Adobe Creative Suite 5

[Dave]

That's right, some of the most important news in the digital arts world was announced on the 12th of April and I had I not have been in London when the announcement was made, I probably wouldn't have missed it and be scrambling to write up a thread for it just now.

That being said, I am fucking pumped for the new Creative Suite being released. It was said that the suite would go on sale no more than 30 days since the announcement was made and that would imply that we could be seeing it in less than 3 weeks from today. Now, this may not be big news to a lot of people around here but I know that some people will be excited as I am. I work extensively with CS4 at the moment and use it to create sigs and webpages for companies. With the release of CS5, things look to be improving massively. I have done some research and found footage of the new "content-aware" features of Photoshop CS5 and it looks utterly incredible.

Adobe have really outdone themselves and everything seems to have been updated since the last suite was released. The brushes look fucking incredible and blending has never been so easy. The content-aware "PatchMatch" looks astounding and as I watched it, I couldn't help but exclaim how incredible it looked.

Who else is excited?

 

[Phoenix]

See I'm in a mix, I'm looking forward to CS5 but I'm also not looking forward to it, purely because some aspects are great but they also bring negativity to the mix. Namely the content-aware fill.

While I have no issue to the benefits it does like actually taking out blotches that I may spend something like 5-20 minutes on (it could be a bad blotch) there's issues like how it simply will take more purity out of photography. I mean I could simple take the worst image of my street right now in panoramic and use the worse attempts to do so. Using the content-aware fill, it simply would finish the job. Now as someone who likes the purity of Photography, this just makes it even more lazier to do the job and certainly would put photographers at risk of losing out work because someone who isn't graphical good can use CS5 and get the job done. That certainly doesn't make me feel secure as a photographer.

Also, I just watched the video regarding HDR, now this is something that requires careful skill and using the ability to take about 3-7 images which you edit to create. Whilst it was great reading that CS5 will do that, they also say that you just do this without even taking that many, just one image! I mean WTF?! I just spend a good amount of time trying to learn about HDR Photography because I'm interested in doing the actual technique. Again Photoshop has basically allowed someone who would actually have no interest in this to do what I've spent a number of weeks learning in just 5 minutes. I guess they are able to polish a turd after all!

The other photographic issue that is a problem to me is about how content-aware fill will encourage illegal violations of copyright. As someone who wants recognition for his work, I always leave a watermark in my work so that it doesn't ruin the image, with content aware fill, there's no stopping people from violating copyright. I mean you have websites like istock was rely on people paying for stock image use, with CS5 I can right click an image, use content aware fill and voilah, there's a free image for me. All this does is basically make me insecure about putting my Photography portofolio online because someone could easily take my images, remove my watermark replace it with their own and reap all the benefits. All Adobe has guaranteed is that my hobbie and part line of interest is under threat because people will do stuff I spent ages learning in easy and lazy time but also I feel inscure about putting my images online to get work because someone could steal it without me knowing.

Congratulations Adobe, whilst you've done something genius with Photoshop CS5, you've also created a monster that could destroy Photography as a profession and enchance the ways illegal copyright violations can be broken. Unless you have a way to counter these concerns, I'm not happy with what you've done.