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Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs

Photoshop reloaded—make that Adobe reloaded

Got work to do? Do not go near Adobe Labs or you’ll get sucked right in. If you don’t find big fun playing with Soundbooth, Adobe’s new sound editor for non-sound editors, you’ll lose hours organizing your photos via Lightroom or picking the colors for your guest room using Kuler, shown above. CS2 users will get a shot at the very latest in Photoshop.

As we have commented here before, the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe has brought on a fundamental change in Adobe’s corporate culture—not to mention its software architecture. We’ve been seeing this evolution from the very start as the Macromedia San Francisco headquarters became part of the Adobe empire and a very desirable place to work. At a meeting of the combined staff Adobe’s executives told Macromedia’s engineers they’d welcome Macromedia’s input in streamlining Adobe’s code. But, to the outside world, the most obvious effect of the merger has been the adoption of the model of the Macromedia Labs idea. Now it’s Adobe Labs. As selected software is developed and becomes at least moderately stable, it’s uploaded to the Labs site and is accompanied by developer blogs and forums. The result is that thousands and thousands of people participate in a very active beta-testing program.

Lightroom—shades of Aperture

Adobe has introduced Lightroom—its program that is in no way a response to Apple’s Aperture but sure looks a lot like it. And Lightroom has been a public beta for more than a year now. The advantages of a public beta seem obvious. It’s hard not to feel a fondness for this software you had a hand in developing, sort of. And, even if one does not wind up buying it in the future, there are a lot more web-active people who know exactly what the program is about rather than speculating about software they can’t afford as you see so often on web forums.

Lightroom was first introduced on the Mac platform. It is designed for photographers to work interactively with their photos, arrange them, and do a little editing. And, despite Adobe’s protests to the contrary, it is a lot like Apples Aperture program. There were of course howls of protest that the software was only available for a time on the Mac. (Mac people have resigned themselves to inequity of choice.) Eventually it arrived on Windows as well and the level of chatter has risen. When last we looked the messages around feature requests had risen to close to 5,000 and there are already three books for Lightroom. This is a program that will launch with a fully formed community around it.

Adobe is also trying out new sound editing software, Soundbooth (see TechWatch, Oct. 30, 2006), after the company discovered that Audition, as part of Adobe’s Video Suite, was a bit more than most Adobe video users wanted to tangle with.

A new, improved Photoshop

So what’s up next? Adobe is using the Labs a little differently for its next iteration of Photoshop. The company will make the beta of the newest Photo-shop version available in the Labs but only to people with a CS2 license. This has two benefits. It gets people to upgrade to CS2, which brings architectural changes to the suite, and it limits free access to Photoshop to the committed. At the same time, Adobe was able to demonstrate the new version of Photo-shop to selected press and users in a Breeze presentation.

With this version of Photoshop, Adobe promises to take users’ complaints to heart; for example, the program opens faster. It is also apparent that Adobe is paying attention to its competition. One of the things anyone working with photos wants to do sooner or later, wisely or not, is to cut out something from one photo and paste it somewhere else. Ideas that seem really great and brilliant often fall by the wayside because they’re way too hard to execute. More often than not, cutting out elements falls in that category for anyone except the patient, steady-of-hand type. Corel acquired Knockout to add this capability to its products. In the demo it looks like Adobe has gone Corel one better with an addition to Magic Wand called Quick Select. There’s more intelligence in the software as it makes decisions about what you want to select. At least it looked great in the demo.

Another mighty cool feature has been added to Photoshop that seems to be inspired from the outside world. Designed for users who shoot multiple exposures, it is now possible to align multiple shots in layers and bring up elements between layers. For instance in that class photo where one kid inevitably makes a hideous face but everyone else looks great, it’s possible to reach down to another layer to get a better image of that kids face and paint it in to seem seamless. A more common application is the ability to combine backgrounds and foregrounds with different exposures to get the perfect combination. What’s interesting is not that you couldn’t do these things before but that Adobe is trying to make it easier and better—more proof of the power of competition.

Among the most important features of Photoshop for professionals is the addition of new tools for work on mobile phone platforms. Device Central is a CS app that will sit outside Photo-shop but will be accessible to all the Creative Suite components (much like Adobe’s Bridge feature in CS2), and it will include as many profiles for the phones on the market as Adobe can get in there.  Users will be able to scale art down to general screen sizes, but also the company is adding profiles for actual phone designs. What users get when they find their phone on a list is a picture of the phone. In addition, presenter John Nack, senior product manager for Adobe Photoshop, mentioned that images of the phones could be animated with Flash so buttons would actually work. We didn’t get a lot of detail on this but it’s suggestive.

In a pre-announcement of the beta, Nack said that with this round of Creative Suite Adobe’s engineers have been putting a great deal of effort into consistent interfaces, refining Adobe’s RAW and working with the Lightroom team to take advantage of popular features in that beta for Photoshop. Nack described the Labs approach as a great opportunity to engage with CS2 users. To that end, Nack will maintain a blog for Photoshop CS2 users.

So, what if you are not a CS2 user but you are nonetheless consumed by curi-osity? Adobe will let you download the beta and play with it for two days. It will time out if not satisfied with a CS2 license.

The new version of Photoshop will arrive with the rest of Adobe’s new Crea-tive Suite in CS 3 in the spring. If you can’t wait, go visit Adobe Labs and get started.

Opinions, anyone?

It’s obvious we’re impressed with Adobe’s strategy of organic growth that has come to full bloom with the acquisition of Macromedia, who are seemingly like-minded creatures. (We always wonder when we write this kind of thing if the employees of involved companies don’t snort their morning coffee and say What are they talking about? We hate those guys.) Flash is on every computer, Acrobat is on every computer. Almost every artist uses Photoshop. So, Adobe is growing through those communities. And, while we’re at it, don’t forget the company’s Breeze products, which extend Adobe’s tentacles deeper into the enterprise and higher up the management ranks.