JISC Digital Media Blog Archive
September 2008

Digital media companies publish new metadata guidelines

Posted by Antony Theobald on Friday 26 September 2008 at 5:20pm
Tags: metadata

The newly-launched Metadata Working Group, a consortium made up of Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft Nokia and Sony, has announced the publication of its Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata.

This is the group’s first specification and provides guidelines to “increase interoperability and preservation of metadata in digital photographs”. It’s worth noting that this first document looks at image metadata for ‘typical consumers’ - metadata for professional photography, audio and video metadata will be addressed in future specifications.

Photoshop CS4: is my 18 year wait over?

Posted by Nigel Goldsmith on Wednesday 24 September 2008 at 11:39am
Tags: image editing | photoshop | software

I have been using Photoshop since 1990 and have watched it grow from an application supplied on 4 floppy disks to multi DVD package.

As a photomontagist I often need to align montaged elements along diagonal lines to match the background perspective. Photoshop has only ever allowed guides to be arranged on the vertical and horizontal axis, if you wanted angled guides you had to use workarounds involving layers, alpha channels or paths. With CS4 if the canvas is rotated so are the guides, it is not clear if angled guides can be applied directly but it is looks like I am a little closer to ticking off the number one item on my personal Photoshop wish list.

The Content Aware Resizing which is based on technology I posted on this blog a year ago is also of interest to those using photographs illustratively. I have often had to convert landscape photomontage spreads to a portrait format, the distortion is normally completely unacceptable forcing me to return to create the image again from scratch, I am hoping this new tool will save many hours of work.

There are also many new features that will please those who did not want to alter the content of an image. There is no release date yet for Photoshop CS4