bruceb news

From the “Interesting Things To Know” Department:

According to a post on the Adobe forums, the latest version of Adobe Photoshop has the built-in ability to detect that an image is of American currency and prevent you from opening the file. Apparently it will also do this with Euro notes. Reportedly the latest version of Paint Shop Pro has the same restriction.

Over on Slashdot, people are trading stories about color photocopiers – apparently some or all of them also have a currency detector that prevents copying currency. In addition to not printing a usable copy, it can also set a flag inside the copier; eventually the copier will shut down until you call for service. […] continued

Adobe released a minor update to Adobe Reader (formerly “Acrobat Reader”), from version 6.0 to 6.0.1. If you use Reader, you might get a popup notifying you of the upgrade.

A number of people are reporting problems with the upgrade on Adobe’s forums. After installing the upgrade, some people can no longer open PDF files in Internet Explorer. For others, Reader becomes detached from the PDF file extension and won’t open PDF files automatically. The worst case is somebody reporting that the upgrade completely emptied his Add/Remove Programs list – on dozens of computers.

There’s always a certain number of disgruntled people after any change, but there’s enough reports that I’m suspicious – this might be a troubled piece of software. […] continued

Adobe has released a new version of Photoshop Album, its software for organizing digital photos. (Click here for my description of the original program.) The new version adds a handful of new features, but my guess is that Adobe focused more on fixing the bugs in the original release.

The program costs $50 – $15 rebate to owners of the previous version, and also available bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements.

There’s also a downloadable free version, the Photoshop Album Starter Edition – same basic features for organizing photos, but fewer options for sharing photos and doing touchup, and limited to 250 photos. […] continued

Adobe Systems announced a new version of Premiere, its high-end video-editing platform, but with one important change that bodes ill for Apple – the new Premiere will be Windows-only, making this the first version of the product that doesn’t support Apple’s Mac OS. Here’s an article about Adobe’s announcement.

Apple and Adobe have a long relationship, and Adobe is arguably the reason the Mac survived past the mid-80s. Adobe products are the primary force behind the longstanding myth that Macs are superior platforms for graphics and video work.

So Adobe’s defection is a staggering blow to Apple. Earlier this year, Adobe posted a public Web page touting the performance benefits of editing video on Windows PCs, and the company recently released PhotoShop Album as a Windows-only product when Apple shut down the market for consumer-oriented Mac-based digital-photo-management software by including iPhoto for free with new Mac systems. […] continued

Adobe released Acrobat 6 today, including a new version of the free Acrobat Reader. Download Acrobat Reader 6 here. Acrobat PDF format is starting to be used everywhere – you might as well have this upgrade in case you want to view multimedia content embedded in a PDF file or simply use the improved interface.

Incidentally, I don’t like “download managers.” They tend to be unhelpful bits of spyware, reporting information back to third parties without making my life any better in return. I don’t know much about Adobe Download Manager but I turn it off on general principles. Watch for the checkbox on the download page. […] continued

I use Microsoft Digital Image Pro for virtually all my photo editing and graphics projects. It does a better job of combining ease of use with powerful editing tools than anything else on the market. Many of my loyal friends and clients have heard me ranting and raving about the impossibly complicated tools in Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, the market leaders.

As digital camera photos accumulated on the hard drives, it was becoming more and more difficult to keep up with them. Windows XP helps a bit – it can display thumbnails and slide shows, and it can rename groups of files at a time, so you can turn DSC0001.JPG through DSC0014.JPG into RINCEWIND (1).JPG through RINCEWIND (14).JPG with a few clicks. […] continued

I hear it from people all the time: PCs might have some advantages, but boy, there’s nothing like a Mac for graphics and video work, especially if you’re a professional.

Well, nonsense. The Adobe programs are identical on either platform, and PCs have long outperformed more expensive Macs. And the gaps in price and performance are getter larger. In a recent test, a Dell PC significantly outperformed a significantly more expensive Power Mac for image and digital-video editing. According to the Digital Video Editing web site, the PC has “slaughtered” the Mac again, with the PC running all the Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe After Effects benchmarks nearly twice as fast as the Mac. […] continued

I don’t know whether these are compelling upgrades – haven’t tried them, don’t know about new features – but Adobe has released Acrobat Reader 5.0 and Apple finished work on Quicktime for Windows 5.0. Acrobat 4.0 was very polished and stable, and I’m not sure what would make a new version seem like a big improvement. Quicktime, on the other hand, has long been one of my least favorite programs, persistently buggy and annoying. It would be nice to think that the new version changes all that, but I’m not holding my breath.

Adobe Photoshop is legendary. Graphics professionals can do magic with it, and they turn up their nose at anything else. I’ve tried to learn it repeatedly, and I remain firmly convinced it is the least intuitive, worst designed, most annoying program in the world. Did I mention that it’s incredibly expensive?

What do I use? Professionals and snobs, avert your eyes. I use Microsoft Photodraw v.2 for photos. It’s fast and easy and I can easily live with its limitations and quirks. And Microsoft Picture It Publishing Platinum is just great – it’s got all the core functions of Photodraw, plus tons of projects and wizards for greeting cards, signs, and lots more. […] continued