Viable alternatives to Photoshop.

[Manfred M]

I use it very much the same way you do Colin (I use both Google and Microsoft Skydrive), essentially for document storage, but not for images. So long as I can connect to the net, I can get these important documents from anywhere.

[Glenn NK]

Ultimately, the best current long term archival solution is Prints. Modern inks with lifespans projected in decades will probably out last all the current computer storage and will certainly out last me unless things change dramatically in the next 20 years.

Several years ago for a boring flight, I picked up one of the PC magazines - one of the articles covered the topic of longevity of digital images (from the point of deterioration and obsolescence). The point was that a high quality photo had the best chance of surviving time; better than electronic versions. My immediate reaction was I thought the writer was a bit of his rocker, but further consideration told me that he was right.

As for digital images, perhaps a useful strategy is this:

1) Select a camera manufacturer that has a high chance of long term stability,

2) Don't convert the RAW files into any other format; keep them as RAW,

3) Keep the camera maker's conversion/processing software up to date (from computer to computer) - this can be used to edit/display/print photos at any time in the future.

4) Just before you die, print everything onto good paper stock.

5) When one has completed the above procedure, one has nothing to worry about.

Glenn

[Glenn NK]

For those interested, Google will give you a combined total of 15GB of eMail storage and cloud storage for free.

Something for free - is that like something for nothing? (aka: too good to be true?)

G

[Wayland]

All I have to do then is work out when I'm going to die.

That should be straight forward enough...

[pnodrog]

What happens if your photography is going to make you immortal?

[Colin Southern]

Something for free - is that like something for nothing? (aka: too good to be true?)

G

Nope - that's just Google's business model; they get it out of advertiser's hides mostly.

[Adrian]

Dropbox do a similar thing. I use their 100Gb subscription (beefed up a bit to around 130Gb by various freebies) and it is very handy for ad hoc backup and accessibility across multiple machines on the fly. It is also very useful for data sharing as you can set up sharing permissions on whichever folds you want for people to whom you give the password.

Cloud is not a useful solution for photo library back up unless you are willing to spend a lot or have access to a private cloud solution. For example, it is easy enough to set up a NAS array as a private remote cloud, there is no subscription as long as you have power and broadband connection in your remote backup location.

Adrian

[Colin Southern]

Cloud is not a useful solution for photo library back up unless you are willing to spend a lot or have access to a private cloud solution. For example, it is easy enough to set up a NAS array as a private remote cloud, there is no subscription as long as you have power and broadband connection in your remote backup location.

Adrian

I still find it useful. Case in point - a typical "sunset landscape" might involve 50 to 100 exposures, but only 1 or 2 from that shoot are processed through to final commercial pieces - so a typical shot may only require 100MB of storage for the DNG, PSD (8 bit) and a JPEG - and that's what I store in the cloud. For me, 100 commercial digital assets "insured" for only 10GB is good value.

[Wayland]

What happens if your photography is going to make you immortal?

He He.. I doubt if there's much chance of that happening.

I'm swapping 1TB drives around for my backups so I don't think online storage is going to be much help for me.

I do use a Dropbox account to pass stuff around sometimes though.

[Wayland]

The way masks work in PhotoLine is slightly different and can seem a bit bewildering for someone used to PS but on exploration not as scary as it first appears.

As far as I can see, an adjustment layer is effectively created with a mask in place because its application is based upon a greyscale layer. This layer can be edited directly with brushes, gradients and the like or filled with a selection so that will be familiar to PS users.

In addition, you can add extra masks to this layer which will then interact with the original mask as well, but remain separate so they can still be individually edited... Very useful indeed. To achieve anything like that in PS I used to have to mess around with nested groups which was rather cumbersome.

Another thing that I have just discovered is that you can add further adjustments to the same adjustment layer that will then share the same masks as the original adjustment... Much more efficient and my head is still trying to get around some of the possibilities of that one.

Many adjustments that PS makes destructively by default such as sharpening, blur or noise reduction are normally made on adjustment layers in PL which means they are completely re-editable. PS works around this of course with their "smart filters" system but that feels a bit clumsy by comparison in my opinion.

To use PS smart filters you often needed to create a copy layer which was then fixed. On PhotoLine you can make Virtual copies which continue to refer back to your original so if you change your original those changes are reflected in the virtual copies.

Occasionally I spot some small error, like edge fringing, quite late in the editing process and it can be difficult to address at that stage without losing a lot of the work you have already done. If you are working on a virtual copy, returning to your original file and editing that means the edits are transferred to all the virtual copies made in the same document.

I'm starting to really enjoy using this software.

[John Morton]

Had an interesting email arrive today:

< >

Hello,

You may have recently received an email with the subject line of "new photoshop". This message appears to have been sent via our forum system without authorization and we are actively working to determine what occurred to avoid additional exploitation of our forum software and to prevent any additional inconvenience you, our valued forum members. Please ignore the email and do not attempt to click on the enclosed link. The only legitimate source to download Adobe software products is directly via the adobe.com website.

Sincerely,

Paul Wilder
Director of Information Technology
Kelby Media Group

> <

Yes I did indeed receive the earlier email; but since I am not interested in subscribing to Adobe Photoshop's new Creative Cloud business model, I simply deleted it.

This is, however and to my mind, a pretty telling example of my original point within this thread: that I do not want to connect my photo editing computer to the internet and, that being forced to do so by Adobe compromises my system security thus putting all of my digital images at potential risk.

I don't know what that software download would have done; but, if it could somehow manage to compromise Adobe's Creative Cloud system, then it could potentially put all Creative Cloud users at risk.

That's exactly what I intend to avoid by divesting from Adobe products and their demands that users embrace their Creative Cloud system.

[John Morton]

Had an interesting email arrive today:

< >

Hello,

You may have recently received an email with the subject line of "new photoshop". This message appears to have been sent via our forum system without authorization and we are actively working to determine what occurred to avoid additional exploitation of our forum software and to prevent any additional inconvenience you, our valued forum members. Please ignore the email and do not attempt to click on the enclosed link. The only legitimate source to download Adobe software products is directly via the adobe.com website.

Sincerely,

Paul Wilder
Director of Information Technology
Kelby Media Group

> <

Yes I did indeed receive the earlier email; but since I am not interested in subscribing to Adobe Photoshop's new Creative Cloud business model, I simply deleted it.

This is, however and to my mind, a pretty telling example of my original point within this thread: that I do not want to connect my photo editing computer to the internet and, that being forced to do so by Adobe compromises my system security thus putting all of my digital images at potential risk.

I don't know what that software download would have done; but, if it could somehow manage to compromise Adobe's Creative Cloud system, then it could potentially put all Creative Cloud users at risk.

That's exactly what I intend to avoid by divesting from Adobe products and their demands that users embrace their Creative Cloud system.

[Wayland]

Perhaps it causes your system to double post..

How did you get on with your trial of PL John?

[revi]

Had an interesting email arrive today:

< >

Hello,

You may have recently received an email with the subject line of "new photoshop". This message appears to have been sent via our forum system without authorization and we are actively working to determine what occurred to avoid additional exploitation of our forum software and to prevent any additional inconvenience you, our valued forum members. Please ignore the email and do not attempt to click on the enclosed link. The only legitimate source to download Adobe software products is directly via the adobe.com website.

Sincerely,

Paul Wilder
Director of Information Technology
Kelby Media Group

> <

Yes I did indeed receive the earlier email; but since I am not interested in subscribing to Adobe Photoshop's new Creative Cloud business model, I simply deleted it.

This is, however and to my mind, a pretty telling example of my original point within this thread: that I do not want to connect my photo editing computer to the internet and, that being forced to do so by Adobe compromises my system security thus putting all of my digital images at potential risk.

I don't know what that software download would have done; but, if it could somehow manage to compromise Adobe's Creative Cloud system, then it could potentially put all Creative Cloud users at risk.

That's exactly what I intend to avoid by divesting from Adobe products and their demands that users embrace their Creative Cloud system.

From the information you give, nothing indicates that Adobe's Creative Cloud system was compromised, 'only' the forum server/software from Kelby Media Group.

And just getting an email like that could have been as simple as a cracker guessing the password of one of the members (seen that happen a few times, some still insist on using very simple passwords), and all that gives them is an apparently legitimate access to a forum account, with possibility to send emails to other members (and without them getting access to the email addresses in most cases). Neither your computer, nor the forum server were invaded in such a scenario, let alone Adobe's cloud servers...

I'm not saying that the software that was proposed in the link couldn't open up your computer to crackers (good chance there is something fishy with it), but compromising Adobe's servers is another kettle of fish. And again, in what you show us, there's no reason to believe Adobe was even involved (afaik, Kelby Media Group is not part of Adobe).

[John Morton]

Hi, Remco;

I did not say, nor mean to imply, that Adobe was in any way shape or form involved; I was just reiterating my initial point (made quite some time ago) that there are legitimate reasons why people do not want to be connected to the Adobe Creative Cloud or, in fact, to the Internet at all when it comes to their photo editing and archiving system.

Sorry, Wayland, haven't had a chance yet to try PhotoLine although I certainly intend to! I'm in the process of shifting from small town Ontario (Canada) to Manhattan, with a house on the market and a lot of stuff to pack up; so photo editing has taken a bit of a back seat in my life for a while...

[Wayland]

Fair call John. Hope the move goes well.

[John Morton]

So, how is that new Adobe subscription model working out for everyone?

Yeah, that's about what I thought. Hate to say "I told you so", but...

BOSTON (Reuters) - "Adobe Systems Inc said on Thursday it was the victim of sophisticated cyber attacks on its networks by hackers who accessed data belonging to millions of customers along with the source code to some of its popular software titles.

"Chief Security Officer Brad Arkin said in a statement that the company believes the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords and removed data relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers. That information includes customer names, encrypted payment card numbers, expiration dates and information relating to orders, he said.
He said they also accessed the source code for several Adobe software titles including Acrobat, ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder.

"KrebsOnSecurity, a cyber security news site, reported earlier on Thursday that a week ago it found what appeared to be a massive trove of Adobe's source code on the server of hackers believed to be responsible for breaches at three major U.S. data providers.

"It said it discovered the code while conducting an investigation into breaches at Dun & Bradstreet Corp, Altegrity Inc's Kroll Background America Inc and Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis Inc. Those attacks were disclosed on September 25."

Hey, at least somebody noticed. Eventually.

[revi]

(...)

"Chief Security Officer Brad Arkin said in a statement that the company believes the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords and removed data relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers. That information includes customer names, encrypted payment card numbers, expiration dates and information relating to orders, he said.
He said they also accessed the source code for several Adobe software titles including Acrobat, ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder.
(...)

Note the bolded "encrypted": good chance the encryption used is a one-way encryption, i.e. you can't retrieve the original value from the encrypted value (that is the case for unix passwords, even on the least sophisticated systems). So, not good, but not a total disaster either.

[Wayland]

Just a heads up about PhotoLine.

Version 18 has now been released and from what I have seen so far it looks like a good upgrade.

[Ady]

So, how is that new Adobe subscription model working out for everyone?

Absolutely fine thanks.

Yeah, that's about what I thought. Hate to say "I told you so", but...

To be fair/honest no it's not good news, but if I refused to buy goods or services from any company that had suffered a similar security breach then I wouldn't be doing business with anyone who was offering anything of value to me.

Cheers,
Ady