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Video: From its origins to a harrowing kidnapping, the story of Adobe

13 Oct

The YouTube channel ColdFusion published an in-depth look at the history of Adobe. In the photo and video industry, Adobe is a giant. While some people may not be in favor of the company’s more recent push toward a subscription model, nearly everyone can agree that Adobe and its software has had a massive influence.

Tracing Adobe’s history requires going back all the way to 1982 when John Warnock and Charles Geschke founded the company in Warnock’s garage. How did the pair decide on the name Adobe? There was a creek behind the Warnock home called Adobe. And the company’s first logo? It was designed by John Warnock’s wife, Marva Warnock, a graphic designer and illustrator.

Adobe co-founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke

Warnock and Geschke had worked together at Xerox Parc and developed a printing code, PostScript. The duo had pitched their development to Xerox but the higher-ups weren’t interested. After being rebuked, Warnock and Geschke left the company to found Adobe. It wasn’t long before others took notice of Adobe, including Steve Jobs, who the very same year Adobe was founded tried to buy the company for $ 5M USD. Warnock and Geschke refused to sell outright but did eventually sell Jobs a 19% share of the company at five times its valuation, making Adobe the first company in the history of Silicon Valley to turn a profit in its first year.

With a license in hand for PostScript, Apple’s foray into laser printing changed publishing forever, allowing people and businesses to print and publish content without the use of expensive photo typesetters. As Dagogo Altraide states in his video below, the idea that you could purchase a Macintosh computer and Apple LaserWriter printer, underpinned by Adobe’s PostScript coding, and be able to publish completely changed the industry.

Adobe’s first few years went very well, and the company became publicly traded on the NASDAQ index in 1986. The Adobe more familiar to us today started to take shape in 1987 with the launch of the vector-based drawing program, Adobe Illustrator, which is still used today. Adobe Photoshop, on the other hand, was not developed in-house at Adobe. Thomas Knoll began working on a grayscale image editor while a PhD student in Michigan. Upon advice from his brother, John, Thomas took a sabbatical from his post-graduate studies to turn his project into a fully-fledged image editing program.

As Thomas continued his work on the program, John gave demonstrations in Silicon Valley, including to Adobe and Apple. Adobe purchased the license to distribute the software in late 1988. Adobe Photoshop was released exclusively on the Macintosh in January of 1990 with a lifetime license and price of $ 895. This price may seem steep, but digital photo retouching services cost upwards of $ 300 an hour at the time.

Thomas Knoll showing off Adobe Photoshop on a Macintosh computer

In the video above, Altraide recaps an incident in 1992 in which Charles Geschke was held at gunpoint and kidnapped as he exited his vehicle in Adobe’s parking lot. The pair of kidnappers held Geschke for a $ 650,000 ransom and told his wife, Nan, that Charles would be killed and dismembered if she didn’t follow their instructions. After four days in captivity and with the help of the FBI, Charles was rescued, and his captors were arrested and eventually sentenced to life sentences.

Adobe’s business moved forward and the next year, Photoshop was ported to Microsoft Windows, beginning a rapid expansion in Adobe’s software offerings and influence. To learn what happened next and find out more about Adobe’s torrid pace of acquisitions and developments in the decades since watch ColdFusion’s full video above. For more from ColdFusion, click here.

(Via Fstoppers)

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Harrowing image from Venezuela named 2018 World Press Photo of the Year (NSFW)

13 Apr

Finalists for 2018 World Press Photo of the Year were announced in February; now, a winning photo has been selected. Ronaldo Schemidt’s image titled ‘Venezuela Crisis’ takes the top prize, chosen from six semi-finalists and 73,044 total contest entries.

The image, displayed below, is disturbing and may not be suitable for children or viewing in the workplace. It depicts José Victor Salazar Balza on fire during a violent clash between police and protestors. He survived with first- and second-degree burns.

Title: Venezuela Crisis
© Ronaldo Schemidt, Agence France-Presse

José Víctor Salazar Balza (28) catches fire amid violent clashes with riot police during a protest against President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas, Venezuela.

Schemidt’s image won first prize in the Spot News, Singles category. All winning images can be seen at the World Press Photo website.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Industrial Scars: Aerial Photos of Humankind’s Harrowing Impact on Earth

30 May

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Photography & Video. ]

In strikingly well-composed, vividly colored scenes resembling abstract paintings, J. Henry Fair’s aerial photographs of toxic waste and industrial activity on Earth give us an uncomfortable look at the cost of human progress. In fact, the images seem unreal: how could the damage caused by industrial pollution be so strangely beautiful? Tar sands, mountaintop removal mining, fertilizer runoff, coal ash, factory farming and devastating oil spills aren’t exactly the stuff that stunning art is usually made of, but Fair is no ordinary artist, forcing us to face the duality of what we’ve created.

Shooting these scenes from the air gives us a perspective we don’t normally have, as if we’re flying over them in person, reckoning with the damage that comes with our consumption of fossil fuels, large-scale farmed meat, chemicals and other commodities that do significant harm to the environment in their sourcing and manufacturing.

Coal combustion waste may not be pretty, but its splashes of rust and bronze against its black and white surroundings are undeniably striking. Some heavy metals, like ‘red mud’ bauxite waste from aluminum production, are almost floral in their contrast to green. Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill is mesmerizing in its flowing red ribbons against the cobalt blue of the Gulf of Mexico waters. Phospho-gypsum fertilizer waste is a brilliant blue-green, like a gemstone; it contains both uranium and radium, piled dangerously close to drinking water aquifers.

“What interests me about this series is its essential irony and hope,” he says. “The thinking person participating in the modern world understands that all of us are living unsustainably, the impending consequences on our economy are real and significant. But in fact, with a little effort and luck, these limitations could be overcome, ensuring a secure future. And so we must hope, as we are all invested. My goal is to produce beautiful images that stimulate an aesthetic response, and thus dialog. If the pictures are not beautiful, the viewer will not stop to consider them.”

These images and many more are available in the form of a hardcover book set to be released on July 6th, ‘Industrial Scars: The Hidden Costs of Consumption.’