John Nack on Adobe

May 13, 2008

DNG codec for Vista available; DNG spec updated

Adobe has posted release candidate (i.e. feature-complete beta) of the Adobe DNG Codec for Microsoft Vista.  This free download enables Vista users to view DNG files in the Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery.

The posting coincides with the DNG Specification being updated to version 1.2.  Tom Hogarty writes,

This update addresses several industry requirements for the DNG format including the formalization of the concept of a "camera profile" and a metadata tag to validate your image data.  The definition of a camera profile for the DNG format as well as the allowance for multiple camera profiles to be embedded in a single DNG file will provide the industry with the ability to characterize raw data in an efficient and standardized format.  (Think ICC profiles, but for raw data.)

 

Check out the rest of Tom's post for more details on the changes.  Developers can grab the updated DNG SDK here.

May 12, 2008

I say "Adobe" you say...

...what, exactly?  That's what Noah Brier's fun Brand Tags project asks, and here's what people have said so far.  It's kind of fun to read the small print, too: "arcane awesome bastards... stucco structure... techy teepee telefónica terrorists..."  (Too bad Adobe doesn't make people think "hot cyclone action," like Dyson does.)  You can play your own word association game on the main page, and you can go backwards, playing name that brand based on what people say. [Via Mark Baltzegar & John Dowdell]

Who builds Photoshop, and the frequency of updates

Via Daring Fireball I caught this little blurb from Panic's Cabel Sasser:

A company like Adobe, which has hundreds of engineers working on Photoshop, releases ONE version every two or three years, and maybe a single bug fix release in the interim. For the most part, we're all cool with that, myself included! :)

I'm glad to hear the last bit, especially as I love Panic's Transmit and Unison software--models of simplicity and refinement.  The rest is kind of funny, though: in reality we have only a couple dozen engineers working on Photoshop.  (If you added in every person who tests Photoshop and Bridge, localizes them, builds the installers, manages the process, etc., you could get to more than a hundred people--but only with some effort.)  Relative to our feature set and code base, the team runs very lean.

As for the shipping schedule, it's been 18-24 months between major releases for quite some time.  I don't mean to take a casual comment in a forum overly seriously.  It's just that I've been thinking about the Photoshop (and Suite) shipping schedule, wondering whether it's too long, too short, or both.

On the one hand, the richer Suite apps get and the more of them there are, the more time people would like to settle into using them.  It's generally easier to absorb upgrading a number of applications at once, then living with them for a while, than it was to handle continual unsynchronized updates (the pre-Suites world).  Through this lens, 18 months looks short.

On the other hand, we're increasingly living in a world where "software is a relationship, not an artifact" (as I think Tim O'Reilly put it).  An application like Google Maps or Photoshop Express could be updated seamlessly, simultaneously for all users, every hour if desired.  Through that lens, 18 months looks awfully long.

I'd like to get to a point where we can have it both ways.  I'd like the core team to be able to go off and spend several years retooling essential pieces of plumbing, making changes that won't become visible for a few versions.  At the same time, I want to wake up in the morning and have Photoshop be smarter & more feature-rich than when I went to bed.  Some things should be updated every 5 years; others, every five minutes.

Obviously this isn't the kind of change a team makes overnight, but we're getting there.  Building on what we've got percolating, functionality like peer-to-peer help will become possible.  More on that foundation soon.

PS--Re: people banging on Panic for more frequent updates to their inexpensive tools, I'm reminded of an observation attributed to Edward Tufte: "The sense of entitlement increases as the price of the service or product decreases."

May 10, 2008

Calef Brown rocks

Having a wee man in the house certainly cuts into the time I'd otherwise put into scouring the Web for good bits to share; hence the dearth of illustration, photography, and type links lately.  On the other hand, it exposes me to books and illustrations I'd never otherwise see (not, y'know, being in the typical Pat the Bunny demographic).

My wife Margot turned me on to the works of the wonderful Calef Brown, poet & illustrator extraordinare.  Both the text and the art are hilariously loopy.  Check out some samples from Polkabats and Octopus Slacks to see what I mean.

Of course, it's fun to revisit the classics as well--Goodnight Moon especially.  Each night as I read it aloud, I try to amuse Margot by sneaking in some new reference to illustrator Clement Hurd's smoking habit--a penchant now hidden through Photoshop.  A little Googling reveals that other Photoshoppers couldn't leave that news alone, staging a "What Is Clement Holding?" contest.  (Keep kids off the Soloflex!)

Next up, I need to prevail on my folks to send us my old & very well-loved set of Mercer Mayer's A Boy, A Dog, and a Frog books--totally wonderful.

Photoshop Express now does Flickr

Woot, there it is!  The subject line pretty much says it all: you can now browse and edit your photos stored on Flickr right from within Photoshop Express.  I've just given the integration a whirl and, yep, it works like a charm.  Similar hooks are available for photos stored on Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa.  (I've been uploading just to my own site since becoming, uh, photographically obsessed with one little subject, but maybe this will draw me back to using a service as well.)

As long as we're on the subject, what's your take on the importance of integrating services like Flickr into Photoshop?  There's an obvious appeal in being able to upload right from Lightroom, but should we make it possible to browse & open images on Photoshop.com & co. right from within Photoshop?  (Let's imagine we could drop in an optional little Flash widget as a browser palette/panel, or maybe enable browsing via Adobe Bridge.)  What about being able to save edits back to the service?  Just curious.

May 08, 2008

Adobe "Hydra" now "Pixel Bender"

No, it's not a low-res portrait of an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler"; rather, "Pixel Bender" is the official name for Adobe's new scripting language for writing fast imaging filters.  Engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith explains,

Hydra is an awesome name for a language like the one we created. At the very beginning, Jonathan Shekter came up with it as a code name for this cool language that could run on different kinds of hardware efficiently. The problem is that it's a great name for any kind of technology that does multiple things, so it is pretty popular. We didn't want to confuse folks, so we worked with the Adobe branding team to come up with a new name that we could use moving forward. That name is Pixel Bender™.

As someone whose mind was blown by the original MacPaint, I was pushing for "Phat Bits"--a fun way to combine a reference to the old-school "Fat bits" display mode with an equally dated bit of 90's slang.  But hey, they don't pay me to come up with the marvels of Adobe branding.

Developers wanting to take Hyd--er, Pixel Bender--for a spin can grab the coding & preview environment from Adobe Labs.

May 07, 2008

All Ansel, all the time

A number of interesting Ansel Adams-related bits have popped up recently:

• The NYT features an interactive gallery in which Adams's former assistant Andrea Stillman discusses the back story on nine of his images.  The story of the naming of "Mt. Ansel Adams" is particularly cool.
• In what he calls "The most amazing 24 hours of my photo career," photographer Marc Silber trekked around Yosemite with Robert Scoble & Adams's son Michael.  Afterward they visited the photographer's darkroom.
• Frederick Johnson from the Lightroom team joined these guys on the visit.  "Michael is amazing," he writes.  "Turns out we were both in the Air Force! Though he was a General, and I was an enlisted man. It was hard to fight the impulse to call him 'sir...'"  Frederick posted some photos and short video clips in his Flickr stream.  And oh yeah: if you've ever wondered why Photoshop has a lollypop-shaped Dodge Tool (you know, this thing), here's why.
  

Chris Cox starts a performance blog

If it's in Photoshop and it goes fast, there's a very good chance that Chris Cox has had something to do with it.  Chris is, among a great many other things, the go-to guy for optimizing many functions in the app.  (At various times we've known there's some kind of crazy-exotic Apple hardware in Chris's office--something that would emerge many months later as the G5, etc.--and that he's busily tuning the app for it but can't tell us any of the details.)  In any case, he has started a blog on C++ performance.  If that's up your alley, I recommend subscribing to the feed.

[Semi-irrelevant personal aside: After so many years of consulting Chris to learn about HDR imaging, color management, GPUs vs. CPUs, and so on, I'm taking some pleasure in sharing my meager (yet superior) knowledge of CSS with him, hipping him to groovy tools like Xyle scope.  I've gotta enjoy the moment while it lasts!]

May 06, 2008

Technology sneak: Photoshop, AE, Flash

Last Thursday Adobe held a day-long event at which the execs briefed members of the financial community.  A couple of us spear carriers (Steve Heintz, Karl Soule, and I) were recruited to help show off some new technology that's baking "in the labs" (i.e. none of this stuff is promised for a future version, your mileage my vary, void where prohibited, professional driver on a closed course, etc.).

Check out the Connect webcast to see the goods in action.  (Scrub ahead to 18 minutes or so--about one third of the way through--to catch the demos.)  I show off some new performance tuning in Photoshop by playing with a 650 megapixel image on a Mac Pro.  It's too bad that the low frame rate of recording hides the fluidity of panning, zooming, and rotating via OpenGL hardware acceleration.  I also demonstrate automated merging of images to extend depth of field, as well as a 360-degree panorama mapped onto an interactive 3D sphere on which I can paint directly.  (Painting directly onto 3D models--mmm, yes.)  Steve demos Adobe's new "Thermo" RIA design tool while Karl shows off inverse kinematics in Flash and more.

You can check out the rest of the executive presentations & their slides here.

Area Man's Bacon Saved by Time Capsule

Hats off to all the Apple folks responsible for Time Machine: I'm pleased to report that restoring my Mac from the data stored on my Time Capsule went off without a hitch. Performing a synch with the drive was easy, and after a couple of hours everything was just where I left it--right down to my Dock icons, desktop picture, and app preferences. (James Duncan Davidson provides more detail on a similar (albeit planned) experience.) I was especially pleased to see that all my NetNewsWire clippings & tabs came back in place.

I've encountered only a little strangeness so far:

• In Adobe Contribute, my local drafts are present, but the app preferences seem to have gotten partially lost. I'll pass my info along to the CT team. I did lose some material I'd worked on over the weekend (as Saturday night's Time Machine backup failed for unspecified reasons), but the rest of the drafts look recoverable.
• Photoshop held onto my serial number, but it asked to be reactivated (which transpired successfully)
  
• Update: iTunes lost my authorization info. Hopefully I haven't now burned another authorization. Also, Ambrosia's iSeek and Snapz Pro have lost their registration info. QuickTime Pro seems unaffected.

Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions below. The Letterbox add-on for Apple Mail seems to do a great job enabling Entourage-style three-pane viewing, but I haven't tried it extensively. I'm really torn about leaving my old friend Entourage, especially as Mail apparently doesn't offer the ability to accept/decline meetings sent through the Exchange server. Efficient incremental backups sound pretty appealing, however.

I'm now going to try using Time Machine with a Drobo. It seems that it'll be possible to store a large photo collection (which wouldn't fit onto the laptop drive) alongside the Time Machine data file. If anything interesting develops, I'll pass along the info.

May 04, 2008

Product testing, the hard way

I hope never to verify the effectiveness of an airbag using my face, or the completeness of my life insurance at the cost of my life. I guess I won't get a pass on testing the promise of my new Time Capsule, however.

Today the hard drive on my inordinately hard-working MacBook Pro bit the dust. I'd had no signs of trouble whatsoever, but I admit the machine did take a spill from several feet up a few months ago. (Let's just say the Slingbox is working out better than the idea of perching a laptop on a music stand.) That jolt didn't cause it to skip a beat, however--not even to disrupt the show that was streaming.

This morning, however, my apps started running really slowly, with the Mac beachballing so hard that I finally had to hold down the power button. After that, no más: just an endless gray startup screen. The guys at the local Mac "genius bar" (not geniuses, but not bad) confirmed that this critter is toast.

Thus far the Time Capsule (acquired in the nick of time, evidently) has been a bit of a mixed bag. For my tastes it's a little off the mark from "As simple as possible, but no simpler"--omitting the second half of that phrase. I haven't found a way to set backups to be nightly, not hourly, so I have to do them manually. (Otherwise the system would presumably be trying to copy my multi-gigabyte Entourage data file over wireless every hour--not a good use of CPU and bandwidth.) I also don't see a way to store a superset of data on the Time Capsule (i.e. keeping a large image collection there but not on my local Mac). Overcoming the latter obstacle may not be that hard, as it seems possible to mount the disk as a normal server, but I haven't had a chance to test it out. And finally, like just about every Apple networking system I've tried (AirTunes, Apple TV, iChat AV, etc.), the Time Capsule doesn't get along with my Cisco VPN connection, meaning I have to shut it down before connecting.

All of these little beefs will melt away, of course, if the TC saves my bacon. I guess we'll see once I get a new HD or a new machine. (This post comes to you from my wife's MacBook.) I'm really curious to see whether it'll be possible to restore things like the list of tabs and clippings I have in NetNewsWire, as that plus my Adobe Contribute drafts constitute all my pending blogfodder. (Without all that stuff, expect a dry period here for a while.)

Crossing fingers,
J.

May 03, 2008

DNG submitted to the ISO

"The DNG format was supposed to be the future, an open standard for RAW files that every manufacturer could use," writes Digital Photo Pro's Dave Willis.  "Here’s a look at how the revolution has panned out."  Dave talks with my boss Kevin Connor about the problem that gave rise to DNG:

"Our philosophy on this from the beginning, sort of my personal belief," continues Connor, "is that eventually the proprietary system is just going to break. When we came out with the first camera RAW plug-in, we were supporting around 25 cameras. We’re now supporting more than 175 cameras—in other words, more than 175 different file formats. And when you’re talking about images, people don’t want to keep those images for just five or 10 years. Professional photographers want to know those images will be fine for 50 years—100 years—from now. If you think about the rate of new-camera introductions, how many new file formats will there be? A hundred thousand? It just seems that it’s going to reach a point when it becomes unmanageable."

It's true that we haven't yet seen big camera vendors like Canon and Nikon adopt DNG, though maybe we'll see more progress now that DNG has been submitted to the ISO as a vendor-independent standard.  In any case, the format is providing real-world benefits today:

• Converting to DNG saves disk space and eliminates the need to use separate sidecar files for raw settings.  (I knocked 1.5GB off the 7GB of photos from our wedding photographer.)
• Because of these benefits, customer feedback indicates that 40% of Lightroom users are converting to DNG on import.  (It's a one-click set-and-forget option that's also available in Adobe Bridge CS3.)
• DNG lets Adobe support new cameras in older versions of Camera Raw without having to constantly revise and test those versions.  Photographers and use the free DNG Converter (Win | Mac) to process their proprietary raw images to DNG.  The upshot is that we can spend our time building good new functionality instead of updating old software.

[Via]

SF Photoshop User Group kicks off this week

I'm pleased to see that this Tuesday marks the first San Francisco meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area Photoshop Users Group.  According to the Evite, here's what's planned:

Photoshop Power Users with Kelly McCathran: In this session we will wow you with some new hot features and double wow you with some little known and under utilized tools... Adobe Bridge: Batch renaming multiple files; The Image Processor to batch convert to different file formats; Photomerge for building Panoramics. Creating and Batching Actions; Vanishing Point Filter; Placing Smart Objects; Image Warping; Patch & Spot Healing Brush Tools; Red Eye Removal Tool; History palette and painting with snapshots; Layer Masks; Setting the best Preferences Tips & Tricks as well as Keyboard Shortcuts.

Kelly McCathran is the Service Provider Evangelist for Adobe.  Her mission is to maintain relationships with the top print shops in North America. To fulfill that roll, she is the primary contact for printers to get the support, training and information they need to successfully work with Adobe's line of products. In addition Kelly is a Certified Technical Trainer and an Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, GoLive and PageMaker. Kelly has traveled North America and abroad teaching applications to the largest print shops in the world.

The meeting starts at 5:30pm at the Adobe SF office (601 Townsend St.).  If you plan to attend, please RSVP to info@photoshopusers.org so that they can get the right amount of pizza and drinks.

May 02, 2008

Lightroom Podcast #52: Martin Evening

Adobe evangelist George Jardine recently filmed photographer Martin Evening walking through the results of a photo shoot for his upcoming Lightroom book.  George writes,

This podcast was recorded on Wednesday March 12, 2008 at Martin’s home in London. It gives us a rare glimpse into the inner thinking of this talented fashion and beauty photographer, as he gives us a shot-by-shot evaluation of a recent session. This video footage was taken during a photo session to create assets both for an upcoming Lightroom book, as well as for demo purposes for Adobe Systems. In it Martin describes his approach to every element of the shoot, from the model selection, the hair, the makeup, the lighting and camera angles, all the way through to the final edit.

This video podcast can be downloaded from my iDisk. It can also be viewed by downloading it directly into iTunes (if you are accessing it by subscribing via the Music Store), or by copying it into iTunes on either a Mac or a PC (if you’ve downloaded the iPod version from my iDisk). Once copied into iTunes, the small version can be transferred to a Video iPod or iPhone, and viewed that way as well.

The podcast (labeled "20080310 Video Podcast - Martin Evening Fashion Shoot") is in the Public directory of George's iDisk. [Via]