Last week I got a very unexpected email telling me I had won an iPod touch during a random drawing from a NAPP member survey. It arrived 5 days later and became the first Apple product I’ve ever owned. I’ve used iMacs before but have a dislike in general of products that are highly proprietary. Thus, my mp3 players of the past have been relatively generic. Ie: no Zunes, no iPods. I’m currently actively using 3 besides the new iPod. I’m going to give a brief rundown of each and then my thoughts on the new iPod.
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Played some more today with the NAPP Challenge 27: Combo Platter which was to combine the following photos into a single image.

I also added:

My final image:

Acutally had some time to play around a bit today. Wandered over to the NAPP Forums and spied one of their challenges which was to colorize this photo:

I haven’t done a colorization in a while and enjoyed playing around with this one. It was done mostly by using masked solid color layers set to soft light. After I had basic colors for all of the parts I made a merged copy at the top and then did some dodge/burn/smudge and light opacity painting…

Yesterday I arrived home from the SOSA appreciation brunch to find my Adobe CS5 sitting on the doorstop. Quite exciting! I decided to do some ‘clean’ up on the computer before installing as I know i will not need to complete CS4 and CS5 on my system. Went through and uninstalled everything except Photoshop and InDesign CS4 since those two are the ones I use the most and was most concerned about upgrade glitches on – the others I figured CS5 would do the trick. Loaded up CS5 and copied over my preferences.

Alot of the user preferences for adobe products are located in: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Product\Product Version\Language  at least that is basic format.

So if you are like me and have some Grep Find-Change Queries you want to grab the “Find-Change Queries” folder from the previous InDesign folder (C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\Version6.0\en_US\) and copy to the new version  – then you don’t have to recreate your saved queries.

Likewise, I copy over my “Snippnets” and “Workspace” from Dreamweaver above format and then Configuration\Snippets and Configuration\Workspace, some custom Save for Web Setting I have in Illustrator and some Photoshop Settings… Makes it easier to get up and running.

Only ’snag’ I had with the install was when it came to the registration. Like in previous versions, when you register your product you are offered a “complimentary benefit” for registration. CS5’s included the new  AdobeText Font, 30 day trial of Linda.com, 30 day trial to Safary Book, 40% off 2 or more titles from Adobe Classroom in a book series, Phototools standard 2.5, or 2 issues of Layers magazine. In the past they have emailed you a link after you’ve registered. This procedure seems to have changed. What was frustrating is at one point you have the choice of continuing updating your profile or picking your freebie – I went with updating the profile and couldn’t get back to the freebie selection page and never got an email for it. So I tried Adobe Support Chat – TOTALLY USELESS! Finally figured out that if you open Photoshop or one of the others and go to “Help/Complete Update Adobe ID Profile” you can again get the options for the freebie…

This morning I actually got to go in and do some work in Dreamweaver - I just did some minor updates to a couple sites and everything went smoothly. I didn’t play with anything new though I’m looking forward to a couple new features I’ve read about… 

Next was InDesign…  Unforutnately, Extensis has not updated it’s Fusion 2 font activator for CS5. So I had to open Fusion and manually activate the fonts used in the newsletter I was working on. I did get to check out a new feature here that I was looking foward to and that was the span paragraph – works beautifully! Looking forward to working with this new version more!

In regards to the Extensis Font activator – while it would not work in InDesign, moving the ExtensisFontManagementAICS4.aip from the plugin directory in Illustrator CS4 to the plugins directory in CS5 does seem to work. Looking at the InDesign plugins folder, it appears Adobe changed the format of the InDesign plugin which would explain why it doesn’t work there.

One last little note – Acrobat is still the Acrobat 9 that was in the CS4 packages, apparently it did not get an update. It is also interesting that it has it’s own serial separate from the collection.

All in all happy – though I wish I had more time to play with the new features…

Toggle EXIF Data

• model: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
• copyright: Connie Jean Burianek
• exposureTime: 0.025 s (1/40) (1/40)
• fnumber: f/9.0
• isoEquiv: 640
• DateTime: 2010:04:10 11:03:11
• meteringMode: matrix
• flashUsed: No
• focalLength: 50.00 (50/1)
• exposureMode: Auto Exposure

Yet another reason the camera has been neglected a bit lately… I decided to finally act on my desire to learn how to play guitar and on February 22nd I bought a Guild GAD30E after visiting the local guitar shop and am slowly learning how to play. While I have figured out the notes/layout of the fret board and my finger picking coming alone smoothly, I’m still working on learning chords. Interesting concept - chords, not something I’ve  ever had to deal being a flute player.
Played with the photo in Lightroom to make the new guitar look old and liked the effect of this… Below is the orginal.