Archive for the ‘Adobe’ Category
Look Away Now …
May 6th, 2011
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
… if you don’t want to see a particularly gruesome image of the assassinated Osama bin Laden.
I’ve put it at the bottom of this blog so you don’t have to look at it without scrolling down, not for any vicarious pleasure, but for the simple purpose of showing what can be achieved with digital image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop (other digital image manipulation applications are available).
What purports to be the shocking photograph of the dead bin Laden which President Obama deemed too disturbing for public view has of course cropped up all over the place, mainly on right-wing conservative American websites. And they are truly scary (the websites, that is).
You will have read in previous postings on this blog that US courts do not allow digital photographic images as evidence because of the ease with which they can be manipulated. Actually as anyone who has battled with Photoshop will know, it’s not that easy, but a truly skilled Photoshop artist can make it look simple — and realistic.
The image is indeed shocking — until you look at the image on the right.
On the left you will see a purported photograph of Osama bin Laden after he stupidly opened the door to some visiting American gentlemen. On the right you will see a much nastier image — Osama bin Laden alive.
Compare the two images.
Look at the angle of the head.
Look at his ear; look at the highlight inside it.
Look at the highlight on the tip of his nose.
Look at his mouth hanging slackly open, doubtless in the process of delivering some deranged spittle-flecked invective.
The images are identical, except that in one he appears to have met with an accident.
It’s the same image. The one of the left has been Photoshopped — it’s a completely fraudulent image. I’m not suggesting for a moment that this is the image that Barack found too disturbing to release; that one is undoubtedly real and I’m sure it’s profoundly unpleasant.
But in lieu of having the real thing, some talented Photoshop artist has been employed to provide slaughter pron for slavering right-wingers. It’s very good — until some clever chappie like David Hoffman unearths the original image.
Unless of course Hoffman has been even smarter and recreated the image on the right from the original on the left!
Now you can see why American courts don’t permit digital images as evidence. The camera lies through its teeth.
Thanks to David Hoffman Photographs for putting the two images together, and for Will Carleton of Photo Archive News for bringing them to my attention.
Two Trick Pony
June 6th, 2010
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I will not yield to anybody in my admiration for Adobe’s Photoshop. It is a stunning piece of software, and anyone who uses a digital camera for anything more than snapshots must have a copy — and use it.
I am less enamoured with Adobe, the corporation. It’s well known that I and many others abhor their commercial decision to charge 37% more for their recently released Creative Suite 5 in the UK than in the USA, as I argued in a recent blog.
Last week I went to a day-long presentation of Adobe CS5 in London, presented by Adobe Evangelists. This is not my opinion of them — this is the genuine job title they carry on their business cards. And they live up their titles: fervent, enthusiastic, excitable, missionary; they tried their level best to whip a somnolent English audience into paroxysms of frenzy with whoops and hollers, at one stage encouraging us to yell “Yee-HAW!” if a particular feature of CS5 caught our approval.
We didn’t. Not because we weren’t impressed, but because we were British. We don’t do “Yee-HAW!” especially when we have to pay 37% more than the Americans to shout “Yee-HAW!”
We just sat there, mute, unresponsive, like London pigeons ignoring the strutting, flaunting cock bird. For, like the pigeons, we all knew that we would end up getting screwed.
In the morning, we were shown the exciting new features in Photoshop CS5. And, in case we weren’t paying attention or we really were dead (as I swear the morning evangelist believed we were) they showed them again to us in the afternoon in a separate seminar. Still, we eventually got the point.
And yes, the new Photoshop has a fabulous new trick called Content Aware which looks at the background of an image, and if you delete something in the foreground you don’t have to be left with an empty hole as you would expect — it will guess at what’s behind and fill it in. You have to see it work, and you can here.
There’s another feature that enables you to pick up hard-to-select parts of an image such as flyaway hair. Very impressive.
But I had other more important concerns. Another new featurette (maybe this was in the page layout package in InDesign, part of CS5) allowed you to attach the Caption (or Keywords, or Description, or other parts of the IPTC dataset) directly to a placed image. Earlier versions of Photoshop have notoriously stripped out the IPTC metadata from an image, not the most useful feature for stock libraries and professional photographers, which are perhaps the audiences at which Photoshop is primarily aimed. So I asked our afternoon Evangelist Terry White if this sinful aberration had been rectified. He blinked cautiously, but then a mouthful of American teeth flashed a “Yes.”
If Terry told me the truth — and how could I doubt an Evangelist? — this is the strongest possible argument for the world upgrading to Adobe CS5. Forget the party tricks; this is what we need from a professional tool. It’s not before time.
Neither I nor anyone else asked if they’d built a more robust version. We didn’t have the heart, after Adobe Bridge crashed twice in the morning sessions. We Brits don’t like to embarrass people.
The relationship between Adobe’s Evangelists and their British audience reminds of the old story of a Frenchman who was caught having sexual relations with a corpse on a beach. Les flics pulled him off and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. “Mon Dieu!” he answered in some shock, “I thought she was English”.
Adobe still at it …
April 16th, 2010
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Tags: Adobe, Creative Suite, over here, overcharging, overpriced, rip-off
… ripping off UK customers, that is.
They’ve just announced Creative Suite 5, the top of the range version of which retails in the UK at £2,303 and in the US at $2,599. That’s £1,685 at today’s exchange rate.
Why should this product — which is software and therefore can be delivered in identical packages anywhere in the world at no additional cost apart from local taxes (not included in these prices) — cost an astounding £623 more in Britain than in America? That’s a 37% hike. There is no way any company in the world can justify such an extortionate, exorbitant pricing decision.
So they don’t. No one at Adobe will lift his cowardly, avaricious head over the parapet to defend the reasoning. “We have established what is effectively a monopoly. If you’re in the image business, you need Adobe Photoshop. So fuck the Brits, we can charge what we fucking well like.”
It’s a wonderful product, but the officers of the corporation who decided on this price differential are shits.
And I bet it still strips metadata. Because Adobe doesn’t own the system.
A Sensible Law
September 22nd, 2009French MPs propose a health warning to be put on photoshopped images of models in a campaign against eating disorders. Pictures would have to carry the message “Photograph retouched to modify the physical appearance of the person.”
As someone who believes we have far too many laws already, I think that’s a good idea.
If you agree with this statement, why not join our group on LinkedIn at http://bit.ly/1HAsKC ?
Photoshop is the tool of choice for most fotoLibra members. At the last count 7,227 fotoLibra members were using Adobe products. If one in ten of you can add your name to this petition we’ll soon have over a thousand.
A substantial constituency. Yet one that is treated with disdain by the Adobe corporation. Pound for dollar, Adobe products have always been around 20 to 40% more expensive in the UK than the US. They claim that support and marketing is more expensive over here.
I don’t believe that. Americans are higher paid and taxed lower than the Brits.
Come on Adobe. Show some respeck, man!
Danish Photographer Off The Job
April 16th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
The snappily named website pressefotografforbundet.dk has an intriguing story (fortunately for me, in English) about an entrant in the annual Danish Picture Of The Year competition.
The judges asked to see photographer Klavs Bo Christensen’s RAW files. On comparing them with his entries, they decided his Photoshopping was somewhat on the Extreme side, and they threw him out of the competition.
The competition rules state “Photos submitted to Picture of The Year must be a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure. You may post-process the images electronically in accordance with good practice. That is cropping, burning, dodging, converting to black and white as well as normal exposure and color correction, which preserves the image’s original expression. The Judges and exhibition committee reserve the right to see the original raw image files, raw tape, negatives and/or slides. In cases of doubt, the photographer can be pulled out of the competition.”
You can read the whole story, and see Christensen’s RAW and processed images, here.
Frankly I think he went way over the top, and they were right to ban him. To my eye, his RAW images are preferable to the garish artificiality of the Photoshopped images.
I’d be interested to hear what you think.
Photoshop Strips Metadata
April 1st, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Why aren’t we rioting in the streets?
18 months ago I posted a blog complaining that Adobe Photoshop CS3, a tool used by all sides of the picture business, removed metadata such as captions, descriptions and key words from images processed in Photoshop. Which means almost every image.
fotoLibra member John Strain got in touch with us to complain that the latest version, Adobe Photoshop CS4, also strips metadata.
I have recently uploaded several pictures to fotoLibra but found that the metadata did not transfer from Photoshop CS4 to fotoLibra when using fotoLibra DND. This has happened on previous occasions in the odd instance but this time a whole batch had no metadata attached. There are ways around this, rather than having to type all the data in again in to each image window, by copying and pasting but for some reason CS4 does not seem to allow “file info” information to be copied, which is a bit of a bind. You used to be able to copy and paste the information from CS3 but not it seems in CS4. So when it happens now, I type in keywords in to the fotoLibra window for one image and then copy and paste from there if the other images can use the same keywords and delete or add words as necessary.
I wondered if you had come across this before. I don’t know if it is a CS4 problem that meta data is not transferring or a general one.
Well frankly we feel it’s a complaint that should be made to Adobe, as there’s nothing fotoLibra can do about it. So we told him so (nicely, I hope) and he went off to talk to Adobe.
He came back to say:
I have just had a word with Adobe technical support and they were able to help to a degree.
Apparently the metadata cut/copy and paste issue answer is that right clicking on words to cut or copy just doesn’t work. The agent said that metadata is dealt with by a different company from Adobe and the ability to right click on words has not been built in to CS4. He didn’t know why that was and thought it unlikely that it was something which would be addressed.
He pointed out however, that pressing Control + C followed by right click and paste does work. It is a strange anomaly.
In respect of metadata not transferring to fotoLibra I got much the same answer as you did. He said that Photoshop does not support the transferring of metadata to a third-party application. I told him that it sometimes works but usually doesn’t. He suggested that your “page” that might not have been fully updated for CS4. I told him that it was also an issue with CS3 and he suggested that you contact him about it as it may be something which needs to be addressed. I asked for a reference so that you could take it from there if you wish and they would know what it was about but he declined to open a “case” as he said it would be something which fotoLibra would have to raise with them direct. I didn’t get as far as mentioning that you had tried to do so before.
So it does seem to be a recognised problem which Adobe has so far not addressed. It will be helpful though when metadata has not transferred, to be able to copy the words from the file information in the picture and paste them into fotoLibra as I used to be able to do with CS3.
I hope that all this might prove useful to anyone else having similar problems.
I would love to discuss this with the gentleman from Adobe, but I have no way of contacting him. We know the past two releases of Photoshop strip out the phoographers’ metadata. They seem to know it too. Why aren’t they doing anything about it?
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC, the body that specifies metadata standards) has published a list of Software supporting IPTC photo metadata standards IIM and “IPTC Core” that very clearly omits Adobe CS3 and CS4. So it would appear to be a commercial decision of Adobe’s part not to support it.
Why aren’t we rioting in the streets?
Oh. I’ve just heard we are.
Adobe CS4 Pricing
September 23rd, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Software giant Adobe has just announced Creative Suite 4, upgrades to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Flash, Ilustrator etc. It’s a phenomenally complex and capable package, and for a digital online picture library like fotoLibra it’s as crucial as a power supply.
The upgrade costs $599, so cynically I expected the British version to be priced at £599.
Oops — I was wrong. The British version sells for £605.
$599 at today’s exchange rate is £323.50. Take away the VAT and the British version (excluding tax) is priced at £515.
That is 63% more expensive than the US upgrade.
So we in Britain pay £191.50 more for exactly the same product. That’s $354.60.
Why are you ripping us off, Adobe? I cannot think of a single justifiable reason other than corporate greed and the cynical exploitation of a captive market. I think I’d admire the company more if it simply admitted “Because we can,” but it will hide behind mealy-mouthed clouded obfuscations of market penetration and market forces.
Bollocks.
Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?