September 27th, 2004

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Technology
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Adobe Wants to Waste More of My Time

According to Slashdot, print and photography software behemoth Adobe is proposing a new photo format. God help us all. How much of my life am I going to waste updating media and the data on it?

I’ve got digital files that go back about 20 years. Already, I can’t read many of those files without specialized software plug-ins and a lot of text hacking. For example, the oldest file I have is a, uh, essay I wrote when I was ten. It’s entitled ‘Adults’. When I open the Wordstar file in Office XP, the first paragraph looks like this (which, I expect, will b0rk some of your RSS readers):

Adult ar ver differen from children.On reaso i tha th
averag adul doesn’ hav a bi n imaginatio a tha o mos
children.Anothe reaso i tha mos adult ar wise tha
children,though children gain wisdom through adversity.

And I don’t speak Czech. And that’s a file that’s only 20 years old!

Picture this. It’s 2039, and I’m a robust 65-year-old. Feeling nostalgic, I pull out this old hard drive (’Hah,’ I laugh, shaking my head, ‘hard drives. What were we thinking?’) from 2004. First I have to make this thing talk to 2039 technology, which (if today is any reflection) will probably be a nightmare for geeks and impossible for non-geeks. Then I’ve got to get the appopriate software (or whatever we’re calling it in 2039) to convert, say, this photo of a cheetah, to a format that my 5-dimensional, super-duper, ocular-implant file viewer can read. Another daunting task. Say I’m like Roland, and took, I don’t know, 40,000 photos in the first decade of the new millenium. That’s a lot of file conversion.

I’m not trying to be a barrier to innovation and clearer photos, but backward-compatibility for the average consumer is an increasingly-complicated problem that doesn’t receive enough attention. I expect there’s an opportunity to become the category-killer in this space in the coming decade.

Comments: 8 Responses so far

Gradin.com: It's like family, only weirder
September 27th, 2004
11:46 am

A Digitally Revolutionized Legacy

We’re beginning a new era of the “Digitally Revolutionized Legacy,” but it’s not us - Generation X - as first thought.

KevinG
September 27th, 2004
12:25 pm

You kept a wordstar essay from when you were 10? Wow, I can’t imagine what your closet looks like :)

[Reply]

Darren
September 27th, 2004
12:28 pm

Hah. Actually, I’m far more pack-rattish about my digital files than my actual posessions. I try to embrace a Zen-like lack of too much stuff. I often fail.

[Reply]

jenny
September 27th, 2004
6:09 pm

20 years old? You might as well have told us you found a mummy…

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Andrea
September 28th, 2004
9:57 am

Is there a way to open my Commodore 64 and VIC 21 essays?!

[Reply]

Darren
September 28th, 2004
10:03 am

Andrea: Exactly my point–there should be, shouldn’t there?

[Reply]

Derek
October 1st, 2004
11:05 am

What Adobe’s doing here is actually trying to simplify things and reduce the archiving problem. Here’s why.

While TIFF, for example, may be lossless in that it does not degrade images from save to save, it is not the same as a RAW file. And JPEG images use lossy compression, which degrades the image and loses information. Many higher-end digicams therefore offer a RAW file option.

RAW data is that, transferred directly from the camera’s CCD into a file, without any additional processing, sharpening, white-balance adjustments, etc. TIFF files, while not using lossless compression, still involve interpolation and processing.

Some photographers, especially professionals, prefer to use the RAW file and do their own processing in Photoshop, since they have finer control than if they let the camera’s own automated software do it:

photo.net/learn/raw/

Right now, there is no standard RAW file format, so each camera manufacturer has its own way (or sometimes several ways) of saving RAW data in a file, making it necessary for Adobe or other parties to update plugins that let you read them into Photoshop, for example. Adobe’s DNG is an attempt to create a standard RAW file format that all camera manufacturers can use, thus simplifying file editing and long-term archiving.

In a way, it’s similar to what Adobe did with PostScript. Before that page-description language, every program or OS had to have different printer drivers for every printer — WordPerfect had legions of developers working on printer drivers. With a single PostScript standard, printing became a lot easier, and desktop publishing became possible.

This won’t be that much of a revolution, but it’s a good step.

[Reply]

Derek
October 1st, 2004
12:17 pm

Here’s even more useful information and a good overall explanation of DNG, posted from MDJ to Macworld.com yesterday:

macworld.com/news/2004/09/30/adobeformat/

[Reply]

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