score

Once we have our timings, we compare them with the times achieved by our new reference platform: a 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K processor, with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 7,200 RPM hard disk, at a display resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 (all desktops are tested at this resolution; we test laptops at native resolution).

Each score is given as a number relative to that platform, with higher scores being faster. Thus, a score of 0.50 in a particular test indicates that a system performs those tasks half as quickly as our reference system. A score of 2.00 would indicate a super-powerful PC that was twice as quick as the reference platform.

We combine the three scores into an average for easy comparison – this is the Overall score. But at the bottom of each review you’ll find a breakdown of the scores in the three tests. This shows each system’s strengths and weaknesses at a glance, so you can easily find the system that’s perfect for you.

Examples

Current desktop PCs are powerful enough to motor through the Responsiveness and Media sections with ease, and should prove the most adept at Multitasking too:

Laptops, with their slower processors but still-plentiful RAM, should show the real variation in what is being tested. Most will remain strong in the Windows Responsiveness test, demonstrating their proficiency at everyday tasks, but will be less successful when pushed by the more intensive Media and Multitasking tests:

Finally, low-power systems such as netbooks and nettops will see that Responsiveness score falling by the wayside as well, but the real drop will be in the more intensive tests as their lack of power limits them to simple linear tasks:

New battery benchmarks

We’ve changed our battery benchmarks too, to be more consistent and to better reflect the sort of stamina you can expect from your laptop while it’s actually in use.

Light use

In the light-use test, we optimise the system settings for the greatest power efficiency. Windows’ power profile is set to Power Saver mode, and we use an X-Rite i1Display 2 colorimeter to set the screen brightness as close to 75cd/m² as possible. We then disconnect the mains and run a script browsing a selection of web pages until the system shuts down, giving you a realistic idea of how much surfing time each notebook offers.

Heavy use

For the heavy-use test, we engage Windows’ High Performance power profile, set the display brightness to maximum, and allow the taxing Cinebench 3D renderer to push the processor load to the limit. This gives a worst-case figure, revealing how long you can expect the battery to last under the most demanding conditions.

The switchover

As of today, every PC and laptop that arrives in the PC Pro Labs will have these new Real World Benchmarks run on them. You’ll still see the old benchmarks on reviews already on the website and (due to press timelines) in issue 199 of PC Pro, on sale 10 March. We’re in the process of updating the benchmarks tab on website reviews, and as of issue 200 the switchover will be complete.

Since then, however, the focus for bitmap editing has moved on from creative origination to photographic enhancement, and the bitmap filter has become increasingly marginalised. Nowadays users might explore the odd artistic filter that comes with Photoshop but, if they do, they are likely to quickly become disillusioned by the disappointingly limited range, control and end results.

Now a new kid on the block promises to radically shake up the whole world of creative bitmap filters.

Unlike most filters, PostworkShop doesn’t aim to tackle a niche market, such as adding film grain or focus effects, but instead aims to offer a universal creative toolkit. As such it offers over 350 effects divided into broad categories (building blocks, drawing, painting, photographic) and then subdivides further (eg abstract, impressionism, pop art and so on). Each of the filters offers real depth so that, for example, rather than just globally finding edges, PostworkShop lets you set sensitivity, minimum and maximum lengths, Bezier conversion, control over start and end width and stroke colour.

Creative Combination

Rather than liberating the creative potential of bitmap filters, Photoshop has been squatting on it

What really makes PostworkShop stand out is the way that it lets you combine filters. In particular, you can both chain and, far more usefully, layer effects and creatively combine them using blend modes and opacity. This is absolutely crucial to artistic effects in particular where you might want to, say, distort the image, reproduce it using artistic brushes, overlay an outline and combine the results with halftoned shading.

Even better, PostworkShop lets expert users manage such advanced combinations in a node-based view, deal separately with multiple image objects and, most important of all, save advanced combinations as reusable styles. This is ideal if you want to apply the same advanced artistic effect to multiple 3D renders. Users of the Professional edition can even set which parameters of the various component filters are then exposed for customisation and make their styles available to others (either for free or commercially).

Suddenly the range of filters that come with Photoshop are exposed for what they are: an idiosyncratic rag-bag of underpowered, antiquated effects that haven’t been seriously overhauled since they were first conceived. Worse, the apparently stack-based Filter Gallery that was introduced with Photoshop CS to supposedly help tap the power of filters in fact only lets you cumulatively chain effects rather than creatively combine them as layers, let alone as advanced styles. In short, rather than liberating the creative potential of bitmap filters, Photoshop has been squatting on it.

Thankfully, PostworkShop’s comprehensive, powerful, modern, style-based approach brilliantly breaks the creative filter logjam and makes the program a natural partner for Photoshop. There’s just one problem: while PostworkShop can both open and write layered PSD files, it can’t act as a Photoshop plugin and so only operates in standalone mode.

At least that’s the case at the moment. Xycod, PostworkShop’s developer, is currently working on enabling the program to work as a true Photoshop plugin so that all this filter-based power will be made available from directly within Photoshop. That’s certainly a mouth-watering prospect and I hope to revisit PostworkShop 2.0 in more depth when it comes out sometime early next year.

In the meantime, don’t hold back. As it stands, PostworkShop is already a must-have standalone application for those interested in the creative possibilities of bitmap editing and, at only $99 for the full Professional release, is excellent value. There’s also a $50 cut-down standard version that lets you save your own styles and a seriously useful free version that lets you explore all 350 built-in styles. Even better, Xycod promise that anyone buying PostworkShop now will be able to upgrade to the next Photoshop-compatible release for free.

As a developer, my main interest when it comes to CS5 is the new release of Flash Builder (aka Flex 4) and its interaction with Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst, and I’m looking forward to seeing whether Adobe has succeeded in creating the new, more productive workflow it was aiming for.

However, I’ve recently been attempting to peek through the fashionable spectacles of a young web designer so that I can advise a particular individual on how to get started in their own freelance business. And it’s a frighteningly expensive vista.

Picture a web designer in your mind. Just as much part of the uniform as the scruffy jeans and hoodie is the MacBook Pro running Photoshop. It might be possible to shake enough sense into said youth so that he can see the logic in buying a Samsung R780, which is the best part of £1,000 cheaper than the MacBook Pro 15 whilst simultaneously being more powerful. Not that this would stop them from buying the MacBook – who said it was about logic?

However, there’s no getting away from the utter ubiquity of Photoshop in the design community – it’s even more prevalent than Apple computers. You could almost say that a designer isn’t a designer unless they use Photoshop. Most designers will also use Illustrator and, if they’re a web specialist, probably Dreamweaver, but it’s Photoshop that is the defining application.

Hard choice

With the demise of the Web Standard package in CS5, web designers are left with a choice between investing in Web Premium or buying the software packages individually. It’s hard to argue that Web Premium represents good value: it contains nine full products for £1,679 (inc VAT), but that assumes that you would use all of the products. Someone looking to get started in design is faced with either stumping up for the full suite or paying £644 for Photoshop, with an extra £420 for Dreamweaver and £606 for Illustrator. In other words, you might as well buy the Web Premium suite. Which is the point, of course.

So assuming our web designer decides he or she must have a MacBook Pro and, at the barest minimum, Photoshop, the total bill runs to around £2,400, which is a hell of a barrier to entry into the industry. Compare this to a developer. A PHP developer could set up shop with an entry-level desktop PC running Linux and UltraEdit with a total cost of less than £500. Even a developer targeting the Flash Player platform could get away with using the free FlashDevelop IDE with the Flex 4.0 SDK. A professional PHP development setup would include a more powerful computer and a professional IDE such as PHPDesigner – still a fraction of the cost of setting up as a web designer.

So, what’s the answer? Well, our designer could save a little by buying a refurbished MacBook from the Apple store or even a second-hand MacBook, although finding one with a guarantee at a decent price is difficult. Or they could buy a PC laptop.

As for Photoshop, even though this upgrade introduces some juicy new features an earlier version would be adequate for most starting designers. Unfortunately, it seems to be next to impossible to legally buy older versions. I can understand the short-term reason why Adobe cuts off older versions when it releases a new product (in common with most other software developers) although if it truly had confidence in the superiority of its latest iteration there’s no obvious reason why it couldn’t continue to market the previous version at a lower price.

What’s the answer to this conundrum? How do newcomers to web design equip themselves? I appreciate that educational versions exist, but their licence prohibits commercial use and equally, of course, there are plenty of cracked and otherwise illegal versions around, but I’m interested in whether there’s a reasonable and legal path available. If not, by continuing to charge such high prices for the single versions of its software, doesn’t Adobe run the risk of choking off its audience at the industry entry point?

photoshop CS5 extended

But is the emperor wearing no clothes? Does anyone actually use the extended 3D functionality of Photoshop Extended?

In a comment on my less-than-flattering Photoshop CS5 Extended review, John_C asked to hear whether users of Premiere Pro and After Effects would have a different perspective and I’d be interested too. Does the program suddenly make sense within wider workflows?

I’m sceptical because, to my way of thinking, if you want to produce 3D movie effects the place to do it is in a dedicated 3D package where you have direct access to advanced animation capabilities (I don’t think anyone would include Extended’s Animation palette under this category).

More to the point with advanced lighting control, including global illumination and ambient occlusion, you can render far more realistic and eye-catching results with a dedicated app. And with a program like PC Pro’s 3D recommendation Maxon Cinema 4D you can also output to After Effects’ and other compositing applications’ project formats complete with information on lighting, cameras and reference objects.

The most obvious advantage of a dedicated 3D package is that it lets you actually create your 3D models. Previously Photoshop Extended relied on loading externally-created models but CS5 does now offer its own modelling power via the new Repoussé command. It’s a fancy term, but dig down and you’ll find that it amounts to some extrusion, bevelling and revolving. It allows you to add depth to single objects but it’s certainly not up to serious modelling.

Of course Photoshop’s real strength is pixels and it’s true that the ability to directly paint and retouch 3D objects is pretty extraordinary. However it’s by no means unique. In fact Cinema 4D includes dedicated BodyPaint functionality for just this reason. And within Cinema 4D this hands-on bitmap-based texturing power runs alongside advanced procedural handling and within a full multi-layer material system (for managing reflections, refraction, opacity and so on).

To produce a successful 3D scene you need to handle models, materials, lighting, animation and rendering. Photoshop Extended now provides a little of everything, but it doesn’t excel at anything and is generally awkward, overcomplicated and slow.

Yes, all users might find it occasionally handy to be able to extrude some text or rotate the odd shape, but surely this could have been done within the standard Photoshop? Or, for CS users, simply left to Illustrator’s existing 3D effects embedded as re-editable smart objects (as opposed to text and shapes within Photoshop Extended which need to be rasterized).

I stand to be corrected, but I really can’t imagine many users choosing to buy Photoshop Extended as a standalone. And if you are thinking about it, please note that Cinema 4D including BodyPaint and the ability to render multi-pass/multi-layered directly to PSD works out at around £200 cheaper.

Inevitably the vast majority of Extended users won’t be standalones but will instead get their hands on the program as part of one of the Premium CS suites. Again I might be wrong, but I can’t help thinking that most of these users will be kept more than happy by Photoshop’s photo-editing power and many will never even look at the forbidding commands under the 3D menu. In which case the premium paid for Extended over the standard release – £248 +VAT for new users and an additional £129 + VAT for upgraders – is entirely wasted.

So is the real point of Photoshop Extended to inflate the price of the CS Premium bundles while fooling users into thinking that they are getting a bargain?

To dominate such a competitive field as photo editing for so long is an extraordinary achievement. All the more so because Photoshop hasn’t been able to rely on a proprietary edge in terms of file formats and integration to secure its success. Basically all bitmap editors are dealing with the same pixel grid/histogram and working with the same core bitmap formats, most obviously TIFF and JPEG.

Essentially it’s an open and level playing field – so what are the secrets behind Photoshop’s extraordinary success?

I think that there are two main reasons and that they were already apparent twenty years ago (to see snapshots of the original Photoshop 1.0 release and all others since visit the excellent Guidebook Gallery)

To begin with, Photoshop has always aimed high. Before Adobe came on the scene, the Knoll brothers’ first trial release was distributed to the 200 or so purchasers on one of the earliest BarneyScan slide scanners. Right from the start, Photoshop has concentrated on preparing high-resolution, full-colour photos for commercial print.

And the key to such high-end, high-resolution handling is speed. Ultimately the engine powering Photoshop’s success comes from the graphical subroutines that Thomas Knoll worked on while writing his image processing PhD at the University of Michigan. When John Knoll, who was working at Industrial Light and Magic at the time (and still is), saw his brother’s prototype application, Display, he immediately spotted the potential and began working on plug-ins for it. The rest is history.

This combination of advanced pixel processing and sheer speed is still the key to Photoshop’s success as Adobe showed in its latest CS4 release with the introduction of content-aware scaling. Behind the scenes the pixel processing involved in this is clearly formidable, but to the end user it just seems absolutely natural – I’m not interested in those areas of the image so when I shrink it they should just disappear.

In many ways content-aware scaling is the natural continuation of what Photoshop has always been about. After all Thomas Knoll’s thesis (never-completed) was on how computers could recognize predefined objects in a digitized picture. More to the point, as John Knoll realised from his day job, when you combine advanced processing and exceptional speed, the results can look like magic. In Photoshop’s case, Desktop Light and Magic.

Editing highlights include the new Photo Merge mode that automatically picks out and combines the best exposed areas of bracketed shots to produce a best-lit composite image and the Image Recompose feature that automatically preserves foreground objects while removing unwanting backgrounds as you resize your image – in real time.

Elements’ editing power remains unchallenged in the consumer arena but, for most users, serious editing images is a relatively rare requirement compared to the regular chore of getting on top of your images through tagging. Here Adobe’s image analysis expertise promises even more, holding out the prospect of automatically tagging images based on quality and – through automatic face recognition – even subject.

It sounds great on paper and works brilliantly with the sample images included in the pre-release press pack, but how does it work in practice with real images?

Badly.

The problem of course is that real images contain faces at angles, partially obscured, in shadow, out of focus and so on. Elements does a surprisingly good job of picking most of these up and even identifying them. However it also picks up many false positives and unwanted faces which waste time. More importantly, it doesn’t pick up all the people that you would tag if you were doing it manually. Which renders the whole process pretty much useless – you’re still going to have go through image-by-image to get exactly the tags that you want.

Photoshop Elements 8 proves even worse when it comes to judging quality. I’m happy to accept that Photoshop can determine whether an image has an ideal tonal range, or is underexposed, or low in contrast, or whatever. But that’s always going to be a secondary consideration to the composition of the photo, whether your subjects’ eyes are shut etc.

Ultimately the best and only sensible judge of what your photos are of and which of them are any good is you. As discussed in more detail in the full Photoshop Elements 8 review (now published), Adobe’s well-intentioned attempts to be helpful backfire and end up adding complexity and wasting time.

It’s lucky the editing power is so good.

The complaint isn’t baseless. Most DSLRs, by default, do less in-camera processing than compacts; the assumption being that you’d rather start with as exact a replica of reality as possible and edit it later.

Still, there’s little worse than a perfectly-composed, perfectly-exposed image that nonetheless doesn’t look as exciting as you thought it would. The answer is to get to grips with the Levels and Curves tools. The good news is that virtually every photo editor includes these, from Photoshop and Lightroom, to Photoshop Elements, and even free applications such as the GIMP.

The image below is a good example of a shot that needs work. Through the viewfinder, the car looked bold and striking, and juxtaposed nicely against the sky. On screen, though, the image is lifeless and hazy.

The simplest tool in your arsenal is the Levels control. In the GIMP it’s under Tools | Colour Tools | Levels, while Photoshop Elements users will find it under Enhance | Adjust Lighting | Levels…, or by pressing CTRL+L. What you’re presented with is a histogram of the current image. At the left-hand side is 0 – i.e. black – and at the right is 255 – i.e. white. The graph in the middle is your image’s tonal range. So, if you have a tall peak on the right-hand side of the histogram, your image is very bright, and vice versa if your graph is mountainous towards the left.

The trouble is that plenty of images don’t utilise the full tonal range available, so nowhere on the image – or not very much – is either pure white or pure black, and your image lacks contrast.

The histogram in Photoshop Elements for our image looks like this:

The problem isn’t immediately clear: the image makes reasonable use of most of the tonal range, but a lot of it is spread thinly along the left-hand side, which is why our shot lacks punch and looks washy.

A useful rule of thumb with the Levels tool is to drag the black and white point sliders towards the middle, until they touch the edges of the histogram. This means the lightest point in your image will be pure white, and the darkest point black. This will increase the contrast in your image. Here’s our original image on the left, contrasted against our final image on the right. The difference is subtle (which is the point, after all), but the right-hand image is more interesting to look at, and because we’ve only dragged the image sliders to the edge of the histogram, our image still has all the detail it had when we pressed the shutter release.

The image is much better, but to finish it off we’ll employ the Curves tool. In the GIMP this can be found under Colours | Curves, and Enhance | Adjust Color | Adjust Color Curves in Photoshop Elements.

The resultant dialog boxes look like this in the GIMP and Photoshop Elements respectively.

Understanding the curves dialog box is simple. The horizontal axis represents the tones currently in your image. Again, dark tones are on the left, light tones on the right. The vertical axis is your output tones. Click on the diagonal line and you take a tone on the horizontal axis and convert it into a tone on the vertical axis. Click OK and your changes are applied to the image. For instance, click on the diagonal line near the top and drag it down, and you’ll make light tones darker.

The classic rule of thumb is to create an S-shape with your tone curve. This increases the contrast in your image dramatically.

And here’s what happens if we apply the above S-curve to our image of a car.

The result is far more striking. We’ve deepened the redness of the car without deepening all the tones in the image and creating a murky, under-exposed effect. The only caveat is to be careful. Heavily-saturated, punchy images work well on screen (you need only look at Flickr to see their popularity), but once printed they can be a little overwhelming, which isn’t what you’re after if you’re trying to produce something to mount on the wall.

Photoshop’s had more than a few imitators over the years, but I’ve never before seen one that was made from real world materials!  It was beautifully constructed as part of an advertising campaign for an Indonesian firm called software-asli.com – you can see how it was made here on Flickr. 

Coincidentally, I also stumbled across this browser-based Photoshop equivalent today:

It’s called Pixlr and though it’s not about to surpass Photoshop CS4 in terms of power and features, it’s more than competent for applying quick fixes and touch-ups to digital photos. It’s impressively fast too – much faster, in fact, than Adobe’s own online editor at Photoshop.com and it doesn’t demand that you fill in any annoying registration forms. You just rock up and use it. 

I’m particularly fond of Pixlr’s Old Photo filter. Let me know how you get on with it on the comments below.