October 04, 2006

Are Apple and Adobe at war over Aperture?

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

Posted by Joshwa at 04:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

September 13, 2006

Digital Photography Market Trends

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

Posted by Joshwa at 01:56 PM | TrackBack (0)

September 12, 2006

Adobe's "Sneak Peek" of Nothing

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?

Posted by Joshwa at 10:41 AM | TrackBack (0)

August 30, 2006

Teasers... Sigma/Foveon and Adobe

  • 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).

    Posted by Joshwa at 10:55 AM | TrackBack (0)

    June 27, 2006

    Microsoft buys Iview

    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.

    Posted by Joshwa at 01:06 PM | TrackBack (0)

    Adobe buys Pixmantec

    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.

    Posted by Joshwa at 12:36 PM | TrackBack (0)