Photoshop + Lightroom for £8.78 ($9.99) a month

Gosh, did Adobe have some kind of epiphany? Did it actually realise that many of its customers were vexed, peeved, and felt exploited by its move from stand-alone software to the subscription-only Creative Cloud for applications such as Photoshop? Heavens is might have! Earlier today at the Photoshop World conference in Las Vegas it was announced that Photoshop CS3 (or higher) owners wil be able to subscribe to a Photoshop + Lightroom bundle that includes access to Behance, 20GB of online storage, access to Creative Cloud Learn's training resources, and ongoing updates for a fee of £8.78 (or $9.99) a month. You'll need to sign up before 31 December 2013.

According to Winston Hendrickson's blog: 'Since introducing Photoshop CC, we’ve listened to feedback from a spectrum of our customers, from advanced professionals to casual enthusiasts. One common request was a solution specifically tailored for photographers. We listened, and at Photoshop World we’re announcing a special offer for our loyal Photoshop customers.' It might be a good deal and it most certainly is a photographically oriented package, but Adobe's Creative Cloud storm left many of its loyal users feeling embittered. Sometimes a 'Sorry, we got it wrong,' can help, too.

There are more details on Adobe's blog.

Instagram 2.0

The mega-successful photo-sharing and iPhoneography icon, Instagram, with its gajillion users, has just undergone its first major upgrade since it hit the App store just under a year ago. It’s Instagram 2.0. It’s faster and it has a gamut of new features. Wanna know what’s new?

Well, first up is Live Filters, which means that you can apply whichever filter floats your boat before you snap your pic, and see what it looks like. As for those filters, they’ve introduced four new ones: Amaro, Rise, Hudson, and Valencia.

There’s a new tilt-shift doo-dad that’s super-fast: pinch, pan, and rotate and watch it all in live view.

In response to people’s requests for higher resolution images, they’ve done just that. If you use an iPhone 4, resolution has increased from 612×612 to 1936×1936. If you’re stuck with the iPhone 3GS, resolution is now 1536×1536.

Borders are now optional. Much better! And you can now rotate your photos so that they’re not stuck on their sides. Fabulous!

But it’s all still only available for devices-Apple. If you’re an Android user, no Instagram for you.

All the details are over on Instagram’s blog.

Front focus? Back focus?

Many of us trust our autofocus implicitly – because it’s just one less thing to worry about, really. But what when the lens starts to do weird stuff? My mate Chris over at DSLR Blog has the skinny…

If you auto-focus on an object the camera will attempt to fix the focus at the correct distance between the camera and the object.

Front focusing is when this calculation goes wrong and it focuses before the object, back focusing is where it incorrectly focuses behind the object. Either way what you achieve is a photograph where the focus is in the wrong place making your object blurred or soft.

Manually focusing still works but in effect something is wrong with either the lens or the camera.

Some more info, along with tips as to how you can test for these problems, in the Front and Back Focussing Explained article.