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February 27, 2006
This Week In Photoshop: Backup, Aperture... Netscape?
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...
Posted by Joshwa at February 27, 2006 08:28 AM