You Can Call Me Al

I've been playing with the newly released Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. The "Extended" parts means Photoshop is no longer just photo editing, it can now edit video on a basic level (we're not talking After Effects level). It also has some 3D stuff that I haven't explored yet.

Anyway, the new video features are great, makes it really simple to edit some footage and render it back to a video format. You also get a cut-down version of the Premiere timeline for some basic editing. You can add titles with text and basic animation functions but the great part (for me) is being able to create blank video layers over your movie to add non-destructive effects. One of which is my old favourite, rotoscoping light sabers :)

Once I get some decent footage I'll put up a tutorial on how to make fancy light saber effects...

Adobe seem to be busy bunnies of late. Their labs site seems to be updated with goodies every couple of weeks. A little round-up:

• Photoshop CS3 Beta
  The first public Photoshop beta that I can remember (Requires a CS2 Key)
• Kuler
  A cool flash-based colour palette selector.
• Spry 1.4
  Framework for AJAX goodness
• CSS Advisor
  The beginnings of the handiest CSS resource ever.
• JSEclipse
  A JavaScript plugin for Eclipse.

Plus other bits like Lightroom, Southbooth and Flash 9.