With the release of the Droid and Android OS 2.0, Google has set up a head-on gadget war with Apple's iPhone. Even if they've got a comparably-cool piece of hardware and a nice OS, Android will have to compete with (arguably) the iPhone's biggest selling point: apps. If Photoshop.com Mobile for Android is any indication, Android will do just fine. The Android version of Photoshop.com offers everything the iPhone version does.

That means you can crop, zoom and flip your photos, as well as adding filters and color adjustments. Black and white, sepia and soft focus are just a touch away. The app also plugs into Photoshop.com, so you can browse your photo library and upload new shots. The only difference between the Android and iPhone versions, as John Gruber pointed out over at Daring Fireball, is that the Android version includes a straighten tool for devices without multitouch.

[via AppScout]

John Nack at Adobe recently posted a demo video of a hot new project in the works from Adobe Labs: content-aware fill in Photoshop. Where the current spot-healing tool in Photoshop (up to CS4) replaces the selected area using information from one other part of the image, the new content-aware version uses a technology called PatchMatch to fill in the hole using info from multiple surrounding points. The upshot is that you get a much more convincing automatic heal.

In the demo video, you can see how content-aware spot healing makes things like removing wires from a photo a whole lot easier, but there's also a new version of the fill tool for larger areas. You can use it to scrub out entire trees and big chunks of scenery, and the result seem pretty plausible.

When is this magical new feature coming to Photoshop? Maybe not ever, according to Nack's disclaimer, but it looks far enough along that I wouldn't be totally surprised to see it in the next major version.

Well, not natively, but with the free FastPictureViewer codec pack you can now view your camera's high-resolution files within Windows 7's Explorer. All in all this codec pack has almost every camera type covered, from Canon's CR2 to Sony's SRF and Nikon's NRW -- and many others.

But how will this help me...? Well, if you're not a photographer, this is utterly insignificant. If you are a photographer though -- and I'd hazard a guess that most or all of us here have a digital camera -- it means that you no longer need to rely on manufacturer's own-brand image browser, or Adobe's Lightroom or Photoshop. You could now, in theory, manage your photography portfolio through Windows -- you can already tag and star-rate images, but with this codec pack there's absolutely no reason to use other tools.

And best of all it's free and devoid of any malware. It installs into the background and you'll never hear from it again. It's yet another good reason to install Windows 7...

P.S. Taken a little wind out of your sails, eh, Apple-centric photographers?

Photoshop has come to the iPhone in the form of Adobe's new Photoshop.com app. As someone with a lot of experience using Photoshop on the desktop, and a little bit of practice with Photoshop.com, I was surprised to find that the iPhone version is incredibly light. There are no layers, no brushes, and no levels ... just a lot of filters. You can touch up the exposure and saturation on your photos, add borders and vignettes, and apply a tint or a number of preset color effects. When you're done, you can save your work on your phone or upload directly to a photoshop.com account.

Honestly, I think Adobe got this one right. It would be cool to do some serious photo editing on the iPhone, but even the 3GS doesn't have the specs for the more resource-heavy features we've come to expect from Adobe's Creative Suite apps. iPhone users mostly just want to make their photos look a little better, and it's not like they're shooting with some kind of 12 megapixel DSLR. The Photoshop app delivers: just throw a little soft focus on there, fix up the colors, and you're good to go. The app also seems to be a promotional effort to get people to sign up for photoshop.com accounts, but it's not much harder to save your images and then upload them to Flickr or another photo sharing site you like.

I'll describe PhotoSketch, but you really have to watch the demo video to believe it. If you make a living putting together composite images in Photoshop, you may want to stop reading right now, and start looking for a new line of work. Photosketch takes rough, even stick-figure-like drawings you do in Photoshop, finds real images to match, and puts together a montage that looks a lot like what you were imagining when you drew those sticks. You do need to add some text labels to the elements of your picture to help with search, but PhotoSketch does the rest. And, surprisingly, it looks pretty darn good.

You might expect something as advanced as PhotoSketch to come from a huge company like Google, but it was actually developed by a group of 5 computer science students in China. Their bandwidth isn't enough to stand up to all the hype, though, so PhotoSketch is down right now. The very impressive demo video shows a bit of how it works, though.

PhotoSketch uses a combination of your text labels and the rough shape of what you drew to find appropriate elements for your image. The results, at least the ones in the video, are incredible. The video also reveals that PhotoSketch isn't perfect - you don't want a baseball player for your Frisbee throwing scene, for example - but it generates several decent options for you to choose from, so one of them should be what you're looking for.

[via Mashable]

The widely acclaimed image editor Paint.NET has been updated to version 3.5 Beta 1.

The Windows application, developed using version 3.5 of the .net framework, was originally developed by a Microsoft-mentored student as a replacement for the basic Microsoft Paint application that ships with Windows. Since it's inception it has grown hugely in features to the extent that many now consider it a viable free alternative to applications such as Photoshop and The GIMP.

Paint.NET includes powerful features including layers, unlimited undo, numerous filters, magic wand, cloning and also offers a plugin architecture for third party extensibility.

The new 3.5 Beta 1 release - the first to require version 3.5 of the .net framework - adds a refreshed UI designed to look great on Windows Vista and Windows 7 Aero / Glass together with new filters, initial Windows 7 taskbar integration (recent items are listed in the jumplist), reduced memory usage and a host of fixes and updates.

If you are already a Paint.NET user you can download the updated release from within the application itself using the update feature, or the release can be downloaded directly from GetPaint.

Many people of course will be sceptical as to whether Paint.NET can genuinely offer a Photoshop alternative for $0 - are you already a satisfied user? Share your thoughts on the application in the comments!

Hot on the heels of stylish Mac OS X image editor Pixelmator hitting version 1.5, Acorn - the simple (yet powerful) image editor from Flying Meat software has reached version 2.0.

This all-new release is one of the first applications we've seen to require Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and comes a tonne of new features including: layer-based screenshot capture; RAW image support; layer groups; perspective transform; Dodge Burn, Clone, and Smudge tools; and much more.

Those looking to script Acorn can now also script the application via Javascript (using JSTalk) - and the trial of Acorn no-longer expires. Instead of locking itself down after the trial period ends, Acorn simply limits certain features until you purchase a copy - a nice change from
If you're an existing customers with a Acorn 1.0 licence you can upgrade for $20, and a new licence costs just $49.95.

We've covered slick Mac OS X Photoshop chaser Pixelmator here before at Download Squad, and earlier in the week version 1.5 of the application shipped.

There's plenty of new changes in this update, however some of my favourites include an all-new (and long-overdue) Save for Web option, a slicing tool for creating images for Web sites, Send to iPhoto and Mail options, and all-important Mac OS X Snow Leopard compatibility.

The 1.5 update is free to existing customers, and if you're tempted to pick up a copy, a new licence will set you back just $59 - ideal if you only occasionally need the Photoshop feature-set and balk at the price of the Adobe behemoth.

[Via TUAW]

If you've got an eye for design, but lack the proficiency in HTML and CSS to convert your ideas into functional websites, Divine might be for you. It's currently in the beta stage, but it aims to transform Photoshop documents into working Wordpress layouts. There's no coding involved, just selecting the appropriate sections of your PSD layout and assigning them the appropriate parts of the layout.

There are professional services that charge substantial rates to do similar conversions by hand, so a free, automated solution - even a flaky one - would be a big money-saver for non-coding designers who want to play with Wordpress. Divine doesn't seem flaky, though. It claims to produce results that are both SEO-optimized and standards compliant. It's also blessedly free of tables. Certainly, there's no substitute for doing it yourself, but Divine seems to be a reasonable (and free!) way to get started.

Adobe is ditching the free version of Photoshop, the Album Starter Edition, and promoting its web-based version of Photoshop at Photoshop.com instead. The move is sure to annoy devotees of desktop apps, who now have to shell out the money for Photoshop Elements, which is now the cheapest (supported) desktop version of Photoshop. On the other hand, the web app can be used from any machine, and offers 2GB of free storage.

Storage is upgradeable for a fee, and there's an AIR app to handle syncing between Photoshop.com and your desktop. Adobe's also pushing a "plus membership" to Photoshop.com, with a few extra features, including templates. Photoshop.com is extremely easy to use for basic stuff like tinting a photo, adjusting levels, or removing red eye, but if you're a slightly more advanced user, the upgrade to Elements might be worth your money.

[via CNET]

Fotografix is an amazing example of what creative developers can accomplish in less than one meg. The 680Kb portable application is a very capable image editor and provides nearly all the same functionality I utilize in Photoshop on a daily basis. It was a no-brainer to include in my list of 40 apps you can download in two seconds.

Only a few changes have taken place, but they're important additions. First and foremost, documentation has been beefed up and now covers nearly every Fotografix feature. As far as editing function go, layers can now be merged down and you can flatten an image in one fell swoop. An external paste command has been added as well: control-v works with the internal Fotografix clipboard, while shift+control+v will paste the contents of your Windows clipboard.

The last time this little gem hit DownloadSquad, the developer's server got hammered and the download became inaccessible. Fortunately, it's now mirrored on Freeware Files.

Pixelmator has earned a following by doing the tasks most people use Photoshop for, but doing them much cheaper. That's truer than it's ever been in the new version 1.4, which adds a new painting engine, new brushes, and support for Photoshop brush formats. If you're a professional photographer, Photoshop CS4 might be worth $700 to you, but if you're someone who just needs powerful drawing and image editing tools, Pixelmator's $60 price tag looks pretty tempting.

With Pixelmator's existing tablet support, and the new brush customization features, you should be able to use Pixelmator for just about any drawing task. It's compatible with practically every image format, and has lots of intuitive little shortcuts that make it behave the way you'd expect from a good Mac app. The main gripe I've seen from commenters on the Pixelmator blog is the lack of a Photoshop-like "save for web" feature. Word on the street is that it will implemented in the next version, but that one feature should hardly deter you from checking out this great app.

Earlier this month, Adobe announced that they would be holding a streaming webcast to officially introduce Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) to the public. Adobe calls CS4 its "biggest software release to date," but then, they claim that with every version (I think CS3 was its "largest release ever" or something to that effect).

Having had the opportunity to play around with some of the CS4 betas, I will say that the jump in magnitude from CS3 to CS4 is much more substantial than what we saw with CS2 to CS3. Performance is snappier and it is easier to complete tasks, but really, what makes CS4 a worthy upgrade is that the product line is much more integrated. The Macromedia acquisition came mid-release cycle, and while product integration wasn't a complete hack job -- they did a really good job with Flash -- Dreamweaver, Fireworks and suite integration with Flash was far from perfect.

Individual applications have all received a bevy of new features and innovations. Searching throughout a project or document for meta-data has been greatly enhanced, for instance. Adobe AIR has also been integrated across applications, meaning plugin developers can potentially take advantage of the AIR platform for easy in-program access to outside data (a la Adobe's Kuler app and its integration with Photoshop and Illustrator).

CS4 will be available in 64-bit builds for Windows users (Mac users have to wait until CS5 to get 64-bit Photoshop love), but both platform take advantage of GPU acceleration.

Like its predecessors, the 13 CS4 point releases can be purchased individually, or in one of six bundled suites: Design Standard CS4, Design Premium CS4, Web Standard CS4, Web Premium CS4, Production Premium CS4 and the Master Collection, which at $2499 US, pretty much gets you everything Adobe offers.

Unfortunately, the insanely complicated upgrade structure is still around too. Pricing starts at $599 for the Premium suite upgrades, but price depends on components owned, time purchased, etc., so check with your Adobe dealer or retailer for exact information.

Adobe stuff doesn't come cheap, but for those of us who rely on its products to do our creative work, the updates and new features in CS4 look to worth the price. CS4 will ship in October for Windows and OS X.