What’s Wrong With Adobe?

I’ll be honest: I’ve never felt comfortable using Adobe software. Too many of their products strike me as being poorly designed and/or buggy. For example, I stopped using PhotoShop Elements after later versions got even worse than earlier versions, which were bad enough.

But recently, I found myself trying another of Adobe’s ideas, the DNG format used for digital images. In principle, the format is a good idea – a universal format for digital negatives. The problem with the usual alternative format – the RAW format – is that it is not standardised between vendors. If you go and read Adobe’s web page on the DNG format, it all sounds wonderful. Alas, this is Adobe talking, so in practice, things are not quite what they seem.

For example, in order to be able to see thumbnails of image files in DNG format on my Windows system, I need to download and install a codec to make this possible. OK, Adobe has one available. Wonderful. So I go to get it. Er, but what’s this? It is a Release Candidate? So in other words, it’s not even version 1.0 of a supported codec? And the date of this release candidate is what: 13 May 2008? That’s 16 months ago, you bunch of wankers. And, to add insult to injury, there’s only a 32-bit version of the codec available. If you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows, you’re pretty much screwed.

Well, since I am still running in 32-bits, I downloaded and installed the codec. And, it runs like a dog. It is horrendously slow, and occasionally crashes. A typical Adobe experience for me, it would seem.

I don’t think I’ll be adopting the DNG format in my digital image workflow anytime soon. Honestly, Adobe do seem to want to shoot themselves in the foot with this one.