*** From the Archives ***

This article is from February 26, 2002, and is no longer current.

Scenes from Seybold Seminars

Jaw-dropping product announcements were few and far between at last week’s Seybold Seminars — at least publicly. Behind closed doors Adobe conducted briefings on Photoshop 7.0, announced Sunday. The predominant theme on the show floor and in conferences was the ubiquity of two three-letter acronyms: PDF and XML. But leave it to the New York Times to make a lasting impression.

Seven’s Up
Adobe Photoshop 7.0 was unveiled during private meetings held in advance of its public announcement a few days later. For a preview of its full feature set, read our sneak peak, courtesy of our friends at NAPP. I’m not sure I agree with the author that 7.0 is the best version yet, but here are my initial thoughts.

This release is much anticipated by Macintosh users who want to flex the image editor’s muscle under Mac OS X. Adobe, however, is downplaying the Mac OS X angle, preferring to acknowledge that it supports multiple platforms including Windows XP. That’s just marketing spin, of course, but it’s worth noting Adobe’s matter-of-fact response to the OS X-induced hysteria that’s been brewing in the Mac community.

The upgrade contains a number of interesting, if not earth-shattering new features. It borrows a new image browser from its kid sibling Photoshop Elements, although the implementation found in version 7 is more robust including customizable keyword fields and EXIF data export from digital cameras. In keeping with its network publishing vision, Adobe has added XMP metadata and variable-object support, which allows Photoshop to share data with other Adobe applications.

Many of Photoshop’s new features could be considered cosmetic in that they apply to paint and pattern tools. Painting capabilities have been expanded with new brush presets, palettes, and defaults. Users can now make custom patterns by sampling a portion of an image, save it as a pattern, and then fine-tune its repeat and tile size. New additions to the compute-intensive Liquify command let you work quickly on a low-resolution preview then apply effects automatically to the high-resolution file.

Perhaps the feature that will attract the most attention is one that can truly be called “cosmetic” — the new Healing brush. Like the airbrush techniques used in commercial photography, the Healing brush lets you erase blemishes and flaws in images by swiping the brush or applying a patch over an area. Unlike Photoshop’s cloning tools that exactly duplicate pixel color values, the Healing brush samples colors and blends pixels over the selected area, resulting in smooth, imperceptible transitions. The results are quite impressive, if a bit unnerving. On one demonstration file the subject’s lines, wrinkles, and crows-feet were wiped away as if undergoing instant plastic surgery.

Photoshop 7.0 will ship in April for $609 with upgrades from previous versions priced $149.

PDF and XML
Two days of Seybold conferences were devoted to PDF, marking the once-puzzling technology’s rise to dominance in both print and Web applications. In Thursday morning’s keynote, it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service is the largest user of Acrobat — 130,000 licensed users — with more than 500 million PDF downloads from its site since 1995. (To read more about Thursday’s keynote, check out Seybold’s coverage.) On the show floor, much of Adobe’s booth was given over to third-party PDF developers such as callas software and Enfocus Software.

XML, while still in the early stages of acceptance, was making a buzz. XML is a mark-up language for the Web that provides deep hooks into structured documents like databases and is the foundation of what we commonly refer to as cross-media publishing. (Read the W3C’s geekier explanation here.) Both Adobe InDesign 2.0 and QuarkXPress 5.0 include XML support, for instance. At the show, Easypress’s Atomik 3.0 was well received. It’s a more robust way to convert QuarkXPress documents into XML than what’s available in version 5.0.

One of the more curious excursions into XML-land was given by Corel CEO Derek Burney. He used his keynote speech as an opportunity to unveil Corel’s new XML-focused subsidiary brand Deepwhite. The vision he articulated was akin to that of Adobe’s network publishing strategy in which information is unshackled from the constraints of platform-specific formats. XML allows us to create content once and deploy it many times on many devices.

Sounds good, but at this stage it’s not exactly a new concept (although to be fair, we may have heard about it last year but it hasn’t taken off yet). It’s good that Corel is rousing itself from its desktop-centered software solutions to embrace the cross-media future, but the company does have a habit of rolling out new brands and initiatives with alarming alacrity. The unshakable perception is that of a strategy du jour. I hope I’m wrong, as having them as a player is a good thing.

But my reservations aren’t alleviated by the fact that no one at Corel was able to tell me the significance of the name “Deepwhite.” See if you can figure it out at the company’s Deepwhite Web site.

This and That
It’s not easy being green, we all know. But props to Nima Hunter for launching a new study designed to convince printers and the companies who employ them to use more environmentally sustainable practices. Check it out at The Greening of Print Web site.

Finally, I found the speech by New York Times CEO Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. to be an inspiring take on how newspapers and journalism still provide a much-needed service in this era of new media. Of course his talk was somewhat self-serving, taking potshots at media rivals like AOL Time Warner and Microsoft, both of whom had predicted the Times would be a dinosaur in the 21st century.

Instead the Times has responded by developing multiple media streams each serving the needs of the Times readers who use them. “Each of our brands have unique wiring,” he said. “We cannot homogenize the human experience.”

After debunking his detractors, Sulzberger described how the Times’ evolving three-pronged approach to news delivery came together on September 11 and the days that followed. He described it as “print, online, and broadcast media working together seamlessly.” According to Sulzberger, the New York Times Web site was the only New York-based major news site still functioning on September 11, serving up 21 million page views on that day alone. More poignantly, he showed a photograph of New Yorkers lined up around the block to get a New York Times newspaper on September 12, an edition that was reprinted several more times during the course of the day. In hard times, people find reassurance in holding a printed newspaper.

But the future, he said, lies in the convergence of media. The Times is a newspaper, he said, “but in the end we can’t define ourselves by the second part of that word.” At its core, the Times is news, not paper.

You can read Seybold’s take on his speech and find other show news here.

And that’s all the news that fits, for now.

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