News Blog

Adobe Creative Suite users will soon have to turn to other Web-based or local stock photography services to get their stock photo fix.

Adobe on Monday quietly announced the end of its stock photography service. The Stock Photos service has been a part of the popular Creative Suite since the introduction of Adobe Bridge in version 2. The cutoff date is March 31st, giving users a little less than two more months to use the service to acquire legal shots to use in design work.

According to Adobe's FAQ on the matter, the company is getting out of the stock photography business to "concentrate its efforts in other areas." The service acted as a go-between to other stock photography services without a markup. It's easily comparable to iTunes for stock photography, as it offered users a one-stop shop with live previews that could easily be put into Adobe's various design applications right after purchase.

Since the front end for the photo service is part of the Creative Suite software, Adobe's created a special uninstaller that gets rid of it in Bridge. Current users of Bridge are greeted to the below message, telling them how many days are left before the service cutoff, along with links to Adobe's customer service center.

To curb any latecomers, Adobe is also cutting off the search function of the stock photo tab on March 4, which will keep new users from even being able to get to the photos that are for sale.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In the past several years, the rise of Web services that offer stock photography has been speedy. With Bridge, it appeared that Adobe was taking notice and making it easier to parse through them.

However, between this and Adobe's foray into publishing to other stock services, killing off the intermediary (Stock Photos on Bridge) to save some hours to work on future products makes good business sense.

Ranking high on the list of a demo guy's worst nightmares, Adobe Systems' Tuesday announcement of its Creative Suite 3 software was derailed for more than 20 minutes by a technology glitch.

The display showing the company's demonstrations was garbled by static, and Adobe's Johnny Loiacono, who led the presentation, resorted to audience Q&A, chatting about the weather, and eventually calling an intermission while technicians tackled the problem. During the problem, audience members milled at the New York event and Webcast watchers were treated to groovy music.

When they presentation resumed, Loiacono blamed the problem on interference from somebody's mobile phone. "Someone in the room had their cell phone on. That's what caused the problem," he said.

Adobe likely will announce its Creative Suite 3 (CS3) products on or about March 27," Merrill Lynch analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer predicted last week, with the products themselves to ship "several weeks thereafter."

Crucial to the new products will be support for Apple computers using Intel processors; current CS2 products run only in a slower translation mode on these newer machines, an awkward mismatch given that Apple and Adobe products are popular with design professionals.

Core CS3 products include Adobe's flagship Photoshop software for image editing, Illustrator for vector graphics and InDesign for page layout, but not products such as Premier for video editing. Adobe has let CS2 customers try Photoshop CS3 beta. Vleeschhouwer, however, expects CS3 components to be offered in a variety of configurations: 14 individual products and about six different suites.

For CS3 and other "creative solutions" design and content creation software, Vleeschhouwer expects Adobe to garner $1.53 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2007 and $1.72 in fiscal 2008. "Demand, especially on the Mac side, is likely to propel significant incremental 'creative solutions' revenues," Vleeschhouwer said after a meeting with Adobe Chief Executive Bruce Chizen.

Despite the revenue spurt, Vleeschhouwer expects less cyclical financial results for the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

WASHINGTON--The feds have come a long way in making more information digital, but a few lingering absurdities, as he puts it, have been irking Adobe Systems chief Bruce Chizen.

Just look at the Internal Revenue Service, which allows taxpayers to download and print out forms but still can't accept them electronically without help from a third party, the CEO of the firm behind the ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF) said Wednesday.

"It doesn't make any sense," he lamented during a luncheon discussion at a conference here hosted by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus, a bicameral, bipartisan group of politicians.

More generally, it's baffling that the government has poured millions of dollars into back-end infrastructure but hasn't yet matched up its front-end business processes. The state of affairs leaves some bureaucrats in situations where "someone takes the information from paper and puts it back into the computer," Chizen said, when that process would ideally be seamless.

And while they're at it, he added, the feds should really make their Web sites prettier. (A thinly veiled plug for Adobe's well-known suite of graphics software, perhaps?)

"We're all living in a YouTube society, and everyone's expectations of what the Web experience needs to be has gone up significantly," Chizen said. "Not that I expect every government Web site to be entertaining, but it needs to be engaging, it needs to be graphically stimulating."

Adobe Systems plans to make an announcement about its Photoshop Lightroom product on January 29, the company said in an invitation to news media.

The company didn't disclose what it plans to announce, but a launch of Lightroom is likely. In September, Adobe said it hoped to release Lightroom 1.0 in late 2006 or early 2007, and the product has been in public beta testing for months.

Lightroom is used to edit digital photographs, in particular the "raw" images from higher-end cameras. Raw images haven't been processed by the camera into more portable formats such as JPEG and are popular among photo enthusiasts and professionals who want extensive control over factors such as exposure and color balance. Photoshop Lightroom lacks many features of Adobe's Photoshop image-editing software, which can process raw images one at time but also can handle text, the combination of multiple images, and sophisticated special effects.

Lightroom will be more than the consumer-oriented Photoshop Elements, which costs about $100, and less than Photoshop, which typically costs more than $600, Adobe said earlier.

A feature called Open Parameters within older versions of the Adobe Reader browser plug-in can be corrupted with malicious content, two researchers say.

In a conference paper titled "Subverting Ajax", security researchers Stafano Di Paola and Giorgio Fedon identified multiple cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. One flaw in particular, the open parameters vulnerability, is quite easy to execute on vulnerable versions of Adobe Reader, they said.

For example, a malicious attack can be carried out by referencing any Web-based PDF file and supplying potentially malicious JavaScript code as an open parameter to any Web-based PDF file--for example, http://www.(domain name).com/file.pdf#whatever_name_you_want=javascript:your_code_here

The researchers said they contacted Adobe Systems in October with their findings and only recently made their work public.

Adobe has since released version 8 of Adobe Reader which no longer allows appended JavaScript within site URLs. However, many users continue to use older versions of the Adobe Reader plug-in and should update this as soon as possible.

Quick facts:

Name: Adobe Reader Open Parameters XSS
Date first reported: 1/3/07
Vulnerable software: Adobe Reader plug-in versions 6 and 7 for Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
What it does: Could allow denial of service (crash), remote access and execution of malicious code.
Recommendations: Upgrade to Adobe Reader 8
Exploit code available: Yes
Vendor patch available: Yes
Advisory: Wise Security

Robert Vamosi writes for CNET Reviews.

Just a few days after one Adobe Photoshop co-architect rained on the 64-bit chip parade, another is trying to rein in expectations for another hardware advance: dual-core processors.

Photoshop co-architect Russell Williams cautioned that multicore processors don't necessarily speed up operations. Recapitulating Adobe's gripe about 64-bit chips, Williams said that memory access performance is a limiting factor that multicore designs don't fix.

"If your system is bandwidth-limited and the operation you want to do involves moving a big chunk of data from here to there while doing a limited number of arithmetic operations on it, adding cores cannot speed it up no matter how clever the software is," Williams said on the blog of John Nack, Adobe's senior Photoshop manager.

"To take good advantage of 8- or 16-core machines, we'll need machines whose bandwidth increases with the number of cores, and we'll need problems that depend on doing relatively large amounts of computation for each byte fetched from main memory."

Intel systems "don't necessarily" add memory bandwidth as they add more cores, and although AMD systems do add memory bandwidth with new processors, it can be difficult ensuring that the right data is stored in the memory next to the right processor, he said.

Multicore chips can help in several circumstances, he said. In editing video, for example, separate frames can be processed on separate cores. And some Photoshop tasks can use Adobe's technology for parallel computation that divvies up tasks across multiple cores.

But many tasks just don't benefit. Arranging text layouts on a page can't be divided into parallel tasks, and Photoshop's healing brush, in which the computer finds mathematical solutions to partial differential equations, also doesn't, he said.

Adobe's software is used by countless professionals for editing images, video and illustrations, and presumably the company has clever programmers and high-end coding tools to optimize its products for the latest high-end hardware. But if Adobe is running into the limits of multicore chips for desktop machines, it doesn't bode well for the average programmer.

Adobe plans to build a 64-bit version of its flagship image-editing software, Photoshop, but the upcoming CS3 version isn't the place to make that plan a reality.

"At some point it will make sense to do a 64-bit version. That wasn't this time around," said Photoshop co-architect Scott Byer in a blog posting last week, addressing feedback on the public Photoshop CS3 beta asking for a 64-bit version. Issues involving technology, performance and support mean that Photoshop will remain 32-bit software for the time being, Byer said.

On the technology side, 64-bit chips permit easier access to more than 4GB of memory (Windows only lets an application use a maximum of 2GB; Mac OS X will dole out up to 3GB). The 64-bit x86 chips have more internal memory slots called registers, which help a bit, but main memory access speeds aren't any faster on 64-bit chips.

When it comes to calculations, many 32-bit chips already can handle 64-bit math operations, he said. And 64-bit data structures, being twice as big as 32-bit ones, are therefore bigger consumers of memory bandwidth. "The number of situations in which an application being 64-bit is a performance win is very small," he said.

From a market perspective, 64-bit applications require 64-bit chips and operating systems, neither of which is a given. Mac OS X isn't fully 64-bit, meaning that zero customers can run 64-bit applications, and 64-bit Windows has penetrated to a "vanishingly small percentage" of customers. Windows Vista has better 64-bit support, but "the expected Vista adoption rates mean that the number of Photoshop customers running the 64-bit version of Vista will remain very tiny over the next couple of years."

Maintaining a separate 64-bit version of Photoshop would mean a huge opportunity cost in "features we can't do because we have to spend resources elsewhere" on quality assurance, testing another version of the application on multiple operating systems.

"Adding the cost of adding a 64-bit version to the mix of things that were already on the have-to-do list--especially in light of the very limited benefits--and doing a 64-bit version this cycle really became an unreasonable thing," Byer said.

News organization Reuters is working with photo editing powerhouse Adobe and camera maker Canon so changes to digital photos can be detected, Reuters CEO Tom Glocer said on his blog last week.

Reuters, the news agency whose image was tarnished earlier this year when a freelance photographer provided doctored photos of bombing in Beirut, wants to ensure such changes can be found.

"I am pleased to announce today that we are working with Adobe and Canon to create a solution that enables photo editors to view an audit trail of changes to a digital image, which is permanently embedded in the photograph, ensuring the accuracy of the image," Glocer said in the blog posting, a transcript of a December 11 speech at the Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv.

"We sought a technical solution so that we had total and full transparency of our work. It's what we stand for. It's what we've always stood for. And we hope that it will provide reassurance to editors and consumers of our services," he said. "Transparency and truth are important to us."

The issue of trust is increasingly important in a "citizen journalism" world where the ordinary public, not just news professionals, supply content, he said.

"What does the future look like in a world in which the consumer has taken over the printing press, the dark room, the television studio? What does the result of a mashup of professional and "amateur" actually look like? And more importantly--is trust the victim in a world of millions of news sources--will we live in a world where truth is passed through a sieve of opinion and commentary?"

It's not an academic issue for Reuters. Earlier in December, it announced a deal with Yahoo in which people who post photos to the Flickr photo-sharing site, can tag their shots and submit them to Reuters.