Adobe

Two 'graduates' of the Xerox PARC research center, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, invented the PostScript printing language, founded Adobe in 1982, and built a graphics and design empire.

Acrobat

Currently, Adobe is focussing on something near and dear to my heart - documentation security, forms creation, and secure collaboration; the product: Acrobat. There's lots you can do with Acrobat...forms creation with an 'fdf' format that can collect answers into a database, web pages can be captured, documents can be both linked and interactive.

Acrobat's greatest feature is akin to networking software; permissions can be set individually on documents so recipients are permitted to only certain things with any document they receive. Version 5.0 allows 128 bit encryption, digital signatures and passwords. When Acrobat is used as a collaboration tool, changes or corrections are made with the equivalent of 'sticky notes' which can be collected and sorted by date/person. There's a pencil tool and a yellow highlighter. I marked up a .pdf file showing some of these features. The compression in Photoshop makes the printed document very difficult to read, but Acrobat's tools are clearly visible, digital signature, sticky notes, highlighting, and an approval stamp.

If your documents are important, this is the weapon of choice. All the documents on this site are set with 40 bit encryption so older versions of the Acrobat Reader will open them. Wholesale emailing of Word documents for collaboration is a very dangerous practice. If recipients have defined styles, there is a strong chance that their styles will become embedded in a document that is just 'passed around for approval.' One of Adobe's new entries is a Digital Signatures product. The Acrobat Reader is ubiquitous and is now in version 6. Click here to read about Adobe's plans for Acrobat.

Photoshop creates 80% of the world's graphics and even with a preeminent market share in its hip pocket, Adobe continues to improve this product as if someone is going to pick their pocket tomorrow morning. One of Photoshop's newest features is called the 'healing brush.' Simply put, you can give yourself a facelift in less than 3 minutes. Users of match.com will be in for even more surprises.

Photoshop Restoration and Doing the Windows on Fifth Avenue Photoshow

Using Katrin Eismann's book, Photoshop Restoration and Retouching, I restored the damaged photos below. Mouse over to see the results. Katrin is a world reknown photoshop color correction author. Click here to go to her website. Digital Retouch.

I have also added a new photoshow, Doing the Windows on Fifth Avenue. To view this correctly, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 installed on your machine. The link to the photoshow is below the photo corrections below.

Adobe

Click here to view Unusual Objects and A Great Idea. The file will play by itself. .

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