Things are not looking so good at ADBE.

If I were the CEO of Adobe I would be getting pretty worried.

Look at the issues:

• Flash is going to die. Apple refuses to use it on its mobile devices and the alternative, HTML5, runs on everything, is bug free, fast and doesn’t spool up the fans in your computer when launched, drawing large amounts of power
• Acrobat is mature and has no growth potential
• No meaningful offerings for mobile computing
• An entrenched culture of low energy and late to market
• No focus, with time wasted on slagging Apple rather than making new products
• The worst customer service on the planet, bar none
• A core product which is, let’s face it, dead

Yes, that core product is Photoshop. Just as the LP reached perfection within its limitations when the CD was launched, so has PS reached a like peak and really has no place left to go.

The only significant additions to CS5 over CS4 are built in lens aberration correction (which you can get in a $25 PS plugin named PTLens which I recommend unreservedly) and Content-Aware Fill.

The latter option will be beloved of advertisers and dictators. Now when the Russians next rewrite their history books (“Let me check the history. Have we written it yet?”) and decide that Lenin is now persona non grata their army of retouchers will be replaced by a dude with CS5 which will likely as not be a pirate copy. Two key strokes and, hey presto, Comrade Lenin is gone.

Lenin? Nah! He was never in our band

What has not changed in CS5 is the awful user interface, one of the worst there is, or the egregious cost, hardly justified by ADBE finally making the thing run in 64-bit mode. Sure, a few pros will be unable to live without it, but a few pros do not constitute meaningful earmings per share, and if I was running Adobe, I would definitely be fixated on those:

A tale of two companies.

Adobe needs to craft some really innovative products, like Lightroom, for the mobile user. An iPad-using photographer is rarin’ to process his pictures on the road and a touch enabled, rethought Lightroom would be a hot seller. But, when you realize that the only reason Lightroom exists is because Apple came out with Aperture, forcing Adobe to react, then it’s not like you conclude that the people running Adobe, who seem to prefer spending their time slagging Apple over Flash use (or non use), are about to suddenly get it.

Think about this. Storage in the iPad is currently limited, so not much space for your RAW files. But a new mobile processing app will allow you to make all your changes on the road and then simply upload the RAW sidecar file with your processing data, which is very small, to your cloud storage. Thereafter you delete that day’s RAW originals from the iPad, once more freeing up space, your snaps remain on an SDHC card and your processing changes reside in the cloud. Once home you re-download the RAW originals from your SDHC card (at $20 for 8gB it’s not like you need to save on these) then your desktop app goes out to the cloud, downloads the minuscule sidecar files and hey presto! you are ready to export or print. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for something like this from Adobe.

At $660 for basic CS5 or $200 for the upgrade from CS4 I would say save your money and wait for someone else to come up with the next generation of photo processing tools unless, that is, you are in the Politburo.

As for ADBE stock – a great short after the near term earnings bump from CS5. Sad really, as without Adobe and Postscript and Photoshop, the Mac would likely not exist today.

Me? I continue to use CS2 (in Rosetta mode!) and still dread every time I have to roundtrip to it from LR2. My use is now restricted solely to correction of converging verticals.

A fast web display application.

I chanced upon the free application Autoviewer the other day which, once downloaded, can be used as a web display generator using iPhoto or Lightroom and comes in Windows and OS X versions.

I tried it with Lightroom 2 using the ‘Web’ module (first time I have ever gone there, believe it or not) into which Autoviewer integrates elegantly and within 30 minutes had uploaded a 42 slide presentation of recent street snaps which you can see by clicking the picture below.

San Francisco street snaps July, 2009 – January, 2010

Autoviewer uses Adobe Flash technology so it may be a bit poky on older machines. However, I used my netbook with its slow Atom CPU and it does fine. There are also SimpleViewer (tabular presentation) and PostcardViewer (what is says) options available through Lightroom 2, though the full screen approach seems to work best for formal presentation of photographs.

I know I have to edit this selection down, but thought a quick first look would be of interest, as I’m beginning to think that a slide show presentation is superior to the clickable thumbnails I have traditionally used on my web site.

Auto blur.

With smaller and smaller digital sensors lenses get shorter and depth of field grows. It’s tough to beat the laws of optics but, in my opinion, all those calling for ever faster small lenses to limit depth of field and thus differentiate the subject from its surroundings just don’t get it. That’s yesterday’s technology.

The faster the lens, the larger the lens, which defeats the whole purpose of compactness – the very attribute in a camera that makes you take it with you.

What I think is needed is what I call Auto Blurâ„¢. We already have face recognition technology. So why not add technology to blur everything that is not the main subject. Rollover the image to see what I’m talking about (renders fine in Chrome and Safari on my Mac). Refresh your browser if the image is not visible. Will not work on mobile devices.

This is a typical G1 image with the kit lens at 18mm fully open at f/3.9. Everything is sharp.

Now, in this case, the background in the mouseover version was tortuously conferred using PS CS2 and the lasso tool – not my idea of fun – but why shouldn’t this be a simple user choice in the camera’s settings?

Software is cheap and weightless. Fast lenses are not.

Follow-up: A reader has alerted me to a Photoshop plugin from Alien Skin named Bokeh which provides many options for the blurring of backgrounds. However, the plugin is seriously overpriced at $199, as the key step – selection of what is to be blurred – remains the exact same time consuming process in Photoshop which I had to use above. So it’s not a solution. Combining face/shape recognition technology with auto-blurring is the approach for those who favor picture taking over picture processing.

Further follow-up: Anothe reader has pointed me to Nik Software’s Viveza 2 – see the Comments to this piece. I see two advantages and one drawback. The advantages are that you do not need Photoshop, as the plug-in will work with Lightroom or Aperture. Further, the selection tool in Viveza 2 is truly amazing – exactly what is missing from Alien Skin’s Bokeh which uses Photoshop’s clunky selection tools which are labor intensive at the best of times. But the key drawback of Viveza 2 is that it does not provide adjustments of sharpness which is what the above piece is all about. Instead (click the link provided at the end of Arun’s Comment) you have to resort to machinations in Photoshop once again. So if only Nik Software could add a sharpness slider to all the other sliders in their tool, that would seem to do the trick until Panasonic or Sony do this with in camera software. Or, even better, if Adobe decides to add this sort of thing to Lightroom – now wouldn’t that be nice?

For anyone suffering from data overload.

There’s that old saw which has it that two workers turn up at your house to build a new wooden staircase. One is from the old world, makes a big pitch about how he only uses hand tools and the crafts he learned from his grandfather and probably has a missing digit to prove it. The other asks where he can plug in his saw bench. Which do you hire?

The investment world’s version of this tale is the old line manager who consults the paper copy of the Wall Street Journal, gets the Financial Times delivered for world news and reminds you that’s how they used to do it on Wall Street when he was learning the trade from his dad. The new kid refuses to meet with you, stating his time is too precious, and sets up a videoconference instead, during which he constantly consults one of a half dozen monitors to see how things are going in the markets.

Well, the answer is the same in both cases. The old guy loses the job. Time is money and he will end up costing you too much of both. And the young guy’s work will not only be faster and much more accurate, he can correct three mistakes while the old boy is still sharpening his hand tools.

This preamble is perfectly in context of this year’s Software of the Year award which is for NetNewsWire.

NetNewsWire

No matter what your interest, NetNewsWire will leverage your time just as effectively as the electric saw leverages the carpenter’s.

A case in point is the increasing frequency with which camera and lens software is updated by manufacturers. New features are added and existing problems fixed. If you have NetNewsWire tuned in to any of the many web sites addressing these things, using an RSS feed you can be assured of not missing these important updates. For example, Panasonic and Canon – whose products I use – have released several camera and lens software updates this year alone. I may not need them all but it’s nice to know they are installed if I do. On a related topic, keen photographers read many web sites and can avoid wasting time checking for new articles through the simple process of using NetNewsWire and a site’s RSS feed. If the site lacks an RSS feed, why bother with it? Clearly, the author cares little whether you read it or not as he cannot be bothered to draw your attention to new content.

This year NetNewsWIre started using Google Reader as its feed engine and has, as a result, become much more reliable. In particular its syncing of feeds between multiple devices is greatly improved. Thus, when I read an article on, say, my netbook, I am assured that its ‘read’ status is updated on my desktop and iPhone. That’s worth a lot to me.

After a while you quickly filter your feeds, separating gold from dross. And if, like me, you manage money for a living, you are in seventh heaven, because that’s a business where dross is dominant.

NetNewsWire is a free download and is this photographer’s Software of the Year. It only runs on Macs but there are doubtless like products for users of other operating systems. Whether you are a photographer or a data fiend who values his time, this application deserves to be on your computer(s).

Once you have loaded NetNewsWire on your Mac, just click the RSS logo in the toolbar of your browser and the feed will be automatically added.