On being driven

On being driven
Just as they say you can remove the boy from the ghetto but can’t take the ghetto out of the boy, it’s hard to shed the effect of a couple of decades in accounting. It creeps out every so often, most recently explaining Sarbanes Oxley to a non-accountant who believes the glib explanations of why some software upgrade simply can’t be released mid-cycle, and today it was reading Adobe’s quarterly results. But if reading the results yourself doesn’t fill you with equal delight, here are a few highlights :

Sales are up 6%
Software sales (“revenue” to Americans) are static compared with the same period last year
Remember that Creative Suite sales are spread over a couple of years so there’s no spike caused by CS6′s release
Sales growth comes, not surprisingly, from subscriptions and service/support
Subscription sales are about 15% of total software revenue
On the costs side
R&D costs are static
Sales and marketing costs up 10%
There are also some interesting comments explaining the subscription revenue growth. “Adobe Creative Cloud paid subscriptions grew to approximately 200,000 in the third quarter.  Adobe added approximately 8,000 Creative Cloud subscriptions per week during the quarter, exceeding the addition of 5,000 subscriptions per week that was assumed in its third quarter financial targets.” So it looks as if it’s got off to a strong start:

“We’re on a path to drive millions of subscribers to our Creative Cloud offering….”

That’s from the top numbers guy and was probably just a rather unfortunate turn of phrase (makes accounting sound dynamic), but it does come in the week when Mitt Romney’s leaked comments showed candour isn’t always the best policy.

Exposure!

Exposure!

Late notice, I know, but if you’re anywhere around South Essex over the next week, see if you can nip into the Royal Opera House’s production centre (the place where they create the sets) at Thurrock just off the M25. For this week only there’s a retrospective exhibition of  photos by my great friend Clive Barda who has been the leading photographer of opera and classical music since the 1960s. It’s already been round some of the major opera houses in China as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and may be in New York next year.

Overturned

Overturned
My initial response to the now-disqualified winner of the 2012 Landscape Photographer of the Year was that I liked the image very much. A black and white had come top of the pile too, and it wasn’t really a cute dog picture, unlike one previous winner,  or belong to another genre which happened to please the sponsor Network Rail. This year I was glad to see the judges had chosen a picture that was unequivocally a landscape.

Maybe their decision would have passed unquestioned had the photographer’s web site not mentioned he’d been trying to copy a friend’s photo of the same scene – and had succeeded in doing so. Alex Nail and then Tim Parkin deserve credit for digging further and demonstrating that clouds and other landscape elements had been added in Photoshop, breaching the rules for that section of the competition, and as a result the winning picture and two others by the same photographer were disqualified. The objection wasn’t to the photographer, and you could readily accept that he hadn’t read the rules if you saw his grasp of spelling and grammar in online forums where he defended himself. The real beef was with how the organisers had not succeeded in enforcing their own rules.

For me, Peter Laurence’s shot of redwoods in Scotland was the outstanding picture in the Landscape Photographer of the Year exhibition at the National Theatre

In fact earlier this year I’d met the organisers of another of the major UK photo competitions and advised on methods for validating shortlisted images. So I’d been thinking of where I would personally draw the line. For myself, I’ve always thought in terms of “darkroom rules” and feel less-satisfied if I know my Photoshopping has extended too far beyond what one could achieve in the darkroom. Yet you don’t need to know much about the history of photography to know how much latitude that might give the unscrupulous. So how does this definition work – if you could perform the manipulation in Lightroom / Aperture / C1, a picture rightly belongs in a photography competition. If that’s not the case, and the image is the result of compositing layers, surely the picture would feel much more at home in a Photoshop contest?

Anyway, I wasn’t so keen on the eventual winner. The photo had initially caught my eye, and I liked the choice of subject and its foreshortened treatment. But I keep thinking it’s let down by the messy trees in the lower quarter, and the photographer Simon Butterworth has certainly done far better work. Seeing it this week in the exhibition at the National Theatre, my view didn’t change. No, my winner was this Peter Laurence shot of redwoods in Scotland which was printed at a metre tall and looked magnificent. Black and white too. There’s a surprise.

Banhegyesy Antal

Banhegyesy Antal
I’ve not been quite so assiduous in buying Black and White Photography magazine this year. It only seems to be at the bigger WH Smiths in railway stations, and for some reason I’ve not passed through casually or nipped into town to pick up a copy. Or maybe it’s that when I do catch a train home , my iPad means I already have plenty to read and just want to sit down and resume my Nordic noir or that Steve Jobs biog? Anyway, I do still love my b&w and yesterday after enjoying a grown up pint with my nephew (at a great discovery called The Speaker in Westminster) I wandered over to Waterloo station and was glad to see the magazine’s not gone under.

In fact, it was particularly full of great b&w thanks to their BWPOTY (do such acronyms need to be written in full) and my favourite was a series of studio nudes by Banhegyesy Antal. It turns out he’s Hungarian and I very much enjoyed his site – even if there’s only a thumbnail of the picture that really caught my eye (legs in the air, her knickers strung between). Well worth a visit, well worth getting buying Black and White Photography magazine again.

What is Adobe Photoshop Touch?

What is Adobe Photoshop Touch?

Adobe® Photoshop® Touch, a new Adobe Touch App, lets you quickly combine images, apply professional effects, and share the results with friends and family through social networking sites like Facebook — all from the convenience of your iPad or Android™ tablet.¹

Screenshot gallery

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Highlights

1. See your images like never before with Retina display.
2. Work on files up to 12 megapixels with higher resolution capabilities.
3. Work with core Photoshop tools designed for tablets.
4. Use your tablet camera to fill area on a layer.
5. Select part of an image to extract by scribbling.
6. Perform Google searches and share images on Facebook right in the app.
7. Sync files to Adobe Creative Cloud™ and open them in Photoshop.²

Creativity anywhere

Work with images on your tablet, and then take them further on your PC or Mac in Photoshop. Sync your projects with Adobe Creative Cloud and open layered files from Adobe Photoshop Touch in Photoshop.²

What's new in Photoshop?

What's new in Photoshop?
Adobe® Photoshop® CS6 software delivers even more image editing power, new creative options, and the Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine for blazingly fast performance. Retouch with new Content-Aware features, and create superior designs as well as movies using new and reimagined tools and workflows.*


Upgrade to Photoshop CS6 for greater speed, power, and productivity. A fresh, elegant interface features groundbreaking design tools like Content-Aware Patch, a new Blur Gallery, a faster and more precise Crop tool, and intuitive video creation. Or become an Adobe Creative Cloud™† member to also get over a dozen new features, including new Smart Object support for Blur Gallery and Liquify, export of text and shape styling as CSS, and other new features exclusively in Creative Cloud.*

Adobe software activation

Adobe software activation
When you license a software product from Adobe, you are issued an Adobe serial number that represents your license to use that software. Activation is the process by which Adobe validates that your software and serial number are genuine and that they are being used in accordance with the license you purchased. Activation is intended to protect your rights, as a consumer, to use the license to its full extent, and it is also intended to protect Adobe's rights as a software developer. Only genuine Adobe software entitles you to critical updates and technical support. You may not be able to use certain versions of Adobe software if it is not activated.

During the Activation process, information about the following is sent to Adobe via an Internet connection: your computer, your computer's operating system, the Adobe software in use on your computer, the Adobe serial number associated with that software, and your Adobe ID. In addition, Adobe receives the Internet Protocol address of your Internet connection. All the foregoing information is collectively referred to as the "Received Information" and is stored by Adobe. Adobe may use the Received Information, alone or in conjunction with other information you or third parties have provided to Adobe, to detect and prevent fraud and abuse of Adobe products and services, such as the use of Adobe software that is not validly licensed or that is not being used in accordance with a valid license.

If your software fails to activate, either because it cannot connect to Adobe over the Internet or because its use is not permitted, it may offer only limited functionality or not operate at all.

ADOBE® CREATIVE SUITE® 6 AND OTHER RECENT RELEASES OF ADOBE SOFTWARE

An Internet connection and registration will be required for software activation. Registration and activation can be completed either at installation or within seven days of product launch; otherwise, the product will stop working.