So What Did You Get For Xmas?

[Mike Farley]

While Xmas itself is still with us, the present giving and receiving is now over except for those with birthdays which fall before Twelfth Night. It does mean that we will have some new things, some of which might be photography related. Did anyone receive such a gift?

For me, it was the Photoshop CS6 upgrade. My views about the latest version are somewhat mixed, as it does not greatly extend the range of functions offered and the purchase was stimulated as much by Adobe's new policies as anything else. Put simply, in future Adobe will only allow upgrades from the previous version, so although I had little interest in CS6 it is a necessity should I want to update in future.

The biggest improvement is the Raw processing, but I already had that in Lightroom where I initiate my initial post capture workflow. When converting a Raw file, Lightroom allows the option of undertaking the processing either within Lightroom or Photoshop provided both applications have the same or similar versions of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). Thus it is possible to open an image from Lightroom 4 in Photoshop CS5, but the result might not be the same as converting the image in LR4 as it is the CS5 ACR process which is used. If LR4 processes the image, a new file is created and it is this which is opened in the image editing program, be it Photoshop or something else. Since I do not always decide to proceed with an image, this means that I have to remember to delete the new file, which sometimes does not happen.

Apart from the benefit of not cluttering my hard drive with unused files, I am beginning to appreciate the new interface which Adobe has introduced, which definitely makes some manipulations easier to complete. It is still too early to give a definite thumbs up, but I do like what I have seen so far.

There were a couple of oddities which arose during installation and afterwards. I left CS5 in place so I would not have to enter the serial number of the previous version, but the installer reckoned it could not find a compatible version from which to update, so I had to enter the code anyway. When I subsequently deactivated and then de-installed CS5, Adobe Bridge CS6 forgot all about Photoshop CS6 and would only open images in the copy of Photoshop Elements I have installed. The same thing happened with Lightroom, even though its preferences clearly stated that CS6 was the preferred editor.

The lesson seems to be that removing CS5 before the CS6 install is the best option as there is no benefit to leaving it in place unl;ess there is a reason to keep it. In the end, I had to remove Photoshop Elements and update the file associations in Bridge to get everything back the way it had been.