Musings on Photography

From the comments on this post:

Suppose you want to lighten or darken an area of an image … with curves, you either make a precise selection using various methods and then make the curves adjustment, or you make a curves adjustment and then create a mask to apply the curves adjustment. Or … with Dodge and Burn, you make a curve/mask adjustment in one step, ie: the darkening or lightening applies only where you put it. What a simple way to add a vignette.

The key words here are ‘precise selection’. They’re key because I never (what, never? Harrrrrrdly ever!) use the lasso tool and the other ’selection’ tools.

What I do is use quick mask mode to quickly ‘paint’ a rough selection. To do this, I hit ‘q’ or click on the button with the round circle on it (below the color swatches in the tool palette) to enter quick mask mode. Then I pick the right size brush, set the flow rate to whatever I want, and just paint on the image where I want to make the change. If I want to change a large area, I’ll select it and use the ‘fill’ paint bucket to paint it solid. Toggling the color between white and black lets me fix up mistakes easily. And when I have some area painted, I switch back to regular mode by hitting ‘q’ or that button again. The not painted area is now the selection. To make the painted area be the selection, I hit shift-cmd-i. That lets me make a rough selection in just seconds.

From here, I create the curves layer. The selection is now the mask for that layer, and I rough in the curve adjustment I want. It can be anything from a straight burn or dodge to a complicated curve or color adjustment.

Best of all, as I adjust the curve, I can watch the image change (I have ‘preview’ checked). This is important not because I can stop when it’s right, but because I can make sure I’ve gone too far. This is a trick I learned in the wet darkroom. It’s easy to make an adjustment, think it’s about right, and then discover later that you weren’t bold enough. The solution to this problem is to always go past the optimal change. Then use the opacity slider on the layer to ‘dial back’ the effect until it’s just right.

Now, I can look at the image with the edit in place. If there are places where I want the change applied but didn’t get in the rough selection at first, I just click on the mask, select black as the foreground color, and set the flow rate low (say, 5%) and then paint on the image. I’m actually painting on the mask, so I’m actually changing the area the mask controls. If I go too far, I switch to white and correct the mistake. It’s pretty easy to get it right.

Having the burn/dodge or whatever other adjustment be a layer is a big help, because I can toggle the layer on and off. That lets me make sure I’ve made a positive change, because I can easily test “Which do I like better - A or B?”

Hours (or days, or years) later, I might decide I want to adjust that burn or dodge. If it’s a layer, it’s childs play to see what I did before (I can SEE the layer mask) and to change it. If I’d just burned and dodged the bejeebers out of the image, I’d have no way of easily seeing what I’d done.

Sometimes I’m very confident I know what the curve shape I want will be. In those cases, I create the curve layer first. By default it applies to the entire image, so I set it with the preview turned off. Then I click on the mask icon on the layer palette, so that my subsequent actions paint on the mask. I then fill the mask with black so that it doesn’t apply anywhere. Then I select white as the foreground color, pick a brush, and start painting the effect onto the image. With a low flow rate, you can build up different levels of effect, so it’s easy to feather the effect.

A lot of the editing of images I do involves what I think of as a gradient mask. In the wet darkroom, you can do burns and dodges with a gradient by moving the burn/dodge card or tool. In Photoshop, I get the same effect by painting a gradient onto the mask for the curve that adjusts the image. You can get some of the same gradient effect by creating a soft light layer, filling it with neutral grey, and then painting a grey to white/black gradient onto it to do a burn/dodge. But again, the curves layer is usually just as convenient and a whole lot more powerful.

In Photoshop there are usually four or five ways to do the same thing. Dodge & Burn is just another tool and another way to apply a simple, quick adjustment. Like all tools, it works in some situations, but not others. This is a bit like debunking the Levels command, because you can do the same thing in Curves.

Sure. There are more ways to skin a cat than there are cats. My goal here isn’t to get the rest of the world to always tackle things the way I do. It’s to argue that if we’re only to have ONE tool, at least let it be the one which is vastly more powerful, instead of the one which can handle only a small number of simple cases.

And, for what it’s worth, when I’m teaching students to use Photoshop, I tell them to ignore the levels command. Better by far, I tell them, to pick the one tool which does it all, and master that tool. The curves interface is vastly better designed that the ‘levels’ interface, and does everything that levels does easily. By using the more powerful tool, students learn to think of the image contrast and tonal range in the context of the tool they’re going to use to adjust it both globally and locally. It just doesn’t make sense to learn a number of tools that each handle a special case (levels, brightness/contrast, burn/dodge) when they can learn one tool that gives them all those sub-tools with a uniform, easily mastered interface.

In my experience, the problem most people face with Photoshop is not that the task of editing images is hard. It’s that Photoshop offers such a complex and overwhelming set of tools that people can’t get a toe-hold on the thing. The trick is to explain that there’s a very simple subset of tools that offers them ALL of the editing power, and all they need to do is learn those tools and ignore all the rest. The primary editing technique I teach is curves layers with masks.

Just this past week, Apple released a new version of Aperture, which now comes complete with a plugin that gives dodging and burning control. Today, Adobe releases into beta the next version of Adobe Lightroom, complete with (wait for it…) local dodging and burning.

And I’m here to tell you that while dodging and burning were the ‘de facto’ standard local controls in a wet darkroom, they’re not the right choice in the digital world.

In the wet darkroom, dodging and burning were strangely convoluted with the characteristic curve of the gelatin-silver paper. In the wet darkroom, the familiar S shaped curve of the characteristic curve (aka the H&D curve, or the Hurter-Driffield curve) had profound implications when we burned (increased exposure locally) or dodged (reduced exposure locally). If you burned down a shadow, you were forcing the tones in that region up onto the shoulder (highest density) portion of the curve, and so contrast would be reduced as you burned, and the more you burned, the lower the contrast got. Likewise, as you dodged the shadows, the tones would move onto the straighter portion of the curve, and contrast would increase as the tones in question moved off the shoulder.

Same thing in the highlights, but the other direction. As you dodged, things moved down onto the toe of the paper, and contrast fell. As you burned, things moved off the low contrast toe and onto the higher contrast middle portion, and contrast increased.

Sometimes those contrast changes worked to your advantage. Sometimes they didn’t, and you were forced to resort to other forms of prestidigitation to get the result you wanted. Things got easier with variable contrast paper, because you could dodge an area back during the main exposure, and then burn it in afterwards with a different contrast. In a very limited sense, using multiple contrast settings on a single print in the wet darkroom (something I did often) was equivalent to using a curve layer with a mask in Photoshop.

Every other technique (e.g. flashing, bleaching, or pouring hot developer on the print, or variable development) you might use in the wet darkroom means that you’ve started to employ tools that are much harder to control than dodging and burning. As a result, the vast majority of prints were made using the techniques of dodging and burning, and nothing else.

But it’s a mistake to think that as we move into the digital world, what we want is dodging and burning. We don’t, because dodging and burning have weak expressive power, and there’s an easy to use tool that can express every possible dodge and burn, plus a whole lot more.

That tool is called ‘curves’, and if we’re to be reduced to just one tool to do localized editing, we should run (not walk) away from dodging and burning, and instead rush to embrace curves with masks.

Let me demonstrate. When we burn an area down, we increase the ‘exposure’ and move all the affected tones down the tonal scale. This can be expressed with the following curve:

Likewise, a dodge moves all the tones UP the tonal scale, like this:

Once we have a way to express the action of burning and dodging, all we need is a way to restrict the action of the curve to a local region - and we do that by editing the mask for the curve layer.

That’s not the imporant point, because if that was all there was to it, we be better off with the simpler interface presented by the burn/dodge concept. The important point is that we can express a lot of things with curves that we can’t easily express using burning and dodging. In particular, we can limit the effect of burning and dodging not just spatial (by using a mask) but also tonally (by putting bends in the curve).

So, for instance, if we want to lighten the shadows, but leave the highlights and mid-tones alone, we might use a curve like this:

and if you want the mid-tones to increase in contrast, the shadows to get darker and lose contrast, and the highlights to get lighter and lose contrast (aka trade highlight and shadow contrast for mid-tone contrast), all without shifting the white point or black point, you use a curve like this:

The bottom line, here, is that by having curves and some way to control where on the image the curve is applied (and where it isn’t) you have the expressive power of burning and dodging, and then a whole lot more besides. There isn’t single tool I could deploy in my wet B&W darkroom that I can’t express simply and easily with curves and masks. Not a single one. Bleaching, flashing, variable contrast gradients, I can say it all with curves. And there are lots and lots of things I can express with curves and masks that were essentially impossible in the wet darkroom.

If you only get one tool, I’d suggest choosing the one that can do it all. It’s a shame that the developers of image editing software don’t see it this way.

[side note: Hurter and Driffield, the fellows who first graphically expressed the exposure/density relationship of photosensitive materials are two of my photographic heroes. Let me just close with a quote from them]

The photographer who combines scientific method with artistic skill is in the best possible position to do the good work

-Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield

Apple have released a new version of Aperture. It has what they’re calling a plug-in architecture, which allows you to buy third party software and it just fits right into Aperture. One of my favorite tools, Noise Ninja, has announced it will be available as a Aperture plugin sometime in May. The developers of other successful imaging tools seem queued up to offer their tools as Aperture plugins as well.

To borrow a line from Theodor Geisel, “This may not seem very important, I know. But it is, so I’m bothering telling you so.”

There are a couple of reasons.

The first big reason is that it seems that a lot of photographers are moving to tools like Aperture (or Lightroom, the competing product from Adobe). It’s a sort of one stop shopping framework for everything from ingesting the images off your memory cards (or camera) to making prints.

The big problem with such products is that it’s awkward to use tools that are outside this integrated environment. That is, it’s awkward if your noise reduction tool (say, Noise Ninja, the really great product with the really silly name) must be run standalone, because you have to save a version of the image, run Noise Ninja on it, then import the result of Noise Ninja back into the integrated environment.

The same problems occur if you want to use some other raw converter instead of the one directly supported by your image processing workflow. That’s why so many people use Adobe Camera Raw - it’s not that it does such a great job as much as it’s there and it fits into the workflow so well. Click on the raw file in Bridge, and ACR runs, and the output appears directly in Photoshop.

“But wait!” I hear you saying, “Photoshop has plugins! This is nothing new!” And indeed, Photoshop does have plugins. In fact, that’s exactly how I use Noise Ninja - it’s a photoshop plugin that appears as a filter. But plugins in Photoshop aren’t really first class citizens. Plugins, for instance, can’t be the basis for layers, the way curves can. Every plugin must , if needed, duplicate the effect of having masks.

But the fact that Apple have developed a significant part of the image workflow as a plugin (they’ve got dodge/burn/contrast/saturation/sharpen/blur done this way) makes me suspect that plugins in Aperture are more first class in the workflow. Plugins in Aperture 2.0 can work on raw files. So your favorite raw converter can be an Aperture plugin. Plugins in Aperture can start from more than one file, so HDR tools can be plugins, and be first class. I saw a really cool tool that takes a bunch of frames, does sub-pixel alignment, and extracts a result that has higher resolution than any of the original frames does, and that tool could be a plugin.

Now, from a strict computability argument, there’s nothing that can’t be done the old way that can be done in the new way. Photoshop has plugins, scripting, and so on, and strictly speaking it’s probably possible to integrate these new tools into Photoshop. But developers don’t do it, and I’m guessing that’s because Adobe have made it hard to do. Apple, on the other hand, seem to view this as the strategic goal for Aperture - and that tells me that they’re going to make it pretty easy.

The big question, really, is whether the local editing workflow in Aperture will be as versatile and workable as the layers model embedded in Photoshop. If so, it makes Aperture a big contender in the imaging world. It’s entirely possible that a really good, structured model like layers could be built as a plugin, in fact. Hard to tell at this point, but it’s an interesting idea.

Another reason why this is important is that Apple have apparently lined up some of the big names to do plugin versions of their tools for Aperture. If you’re a developer and your product competes against Noise Ninja, the pressure is on to do an Aperture plugin so you can compete. This isn’t a big chink in the armor of Photoshop dominance, but it might be the thin edge of the wedge.

Back when Aperture and Lightroom were introduced, I was still a Windows person. Now I’m a Mac person, and so I’m looking forward to getting a look at Aperture 2.1 and seeing what the image editing workflow looks like, and whether these plugins are more first class citizens than plugins in Photoshop. If so, I may be giving Aperture a whirl.

I see (in uncountably many places) that Adobe have released their spiffy, wonderful new online version of Photoshop Express. It will be, we are led to believe, all singing, all dancing, and will make our beds, cook our breakfasts, and keep our mugs of tea warm all the time.

So I went to the website to take a look, and because I am sort of paranoid about such things, I first took a look at the ‘Terms’, the link to which is in light gray on a grey background (almost as if Adobe would prefer that you not look at them). The terms linked to at the target to that link link further on to further terms, where we must scroll down through several pages of dense legal boilerplate before we find the following:

8. Use of Your Content.

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

The upshot is that any time you submit a photo for inclusion in the publicly accessible area, you are giving the photo to Adobe. Period. They’re not claiming ownership of your content. But if someone can point out something that owning your content would allow them to do that this license doesn’t let them do, I’ll be mighty surprised.

Now, Adobe are free to place any licensing agreement on their software they like. But I think this is a horrible, disgusting, unethical, lowdown, scumsucking, awful, pathetic rights grab here.

I hope nobody ever uses this online software, ever. Because I’m sure that now the uproar is started about this disgusting license, Adobe will knuckle under and remove this rights grab crap. But I’d also note that they reserve the right to change the terms at any time, and I’ll bet a nice breakfast that eventually Adobe will submarine that rights grab right in there again. I’m willing to make that wager because anyone who would put those terms into the license to begin with is such ethical scum that they’d try to get it back in there later.

I hope they all lose their jobs and have to beg on street corners. And this time, I really mean it.

Colin Jago makes some interesting points about when irrevocable decisions are made in the photographic process, and some further observations about the difference between a film based process and a fully digital one.

The interesting thing for me is that, back when all of my photography was done with film, I made very few irrevocable decisions at exposure time. I suppose I did the whole ‘visualization’ thing, since the ground glass of my camera displayed the image upside down and in color but when I looked at the groundglass everything was right side up and the color wasn’t evident to me. But I didn’t ‘plan’ the look of the photo at exposure time. Instead, I took care to make the exposure so that I preserved as many options as possible.

That is, I didn’t make decisions like “Oh, I want all of that shadow to form a solid mass with no detail”. Instead I made the exposure that left detail in the shadows. I’ve struggled with lots of things in the wet darkroom, but I’ve never had a problem burning a detailed shadow down to featureless black. So my basic strategy with film has been (for a long time) “Get it all onto the negative. Sort it out in the darkroom.” My observation is that I’m not very adept at making decisions in the field. Better by far to procrastinate and make the decisions later, and in particular to preserve options so that the decisions aren’t irrevocable. If the detail is in the negative, you can always throw it away later. If the detail isn’t in the negative - well, we’re in there with the Fitzgerald translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyham:

The moving finger writes
and having writ, moves on,
nor all your Piety nor Wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all your tears wash out a word of it

As a result, my darkroom process had lots of twists in it, all designed to let me get functionality rather like what you get with Photoshop Curves. I flashed paper to change the curve shape. I bleached prints to change the curve shape. I dodged and burned and made prints with the contrast changing all over the print. Essentially all of the decisions about tonality and tone arrangement and how the print actually looked were made in the darkroom, not out in the field at exposure time.

The thing that made all this possible was the straight line, ‘modern’ films like TMAX films from Kodak and the Delta films from Ilford. All of that complicated zone system stuff boiled down to what, at the very end, was a very simple process - always give generous exposure to the shadows, so that you avoid losing shadow detail to the abrupt toe of these straight line films. Get the shadow exposure well up onto the curve. The straight line characteristic curve of the film ensures that you won’t blow out the highlights. TMAX-100 probably can capture up to zone XIII or XV without losing highlight contrast. The real limit to the recording of the film is that you end up running into halation when the highlights get really up there.

The bottom line was to give film generous exposure, so that everything in the scene is recorded on the film. Do that, and pick film development so that the density range of your developed negatives falls close to the middle of the range for the VC paper you use, and you’re cooking with gas.

The upshot here is that, since 1994 or so, I’ve used a process that was tailored to preserving as many options at exposure time and deferring all the decisions possible until printing time. I know that many large format photographers used/still use much the same process - I think I first heard it articulated by John Sexton in a printing workshop I took from him long ago.

It occurs to me that this might go a long way toward explaining why some folks are finding the switch from film to digital difficult to navigate and others seem to make the switch with minimal fuss, botheration, and hardship.

John Nack weighs in with Adobe’s definitive word on the upsetting business with Adobe CS3 apps contacting “192.168.112.2o7.net”, a domain name clearly chosen to look like it’s a local network address (although it’s not):

Q.: Why does Adobe use a server whose name is so suspicious-looking?
A.: I’m afraid the answer is that we don’t really know. The fact is that this SWF tracking code already existed on the Macromedia side at the time the companies merged, and it was adopted without change by a number of products for CS3. The people who wrote the code originally did not document why they used that server name, and we can’t find anyone who remembers. I’m sorry we aren’t able to provide a more solid, definitive explanation.

I would just like to point out that, now that they’ve had plenty of time to work this all out without the problems of having people on vacation over the holidays, Adobe has managed to come up with a definitive answer, and the answer is “Gee, we really don’t know.”

Boy, howdy, Adobe. You guys are really doing just exactly the right thing to maximally erode my trust and confidence. This is the best answer you can produce? I don’t know about anyone else in the world, but when you give me an answer like this, my conclusion is that you know the real answer, and you don’t want to give it, so you came up with a bullshit story like this.

Let’s just refresh our memories, with John Nack’s words from his original post on this subject:

As I say, now is the perfect time for people to throw around whatever wild assertions they’d like, given that so many people are out of the office and can’t respond.

Hey, John. It turns out it didn’t make much difference. Apparently an Adobe software development team at work doesn’t get answers any better than an Adobe software development team off on vacation and unreachable does. I think you’ll find it works better if you keep the whining about those annoying customers to a minimum. That’s probably a good thing for a senior product manager to know. And I offer it up, here, completely free of charge. Consider it a goodwill gift.

From the Adobe website referenced in John’s most recent post:

If you would prefer that the software not make these calls, simply disable the Welcome Screen in your Adobe software by selecting the Don’t Show This Again option in the lower left corner of the Welcome Screen.

This would seem to imply that turning off those welcome screens would mean that I could stop worrying about all this. But then I read, on the same web page:

…some Creative Suite 3 software contains embedded web browsers, any user action which requests Adobe.com content from such an embedded browser will cause the host software to make the tracking calls.

For example, clicking Bridge Home in Adobe Bridge CS3 will cause its embedded browser to visit an Adobe.com page and initiate this tracking. If you would like to prevent this from happening, turn off Bridge Home by opening Adobe Bridge CS3, choosing Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Bridge CS3 > Preferences (Mac OS), and deselecting Bridge Home under Favorite Items.

Uh huh. So turning off those Welcome screens means no more calls to Omniture’s servers. Except, of course, for all those OTHER calls to Omniture servers, like those that happen when I hit ‘Bridge Home’. One is left wondering, really, not just whether it’s possible to turn off all this crap, but whether Adobe actually has any employees who can muster the fairly minimal competence required to give us a definitive list of all the things we might do that will trigger this behavior.

And then, just as a final note, I followed the link from that web page to take a gander at Adobe’s Online Privacy Policy. And there, I found the following:

Please note that the practices of Adobe Systems Incorporated, its affiliates, and agents (”Adobe”), with respect to data collected and used by Adobe in connection with this website and all other Adobe.com, Acrobat.com and Acrobatusers.com websites of Adobe Systems Incorporated and its affiliates with links to this policy (collectively, the “Site”) and Adobe products and services available or enabled via the Site (“Products and Services”), are governed by this online privacy policy (“Privacy Policy”) as amended from time to time, and not the privacy policy in effect at the time the data was collected. [emphasis mine]

In other words, what Adobe are saying is that the privacy policy that applies is not the one in effect at the time they collected data from you. It’s the privacy policy that is on that website, which Adobe are free to change AFTER they collect the data. So they’ll give you lots of assurances now, collect the data, and then in the future, they’ll amend the policy, and do whatever they like.

I think that’s unspeakably scummy.

From Uneasysilence.com, we read

The sky is falling, the NSA is listening and Adobe is watching how many times you open your programs. Okay, the first two can’t be PROVEN but I can show you that Adobe is spying on users application habits.

When you launch a CS3 application the application pings out to what looks like an IP address - and internal IP address: 192.168.112.2O7.

That makes sense, right? Adobe wants to be sure you aren’t running multiple copies of their programs…. Wait something is wrong here.

The first clue something is fishy is that I don’t use a 192.168.xxx.xxx numbering scheme in my network. Secondly, if you look at the address Little Snitch is displaying, the last “numbers” of the IP address (2O7) look funny. Also, IP address don’t end in any .com/net/org suffix.

Turns out that 192.168.112.2O7.net is owned by Omniture, a huge behavioral analytics firm. Hmmmmmm, anybody curious why Adobe is doing this? Anybody care to sniff packets? I sense an invasion of privacy here!

John Nack responds on his blog here, and here.

One thing I find particularly snarky is John’s complaint:

This year it’s “Lies, Lies, and Adobe Spies”–a story noting that some Adobe apps contact a Web address associated with Web analytics company Omniture. The story is getting echoed & amplified on Valleywag (”You’re not the only one watching what you do in Adobe Creative Suite 3… Adobe is watching you, too”), CenterNetworks (”I am not suggesting that Adobe is doing anything wrong…” but then “Shame on Adobe, shame”), Daring Fireball (”Assuming this is true, it’s a disgrace, whatever the actual reason for the connections” [emphasis added]), and I’m sure elsewhere.

Whoa, Nellie.

As I say, now is the perfect time for people to throw around whatever wild assertions they’d like, given that so many people are out of the office and can’t respond.

Well, John. I’m so very sorry that this little hidden behavior of your company’s applications was discovered at a time when Adobe employees find it inconvenient to respond. Isn’t that just rude? I mean, here they are, using your company’s software during the holidays, and they find this very suspicious behavior, and instead of waiting for #$&*&^%$#$%^& HOURS on hold trying to connect with Adobe’s famous crappy customer support they choose to notify other users of Adobe software of the behavior on their blogs. And they have the temerity to voice their opinion of that behavior, too! Of all the nerve!

John, welcome to the grown up world. Your customers don’t have any obligation to you at all. They paid their hundreds of dollars for your software, and when they find out that it engages in suspicious behavior that’s been hidden from them they don’t have to do things the way you’d like. They’re free to say whatever they please about the behavior. They’re free to say it whenever they please, even if John Nack finds the timing to be upsetting in some weird tinfoil hat “clearly there’s some conspiracy to complain about things while everyone is on vacation” way. The fact that they complained when you personally found it inconvenient is bad news for you but has no bearing on the merits of their complaints.

If they find the behavior of your app phoning home sufficiently offensive or upsetting, for whatever reason, they’re free to complain, to be discontented, and to spread that discontent as widely as they please. Realistically, there isn’t a thing you can do about it. I suggest that you wake up, smell the coffee, and start blaming your own company for this little brouhaha. I make that suggestion because the amount of impassioned discontent I see that’s directed at Photoshop and its stranglehold on the photo world makes me think that your days of charging $600 for the application are numbered, and the number is surprisingly low.

Finally, you might want to change your wording. You call these ‘wild assertions’, a wording which suggests that these claims are unsubstantiated. Well, John, I’m guessing that, given that UneasySilence actually caught InDesign in the act of doing this, it’s not unsubstantiated and thus very much NOT a ‘wild assertion’. It’s established fact, and no amount of spin on your part is going to change that.

Nack then writes:

PS–Tracking user habits can be a good thing that benefits customers by helping software creators notice trends & improve their tools. When Adobe has pursued this kind of thing, it’s always been on a strictly opt-in basis.

Horsehockey. I’d suggest that if John really feels this way, I’d like to install some software that tracks the banking habits of all Adobe employees. I’m pretty sure that I would find trends that would help me ‘improve their banking tools’. You’ll have to trust that I won’t track anything you’d find violated your sense of privacy. To make it easy, I’ll hide this tracking so that you won’t know about it and thus won’t find it upsetting.

If Adobe has some legitimate goal here, there’s no need to hide that goal from users. It should be emblazoned in really big type on the initial splash screen when the application is first installed. And it shouldn’t use the domain name ‘192.168.122.2o7.net’, which is clearly a bad choice because it’s exactly the sort of thing the really bad guys would use and so using it pretty much drives people to a conclusion that you’re up to no good.

In the comments, Nack then responds to a comment (Nack’s response in brackets):

Adobe apps can call various online resources (online help, user forums, etc.), and those requests are logged.” Heavens, how could anyone equate that with “covertly phoning home”?

[I don't know, because it's not covert. The app only connects to those things if you ask it to do so, by selecting the appropriate menu item. There's nothing covert about it. --J.]

Ok, John. Without telling you, I’ve installed something on your computer. I haven’t told you what I’ve installed or revealed that I installed it or revealed what it does. It does it when you do something, but I haven’t told you what things trigger it. But you’ve just discovered that when it does it, it contacts a domain with a very phishy sounding domain name that appears to be intended to confuse people and firewall rules.

Two points come to mind:
1. If I did this, you’d be pissed as hell, and you know it. And you’re surely agree it’s ‘covert’. If you’re unsure let me direct you to the definition of covert.
2. Your claims that this is not covert because it only happens when you do some things and not others is nothing but meretricious, unadulterated crapola. And your claiming that it isn’t covert is offensive - not a surprise coming from the company that’s blazing new trails into the land of “We Pissed Off Our Customers Because We’re Arrogant Asshats”.

Bottom line: let me make a Modest Proposal to Adobe. If this information is so valuable to Adobe and isn’t something that would make users uneasy, then issue a software update for the CS3 apps that adds two menu items. The first menu item will display all the information that’s been forwarded to Adobe. The second menu item should offer users a choice of two options 1) users can opt in to sending this info, and Adobe will pay them for the info 2) users can opt out. If this information is so valuable to Adobe, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to have Adobe compensate the users in exchange for the data, instead of just taking the data for free.

One of the things I hear repeatedly from folks who are just starting out with a digital printing workflow is “Photoshop is just too complicated. There’s too much to get a grip on.” This is a slightly different twist on the same theme as is discussed in Photoshop Future, where the complaint is that the interface to Photoshop has just gotten too unwieldy.

Those are legitimate complaints. Photoshop is too big, with lots of features that photographers don’t really need. And the interface is too unwieldy, so that you have to drill through lots and lots of stuff to find the things you want. And the combination of those two means that for a beginner, it seems like not only are there more ways than one to skin a cat, there are infinitely many was to skin a cat, and there’s no obvious way to choose what you’re going to do from among all those ways.

There is a solution, though. What I recommend (and teach to students) is to strip Photoshop down to a few key concepts/tools, master those concepts, and then go exploring through the vast array of tools that Photoshop offers only when the problem at hand can’t be conquered using those core tools.

I’d say that those core tools are:

• layers - layers are the basic structuring tool that is used to organize your edits to photos, to adjust how they relate, and to make your edits be reversible. If you can’t understand and use layers in Photoshop, you’re not going to get anywhere. Never do anything directly to an image if you can instead put the adjustment in a layer.
• layer masks - layer masks are the way that you restrict a change to just a certain area of an image. I’m particularly fond of putting gradients in layer masks, perhaps because I grew up doing essentially this to blend burns and dodges in the traditional darkroom.
• Curves - forget about the levels, brightness, contrast controls. All of those changes can be expressed, more easily and intuitively, as a curves layer. Burns, dodges, bleaching are classic tradtional darkroom methods that can be easily expressed as curve layers with masks to restrict the change to certain areas.
• sharpening, especially good old classic unsharp masking - in addition to using sharpening to crisp up an image prior to output, unsharp masking with a large radius and low percentage is an essential tool for building internal contrast in an image.
• cloning and healing brush, for spotting images.

There are other useful tools in Photoshop. But the fundamental adjustments to images, both getting to what the traditional darkroom worker would consider a ‘good straight print’ and getting to what the same traditional worker would call an ‘expressive print’, can usually be expressed in terms of those fundamentals. And working with those fundamentals first means that you’ve pared the staggering complexity of Photoshop down to a manageable size. The vast majority of images I print are adjusting using these tools. Beyond that, I find that teaching people how to think about the problem of printing in terms of these fundamental concepts gives them a useful way of thinking about the problems of printing (e.g. think about tonality, contrast, etc. in terms of curve adjustments). It’s not just a limited set of tools that’s easily mastered, it’s a whole way of thinking about the image that gives you a structured way to go from the raw image to the final print.

Do I use other tools? Sure. But not very often. Am I a Photoshop expert? No way. I’m just a photographer who’s figured out that the vast majority of clever Photoshop tricks I neither need nor want. I can either spend my time mastering the sneaky tricks in the next volume of “Photoshop Wizardry for the Masses”, or I can spend my time out in the field with the camera, or at the computer printing. I’m sure there are artistic, creative ways to use all those tricks and spiffy tools. But I don’t seem to need them at all. For me, the secret seems to be to ignore them.

This interesting article discusses what Adobe has in mind for the Photoshop of the future, based on a blog entry on a blog written by Adobe developer . Since my main complaints with PS have been that the UI is horrible (and hard to make smaller) and the app itself is a memory pig, the changes discussed (customizable UI and more modular code base) sound good to me.

The blog entry (linked to from the linked article) links back to earlier entries, which make an interesting read in that they discuss the tension between adding functionality to an app and keeping that app usable.

Interesting reading.

I wrote here about how nice my customer service experience with Adobe had been. Way to go, Adobe, I said. Especially on a weekend, I said.

Today, after no communication from Adobe whatsoever (for instance, an emailed shipping notice) the Fedex guy arrived to deliver my cross-platform upgrade copy of Photoshop CS3. In what would presage the remainder of my Photoshop CS3 cross platform upgrade experience, the Fedex driver attempted to turn his truck around by backing up into the narrow parking next to the studio, and promptly hit a big rock, putting a big scrape on the rock and seriously bending his bumper.

Ignoring this portent, I nevertheless proceeded to uninstall the demo copy (many thanks to everyone who saved me untold hours of heartbreak by telling me to do this, either via comments or email). Then I installed the real copy. Whew, it takes a while to spin all those data off the CD and onto the hard disk. Finally, at last, it was time to activate the software. I entered the 27 bazillion digits of the serial number, and got them right. But, of course, it was an UPGRADE, so I also needed to enter the digits of the OLD version, Photoshop CS2. No problem - I took that disk off the shelf, entered the number, and… no dice. That serial number doesn’t correspond to a copy of Photoshop CS2 for Mac, which was the option I had. Sigh.

So I called Adobe on the phone, and navigated their wonderful phone tree. And then I sat on hold, for 20 minutes. Once there, I explained the situation, and the friendly service rep transfered me to the ‘activation’ people, who asked that I read them 39 million digits of customer numbers, case numbers, serial numbers of old versions, serial number of new versions, etc. This I did, and I’m happy to report that despite a growing headache I managed to give them all the numbers without transposing digits even once (transposing digits over the phone is a special talent of mine).

And then they gave me the magic shift-command-double click trick, and I read them the challenge code, and they gave me the response code, and Ta-Da! the activation and registration proceeded nicely. And Lo! I was happy, having only spent about 40 minutes more than really would have been necessary to activate my perfectly legally purchased direct from Adobe copy of Photoshop CS3 for the Mac.

And then the bad thing happened. I asked, in a light, devil-may-care, pococurante voice, if I was going to be forced to go through this hateful phone process again when I installed (as allowed by the terms of the license agreement) a copy of Photoshop CS3 on my laptop. And, to my great chagrin, the answer I received was ‘Yes, so sorry, you will need to go through this again.”

And so I sat down with my laptop, stuck in the disk, let it grind for a frustratingly long time, and came around to the same roadblock, at which point I called Adobe Customer Service, and was promptly put on hold. Not just hold, but on hold being forced to listen to the most horrific nasty-ass pathetic jazz I’ve ever heard. This was, if I might expound a bit, nasty-ass jazz that was not just bad. It was not just offensive, or aversive. It was Guantanamo level abuse, really. And I had to listen to it, repeated ad nauseum, for 30 minutes. The damn track was six minutes long, and I listened to your crappy jazz track, Mr. Adobe, for 5 solid end to end repeats. And then I was disconnected.

I invented new words. I used the old words and these new, invented words in incredibly inventive ways, describing the genealogy and personal attributes of the person responsible in graphic detail. And then I called, on a lark, Technical support, where I was offered the chance to get priority routing by entering a case number (or maybe it was a customer number). Whatever it was, by this time I had three of them written on my notepad, so I entered one, and was promptly put on hold for 15 minutes. And then, when they finally answered the phone, the first thing they wanted was the number I’d entered.

But I recited the litany of numbers for the tech support gent, in three part harmony with feeling and what I thought was a sort of catchy syncopated rhythm. Customer numbers. Case numbers. You name it, I had it. And he told me he could give me the response code, it would take just a few minutes to get it for me. He put me on hold, and I listened to more (but different) bad jazz. He came back, and told me that if I needed to do this again, there was another number I could call - he gave me the customer service number that I used when I was on hold for 30 minutes and then got disconnected. And when I told him that this had happened to me, not only was he unsurprised but he observed that that was a downside to calling customer service.

So let me sum up things for Adobe - my experience today sucked. I don’t mean sucked as in I am dissatisfied with the customer experience I had. I mean sucked as in I would like for the people responsible to come to my home, so they can have a little chat with Mr. Stihl, my MS 310 chainsaw with the 25″ bar and the aggressive, fast cutting skip tooth chain. [update: No, I don't really want to confront Adobe employees with a chain saw. I am engaging in hyperbole - outrageous exaggeration for effect.]

Why in the world would you send me a box, knowing a priori that I would have to go through needless hours of painful customer service phone calls to activate the product inside? Are you completely, utterly stupid? Do you think this makes your customers happy, or do you think it makes them angry? Here’s a hint, for free: it makes me angry. It makes me want to find the Adobe employees responsible, and subject them to horrific treatment. I’m not talking something subtle like the Chinese Water Torture. I’m talking “I am really angry” sorts of stuff. If you picture something akin to the Chinese Water torture, but replace the water with hydrofluoric acid and add high voltage electrified flensing knives, you’re about 10% of the way there. [update: no, I do not actually condone torturing Adobe employees under any circumstances. See 'hyperbole', above.]

I’m not really a customer service expert, but I have some advice for Adobe. Based on the comments on my previous post, and based on my experience today, Adobe is seriously pissing off customers. You need to fix it, and I mean really fix it. Because each and every user of photoshop, it seems, has a horror story about Adobe, and if they get a chance to jump ship, you’re going to find it damn hard to sell them anything at all.

If nothing else, at least make it possible for users to own and run your software on both the Mac and Windows without going through phone support hell.