Adobe PhotoShop

PhotoShop vs. PhotoStyler

Early versions of PhotoShop (1 & 2) only ran on the Mac. Since I was a PC user in 1992, I purchased a copy of Aldus PhotoStyler which I used until Adobe released PhotoShop 2.5, the first version to run under Microsoft Windows. When Adobe bought Aldus, they offered PhotoStyler users a $200 "cross-grade" to PhotoShop. In 1996, Adobe killed PhotoStyler development.

When I bought my first Mac in 1997 (A second-hand IIci), I also picked up a license to PhotoShop 2.5, upgraded to 3 (cue the angelic choir) WITH LAYERS! I have been a PhotoShop user ever since, generally skipping the even versions until PhotoShop CS, which is actually Version 8 (Says so on the splash screen).

Cascade Failure

One thing that came up and bit me on the butt was when I bought my Nikon D70 in 2004. With two weddings in one weekend (one family, one job), and other recent developments in my businss, the stars aligned in the sky indicating it was the time to go fully digital.

The first wedding was like a courtship with the camera, fumbling around for the buttons in the back, ad so on. But in the end, it's a camera (still going strong at the venerable age of 26 months), and the picture-taking part is pretty much the same as with any SLR.

Not so the picture-viewing part. A half hour into the reception at the Sunday wedding (the revenue generating one), I decided it would be a good idea to open one or two of these new Nikon RAW files. The NEF files from the D100 I had been using courtesy of a good friend and [fellow photographer http://gwcreative.com] had worked fine with Adobe !PhotoShop 7 and the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) plug-in.

So it was rather a surprise when I discovered that ACR was unable to open the new NEF files. Hmmm. Well, I had a job to do, so it was back to work. I could panic later. Besides, I could view them on the camera's LCD and each raw image took up 5.5MB of disk space, so I figured I could sort it out.

The sorting basically meant having to upgrade to PhotoShop CS, which ran like a sloth on my Apple PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet). This failure forced me to bite the bullet and buy a new !PowerBook G4 (Aluminum). Now while this was (and is, at the ripe old age of 24 months) a sweet machine, it was an awful steep price to pay for the luxury of reading the newer file format. Fortunately the fee from the wedding covered a big chunk of the cost, and I would have needed a new machine soon enough anyway. And as the alternative was to use the Nikon Capture and Nikon Editor software, there wasn't much choice. It took hours and hours, and by the time I was done with it, I was so involved I didn't know what to think. (Sorry, flashback). Suffice to say that the Nikon Software blows. It runs like a poorly ported Windows application, probably because it's a poorly ported Windows application.

Another interesting note is that the file size of the D70 raw files is only 5.5MB rather than the 9MB of the D100 for the same 2Kx3K image size. But the camera thinks they're going to be bigger. So that with my 1GB card, freshly formatted, it indicates a capacity of 87 pictures. I can fit more like 135. Weird.

But I guess all this belongs an a Nikon or Digital Camera page. Maybe I'll move it someday and go into long-winded detail about the Leaf DCB (no number, since it was the first of its kind...)