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Sci Tech
Network publishing: 'Third wave' of digital imaging
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To manipulate text and pictures created by a variety of information appliances and present it seamlessly on the Web — that is the current challenge before the imaging industry. Anand Parthasarathy examines the strides made in content cre ation in the 20 years since DTP was born.
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THE FIRST Wave was DTP — Desk Top Publishing. Remember the mid 1980s? Apple Macintosh PC users raved about a dinky little software tool, called `Aldus PageMaker', which allowed them to do wonderful things: create entire pages with a smooth mix of words and pictures — dozens of font choices and layout options: headlines, flowing text over columns, or around irregular pictures.... all in a WYSIWYG — `what you see is what you get' — format, which meant everything you designed on the monitor came out identically from the printer. In next to no time, a DOS-compatible edition of PageMaker was released for IBM PC users, and the publishing business was transformed forever.
The Second Wave was conventional Web Publishing, which came a decade later, when the World Wide Web became the newest medium to publish your ideas and carry them to a massive world viewership. HTML — Hyper Text Markup Language — became the lingua franca of the new electronic canvas, allowing anyone who could afford to own a Web page to populate it with text and pictures. But this was still a Web in its infancy — and one had to go through multiple access layers — Service Providers, Web page creators, Server owners...
It was too complicated — and the consumer's irritated push inevitably came to shove: as a new millennium was born, so was the Third Wave of electronic publishing: the reliable creation, management and delivery of visually rich, personalized content, anywhere, any time, on any device. Content can be authored just once, then presented in different `avatars' for Web page, printer, mobile phone, handheld `Pocket PC' — or any other Internet appliance. The authors can't be bothered to customize the content for each device — that's the job of software today. And that's the challenge before the digital imaging industry. You've come a long way Aldus!
Correction: Aldus died somewhere on the road, a casualty of the high attrition rate on the Information Superhighway. Its path-breaking DTP package was born again as `Adobe PageMaker', given a new lease of life by a company that has made itself the digital `dada' of image creation, transport and publishing, with a bouquet of tools for all tastes from low-tech dummy to top-end professional.
Last month, saw the global release of the latest edition of the DTP package — Adobe PageMaker 7.0. Since the package graduated from the days when output was exported only to the print medium, to its new role as an electronic publisher, PM7 allows you to reuse the content in other applications. The new PM also makes it easy to import graphics created using other Adobe products like Illustrator or Photoshop. Text can be typed directly in PM or imported and resized. Import text filters from a variety of word processors including the ubiquitous WordStar was long, a useful feature of PM. But even after it was acquired by Adobe, it remained irritatingly unfriendly to pictures saved in Photoshop or MS Paint formats. That lacuna has now been corrected — and we have to thank the nameless engineers in Adobe's India Development Centre for this. PM7 is an upgrade that was totally achieved by the company's India operation.
There is a built-in export tool which facilitates export as a PDF file. The Photoshop Document Format is now a defacto standard for electronic document distribution, a format which preserves the fonts and print styles, the graphics and the colours of the source document exactly as it was created, regardless of the application and the platform used to create it. Any one with an Adobe Acrobat Reader (freely downloadable from adobe.com) can view, save, share or print the document in a format identical to that of the sender. The latest version is Acrobat 5.0 ( you have to buy the software only if you want to create a PDF document, not to read it) and it allows the document to be saved as a `rich text' which means you can then reformat and use it in other applications. It is also `tagged' which means its visual integrity is not lost, even if it is read on `lite', platforms like hand-held computers.
The latest application of the Acrobat format is the e-book and many publishers of electronically transmitted books, have adopted this as the standard to carry their products.
New `Photoshop' released
Today, marks the India launch of Adobe Photoshop 7.0 the latest version of the leading professional image editing application, and a favourite with digital imaging professionals because it is fully compatible with both the Windows and the Apple Mac OS operating systems. New features include a File Browser that allows the user to inspect images on hard disk, floppy or CD drives in thumbnail form before opening them. Files can be made Web-compatible by removing some colours and making the web elements transparent; and can be saved in the new industry standard format, XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform). Another extension, WBMP, allows the pictures to be displayed on wireless devices. A detailed review of Photoshop 7 will appear in these columns, once The Hindu evaluates the full product.
In the high end of image editing, Photoshop is often the preferred package — but what about the rest of us? We have affordable access today to multiple digital image sources: we can scan photographs on a Rs 4500 scanner; capture them with a Rs 4000 webcam or a Rs 10,000 digital camera; create them with tools that come free with the Windows operating system — like Paint — or just download them from the millions of images that are available on the Web, for copyright-free use. Hitherto the middle ground of image editors was occupied by excellent and more affordable products like Jasc `Paintshop Pro', `Picture It!' or Ulead `PhotoImpact' (Apple users manage quite well with the free `iPhoto' that comes with the newer iMac machines). A few weeks ago, Adobe unveiled a `lite' version of Photoshop called `Photoshop Elements' that seems tailored to compete in this space, not quite the `made for dummies' approach of the free or built-in image editors, but less intimidating that the professional packages.
Having used Photoshop versions 1 to 6, off and on, over the years, I can appreciate some of the friendly features of `Elements.', after a few weeks of toying with the packageSize-wise it is almost as bulky as the full Photoshop — requiring about 150 MB of disk space .
The look and feel of the opening menu will also be reassuringly similar — but some things are new:
-A Quickstart screen, allows you to quickly open a file, create a new file, acquire an image from scanner or digital camera.
-The handy File Browser of the new Photoshop 7.0 is also available here.
-The handiest tool is the `Filters' browser which provides an illustrated drop-down menu of over 90 special effects. You can drag and drop any one of them to the image you are editing and see the effect.
If you don't like it you can cancel it with a single click. A great saving of time over the older Photoshop versions.
-Any one who has tried to scan the pages of a book will know that it is virtually impossible to avoid a slight tilt in the captured image.It needs a lot of careful cropping or rotating to get the final picture right.
I was therefore thrilled to see the `Straighten and Crop' tool that is available with the `rotate' command, which does the chore for you with one click.
-The other great time saver is the new `Recipes' palette, which allows you to sit back and enjoy a sip of coffee while `Elements' performs multi-step tasks.
I gave a command to add a shadow to a photo, and the software zipped through half a dozen tasks each of which would have taken me a few mouse clicks earlier — resize the canvas, add gray and black shadow, send new layer to the back, merge and flatten, crop and save.
-A new tool called Red Eye brush, helps you change the red spot in the eye that comes when you take photos by flash. You can replace by any colour in the palette.
heaper than coloured contact lenses! So what have they dropped from the original Photoshop?
The CMYK colour saving option is one tool missing. So is Photoshop's high end colour correction support.
But who needs them other than professional graphics artists working with colour offset printing machines?
For the rest of us,ments is a great way to have your imaging cake and eat it too (at something like a fifth of the price)!
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