October 2009 Archives

By Marco Kramer on Smashing Magazine

A lot of designers think CMYK is the way to go when designing for print. We will, of course, always use CMYK-based ink, but this does not mean you have to work with CMYK files. You can work with RGB images to perfectly optimize your print colors and save a great deal of time in the process.

1. Use RGB Color Mode For Photoshop Images

For several of the following tips to work, you will have to create and save all of your Photoshop images and artwork in RGB color mode. If you're a veteran designer, you probably think this goes against what you've been taught, which is to use CMYK color mode. Well, technology has come a long way, and nowadays RGB color mode is better because it produces a wider range of colors and allows you to use one image for several media, including print and Web.

Think of it this way: RGB colors (red, green, and blue) are created with light. That's why your computer monitor and TV use RGB colors to produce its fantastic range of colors. CMYK colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and key, or black), on the other hand, are created by putting ink to paper. "Ink-on-paper colors" will never be as bright or saturated as the colors on your computer screen or TV, no matter how much ink you add to the paper. So, to get the widest range of colors possible, you need to save all of your Photoshop files in RGB color mode. Most of the time, you won't even have to think about it, because almost every photographer will supply you with RGB images. All you have to do is keep them in that mode.


2. Specify The Right Color Settings

To successfully use an RGB image in Adobe InDesign, you first need to specify the appropriate color settings. Fortunately, Adobe has made it really easy for you to specify the right settings and quickly apply them across its Creative Suite. This is where Adobe Bridge comes in.

To specify a color setting in Adobe Bridge, choose Edit - Creative Suite Color Settings and then select your region: either "North America Prepress 2," "Europe Prepress 2" or "Japan Prepress 2." If your region isn't displayed in the dialog box, select "Show Expanded List Of Color Settings Files" at the bottom of the dialog box. After clicking "Apply," the setting you have specified will be applied to Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat.

I found this fascinating quote today:

On october 16, 2009, six trade associations representing more than 50,000 photographers as well as 800 agencies and archives across UK, Europe and North America, gathered to pursue an open dialogue.ChrisH, Media Management and Licensing, Oct 2009

You should read the whole article.

By Ping Li, in Gigaom.com

While when it comes to cloud computing, no one has entirely sorted out what's hype and what isn't, nor exactly how it will be used by the enterprise, what is becoming increasingly clear is that Big Data is the future of IT. To that end, tackling Big Data will determine the winners and losers in the next wave of cloud computing innovation.

Data is everywhere (be it from users, applications or machines) and as we get propelled into the "Exabyte Era" (PDF), is growing exponentially; no vertical or industry is being spared. The result is that IT organizations everywhere are being forced to grapple with storing, managing and extracting value from every piece of it -- as cheaply as possible. And so the race to cloud computing has begun.

This isn't the first time IT architectures have been reinvented in order to remain competitive. The shift from mainframe to client-server was fueled by disruptive innovation in computing horsepower that enabled distributed microprocessing environments. The subsequent shift to web applications/web services during the last decade was enabled by the open networking of applications and services through the Internet buildout. While cloud computing will leverage these prior waves of technology -- computing and networking -- it will also embrace deep innovations in storage/data management to tackle Big Data.

Fan of Canon products? Here is a review of the newest EOS-1D digital camera by Rachel King on ZDNet. SeeFile supports RAW files, including CR2 files from Canon's digital cameras.

Excerpt of the review:

Canon has just announced its newest EOS-1D series model: the Mark IV Digital SLR Camera. The two prime highlights of this 16.1-megapixel CMOS sensor camera are improved its AF system and full HD video capability.

By Jennifer Martinez in gigaom.com

Our bandwidth and the speeds at which we access the web will grow fivefold over the next few years thanks to advances in wired and wireless technology. Not only are we connecting faster, but we're also doing it from more places thanks to mobile broadband. These two things combined are creating a rush of data that will be generated and consumed. At a GigaOM Bunker Series event held today in San Francisco, a group of technologists explored how the next generation of the web will use location, sensors built into devices such as our mobile phones and other context clues to "give the Internet a body."

By Larry Dignan from Zdnet blog

Content management software vendors are pondering social networking features and are expected to collaborate or acquire so-called white label networks to make their enterprise apps more social.

That's one of the takeaways from Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester.

Owyang's working theory is that the big enterprise content management software (CMS) vendors-EMC's Documentum, Interwoven, Vignette, Stellent etc-are leaving money on the table by not offering social networking features. Meanwhile, there are more than 90 companies offering white label social networking infrastructure branded as something else (see Jeremy's roster of players). At some point these two categories of vendors will meet:

With the demand and buzz for social network features, or community offerings, these established CMS/Portal vendors recognize the demand, and see opportunity dollars falling through the cracks. I've started conversations with several of the big players to gauge where they are headed. Of course, the conversations don't end up on this blog (unless they give me permission, or publish first) but it's quite obvious where things are headed.

In other words, social networking will become a generic enterprise feature at some point. These CMS players can develop their own community suites (and hire staff that understands the social types), acquire white label networks or just hang back.

Read full article.

Original post by Ryan Naraine on ZDnet

Adobe has confirmed a critical, unpatched vulnerability in its PDF Reader/Acrobat software is being exploited by malicious attackers.

The vulnerability affects Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1.3 and earlier versions on Windows, Macintosh and UNIX.  Adobe described the in-the wild attacks as limited and targeted, suggesting PDF documents rigged with exploits are being attached to e-mails and sent to business targets.

Read full article

I often find it hard to describe to my friends or general public what exactly is digital asset management. Read this article from digitalassetmanagement posted by  Henrik de Gyor that will help you to understand or to explain DAM.

Excerpt of article:

Before I had a simple explanation meant for the average person, I also confused lots of people (which is unfortunately really easy to do nowadays). It took me a while to come up with this simple analogy. Here is how my DAM elevator pitch often goes whether I am speaking with an executive or someone I just met:

1. An inquiring individual asks the question, "What do you do?"
2. I reply,"I am a Digital Asset Manager. I work on Digital Asset Management."
3. The inquiring individual often says "What is that?"
4. I say "Are you familiar with the  iPod?"
5. They often say "Yes," unless they admit living in a cave since 2001.
6. Whether that is the case or not, I quickly show them an  iPod, scroll through its contents as I explain that "while this is meant for individual consumption of media (such as music, video, photos), I manage similar kinds of media (generally called assets). The big difference is we can share assets across an entire organization legally using a set of more sophisticated tools with a series of workflows, commonly referred to as DAM. This helps the organization save money by being able to search, find, use, reuse or repurpose what we already have in the DAM legally." I show the how assets can be found using various information called metadata.

Read full article

We're now starting to see the emergence of a more perplexing concept called "private clouds." If the benefit of the cloud is primarily loosely coupled, location-independent virtualized services (implemented in a service-oriented manner, of course), and we're doing this with the intent of reducing IT expenditures, then is there any value in a new concept called private clouds? How does the addition of this word "private" add any value to the sort of service-oriented cloud computing that we've been now talking about for a handful of years? Is this a valuable term, or mere marketing spin?

Many organisations have deployed File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers to transfer large files around networks and across the Internet. But, FTP was designed when security was much less of a concern. As a result, the same username and password is often shared among multiple users, representing a potential and significant security breach. Additionally, simple FTP cannot provide audit trails which meet today's compliance and audit legislation. Enhanced FTP systems (such as SFTP, FTPS and EFTP) offer genuine improvements over conventional FTP, but require specialist programs to be installed on users' desktops -- increasing overheads for IT departments and inconvenience for users. Data management over FTP can also be problematic: once files are uploaded into FTP directories they need to be deleted manually, so they are rarely removed. The result is sets of directories containing hundreds of files, with little information about when they should be deleted. This creates a valuable digital asset which is left unprotected for extended periods and is accessed easily by unauthorised users.