While we’ve been busy at Macworld this past week, playing with and testing the Photoshop CS3 beta, there’s also been a lot of activity elsewhere on the Web. Here are a few of the better tips and tutorials that we have seen:
- The folks at Lynda.com, along with former Macworld contributor Deke McClelland, have put up a set of video tutorials that look at Photoshop CS3’s new features. If you just want to get a quick walkthrough of Photoshop’s new look—which will reportedly be adopted by the whole CS3 suite—the tutorial on the new user interface is the best place to start.
- Photographer Amadou Diallo has started a Photoshop CS3 blog, and plans to post tutorials and tips regarding the beta. One of his posts covers CS3’s new grayscale conversion tools, which includes movies covering CS3’s Black & White adjustment feature and the Convert to Grayscale option in the new Adobe Camera Raw.
- Derrick Story, blogger, book author, ace photographer and raconteur par excellence , pointed me to Russell Brown’s great Photoshop CS3 tutorials. (Russell is Adobe’s senior creative director, and one of the most intelligent and funniest people on the planet.)
- Rob Galbraith, who runs an excellent digital photography site, posted some performance test results comparing specific tasks with CS3 and CS2 on his Mac Pro. The results are pretty comparable to our own, but it’s always good to look at alternative sources.
- Thanks to the fearlessness of Robert Scoble and a few others, company blogs are all the rage these days (or at least on the rise). Many of them are pretty good, and Adobe has a bunch of blogs that are worth reading. If you’re interested in Photoshop, you should read John Nack on Adobe. He’s an articulate guy who is passionate about his product, and he’s not “spinning” things to toe the company line. (Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has some really good blogs too—check the list on the left of the Mac Mojo blog).
- Lastly, regarding existing Photoshop plug-ins and the CS3 beta: you should be able to run most CS2-compatible plug-ins with the CS3 beta, but only on PowerPC-based Macs, or under the Rosetta emulation mode on Intel Macs. According to John Nack, plug-ins will require a code update to work with Intel Macs; many developers have been working on updates through the existing Adobe beta program, and Adobe hopes to publish a draft software development kit very soon. John added, “The public beta should really help here, and we’ll be posting a draft CS3 [software development kit] later this week.”