Opinion: Adobe adapts its industry-leading application to keep step with advances in file formats, photography and page design.Over the past decade, digital imaging has become an immensely complex field that reaches into publishing, Web design, graphics, video games and movie production, among others.
And while there are multitudes of applications catering to this market, one program represents digital imaging more than any other: Adobe Photoshop.
How many software programs have their own trade shows? Photoshop World, hosted by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, opens Tuesday in Las Vegas.
How many applications have entered the everyday language? (Do you say 'I'll Word it" when you correct a piece of text? Hardly. Yet "We'll Photoshop it" has become a common expression.)
And unlike other common application programs, which have reached some kind of maturity by now, Photoshop keeps growing and growing. To some extent, these changes are driven by advances in hardware: The widespread move from 24-bit color to 48-bit for high-quality retouching could not have been envisaged if the scanners had not become more adept in rendering pictures in more color depth.
Likewise, the evolution of digital cameras has played an essential role. Digital SLRs (single lens reflex cameras) have reached a price point where they are within reach for almost any graphic designer who wants to experiment with pictures. (And in some cases they have begun to replace scanners as input medium).
The impact of these evolutions on the creative landscape is enormous. When the first affordable color scanners reached the market in the early 90s, their impact on graphics was considerable, as graphic artists started scanning everything from old engravings to everyday object or even pieces of debris found in the street in order to add some unexpected flair to their designs.
Advances in digital photography, such as the possibility of working with RAW image files offered by an increasing number of applications, have been similarly transformative for Photoshop. (RAW files are camera-specific electronic files which, unlike JPG files used in consumer models, preserve the entire range of data captured by the image sensor in a digital camera). RAW files are so popular now that even consumer programs such as Apple's iPhoto support them.
But Photoshop has moved way beyond being simply an application for image retouching to become a complete design environment. This has been made possible by evolutions in the application, and in particular by its sophisticated support for layers and text. As a result, many graphic artists and designers working on single-page designs prefer to create their projects in Photoshop, rather than combining different elements in QuarkXPress, InDesign or Illustrator.
Click here to read an interview with Adobe President Shantanu Narayen.
Of course, this trend would not have happened without the necessary hardware advances: multi-layered, high-resolution Photoshop files can bring the most macho PC or Mac to its knees, and if there is one application that will use every shred of performance increase in a new hardware platform, Photoshop is it.
Finally there is integration: A few years ago, the exchange of data between applications was limited to a small number of standardized file formats, but the integration of imaging with other applications has become increasingly sophisticated. Page layout applications now can read Photoshop files (QuarkXPress 6.5 even offers the user the possibility to activate individual layers of a Photoshop file). Integration with Web design environments, digital video and 3D rendering environments is also becoming increasingly sophisticated.
But don't worry, the Photoshop environment still has room to grow in future releases: Adobe's application still does not support 64-bit addressing of memory, for instance, and while support for 48-bit images has improved, Photoshop still can not handle HDR (High Dynamic Range) images popular in 3D production environments.
And finally there is the question of workflow: How can we be more efficient in dealing with our ever-increasing load of digital images on our hard-drives and servers?
But that, as they say, is a different story…
Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.
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