Adobe recently released a beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 on the Adobe Labs website. The software is available for both Windows and the new Mactel platform.

While Photoshop CS3 is free to download, there’s a small catch - you must have a valid serial number of Photoshop CS2 to activate Photoshop CS3 beta else the software will expire after the two day grace period.

Coming back to Digg, this site is inhabited by a large population of Adobe Photoshop fans and actual users. Some previous stories related to Photoshop have been dugg by as many as 5000 members.

The rule is simple - if you can write any good tutorial on using Photoshop, the likelihood of hitting the Digg front page is very high.

No wonder when Adobe announced Photoshop CS3, the news of the software release, Photoshop CS3 Screenshots story and even the download page hit the Digg front pages immediately.

Digg could be a good place for Adobe to advertise their products but there is a slightly worrying phenomenon as well.

A Digg member posted a link that had easy instructions on how to bypass activation of Photoshop CS3 by changing certain Hex values. The link has received ~800 diggs at the time of writing this story.

Unlike the general Digg crowd behavior, most comments here are very polite like “smooth and sexy”, “wow… thanx patch worked perfect! ” - people are happily discussing and sharing their opinions about the Photoshop CS3 patch.

It can be assumed that most of these ~900 Digg members are using pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop CS2 on their machines. And that’s not all, the crack is just meant for the Mac version of the software, all hell will break loose when someone posts a Windows patch for Photoshop CS3 on Digg.

Strong signals that the pirated to legit user ratio is really very high at Digg. Is Digg any different from Pirate Bay and other warez sites ?

Probably not since Digg is also promoting software piracy by allowing threads that discuss methods to crack software. It maybe time for Digg moderators to step in.

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• Convert Photo to a Pencil Sketch
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The Photoshop Photo Effects Cookbook describes how to use Adobe Photoshop to convert a picture to a sketch in pencil, charcoal, conte, or other mediums.

The so-called “Sketch Filters” in Photoshop consistently yield very disappointing results; re-creating the quintessential sketch demands a little more inventiveness and an approach that mimics traditional techniques. Pencil sketches work especially well when very soft leaded pencils are used on a tinted paper, with a few touches of white chalk here and there to heighten the tones.

In exercises such as this, using a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet has huge advantages over using a mouse. When using a graphics tablet we can simply apply more pressure to the stylus to create darker strokes.

Read entire Photoshop tutorial - Photoshop converts a Photo to a Pencil Sketch

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The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) announced a “Call for Entries” for its 2006 Digital Canvas Awards, the first worldwide competition exclusively for Adobe Photoshop users.

For official contest rules and entry form, visit digitalcanvasawards.com.

Winners will be chosen in 11 categories, and the Best of Show Grand Prize winner will be sent by Photoshop User magazine on a dream assignment to Paris, France. They’ll be on assignment for five days, using the City of Lights as their inspiration as they design the artwork for a cover of Photoshop User magazine.

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• Download Corel WordPerfect Office X3

If you are seriously looking for an alternative to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite or the free OpenOffice office suite, Corel WordPerfect Office X3 is definitely one to consider.

Corel has put together a solid office suite that offers unique features like ability to export or import PDF documents, mail client with full indexing, one-click Powerpoint presentation conversion to Flash and a Save without metadata command that clears out everything that you can’t see on the page. (related: Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, Redacting Adobe PDF)

Publish to PDF: Corel WordPerfect 13 provides support for reading and importing PDF files without having to buy a PDF conversion software like Adobe Acrobat. Once open, you can edit the document as a WordPerfect file. Microsoft Office 2003 can’t export files in PDF format (although Microsoft Office 12 will)

Corel WordPerfect Mail program, based on Yahoo StataLabs Bloomba mail client, has built-in indexing, RSS reading, and trainable spam filter. WordPerfect Mail uses a tool called Smart Groups to organize e-mail, listserv messages, and RSS feeds. You can add additional predefined RSS feeds, or create your own using the Smart Groups Wizard in WordPerfect Mail.

You can easily open, import, export, and save Microsoft Office document formats in WordPerfect Office Suite. The new Compatibility toolbar lets you save WordPerfect documents to popular document publishing formats, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, HTML, and XML with one easy click.

By minimizing the differences between the Corel and Microsoft productivity suites, Corel hopes to reduce the training time for converts from Microsoft Office. Yahoo search capabilities are embedded within the word processor. You now can highlight text in a WordPerfect document and select Search With Yahoo from the right-click menu, and Web search results appear in a browser window.

The Corel Presentations tool can export a presentation in Macromedia Flash format, allowing it to be published to the web. Another real time saver in WordPerfect is the new Ctrl-Alt-V hotkey to “paste without formatting.” Paste text from a Web page and give it the format of the document you’re editing.

Corel WordPerfect Office X3 Standard edition includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro (spreadsheet), Presentations, and WordPerfect Mail (an e-mail client). It also comes with a host of utilities, including Pocket Oxford English Dictionary, PerfectScript (a macro script language), the WordPerfect XML Designer and the Pleadings Expert (for lawyers). The Professional Edition adds the Paradox database application, the WordPerfect SDK, and Visual Basic.

Corel X3 release does not support the vendor-independent OpenDocument Format (ODF).

Download Corel Word Perfect X3 198 MB EXE installer

Source: Transitioning from Microsoft Office to WordPerfect Office | Corel WordPerfect Office Family | Corel WordPerfect Office X3 Standard Edition | Review: WordPerfect Office X3 Standard Edition | CNet Take

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