Neverending Upgrades

A lot of programs coming out on the horizon. Start figuring out how you can afford it all if you're the type of person who likes using all the latest.

I'm waiting to see how this whole affair with Window's Vista is going to turn out. I haven't tried it yet, but if my experiences in the past watching Windows progress through 2 major overhauls goes, (Windows 3.1 and Windows XP), I'd wait between 6 months to a year before touching Vista. The only reason I can see you need to do so is if you have new programs that absolutely require you to upgrade. Until then, stick to XP.

That Aero thing that Vista does is neat, but it's just eye candy. I think if I wanted eye candy, I'd switch to OSX on Apple.

I've also been testing out the beta version of Photoshop CS3. It's not bad...the interface has been overhauled some, and like always, familiar tools are not always where they were before. My computer's about 3 years old now (ancient by computer standards) so I can tell CS3 noticably slower in performance. I think you'd need about 2 GBs of memory to run this sucker comfortably.

The most immediately noticable improvements to CS3 is that Adobe Bridge is much more improved, almost like they borrowed some of the ideas from Lightroom, and they now made "Smart Filters" instead of just "Smart Objects". So now you can put all kinds of filter effects on your photos without actually worrying about messing up the original.

Speaking of Lightroom, if you've downloaded and tried the trial version like I recommended...it will automatically expire in a couple more days. Right now I think they have a special that will last through the end of April where you can have $100 off the program.

Do you need it? I think if you're either a professional photographer, or if you're even a person that simply takes a lot of photos, you should get it. It's THAT good. Even if you're simply using it to organize and sort your photos, it might be worth getting.

Not only that, but it will help you with printing, developing, and even creating web galleries too. It's just a HUGE time saver for anything photo related. The newly released 1.0 version already has a number of improvements over the beta version, I spend my morning goofing around with it and watching some tutorials. At the risk of sounding like the total geek....I had fun. :)

It runs perfectly fine on my old machine as well.... wouldn't be terrible if it doesn't run on Vista? :)