From the entire crew of PhotoshopNews.com and PixelGenius, here’s wishing you all a very happy holidays (or should that be holidaze?). And no, this isn’t a self portrait by Jeff Schewe…it’s merely a coincidence that  Schewe’s beard is getting so long that he resembles ole’ St. Nick now commonly called Santa Claus.

PhotoshopNews.com will be on holiday hiatus until the new year.

As we approach the end of 2007 we wanted to ask some of the leading figures in the Photoshop community which books they had found most inspiring and in the case of authors, which books they had written were they most proud of. We got some interesting and quite varied responses. So if you are still stuck for ideas about what to get a Photoshop geek for Christmas, here are some reading tips from the experts.

To keep this article seasonal we didn’t want it to be entirely about Photoshop and digital imaging. We did also ask people to nominate a book for recreational reading. After all, the holiday season is a time for relaxing and leaving work to one side! To help you find out more about the books recommended here we have created links to Amazon.com for all the books featured here.

From authors Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggen comes a new book dedicated to creative digital imaging titled The Creative Digital Darkroom.

Due to be released in January of 2008, the book is now available for pre-order from Amazon (we hope Amazon has gotten over it’s “difficulties” dealing with pre-orders).

Source: Newsweek
Written by Perter Plagens

How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated. There are hordes of photographers out there, working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo “shoots” whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets.

Step into almost any serious art gallery in Chelsea, Santa Monica or Mayfair and you’re likely to be greeted with breathtaking large-format color photographs, such as Andreas Gefeller’s overhead views of parking lots digitally montaged from thousands of individual shots or Didier Massard’s completely “fabricated photographs” of phantasmagoric landscapes.

onOne Software Announces Compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard Operating System
Current users of onOne Software products can automatically update to latest versions

Press Release: Portland, OR - December 18, 2007 – onOne Software, Inc., provider of world-class software solutions for professional photographers and graphic designers, announces today that all of the latest versions of onOne Software’s products are compatible with Apple’s recently launched Leopard operating system.

Phase One Delivers Capture One 4 Next-Generation RAW Workflow Software Transforming RAW Data to Uncompromising Image Quality

Press Release: COPENHAGEN, Denmark–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Phase One today announced the availability of Capture One 4, the next generation of the world’s first RAW workflow software. Built on a new architecture, the successor to Phase One’s entry-level Capture One LE offers photographers – pros and enthusiasts alike – a RAW workflow solution for superior image quality.

Strong Adoption of Creative Suite, Acrobat and Enterprise Solutions Drives 23 Percent Annual Revenue Growth

Press Release: SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dec. 17, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today reported financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended Nov. 30, 2007.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, Adobe achieved record revenue of $911.2 million, compared to $682.2 million reported for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006 and $851.7 million reported in the third quarter of fiscal 2007. This represents 34 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Adobe’s fourth quarter revenue target range was $860 to $890 million.

“Photoshop” is not just the name of popular software for editing photos; apparently, it can also be used as a verb – as in “we’ll Photoshop that undesirable feature out of the frame” or “we’ll Photoshop that more desirable feature into the frame.”

Source: The ChronicleHerald
Written by Dawn Henwood

As a rule, I don’t, as they said in the 18th century, “paint” my face. Back in the age of powdered wigs and corseted waists, wearing make-up meant powdering one’s cheeks chalky white with an arsenic-containing substance. Even without the chemical analysis, moralists had the good sense to warn against such artificiality.

The largest Adobe® Photoshop® training event in the world
April 2-4, 2008 Orange County Convention Center - Orlando, FL
The Website for the 2008 Photoshop World Conference is up and accepting registrations.

Adobe is celebrating its 25th year in existence. Started in December of 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Adobe has grown to become a $2.5 billion-a-year-company. Not bad for a couple of refugees from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center–the same place Steve Jobs went to visit to “discover” the GUI and the computer mouse.

From the book Inside the Publishing Revolution: “We were prototypical scientists in that we wanted to have an impact. We weren’t in it for financial gain” –Chuck Geschke
In 1985 it was Apple that licensed PostScript and helped Adobe form the backbone of the desktop publishing revolution. In the middle 1980s Adobe broadened their horizon by entering into the professional design software market by releasing Adobe Illustrator. Announced in 1989 and shipping in February 1990, Adobe took a leadership position in digital imaging with the release of Adobe Photoshop.

Also from Inside the Publishing Revolution: “When we all saw that first sheet of paper come out of the LaserWriter, we knew we were going to hit it out of the park.” –Steve Jobs
In 1993 Adobe created the PDF file format and offered Acrobat Reader in June of 1993 for the Mac and later for DOS and Windows.

Extending its leadership role, Adobe acquired Aldus in 1994 primarily to get PageMaker and eventually After Effects was released. About a decade later Adobe acquired Macromedia and all of that company’s technologies which, with the release of Creative Suite 3, further broaden Adobe’s software and technology portfolio.

Also from Inside the Publishing Revolution: “If anyone had told me 20 years ago that we would have a fundamental impact on the publishing industry, I wouldn’t have believed them.” –John Warnock

To get a better inside look at the first 20 years of Adobe, check out Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story written by Pamela Pfiffner. Available on Amazon.

METACOW: A Public-Domain, HighResolution, Fully-Digital, Noise-Free, Metameric, Extended-Dynamic-Range, Spectral Test Target for Imaging System Analysis and Simulation

Geek Alert: the following would really only excite a “color geek”…

Source: Summit Daily News
Written by Leslie Brefeld

Since Ansel Adams developed the zone system of manipulating the lights and darks of a photograph at the turn of the 19th century, darkrooms have been facilitating the production of this mainstay of popular art.

But in the name of digital, the art of photography is undergoing a revolution.

Source: internetnews.com
Written by Andy Patrizio

In the 1970s, a quintet of spray paint artists called The Fabulous Five turned New York trains and subway cars into their canvases. New Yorkers were impressed with art that stretched as far as 10 cars while the Transit Authority and hardware stores where the five stole their paint were furious.

Thirty years later, the Five are gone, New York subways have been replaced with JPEG images and Adobe Photoshop has become the spray paint of the new century. The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” has never been more apparent as jokesters on the Internet use doctored images in place of text to get their messages across.

According to wakoopa, a software use tracking application and web site, the most used software (among people who registered and downloaded the tracking app) was Firefox which was used by 8905 people for 102,859 hours in the tracking period. Photoshop CS3 was used by 3869 people for a total of 23,234 hours. And, according to TechCrunch, wakoopa shows that Tuesday is the day that users play games the least while women spend about twice the time in Photoshop than men.

Chizen will be a tough act to follow. Can Narayen, with an ambitious plan to remake how we gain access to the Web, fit the bill?

Source: BusinessWeek
Written by Sarah Lacy

A little more than a year ago an exhausted Bruce Chizen was just landing in Barcelona. He’d been on a plane all night and, despite the rigorous travel schedule associated with being chief executive officer of Adobe Systems (ADBE), he’d never gotten very good at sleeping on planes. As the plane taxied to the gate, a groggy Chizen checked his Treo and was jolted by bad news. The son of Adobe India’s CEO had been kidnapped. “This is hell,” he thought to himself.

InfoTrends Study Shows Significant Changes in Pro Photography Workflows as Image Capture Volumes Increase

InfoTrends Press Release: According to a recent InfoTrends survey of over 1,000 professional photographers across specialties, the increased use of digital photography is leading to new opportunities in the imaging industry. It’s no surprise that the percentage of total digital images captured by pros has grown from 82% in 2006 to 89% in 2007; however, a pronounced increase in the number of digital images captured per week by the average pro suggests that software, service, and printing solution providers are likely to benefit in the long run.

Source: Reedsburg Times Press
Written by By Nathan Greenhalgh

REEDSBURG-For some people pets are like family members. They walk them no matter what the weather is like, feed them regularly, dress them up and even use them to attract members of the opposite sex. In other words, pets can be a serious time investment. So why not take pictures of them?

That’s where Dennis Kline’s new digital studio, Critter Camera, comes in. Not only can Kline take the usual pet portraits, he is also a graphic artist. For example, he can put your pet’s image inside of a Christmas ornament, make it pensively stare at it’s own reflection ala Hamlet or give it vampire teeth.

“It’s not limited to dogs and cats; any animal,” Kline said. “I do a lot of Photoshop.”

Press Release: 2007-12-10–XChange International, the source for extended technology worldwide, are pleased to announce the release of PhotoSpray 1.8. PhotoSpray is an Adobe® Photoshop® or Adobe Elements® plug-in that offers the ability to spray pictures on top of any RGB photos or layers. This method of painting lets users brush sets of images on top of any photo.

Source: USA Today

Narayen takes over as Adobe, best known for Photoshop photo software and Acrobat and PDF digital document tools, is shifting many of its wares from boxed software to online services.

Bill Crow, the Microsoft Program Manager for HD Photo (originally code named Photon) says on his blog, that the final versions of the plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 are available for download. The download is free.
The plug-ins are available for both Windows as well as Macintosh. For the Windows, XP SP2 or Vista is supported. For Mac, both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard) are supported. The plug-in development was done by Microsoft in conjunction with Pegasus Imaging Systems.
HD Photo, which uses an expanded color space named scRGB has the capability to encode high-dynamic range (HDR) images in a wider color gamut color space.

Due to an issue with certain raw files (Compressed NEF) and a possible artifact when opening Olympus E-3 files, Adobe has released a second version of Camera Raw 4.3 bringing the current version to 4.3.1.

Check the Camera Raw product page for downloads.

I’ll be on the road to Ann Arbor, MI for a short visit with Thomas Knoll (can’t tell ya what’s going on just yet) and will be back Friday of this week. See ya then…