Adobe Photoshop Enables Global Photo Shoot in Cyberspace; Real-Time Cyber-Journalism Comes of Age with 24 Hours in Cyberspace

Business Wire, Feb 8, 1996

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 1996--(Nasdaq: ADBE)--On February 8, 1996, the largest real-time, on-line, global photo shoot in history will take place. The 24 Hours in Cyberspace project, a dream which has been months in the planning, will finally become a reality in part because of the advanced capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, the world's leading photo design and production tool, from Adobe Systems Incorporated.

"Adobe Photoshop created the desktop imaging category five years ago and continues to push the envelope of publishing, changing the way people work with images and information," said Tom Melcher, chief operating officer in charge of technology for 24 Hours in Cyberspace. "Now we're seeing the applications developed for the desktop seamlessly transitioning into incredibly powerful, easy-to-use Web tools. No one but Adobe could provide the high-performance, cross-platform electronic publishing tools necessary to make this ambitious undertaking a success."

The 24 Hours in Cyberspace project will showcase thousands of photographs from hundreds of professional and amateur photographers from all over the world. Adobe technologies are pervasive throughout the project, but the real backbone is Adobe Photoshop, which is the industry standard for working with digital images. Adobe Photoshop provides professional designers, graphic artists and photographers around the world with the tools they need for print and on-line publishing. Photoshop also offers a consistent cross-platform solution with versions for Macintosh, Windows and UNIX computing platforms, making it a natural fit for the 24 Hours in Cyberspace real-time event.

"I can't think of any other tool that will allow us to take 80 of the top editors in the world, representing leading publications like TIME, Newsweek and National Geographic, and get them working together fast on mission-critical photo editing," said Melcher.

Mission Control in San Francisco is the physical site where images will be received, edited and posted on the 24 Hours Web site in real-time on February 8, and Adobe Photoshop is a key application for this entire process. Selected for its ease of use and reliability, Adobe Photoshop for Windows will be used by hundreds of professional photographers working on NEC notebook computers in the field to edit and select images, and to prepare them for transmission to Mission Control. Images will then be edited using Photoshop for UNIX running on Sun UltraSPARC and SPARCStations. Because the Photoshop software's interface is identical on all platforms, professionals accustomed to working on the Macintosh or Windows platform can easily move to a UNIX system with minimal effort.

Once the images are received at Mission Control, an elite team of editors will use Adobe Photoshop to perform basic color correction and cropping, save edited photographs as GIF files, and post them to the project's central database. The plug-in architecture of Adobe Photoshop software also allows for tight integration with other third party software used in the project. In particular, the Illustra multimedia content management database, designed to manage all of the content for the project, was easily integrated with Adobe Photoshop by the 24 Hours in Cyberspace team. They quickly wrote an interface for Illustra that automatically launches Photoshop in one step and retrieves the selected image from the database, a key advantage when working under tight deadlines. Once the image has been edited in Photoshop it is seamlessly saved back into the database because of the program's unique, open, plug-in architecture.

The 24 Hours in Cyberspace team has used a full suite of Adobe tools for a variety of applications, including preparing press releases in Adobe PageMaker, creating graphics in Adobe Illustrator, and authoring Web pages in Adobe PageMill. The entire visual design of the 24 Hours Web site was done using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. As the project has been coordinated across platforms on a global scale, Adobe Acrobat has been instrumental in exchanging documents across platforms. It is the only tool which allows all parties to share information, regardless of the application used to create a document, the computer platform, or file format. Once it is saved as an Acrobat file, anyone else can read and work with the document.

Adobe technology will continue to play pivotal role even after the February 8 event. A permanent Web site is expected to be finalized by mid-March, created using Photoshop and Acrobat software. In the fall of this year, the images collected will be published as a hard-copy book and CD-ROM. Both the book and CD-ROM will be created using Adobe tools such as Photoshop, PageMaker and Adobe Illustrator.

Based in Mountain View, Calif., Adobe Systems Incorporated is the world's third largest personal computer software company, with 1995 revenue of $762.3 million. The company develops and supports products to help people express and use information in more imaginative and meaningful ways, across all print and electronic media. Founded in 1982, Adobe helped launch the desktop publishing revolution. Today, the company offers a market-leading line of application software and type products for creating and distributing visually rich communication materials; licenses its industry-standard technologies to major hardware manufacturers, software developers, and service providers; and offers integrated software solutions to businesses of all sizes. For more information, see Adobe's home page at http://www.adobe.com on the World Wide Web. -0-