The Computer Blog

Monday, October 20, 2003

Photoshop CS or Tools for Television?

Video and “regular” computer graphics work uses two kinds of pixels. Computers use square ones, meaning that the pixels’ vertical and horizontal dimensions are the same. Some video formats, and digital video (DV) and MPEG-2 are two of them, use rectangular pixels. Why do we care? Because when I make something up in Photoshop (or any other computer graphics application) I want to use in my video, the pixel types don’t match. That means the image imported into the video will look distorted. While there are manual techniques that can account for that, the two solutions I’m looking at involve upgrading to Photoshop CS (just released by Adobe and does support non-square pixels) or an application entitled “Tools for Television”, a Photoshop plug-in that would allow me to use my current version of Photoshop to build images I can import into FCP. The cost of the Photoshop upgrade is $10 less than buying Tools for Television, but buying the latter would leave my Windows and Mac versions of Photoshop matched. I’m weighing which way I want to go; and if I do upgrade to Photoshop CS whether I want to follow that with Go Live, Illustrator, or In Design upgrades as well.

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