BobD's Photo Blog

There are big changes coming to the way we use Photoshop and Lightroom.
Seems like there will be no more Photoshop as we know it after version CS6. Photoshop will move to the “cloud” starting in June 2013 available only through a monthly subscription fee. It will reside in Adobe’s “Creative Cloud” as “Photoshop CC”…  no more upgrading versions of PS – no differentiating PS from PS “Extended, just one version with continuous updating of the program on the cloud.  Much has been posted already and I am sure there will be much more.[Click Here for the Adobe press release]   [Click Here for Adobe’s spin: “A Break from Tradition”]

The focus of this post… its effect on our Photoshop / Lightroom / Camera Raw workflow.In this link about The Future of Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe states:
“When we update ACR8 with new camera support, Photoshop CS6 customers can work with the new version of the Camera Raw plug-in. No new features or functionality will be available in ACR to Photoshop CS6 customers as part of those updates.“

What does this mean? It seems if you buy a new camera in a year, Adobe will update the Camera Raw plug-in to support that camera BUT our PS CS6 will NOT support the features of ACR8 (or 9, or 10, or…)! The the question is how do we work our new PS/LR/ACR workflow?

Seems when we upgrade to the new Lightroom 5, it new features (Upright, Radial Filter, New Spot Healing Brush; and many more) will NOT be supported with PS CS6.

What might this mean to our non-destructive workflow?  As with LR5 beta, when you open your file a “smart-object” in PS your are not able to edit the new features. In future versions of ACR updates (yet to be determined by Adobe) we will probably not be able to open our file a “smart-object” at all.For those who do not use “smart-object” you might want to check out this Russell Brown link.)

How do we get everything we want…
It seems to get full functionality we need to subscribe to “PS CC“!

The “Camera Shake Reduction’ seems to be an interesting feature of PS CC… but more intriguing is that “Camera Raw” has been added as a filter able to be applied to individual layers! This might totally change our non-destructive workflow. Stay tuned!