Articles about Adobe

CyberLink has unveiled the latest version of its flagship video creation tool, PowerDirector 12, and image editor, PhotoDirector 5. And these are major updates, too, with some particularly interesting high-end additions.

Multicam editing isn’t something you’d expect to find in a consumer video editor, for instance. But PowerDirector 12′s new MultiCam designer might just change all that with its ability to easily combine, organize and edit footage of the same event from up to four cameras.

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Adobe caused a fair amount of controversy over forcing users into subscription services, while Microsoft Office continues to provide an option to its customers. Now Adobe rolls out its latest Creative Cloud model, in the form of Windows 8 apps -- yes, you still need to pay a subscription fee.

The new rollout comes with several options, including the flagship Premiere Pro CC, which packs in new features for video editors, such as enhanced GPU support, redesigned timeline with new shortcuts and new selective paste attributes, new closed captioning capabilities and additional codec options.

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Veteran US developer Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 for Windows and Mac. Photoshop Lightroom is aimed at improving digital photographs, and version 5 debuts some major new features, including an Advanced Healing Brush for removing unwanted elements from photos.

Other new features include Upright, a smart straightening tool, Radial Gradient, smart previews, video slideshows and the promise of better photo book creation.

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I use Adobe Reader sparingly on any platform. Alternatives abound and mostly those are faster and more secure. Still, the company persists and owns market share for PDF, among other things. That is why, today, when Adobe announces a Reader app for Windows Phone, customers take notice.

"Adobe Systems, which invented the PDF, this morning published its official PDF document reader for Windows Phone 8", says Microsoft's Michael Stroh.

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Not content with free versions of its cut-down photo editing software for iOS and Android, Adobe has released Photoshop Express for Windows 8 and RT. As this is available free of charge, it should come as little surprise that the app does not afford users access to an unfettered range of professional level image editing tools, but for quick and dirty tweaks and fixes, there are plenty of options.

Taken a wonky photo? Getting things straightened up takes just a couple of taps and swipes. There are also tools for removing red eye, adjusting color levels and tweaking shadows and highlights. If you don’t feel like doing the hard work yourself, you can always turn to the auto-fix option to help take care of common issues in an instant.

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Tomorrow is what is commonly known as Patch Tuesday in the lands of Microsoft and Adobe. It's the time of the month when the two software giants attempt to fix the bugs and security holes in their software by issuing a series of updates that are intended to benefit users. The practice of waiting to issue these updates is debatable, especially when exploits are available in the wild.

These updates, at least in the case of Microsoft, can also cause as much harm as good. Given that possibility, security company GFI issued an advisory in advance of the upcoming patches. "In light of the reboot loop problems resulting from the Microsoft patches issued in April, businesses need to have the ability to test patches, or have a trusted third-party test them, before deploying on corporate networks and PCs, in order to minimize potential downtime caused by a faulty patch"  says Cristian Florian, product manager at GFI Software.

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Yesterday I wrote about Adobe's latest security nightmare, this time involving web development environment ColdFusion. I also stressed that while aware of the problem, the company didn't plan a fix until May 14, during its next monthly patch release. For the Washington state court, this is not soon enough.

A ColdFusion vulnerability exposed 160,000 Social Security numbers and the driver’s license numbers and names of a million people. Before hitting the panic button, realize that if you have had no legal issues then you are likely safe.

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I feel as if I can write an "Adobe security flaw of the week" column. The company seems to be a target for every hacker on earth, with Flash and Reader leading the way. Last week Reader was under attack. Now this week brings a new security flaw, and also a new (or old) target in the form of ColdFusion, the Adobe web application development tool.

The developer has issued a security advisory letting customers know that some are vulnerable to this latest flaw. ColdFusion users who have restricted public access to the CFIDE/administrator, CFIDE/adminapi and CFIDE/gettingstarted directories are safe. However, those who have not taken these steps are vulnerable.

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No one rightly can accuse Adobe of playing the ostrich, digging in and pretending the cloud isn't changing the market for desktop software. The developer of popular publishing tools like InDesign and Photoshop takes huge risks that will either make or break future revenue. A year ago, Adobe unveiled the Creative Cloud subscription service. Today, in Los Angeles, the company rebranded CS suite as CC and moved all future features, updates and versions to the cloud subscription service. You want new Photoshop, Adobe will take your money monthly, baby.

I cannot understate the risk taken here, as Adobe delivers double-whammy to customers. Changing an iconic brand is trouble enough -- how people pay and what for, even more so. But the CC (for Creative Cloud) also demarks change, break from the old model for the new. With risks come rewards.

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When you produce two wildly popular platforms like Flash and Reader then you can expect to be targeted by those who wish to exploit them for gain. Such is the case for Adobe, the developer behind both applications. The company is a constant target for security exploits and malware, with the vast majority of "update Flash" pop-ups on the web being fakes that lead unsuspecting customers to a bad end.

The most recent is a flaw in Reader, discovered by McAfee researcher Haifei Li. To be fair to Adobe, this one is much less of a problem than some previously discovered. Li writes that "we successfully identified that the [PDF] samples are exploiting an unpatched security issue in every version of Adobe Reader including the latest 'sandboxed' Reader XI (11.0.2)".

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Adobe has announced the first public beta of Photoshop Lightroom 5. And while a first look suggests this isn’t the most major of upgrades, there are still some worthwhile improvements to be found.

A new one-click Upright tool can analyse your images and detect tilted lines, for instance. You can choose a correction method, but otherwise the program will straighten images all on its own.

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Adobe has refreshed its cross-platform web media playback and runtime tools with the release of Adobe Flash Player for Other Browsers 11.7, Adobe Flash Player for Internet Explorer 11.7 and Adobe AIR 3.7.0.

There’s only one notable change to report in this first stable release of Flash Player 11.7: enhancements to the sandboxing features that allow it to better address application launches in protected mode.

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Seventeenth in a series. Love triangles were commonplace during the early days of the PC. Adobe, Apple and Microsoft engaged in such a relationship during the 1980s, and allegiances shifted -- oh did they. This installment of Robert X. Cringely's 1991 classic Accidental Empires shows how important is controlling a standard and getting others to adopt it.

Of the 5 billion people in the world, there are only four who I’m pretty sure have stayed consistently on the good side of Steve Jobs. Three of them -- Bill Atkinson, Rich Page, and Bud Tribble -- all worked with Jobs at Apple Computer. Atkinson and Tribble are code gods, and Page is a hardware god. Page and Tribble left Apple with Jobs in 1985 to found NeXT Inc., their follow-on computer company, where they remain in charge of hardware and software development, respectively.

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Are you sitting down? I know this will come as a shock, and I want to prepare you. Adobe Flash is the source of a new attack against PCs. Honestly, in this case it really is not Adobe's fault (unlike some other past cases), but the software is still the vehicle used in this drive-by. Microsoft reports that Trojan:Win32/Preflayer is in the wild and changes the home page for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Yandex.

"These sites appear to be a type of search engine, but there are pop-up advertisements displayed on the pages, and there was an instance where I was redirected to a different page not of my choosing", Jonathan San Jose, Microsoft antivirus researcher, says.

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Back in February Adobe announced plans to kill the storage portion of its seemingly popular Photoshop.com web service and migrating users' content to Adobe Revel. The move seems painless on the surface -- all of your images will be exported to Revel automatically. Except, that is not entirely the case.

In fact, all of the JPEG images will be moved. Only. Other formats, including video, PSD, RAW, ACR, PNG, TIFF, must be archived by the customer or they will be lost. Those file formats are not yet supported.

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