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Adobe updater could be really annoying, though I find Adobe Creative Suite 3 as a masterpiece. Every time that you start Photoshop, Illustrator or Acrobat Adobe updater pops up and tries to download updates. It is also a big resource hog. So how can you disable Adobe updater?

The solution is very simple. Find through search in disc C file “AdobeUpdaterPrefs.dat” (c:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Updater5), click with right mouse button and change Attributes of this file to "Read only". UPD: Open this file with any text editor (Notepad) and change year value in this line to 2008 or 2009 <LastDateCheck>2008-10-29</LastDateCheck> or just delete this file, though its very radical cure to my mind.

New version  of open source image editing software GIMP 2.4 recently came out with new goodies and long-awaited improvements. Most valuable new features are scaling for all kinds of brushes, intuitive selection and crop tools, improved printing and color management, red eye removal, a new object alignment guide and advanced tools like perspective cloning and lens distortion filters.

The main advantage of GIMP is that it is best FREE image editing software and it works on Linux, Windows and Mac. Without doubt it lacks some substantial features in comparison with Photoshop which are crucial in a commercial printing environment and has many drawbacks. In GIMP there is NO support for CMYK colorspace, support for digital camera’s RAW format, support for 16-bit, 32-bit, adjustment layers, the history brush tool, folders in the layer window, a free transform tool to rotate, scale and move in one tool and an interpolation code to draw smooth brush strokes using a tablet.

The GIMP also requires basic Script-Fu programming knowledge for automation upon it, while Photoshop can record your actions and repeat them with a "Play" button. Though, there are many plugins to improve GIMP, there’s no way to make it right out of the box.

Since there are really no any innovative features which are superior to Photoshop or makes the image editing easier, I don’t understand why the GIMP developers should invent new bicycle i.e. “different product vision” since they anyway follows the graphic design industry leader Photoshop.

Even novice who doesn’t ever see Photoshop User Interface feels lost and disappointed with GIMP UI. Certainly there is GIMPshop available which makes the GIMP accessible to the many Photoshop users applying renamed and reorganized GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop’s menu structure and naming conventions.

When someone say that most users don’t need all that Photoshop features, there is less complicated software than GIMP itself to handle simple photo processing such as XnView.

The development of GIMP 2.4 took about 3 years, so we could expect GIMP 3.0 in next 3 years with huge improvements such as higher bitdepths, more colorspaces, layer grouping, adjustment layers, filter layers and shape tools.

To sum up, GIMP has a long way ahead in development to be not just a toy for geeks i.e. “experienced users” but real competitor to Photoshop and other commercial image editing software as it happened with Mozilla Firefox. Most of all, it needs to be more user friendly, intuitive, implement all industry standards and gain some exclusive new features which other tools don’t provide to users.

Flickr users will be able soon to edit photos more extensively than just rotate and crop, using the Flash based online photo editor. The deal has been signed and Picnik tools will be integrated via an iframe within next few months. I should say that currently Flickr users can edit their photos using Picnik but only within Picnik work area (there are also built in support for Photobucket, Picasa and Facebook albums.). After editing, users can add the edited photo to their Flickr account or, if they are a Flickr pro user, overwrite the original. (more…)

Frankly speaking, a couple of times my graphic design ideas was stolen by unfair customers, even though I didn’t send them my works in good resolution or vector. You know, to repeat something is much easier and cheaper than to create from scratch. So now I don’t even think of the project in graphic design business before getting paid at least half of the money.

Sometimes I was upset that work which I’ve done was much harder than it has been paid for, therefore I can much better evaluate real cost of my work currently.

Graphic Design Blog You the Designer  has posted a number of tips in graphic design business which will be especially useful for a beginners to avoid most common mistakes.

12 Tips for Your Design Business

Photoshop MSU Image Restoration is a great plugin for Photoshop CS2 and CS3 (probably also working in other versions) to erase unwanted objects such as accidental people in photo or in my case I wanted to remove ugly trolleybus wires which really corrupted photo of cool big board in Warsaw. (You can have a look at full size processed photo in my Flickr page). (more…)

What to do if you’d like to impress your mom or granddad making especially valuable for them old faded photo look vivid and colored as though it was taken yesterday? Probably I exaggerate a little, but the result will be worthy :). Anyway, this tutorial helps you a lot in coloring black and white photo. (more…)

I participate in Prestigio wallpapers contest The Art of Hi-Tech with two works: Taste the sweet glam Hi-Tech! and Autumnal Hi-Tech. If you liked any of them, please comment and vote for it. In my opinion, contests are great for every designer. They give you publicity, fresh look for the world and your works. And if you don’t yearn terrifically for a win then sometimes it happens.