Adobe releases PhotoShop CC 2015 with many new and interesting features. Austin and central Texas prepare for more intense rain and flooding.

 This downtown Austin building shot up like a weed.

There's no real signage on it anywhere and no 

big corporate logo on it either. I'm naming it

"the Anonymous Building."

I just finished a seamless and pain free upgrade of my PhotoShop CC application to PhotoShop CC 2015. There's a bunch of new stuff under the hood and I will spend some time this week finding the stuff that's relevant to photography and dive in to the learning curve. I've poked around in the "Blur Gallery" and think that's pretty cool now that a number of the filters are content aware. 

There was much sturm und drang at the launch of PhotoShop in the cloud and many photographers gnashed their teeth and grumbled about "owning" their copy of the program, etc. I had a few misgivings but I dove in because I am an avowed camera junky and I knew that having the automatic updates to Lightroom and PhotoShop would ensure that I'd get the latest upgrades to the raw converters needed for new raw camera files. In the real world the $10 a  month I'm paying to have the constantly refreshed programs isn't even a blip on the old tri-corder. 

In addition to added capabilities the folks at Adobe say many parts of the code have been re-written for speed and performance so things like the Spot Healing Tool, for example, are much faster to use. Sounds good to me. I'm just happy that I was able to launch it and nothing crashed...

If you subscribe to Adobe's cloud versions of Lightroom and PhotoShop they are available for immediate upgrades. 

More rain coming.

We begged for water during the worst of the drought and now people in central Texas are wondering when someone will turn down the giant faucet and allow us to dry out and get the mold and mildew out of the crevices. We are under flash flood warnings until Thursday with the most intense part of the storms hitting us this evening around dinner time. I'm worried about getting more unwelcome water on the floor of the studio but my friends in Wimberly are really on edge after all the destruction that happened there two weeks ago. I cleaned out the French drain next to the studio and added a few barriers to re-direct water so I guess we'll wait and see what the quality of my engineering is like later today. 

I can feel my friend Paul's pain though. He's an architectural photographer and he was waiting for things to green up outside earlier in the year, now the whether has delayed or side-lined his projects for weeks at a time. Just when it seems like we'll have blue skies and good shooting weather more clouds roll in....

Swim Early, Swim Often. 

I am now engaged in "hoarding" swim practices, and it seems everyone else is as well. Swimmers pretty uniformly hate it when we have an early morning practice and we've gotten through warm up and are engaged in a main set only to be ordered out of the pool because of approaching lightning strikes. The coaches actually have apps on their phones that track lightning strikes and their proximity. 

This Spring we've been tossed out of a record number of workouts so on any day available we show up en mass to swim. It was five in a lane this morning, all present in anticipation that tomorrow's workout might get cancelled. Nobody really minds the crowds. Most of us swam competitively in high school and college and that was endless practice circle swimming with a crowd in each lane. 

Paradoxically I hope I get wet but I hope we stay dry. I think you know what I mean....