Moving to a new…

Moving to a new blog hosting at andrewmccolm.com

See you there! 

Photoshop CS6 Beta

Adobe latest incarnation of Photoshop is now available to try out as CS6 Beta.  Photoshop is a staple for any production facility for artwork lay-up and image manipulation, and well… for just about anything. I use it extensively and it is a major player in our post production facility.

New look Photoshop 6CS

This time, at first glance, the CS6 interface has evolved. Photoshop CS6 launches with a darker workspace which has been reworked. Naturally you can change this, but I didn’t mind it. Our Avid edit system also has a dark working environment which tends to make images a bit easer to work with. I know, its not everyone’s cup of tea.

It’s operationally the same, but the software takes advantage of the new hardware in today’s modern computers, but there are some new worthy additions, like the auto save option, something we’re very thankful for in our editing package. It uses Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine to speed up performance which first hit the scene in Adobe Premier CS5.5 This is built using the NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel processing architecture, which is perfect in a post environment as Nvidia cards are prolific here.

Some of the new features on offer, according to the Adobe sales pitch include:

• Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.
• Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop.* Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.
• New and re-engineered design tools — Create superior designs fast. Get consistent formatting with type styles, create and apply custom strokes and dashed lines to shapes, quickly search layers, and much more.

Note the Video Layer

Surprisingly, Photoshop now ships with a video editor, all be it quite basic, and it looks like Adobe Premier… sort of. As Photoshop is a image manipulation package, it does this with video too, but I haven’t played with this just yet. It looks very basic, and most likely just a bit of fun. Traditional video platforms will not fear this feature.

The Blur Gallery has evolved a little too with new, tilt-shift and bokeh background blurring. Useful if that’s your thing or you want your photos to have that great depth of field look. But one of the best features is the Content Aware Move (with Patch). It lets you drag parts of an image like people or animals almost any object around in a photo and Photoshop magically and automatically fixes the background. The complexity of background is it’s limitation, but it works remarkably well and will save time with quick fixes in shot placement.

Adobe says it has 62 percent more new features, which I’ve yet to see, but all in all, a piece of software I look forward to updating when the time comes.

Check out the YouTube clips here here and here.
You can download the beta here

Holidays are here – time to update

Well… You know… New Year Resolutions and all, it was well overdue, but the Tech Talk Radio site is undergoing a make over which is not what it seems these days – what with sitemaps, interlinking websites and all the shenanigans which goes with making search engines happy. We’re also building a new website called slashrant. It’s a place to vent if you’re the victim of telco incompetence, shoddy workmanship and the like. So if you have to get it off your chest, come and tell us at Tech Talk Radio. Adam even has his own landing page now for View from the Couch and for those with iPhones, there’s even a page for your device. just visit the main site and you’ll be auto detected! Hope it doesn’t hurt.

So it’s back to pre production for this years TTR. It’s 6th – believe it or not!

Component Price Advertising – Changes to the Trade Practices Act for Advertising in Australia.

It’s about time the regulators changed the way advertisers dish up prices to consumers in this country. Obviously advertisers want us to buy, that’s why they do what they do, but why not tell consumers the TOTAL COST of a purchase. Take motor vehicles for example. “$29990 + dealer delivery and government statutory charges’. That can add thousands to the total purchase price. You could rephrase it “$1000 for the tyres + car +  dealer delivery and government statutory charges”. It’s a bit silly – I know – but it emphasises Component Pricing – something rampant in real estate and motor vehicle advertising.

The ACCC recently clamped down on this sort of behavior in the telecommunications sector, so now they’re moving on to other industries.

On May 25 the law in Australia changed. So what do the new laws require?
In short, where a corporation makes a price representation to consumers, it may only use a component price (part of the total price) if it also ‘prominently’ specifies the ‘single (total) price’ payable for the good or service (where a single figure price is quantifiable).

Let’s see what happens now. Next the ACCC should target these bloody cash-back deals. They’re on the rise at the moment and a complete pain in the ass. Consumers have to jump through hoops and wait months to receive their offer – and why? Why don’t they just discount the product at the point of sale. As someone who’s been making ads for 25 years, have I missed something here??

Read more details here.

McBlog

Hello everyone and welcome to McBlog

I’m Andrew McColm, host of Tech Talk Radio, purveyor of electronic media, and regular contributor on ABC Radio. This blog will ramp up as time permits, primarily discussing technology. I run a production company in Melbourne, where we make TV, Radio and Websites.