Adobe Chases Creatives Out of the Office and They Go Willingly

Adobe seems to want photographers, designers, and other creatives to get out of the office and to that end they've developed a series of free mobile apps (Apple IOS devices only for now) that offer considerable functionality by themselves but really shine when they're coupled to a Creative Cloud subscription on a desktop machine.

In addition to the apps that are connected to Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, there's also Lightroom Mobile.

Lightroom is, in my opinion, the single most comprehensive advance in photography work flow management since the invention of film, which replaced cumbersome glass plates. Professional photographers say that Lightroom allows them to work faster and amateur photographers are amazed by the power Lightroom gives them to improve their images.

Now Adobe makes much of it mobile.

When Adobe loaned me an Ipad for a couple of weeks so that I could try out the mobile apps, most of them (Line, Color, Mix, Brush, Draw, Clip, Shape, and Sketch) were already loaded. Adobe Voice appeared after I had started testing. Not Lightroom Mobile, though. Apple should work with Adobe to highlight Lightroom Mobile because it's currently available only for IOS devices and it's almost enough to make an old Windows die-hard like me wish Santa would bring an Ipad this year.

Almost. I'm still holding out hope that Adobe will follow through with promises to release these apps for Android devices someday. Someday. Old time photographers used to say "Someday my prints will come," and that seems to apply to Adobe apps for Android.

Synchronizing files between desktop and mobile devices is easy enough, but first you need to create a "collection" and a "smart collection" cannot be synchronized. Only dumb collections. Or, perhaps more correctly, standard collections. Once you have created a collection, you'll find an icon left of the collection name and you can sync it. Some examples:

Here are 3 collections that I synchronized from the desktop Lightroom application, pictures from The Wilds on the left, camels from the Columbus Zoo and The Wilds in the center, and photos of my favorite cat, Tangerine, on the right. These are screen captures of Lightroom Mobile on the Ipad.

In essence, Lightroom Mobile reduces those gigantic raw files (10MB to 30MB each, and sometimes even more) so that they can be stored in the cloud and edited on a hand-held device.

You can start with a basic picture of a camel from Lightroom on the Ipad (left) and choose to increase the color saturation, reduce the clarity, drop the contrast a bit, and lower the exposure slightly (right). After making the modifications, you would save the image on the Ipad and it would be synced back to the desktop Lightroom application.

So Lightroom Mobile is even better when it's combined with Creative Cloud, which no longer involves a $50-per-month fee if you need just Lightroom and Photoshop. For $10 per month, you'll have access to those capabilities. Amateur photographers who were put off by thoughts of paying $600 per year generally seem to feel that $120 per year is a fair value for the applications they need. To use Lightroom Mobile, you need at least version 5.4 of Lightroom for Windows or Mac (the current version is 5.7). Version 5.4 was the first that provided the ability to sync photos via Creative Cloud.

The Lightroom Mobile app (free from the Itunes App Store) requires an Apple account, of course, and IOS 7 or later. The app requires nearly 70MB of storage to be installed. After installing it, you'll need to set up the sync process.

Clicking a small plus sign in Lightroom Mobile allows the user to create a new collection. Once you've done that, you can add photos from the Ipad's Camera Roll so that they will be synced back to the desktop. There's also an auto-import feature that will add every new image created on the Ipad to Lightroom Mobile and then synced to the desktop.

The Apps that Tie to Creative Cloud

One of the more amusing new apps is Mix, which is linked to Photoshop. It's an image editor and compositor that moves surprising power to a hand-held device. The compositor function, in particular, which allows users to cut out portions of one image and combine it with another image. Mix also includes content aware fill, shake reduction, and lens corrections. These are processor-intensive functions, so they're actually rendered on Adobe servers and then reported back to the Ipad.

Mix can open complete Photoshop PSD files or just individual layers of a PSD as well as images from the Ipad's camera, photo roll, or other sources. I wasn't able to get it to open a raw file directly from a camera, though. Those images can be exported from Lightroom in PSD format, though.

The Cut Out Photos function acts a lot like Photoshop's Quick Select except that your finger takes the place of a stylus or mouse in selecting parts of the image to include or exclude. Selections are considerably more precise in Photoshop, but Mix does an impressive job. Once you've isolated part of an image to combine with another image, it's possible to rotate, scale, and move it.

I had a photo of a bridge that you may recognize if you've ever visited San Francisco and a penguin from the Columbus Zoo.

What might it look like if I placed the penguin in front of the bridge?

After cutting out the penguin and placing it in front of the bridge, I thought that some minor color changes would help. That's another capability that's built in to Mix.

Here I started with a picture of an office building that's nearby and a photo of a flamingo.

After cutting out the image of the flamingo and placing it in front of the office building, I uploaded the image to Creative Cloud.

Adobe also offers Photoshop Touch, which costs $10. Mix, on the other hand, is free. Mix offers fewer functions than Touch, but it also differs in that the processor-intensive actions don't run on the Ipad as they do in Touch. I found myself wondering if the next version of Mix or the one after that might replace Touch and, if so, whether it will continue to be free.

The other functions that Mix brings to an Ipad are some basic image modification capabilities: Adjusting exposure, contrast, saturation, and clarity, and the ability to apply "looks" to images.

Lens corrections (Upright) and Shake Reduction are also handy features on a mobile device. Upright corrects images that aren't straight. Think of a photo with a horizon line that isn't straight so that it appears the ocean in your otherwise outstanding image of a sunset appears to be flowing downhill. Upright will straighten the image. And if you've created an image that suffers from camera motion blur, Shake Reduction can help. Key term: HELP. If there's unintended camera motion, nothing will make the image perfect, but a judicious application of sharpening and other controls -- all automated by Shake Reduction -- can make the image better than it was.

Connectivity is probably the most significant problem these apps face, even though they do most of the heavy lifting on distant servers. Using your Ipad's data plan for this could prove to be both costly and slow and Wi-Fi speeds vary greatly.

The Other Apps

I didn't use Clip, which is linked to Premiere because I'm not exactly proficient in video production. And although I'm also not a graphic designer, I can see the promise that's inherent in Sketch, Line, and Draw.

Shape is a phenomenal app that creates images that can be imported into Illustrator.

Let's say you have an individual that you'd like to depict as a line drawing in an article. If you're an artist, you could create the line drawing manually with a pencil or a pen. Or you could use Shape to short-circuit the process. If you're an artist, you can use the output from Shape as a starting point, but if you're someone like me who can't draw a straight line with a ruler or a curved line with a French curve, Shape can provide exactly what you need. During the process that uses the Ipad's camera, you can decide how much detail is needed and how large the lines should be.

Or maybe you have a building that needs to be represented in an abstract form. Perhaps the owner of the building would like to use an outline or some part of the building as a logo. Again, the artist could do the job manually or start with the output from Shape

.

If you have an Ipad or an Iphone, you should have these apps!

I'm sure that some folks will complain that you can't do everything with these apps that you can do with the desktop versions of the various applications. So what!? You can do a lot more with these apps than you can if you don't have them. They literally make it possible to perform tasks while sitting on a park bench on a sunny day that previously would have required sitting in front of a desktop computer or, in an earlier day, would not have been possible even in a well equipped darkroom. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and -- even at version 1.0 -- these apps are good candidates for that accolade. I can't wait to see what Adobe comes up with next.
Additional details are available on the Adobe website.

Data Breaches Continue to Accelerate

This has been some year for data breaches and it's understandable for people to come away with the feeling that no information is safe anywhere. There's a difference between data breaches that may expose millions of accounts and what crooks can actually do with the information when they have it.

We hear that user names and passwords have been exposed, but often the exposed passwords are actually hashed versions of the passwords, which makes them hard to use, or hashed and salted versions of the passwords, which makes them much harder to use.

This isn't about what happens to potatoes in a restaurant. Hashing turns a password into a string of characters that can represent the password, but can't easily be worked backward to find the password. Salt refers to random data that is used as an additional input to a one-way function that hashes a password or pass-phrase. The salt is an attempt to defend against dictionary attacks. Salts are randomly generated for each password, the salt and the password are combined and processed with a cryptographic hash function, and the resulting output is stored with the salt in a database.

Far too many breaches have involved data that has not been stored securely.

Between July and September of this year, there were 320 breaches reported worldwide, an increase of nearly 25 percent compared to the same period last year, and more than 183 million customer accounts and data records containing personal or financial information were either stolen or lost.

SafeNet provides a quarterly review of data breaches.

Banks and retail stores were responsible for 73% of the stolen records: Financial services (42%) and retail (31%) took the top spots among all industries in terms of the number of compromised customer accounts and data records. These were followed by breaches involving technology and personal online accounts (20%) such as e-mail, gaming and other cloud-based services. Identity theft also took the top spot among the types of data breaches, accounting for 46% of the total.

Tsion Gonen, chief strategy officer at SafeNet, says that companies should develop comprehensive plans to deal with data breaches so that they will minimize the impact of a breach.

Retail stores have been consistently hit hard with breaches, Gonen says, because criminals want to have access to credit card and banking information for financial gain or to obtain personal information to use for identity theft. So far, customers have been tolerant because they feel that the problems will be rectified by the bank. But, says Gonen, "Once your personal photos or private messages have been accessed and leaked online, there's no fixing that. Those items will be forever in cyberspace for your future employers, friends, and family to access."

Probably the most concerning aspect of the report is the minimal use of basic encryption procedures for online credentials. "While it's not surprising that sophisticated cyber-criminals are continuing to attempt these breaches," Gonen said, "what is surprising is that only 1% of breached records had been encrypted."

The Breach Level Index provides a centralized, global database of data breaches and it calculates their severity based on multiple dimensions, including the type of data and the number of records stolen, the source of the breach, and whether or not the data was encrypted. The severity score allows breaches to be categorized with regard to their overall impact.

The infographics used in this article were provided by SafeNet.

Short Circuits

Home Depot Sees Suits Resulting from Data Breach

More than 40 lawsuits have been filed in the US and Canada as the result of a data breach at Home Depot, a breach that exposed information about 56 million credit cards and debit cards along with 53 million e-mail addresses.

In a regulatory filing this week, Home Depot said it expects additional suits because federal and several state agencies continue to investigate. The company's filing said that the investigations and legal actions will be distractions, but won't have substantial impacts on the business because it has a $100 million insurance policy for breach-related expenses. The policy has a $7.5 million deductible.

Fraudsters had access to Home Depot data for several months, from at least April until September when the company disclosed the break-in. The attackers used a vendor's password to gain access to Home Depot's network and then planted malware throughout the company on Home Depot's point-of-sale terminals.

Home Depot has completed a security upgrade at US stores, but Canadian stores won't see the enhanced security until sometime next year.

Symantec Says US and British Government Spyware is Widely Distributed

Malicious code has been found on research computers, government computers, and business computers, including those used in the telecommunications industry. Security company Symantec says it's been there since 2008 and it was planted -- not by Chinese hackers -- but by US and British government spy agencies.

Symantec calls it "Regin" and released a white paper this week describing what it has learned so far. Apparently the malware is the work of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The NSA and the GCHQ have been linked previously.

Symantec says that it found the malware on computers in 10 countries, most of them in Russia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, but also in places such as Belgium, Austria, and Ireland. Other malware-infected computers are in Mexico, India, and Afghanistan. The report says that it found the malware on computers operated by Belgium's phone company, which is also an Internet service provider. Do you suppose any computers in the United States have this malware on them?

The company was blunt in its analysis: In the world of malware threats, only a few rare examples can truly be considered groundbreaking and almost peerless. What we have seen in Regin is just such a class of malware.

The malware doesn't cause damage, at least not intentionally, but it is used for spying. Symantec says that it can be set up to capture screen images, collect user names and passwords, monitor network traffic, and retrieve files that have been deleted. It could also commandeer the computer's keyboard and mouse.

Symantec says that it's unclear how the victims' computers were attacked. The infection method, researchers say, seems to differ from one system to another. Fake versions of websites have been used as have malware-laced instant messages.

Computers used by academic researchers have been infected as have systems that are used by small and large companies, and individuals. Symantec found evidence of Regin on systems used by energy companies, airlines, telecoms, and even hotels and restaurants.

Gives you a nice warm, fuzzy feeling, doesn't it?

Fire Phone Fire Sale (Part 2)

Amazon's Fire Phone hasn't exactly been a success. More exactly, it has been a disaster. At full price, it didn't sell. Priced at 99 cents (with a 2-year AT&T service contract), it didn't sell. Now Amazon is trying $200 (instead of $500) for an unlocked version. Perhaps they should consider hiring people to carry them away.

The GSM-based phone can be used only in the US on AT&T and T-Mobile networks, but not with Verizon or Sprint.

Those unfortunate few who bought a Fire Phone with a 2 year contract when the phone was released paid $200 for it, the same price that Amazon is asking now for a phone with no contract. And those early buyers have had their phone for about 4 months.

Amazon spent a lot of money on research and development, which pushed the price up. Consumers, though, seemed to be expecting the Fire phone to be the smart phone equivalent of the Fire tablet, a basic model without a lot of frills. Maybe another name would have been better.

Regardless of the price, the phone has received only mediocre reviews and that's being kind.