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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.

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.

If you want to learn about digital photography but have had your fill of redeye reduction tips and unsharp mask tutorials, a new book by Stephen Johnson is worth a look. On Digital Photography (O'Reilly 2006, $40) has plenty of pointers on color correction and tonal balance, but what sets it apart is Johnson's enthusiasm for the history and mechanics of digital photography--and the abundant landscape pictures that serve as inspiration.

Johnson's perspective has the benefit of history--he's been guiding Adobe on Photoshop since the product's inception and has been deeply immersed in digital imagery since the days when that meant scanning film. And he's paid his pioneer dues: in a 1994 project to digitally photograph U.S. national parks, he'd have to stay awake into the wee hours offloading images from his camera's hard drive onto tape so he'd have room for the next day's shots.

On Digital Photography isn't for the casual snapshotter.

Johnson's guidance tends toward higher-end matters such as duotones, histograms, archiving, high-dynamic-range images and color-space considerations of printing. When it comes to the book's practical advice, the ideal audience are people who devote a lot of time and money to photography. Even then, exercise caution: some sections of the book are relatively timeless, but others involving fast-moving technology, such as image repair or raw image processing, are in danger of being rapidly dated.

For those who want to dig into the details of the technology, Johnson provides plenty of material. He details the inner workings of camera image sensors, illustrates the differences in how many shades of gray can be displayed with 8-bit, 12-bit and 16-bit image data, explains image conversion between two color spaces, and shows historical digital sensors used in spy satellites and interplanetary probes.

The book is stocked with numerous reproductions of Johnson's own photographs, a delight to behold and ample incentive to head out with your own camera. My favorites are images that at first blush appear washed-out or overexposed, but on deeper inspection are a true reflection of their subjects.

Be inspired, but don't get your hopes up too high, though: Johnson not only is more skilled, disciplined and patient than most of us, but most of his shots are taken using BetterLight imaging equipment that costs between $7,000 and $18,000--not including lenses or even the camera body. Indeed, the book is something of an advertisement for the technology.

On Digital Photography is a somewhat meandering exploration of what's on Johnson's mind. It also includes some previously published material, not so fresh but still valuable. Overall, Johnson's tour of the digital photography landscape, while not terribly structured, is one worth taking.

Adobe has resumed work on a Linux version of its Flash Player and plans to catch the software up to its Windows and Mac OS X equivalent, version 9, the company has said.

"Yes, Adobe is actively working on the Linux version of Flash Player 9," said Emmy Huang, Flash product manager, in a May blog posting. "We expect to make a pre-release version available on Adobe Labs for early feedback and testing before the end of the year, with the full release expected in early 2007." A better performance for the Linux version is one goal, as is a consistent experience across different operating systems.

An Adobe developer, Mike Melanson, launched a blog about the Linux Flash work. On Monday, he described the software interfaces he plans on using and asked for input on his choices.

Adobe has revived other desktop utilities before as well. The company skipped version 6 of Adobe Reader but released version 7.

Adobe doesn't release Linux versions of its flagship desktop software products, though. A Novell survey found that Linux users believe Adobe Photoshop is the most important missing desktop application.

Rumors are swirling about the fate of Sun Microsystems' top executives, fueled by the return of Chief Financial Officer Mike Lehman and his no-stone-unturned "fresh look" at the server and software company's operations.

The latest rumor is that Sun hired an executive search firm to look externally for a new chief operating officer. Jonathan Schwartz has held that title, along with that of president, for two years. He currently also is acting executive vice president of software in the wake of John Loiacono's departure to Adobe Systems.

One popular rumor is that Scott McNealy will drop his chief executive role but remain chairman. If Schwartz gets moved to CEO, as some suspect, or returns permanently to his old job as EVP of software, that would leave a slot open for COO.

Sun declined to comment on the rumor.