Adobe is taking a page from the Lightroom specialization playbook for Photoshop by trying to make it more customizable to specific users and tasks. But in contrast with Lightroom, company is trying to do so without sacrificing the software’s general-purpose nature, said John Nack, [principal] product manager for Photoshop.

“We want to make it possible to be everything you want and nothing you don’t,” Nack said. “One of the tough things has been dealing with the enormous breadth of Photoshop. We end up presenting same interface to architects as we do to Web designers as radiologists as prepress folks.”

To achieve that goal, Photoshop’s interface will become more open-ended and even programmable, he said.

“You’ll see some of the things we’ve learned about Lightroom–making things browsable and less modal–come into Photoshop,” Nack said. In other words, it’ll be easier to shift Photoshop from one task to another.

With a “Configurator” application that should be released by Adobe Labs within a month or two of release the next version of Photoshop, Adobe will let users create and share their own Photoshop control panels written in Adobe’s Flash programming language, Nack added. “Our goal is to make it possible for expert users to reconfigure the environment on a task-by-task basis and share those workspaces with other people. You don’t have to write code. You can knock together an interface and make it sharable.”

We have been actively working on improving color rendering for digital raw photographs. Our new color rendering package contains the following components:

• the DNG 1.2 specification, which expands and formalizes the concept of a color profile for raw (i.e., scene-referred) image data captured by digital sensors,
• Adobe Standard camera profiles that significantly improve color rendering, especially in reds, yellows, and oranges,
• Camera Matching profiles that match the camera manufacturers’ color appearance,
• DNG Profile Editor, a free software utility for editing camera profiles, and

this web page, designed to help photographers get the most out of the new camera profiles and the DNG Profile Editor.

The first one I noticed is a graduated filter, will have to play with this one.

Also they added a SDK to build plugins for export, metadata, and web gallery. Not quite the full sdk like Aperture but its a start.

It shoots the 60mp image at a speedy 1 frame per second, not a sports camera. It also has varible resolution. So you can take a 30mp frame at 2fps.

I though the 50 megapixel Hassellblad back was a little overkill, but this?

It will sell for $39,990 for just the back, or $41,990 for the camera system.

See the full post here.

Phil Clevenger - Lightroom Interface Designer from Frederick Johnson on Vimeo.

It seems like something that would be fun to try, but take a lot of trial and error to get right.

Currently I own two digital camera bodies, a Canon EOS 5D and a Canon EOS 10D.  I also own 5 Canon L Series lenses, the 135 f/2 (my favorite lens), the 24 f/1.4, the 14 f/2.8, the 50 f/1.2 and the 70-200 f/4.  In addition to these lenses I own the Canon EF100 macro.  I also own various accessories to go with this Canon setup, Speedlite, batteries, CF cards, card readers, tripods, etc.

You can read the interview here or go to Thomas Hawk’s blog.

Check out his post here.

I shot these with the 40D on a tripod. I put the camera in manual and set the it from f8 to f16. I had the shutter speed set in bulb mode. I was using a shutter release and mirror up mode. I would just hold the release down for a couple of explosions and then let go. I had to watch to make sure I did not get too many bursts that they would overlap too bad. I think they turned out fairly well for a first time.

To see more please take a look on my flickr set.