JW Digital Blog

Are Apple and Adobe at war over Aperture?

Joshwa — 2006-10-04T16:46:02-05:00

Interesting, frightening (if true):

Apple released a major update to Aperture last week, improving much of the functionality and feature set, as well as dramatically improving the performance of the product across the range Apple platforms. Allegedly this has so annoyed Adobe, that rumours of threats between the companies have been passed through various ‘back channels’. One such threat being that Adobe would consider dropping support for Apple’s new Intel platform products with the upcoming version of Adobe Photoshop CS3.

link to article

Digital Photography Market Trends

Joshwa — 2006-09-13T13:56:11-05:00

Here's an excellent essay at Digital Outback Photo on how the "First Wave" of digital photography development is coming to a close...

Adobe's "Sneak Peek" of Nothing

Joshwa — 2006-09-12T10:41:34-05:00

So much for Adobe's "Sneak Peek of Upcoming Photoshop Technology", which consisted of showing Photoshop launching natively on Intel.

I guess they figure to be selling more copies of Lightroom than Photoshop next year?

Teasers... Sigma/Foveon and Adobe

Joshwa — 2006-08-30T10:55:36-05:00

A teaser web site for a new Sigma DSLR, the SD14 (presumably with a new "14" MP Foveon chip), to be released Sept 26 at Photokina.

Adobe will be previewing new Photoshop technology at the PhotoshopWorld conference on Sept 7. Will it finally be non-destructive editing? Will we see a release any earlier than Q2 2007?

This Intel thing is actually a Big Deal, especially for Apple-- I know of some larger companies that simply can't buy any new Macs until Creative Suite runs on Intel-- they're struggling to find PPC Macs still in the channel, and those will probably run out well before Adobe's release. What are creative departments to do? Rosetta is NOT an option, sadly (not fast/reliable enough for real, deadline-driven work).

Microsoft buys Iview

Joshwa — 2006-06-27T13:06:48-05:00

Slightly more worrying: Microsoft buys Iview.

I do not want to see this folded into something Microsoft-y... Iview is the only good way of doing many things DAM- and metadata-related.

Adobe buys Pixmantec

Joshwa — 2006-06-27T12:36:16-05:00

As you've no doubt heard, Adobe announced yesterday the acquisition of Pixmantec, makers of the RawShooter raw converter.

My take, as excerpted from a few comments I made around the web:

I view this as an unequivocally good thing.

Adobe will finally get their workflow ducks in a row-- bridge/acr was always a little clunky, and Lightroom needs some serious performance improvements. With a former Capture One developer on board (that's the real purchase here), Adobe can finally make Lightroom and Bridge scream.

I think you'll see a healthy ferment of good ideas between Michael Jonsson (C1/RS dev) and Thomas Knoll (Photoshop author, ACR dev)-- the best of both worlds.

In short, Adobe bought Pixmantec for the talent, the workflow, and the performance.

My favorite RawShooter features I'd love to see in Bridge/ACR:

* versioning for processing parameters (!!)
* fill light
* higlight/shadow contrast

I got some particular film-like tone "looks" in RSE/RSP that I've not been able to reproduce elsewhere-- hoping this means I can get closer in ACR.

Nikon Capture NX Preview

Joshwa — 2006-05-26T17:03:29-05:00

An extremely cool preview of Nikon's new Capture NX software, jointly developed with Nik. The idea of parametric "control points" do create masks is very cool. (pick an origin, a radius, and hue and sat boundaries-- see the article for details and examples). Now how long till we get a Photoshop plug-in with the same kinds of paramters?

link (creativepro.com, via Rob Galbraith)

and here's another look from Imaging Resource.

I'm noticing a trend here-- between Aperture, LightZone, and now Capture NX, non-destructive editing is now all the rage. I wonder if Photoshop CS3 will look a lot like some of these new programs, or if Adobe has missed the boat?

Digital Failures and Features

Joshwa — 2006-05-07T22:32:27-05:00

From Mike Johnston's The Online Photographer, a very nuanced analysis on why we get the digital features and products we get and why we don't necessarily get what we want:

As with any emerging technology, there are substantial "accidents" in the market as well: ways in which the market evolves that are neither intelligent nor guided strictly by demand (or else guided by demand that is partly wrongheaded, for example, the "full-frame sensor" shibboleth). Some factors remain "hidden" or "masked" and are neglected, while others become prominent and therefore get attention.

An example of the latter is something I've been saying for a number of years now, which is that photographers should thank their lucky stars for the extremely poor longevity of early inkjet prints. What that did was shine the spotlight of consumer attention on print life expectancy (LE) and force the manufacturers to address the issue.

...

Had early inkjet prints commonly had LE's of, say, 20-30 years, no one would ever have paid any attention to it and we'd probably still be stuck with those numbers today.

More Aperture Dirt from Daring Fireball

Joshwa — 2006-05-04T16:23:09-05:00

More Aperture dirt from Daring Fireball, attributing Aperture's flaws (and the departure of top engineers) to a prototypical "Mythical Man-Month" software project management debacle-- adding loads of people at the end of a project will make it ship later and crappier, not sooner and better.

HDR - a definition for now

Joshwa — 2006-05-01T07:45:42-05:00

HDR: 1. High Dynamic Range photography, wherein several captures at different exposure lengths are combined to capture a higher dynamic range than current chips are capable of in one shot. 2. A temporary hack, useful only until chipmakers solve their dynamic range problems (and they are).

Most HDR shots exhibited on the web up until now have been rather gimmicky, not to mention full of haloes and artifacts.

But Katrin Eismann and her students at SVA have put the technique to good use-- check out these NYC images that couldn't have been captured with any traditional method, not without losing information in the shadows or highlights. Truly impressive. (via John Nack)

Shakeup Roundup - This Week in Photoshop

Joshwa — 2006-04-28T22:08:11-05:00

ThinkSecret gets a real scoop about why Aperture didn't live up to expectations....

And John Gruber at Daring Fireball says pretty much what I think-- Aperture is a great idea, poorly implemented, and should be fixed (rewrite the whole backend!), not killed.

Mamiya is selling its camera business (Mamiya-OP) to another company... and still no word as to when we'll see the ZD in the US. No announcement of fresh capital infusion into R&D. No indication from Mamiya-OP of continued product development (notwithstanding the pres of Mamiya America, who just went out and bought an ad agency?!, saying otherwise). No one can say what's really going on here...

Theories: a) they're selling it at a discount to get the debt off their backs b) they're being bought just for the talent or the patents that can be applied to consumer cameras, by all measures a much larger and hotter market.

Adobe reiterates 2007Q2 ship date for CS3.

An interesting take on the costs of wide-format inkjet printers...

Why Your RAW Converter Matters

Joshwa — 2006-04-05T16:39:53-05:00

Charles Cramer over at Digital Outback Photo has posted a comparison of Capture One and Irident RAW Developer working on files from Phase One's 39-megapixel P45 back... It's really quite remarkable the difference, especially when compared to 4×5 film.

Now, usually when the landscape guys get out their $30,000 backs and start comparing 100% crops, I start to glaze over a bit, because, really, who but a handful of landscape photographers can afford such a thing. And wouldn't we really be better off looking at a test from a commercial assignment, because that's who actually buys these things?

But this time I looked, because, lo and behold, I could actually see a difference! The photos processed with c1pro had some spots look like they'd had gaussian blur applied compared to the same areas in RAW Developer, which held all sorts of nice detail.

If their workflow and interface were a little easier to use, I'd seriously consider using RAW Developer on a daily basis.

I've always had a sneaking suspicion that there were better raw converters out there, that there is all this latent beauty sitting there untapped in raw files, and now I think I'm starting to get a glimpse of that, as more companies compete in the space, and are starting to focus on "quality" as a selling point. Adobe Camera Raw, for all its ubiquity, has some catching up to do.

Photoshop CS3 - Q2 2007

Joshwa — 2006-03-24T22:00:54-05:00

Well, so much for the 18 months side of 18-to-24 months... Adobe has "announced" (in the form of a disclosure by CEO Bruce Chizen in an interview in Fortune magazine) that the next version of Creative Suite, CS3, which includes Photoshop, won't be released until Q2 2007.

Furthermore, in a blog entry, Adobe engineer Scott Byer pretty much confirms what I said about why it's non-trivial to make Photoshop CS2 a Universal Binary.

How to Edit 40,000 Photos In A Day

Joshwa — 2006-03-08T20:03:08-05:00

From PDN Online: How To Edit 40,000 Photos In A Day. Short on tech details, long on celebrity snipes, but shows the importance of having a really robust image management system in place.

By now, technology has advanced so far that US Weekly photo editors can cover the Oscars from the comfort of a catered conference room in Midtown Manhattan. The magazine is linked to WAM!NET, a secure computer network that pulls captioned, keyworded digital pictures directly from photo agencies and sorts them all into a single database. Pictures from the big wire services like the Associated Press and Getty Images appear alongside smaller celebrity agencies like Celebrity Magic.

Fees are paid to the agencies later, based on space rates negotiated in advance. The agencies will leaf through the actual magazine, measure how much space each of their photos takes up, and send a bill. Rates vary, but typical Oscar photos cost a few hundred bucks, says photo director T. Brittain Stone.

Stone spends most of the morning running around the office to distribute printouts of fresh photos as they arrive. He estimates that 40,000 Oscar-related pictures will come in.

This Week In Photoshop: Backup, Aperture... Netscape?

Joshwa — 2006-02-27T08:28:34-05:00

Adobe to Offer Online Backup Solution with Iron Mountain (link)

Now, see, I saw the need for this a while back. Photographers are notoriously bad at backup, in my experience. It doesn't help that the standard for what's considered a good backup solution changes every 8-12 months, and that they all include serious hardware, software, and time investments. So Adobe is getting it right with the service contract, no-investment model. But I don' t think the Adobe/Iron Mountain solution will be very sucessful, for one simple reason: upstream bandwidth. Most Cable/DSL links are severely limited when it comes to how fast you can upload. On the other hand, digital photo libraries are HUGE. Even the incremental sizes are gigantic. Gigs and gigs of photos are shot every week in a relatively busy digital studio. At 384kbps, which is standard for a cable connection (most DSL contracts have even slower rates, like 128kbps), 1 gigabyte of photos will take about 6 hours to upload. And that's if you're getting full speed the whole time. And if you only want to back up 1 gig of photos. And, you can't really do much else on the net if your upstream link is saturated.

online proofing, and what's wrong with photoshop services

OK, now the other deal they mentioned, with morephotos.com, I don't have any real technical qualms with, although it's really nothing special. What bugs me here is the growing "portalfication" of Bridge. Adobe Stock Photos, Adobe Photographers Directory, online proofing, backup, etc.. so many tie-ins with Bridge. Do they think they're Netscape or AOL circa 1999? It wouldn't bug me so much if the cruft didn't cause problems, but all last week Bridge kept throwing these "Photoshop Services could not initialize" messages at me. I don't use any of these services, I can't turn them off or uninstall them, and they're making Bridge run slower.

Netscape 6.0. THAT's what it reminds me of. Eventually there will be so many synergies and affiliates and partners that it will be difficult to use Bridge to actually manage images. I don't think anyone wants to see Adobe go the way of Netscape. Least of all Adobe!

Aperture 1.1

Apple announced, but did not release, a 1.1 update to Aperture. The hilights:

revamped RAW processing
PSD layer preservation
PSD files as master file
speed boosts

The PSD stuff is great, and will help with converting holdouts like me. I'm definitely interested to see the new RAW algorithms, as processing quality is something no one has really focussed on. In my mind there is still lots of room for quality improvements, though I'd like to see some of this stuff better explained and quantified (it's better! how about telling us how?).

In any case, when they actually ship this update, I'll have to wrangle myself an evaluation copy, as I'm finally interested enough to investigate further.

Now if they'd just store all this stuff (versions, etc) as metadata in an .xmp file instead of requiring the bleeping monolithic Library, then I'd be REALLY interested...