Daily Technology News

REDMOND, Wash.–Stage 8H is best known as the place where Saturday Night Live is filmed. This week, though, it’s been turned into an ad-hoc data center as part of NBC’s efforts to stream thousands of hours of live Olympic coverage over the Internet.

Instead of the usual crop of comedians, NBC will have dozens of people watching every hour of the games, looking for highlights that it can chop up and make available on-demand. It’s just one piece of an elaborate arrangement that shuttles the events in Beijing back to the U.S.

From each of the dozens of Olympic venues, a high-definition video feed is delivered over fiber-optic cables to the International Broadcast Center that has been set up in Beijing. A bunch of encoders and Windows Media servers get the video into an Internet-ready format. From there, it travels via satellite to NBC’s headquarters in New York.

There, NBC actually adds a one-minute delay, allowing its cadre of live bloggers in Stamford, Conn., and elsewhere to write their text and have the video and commentary synchronized. Once ready, it goes from NBC to Limelight Networks, a content delivery network, which has 1,000 servers just for the live events sending the content to various Internet service providers, who then shuttle the content directly to their customers. (See chart below)

(Credit: Susan Dove/CNET News)

Mike Gordon, chief strategy officer, Limelight Networks

(Credit: Limelight Networks)

Making it play
Limelight Chief Strategy Officer Mike Gordon said his company is prepared for this to be the biggest live event the Internet has ever seen. “I would not be surprised at all to get 1 million viewers,” he said. “We’re certainly prepared for whatever the audience turns out to be.”

That said, there is clearly an element of risk in all this, considering NBC’s history of live Olympic streaming has been limited to broadcasting a single game, the gold medal ice hockey match in Torino, Italy, two years ago.

“NBC has always taken risks and is always trying to do more than it has in the past,” said Perkins Miller, the NBC senior vice president in charge of the Internet push. “It does keep me up at night when I think about streaming 2,200 hours (of live coverage).”

The massive effort has come together in a remarkably short amount of time. Microsoft’s deal to power NBCOlympics.com dates back only to January.

NBC had a pretty good idea what they wanted to do and had built some mock-ups of the player prior to deciding to partner with Microsoft.

Initially, they expected to use Adobe’s Flash, given that is the standard for video delivered over the Internet these days. But, as they began to hash things out with Microsoft during a series of all-day meetings at NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters, Microsoft was able to show NBC some ways it could do more using its homegrown Silverlight technology.

Perkins Miller, senior vice president, NBC Universal

(Credit: NBC)

Silverlight, Microsoft said, would be key to enabling NBC’s vision of a “control room” in which a viewer could watch multiple live streams at once.

Even within Microsoft’s team, though, there was some apprehension of whether it was doable.

“Can we actually pull this off?” Senior Technical Evangelist Jason Suess recalls thinking. “Is the user’s machine going to be able to maintain four connections at one time?”

The key, Suess said, is using an approach known as adaptive streaming in which the player has the ability to customize the bit rate of the video stream based on a computer’s connection and processing power.

By Valentine’s Day, they were ready for a test. It was pretty important that the test work out, given that NBC was getting ready to crate up the gear to ship it off to Beijing.

“That was the first time the player came to life,” Suess said. “Obviously the player was extremely crude.”

Making it pay
One of the last pieces to fall into place was the advertising. Initially, NBC and Microsoft were hoping to be able to insert full video ads into the live streams, but doing so is tough work.

“You don’t have any way to pause a live stream,” Suess said. “Trying to deliver a video ad on top of that, you hit the limits of a user’s bandwidth.”

Jason Suess, senior technical evangelist, Microsoft

(Credit: Microsoft)

As of mid-April, they were still struggling with what to do and began considering that perhaps they would have to just rely on companion advertising around the video stream. Then they came up with an idea. Rather than insert full videos into the live streams, what if they stuck a display ad into the video, particularly during dead times in the action.

That, approach, which is ultimately what’s being done, solved several issues. It was less bandwidth-intensive than video ads, but still got the advertiser directly in front of the viewer, all without interrupting any of the coverage. The amount of advertising will vary, Suess said; “It depends what is happening in the sports. We just wait for a dead space.”

By early May, NBC made the basic player available on the Internet, using a variety of prerecorded Olympic video, and by early June the enhanced Silverlight player was made public as well. The Olympic Trials, at the end of June, offered the companies and the public a chance for a test drive.

At this point, it’s come down to a triage of the few remaining known bugs. Each day, the bar is being raised in terms of what is a big enough deal to warrant such a late change. Suess, meanwhile, sent his wife and kids to visit family in New York so he could work 18-hour days.

In an interview last week, Suess said he had been at work until 1 a.m. the night before and gets in every morning by 8 a.m., so he can chat with the folks in Beijing before they sign off for the night.

“If I am not online and pushing things along, then I am introducing delay,” Suess said.

An admitted type-A personality, Suess is a stickler for organization–the kind of guy whose desk is always clean. (His wife would probably use the word “compulsive,” Suess said.)

Suess said he hopes things will be enough under control that he can actually watch some of the games, particularly sailing, of which he is a big fan. “I sure hope so,” he said. “When I got involved in this project, that was one of the reasons.”

Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, owner of CBSSports.com and NCAA.com.

Chris DiBona’s job–manager of Google’s open-source programs–is a balancing act.

Google consumes a lot of open-source software for its own highly profitable business. But as he oversees the search powerhouse’s open-source work, DiBona has to ensure that the company reciprocates. It can’t be all take and no give.

Chris DiBona, Google’s manager of open-source programs

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Free and open-source software advocates can be powerful allies–but also vocal critics. For example, some have critized Google for its lack of support for the Affero GPL license, which can require those using software for a publicly available network service to share modifications they’ve made to an AGPL software project.

DiBona thinks Google strikes the right balance, though, by offering its own modifications back to many open-source projects, advocating the philosophy in general, and trying to nurture the next generation of open-source programmers.

DiBona has been steeped in open-source software for more than a decade. Before his job at Google, he worked for Slashdot, still an influential virtual water cooler for open-source discussion. Slashdot was part of Linux server maker VA Linux Systems, which had a spectacular initial public offering in 1999 followed not long after by a drastic cutback.

DiBona will be preaching the open-source gospel at the Google I/O conference Wednesday–”open source is too good to be true and thus must be magic,” according to the agenda–but I sat down with him beforehand to hear his view of open-source software at Google.

What’s the view of open source within Google?

I asked myself, “Who am I trying to address?” The world of open-source business? No. The world of the open-source enthusiast? No. I’m really looking to work with open-source developers. We came up with these goals for our group: to support open-source development in general, which means to support open-source infrastructure; support the release of open-source code, from Google and in general; and to create more open-source developers, because especially when I started, there was a perception that Google took a lot of people from the open-source world and then went away. It was partly true, because people would come here and say, “Wow, I’ve been working on my open-source project forever, and I want a new problem,” and we have a very good class of new problem. So they kind of went away.

That was too bad. The last thing we wanted as a company was to hurt the release of open-source software, because we consider it pretty important. We use a ton of it. Every engineer we bring on–how much open-source do they want to use? We have new packages and new libraries being brought into the company all the time. It’s our group’s job to track that. As we brought people in, we wanted to be sure more open-source developers were being created. So that’s where we came up with the Google Summer of Code, and now we have a high-school flavor of that as well. I think we’ve made a very real impact in creating new people in the open-source world.

I’m curious about maintaining a balance between contributing back to upstream projects vs. maintaining your own internal forks. How do you go through that evaluation?

Google considers some projects more important than others. Obviously the Linux kernel is incredibly important. Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel. We have a fairly large kernel team, and we employ people whose job is just to work on the external kernel. Andrew Morton is a good example of that. We try to make sure those guys patch out (submit their modifications to the main open-source project) whenever they can. It’s usually more dictated by the engineer’s time than it is any lack of desire on our part. I always wish we were able to release more, but it takes time for an engineer to do that. For the larger efforts, it’s a little easier because there are more personnel on it.

The same thing goes for our compilers (software that translates programmers’ code into instructions a computer understands). The great thing about our compiler team is they patch as a matter of their jobs. They’re always patching out things from the compiler work we do internally to the outside world. We recently released the new linker, Gold–Ian Lance Taylor works for us on our compiler team. He’s been on the GCC team forever. He used to be at Cygnus (a company that developed GCC). We have a lot of ex-Cygnus people.

Then there are Googlers who just want to patch into an existing projects. They found a bug, they want to add a feature. That takes no time at all. Our team looks at the first couple patches an engineer wants to send out, makes sure the engineer knows what they’re doing with the outside world, then they’re basically given free rein to do that. They keep us posted on what they’re patching. We want to make sure our code gets out to the projects as fast as possible because projects keep on iterating. If you don’t get your patches in, they won’t get accepted, because they’ll be too old or won’t matter. If you’ve got a patch, getting it out there fast is better for us, because then as that project iterates and comes back into the company, we don’t have to reapply a patch.

What are the most important open-source projects you ingest?

The kernel, compilers–GCC, the Python interpreter. Python is very important to us. Google App Engine–it’s a Python hosting system, basically. Java is very important to us, and that’s become open-source now. We have some very good Java people working for us–Josh Block, Neil Gafter–they’ve got a great handle on that technology.

Once you get past those three projects–the compilers, the languages, the kernel–then you go to the libraries. For us that’s OpenSSL, zlib, PCRE. MySQL is hugely important to us. Past that, it starts tapering off pretty quick.

Has the open-sourcing of Java changed anything for you?
Not really. I think it had more impact on the outside world than for us. Java is a fairly mature language now. We’ve been using it for a long time. Before, it was the JCP (the Java Community Process to govern Java’s future)–it had the rubric of openness around it. It was never really not so open. There are questions around what open source means now around Java, specifically J2ME (Java’s mobile edition for gadgets such as cell phones) and the TCK (the technology compatibility kit).

Are you using a super-uber-customized Linux kernel, or are you guys pretty much vanilla?

I don’t think there’s such thing as a customized Linux kernel anymore. The kernel is incredibly flexible. It’s got all these different architectures. I think the Linux kernel itself is this ubercustomized thing.

But do you have a lot of in-house customizations?

Not a lot. Google is exposed to some interesting hardware before the rest of the world. So internally we’ll be sampling code for that hardware. So that’s pretty custom stuff. But eventually that goes to the outside world. We funded some work with a group in Berkeley called Xorp to bring high-speed Broadcom networking chip functionality to Linux. It’s not in our interest to keep control of it ourselves. So is it customized? Absolutely. But is it heavily customized? I don’t think it is as heavily customized as you might think.

Is it true you still use 2.4 kernels?

In some places, sure.

How about for the core search product?

I don’t know how it’s partitioned out. When you think of Google, you think of search being on top of a kernel that’s static. It’s not always like that. It differs on data centers. I think 2.6 predominates, though.

There’s been discussion about reciprocity. When General Public License (GPL) version 3 came out, the Free Software Foundation dumped the Affero clause out of GPLv3 and split it out into a separate license. Eben Moglen (co-founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and then counsel to the Free Software Foundation) said, to paraphrase, “If Google starts getting too parasitic, then we’ll re-evaluate it.” How worried are you of getting a negative perception of using more than you contribute?

I do worry about this. I think it is a largely incorrect perception. You can always give out more, and there are always people who will never be satisfied. Could we be giving back more? Sure. One of the ways I ameliorate that problem is (through) projects like the Summer of Code. Google is releasing every year, not counting Android or the really large open-source projects like GWT, a new project every two or three weeks. Or patching hundreds of projects a month. I conservatively estimate we’re releasing about a million lines of code a year from the company.

If you talk to open-source developers–people who are working on projects–I think they understand that. It came back to who do we want to interact with. I always felt the enthusiast community would understand that eventually, and I think that’s true. There are some people who are upset with us because we didn’t embrace the Affero-style GPL, but it’s not practical for us to do so. When they had an Affero-style clause in GPLv3, the thing I told Eben was, “Listen, you can adopt whatever you want. We’ll still keep on backing up the FSF and the SFLC as much as we can, but it means we won’t be able to use that license inside, because it won’t be practical for us to do so.” I think that’s a very realistic response. The Affero GPL is out there. That’s great for the people who use it. It’s just not for us.

That’s the thing about free software. You’re not obligated to use it. We have enough fine-grained control within the company that we don’t use things we don’t want to use.

What are your preferred licenses?

We generally release under the Apache License–Apache 2. We think it has the fairest language of the licenses. And the GPL requires a lot of management–more than we have time for to run a project well under that license–patch flow and all that. Apache 2 encourages people to take the thing and run with it. That’s what we’re going for when we release code, whether it’s to have people adopt technologies we really like, or for API examples. That said, we’ve released things under the GPL, LGPL, GPL version 3, BSD. We default to the Apache License.

To what extent to you subsidize gurus to sit around and work on important projects?

We’ve got people like Jeremy Allison and Andrew Morton and some of Guido (van Rossom)’s time. He’s been working pretty heavily on Google App Engine and Mondrian. It’s more common that we…try to make open source a part of their job, so they’re patching out to the libraries they use. We think that’s more healthy than having people whose job is just working on an open-source project.

You use open source a lot internally. Do you have some kind of intellectual property vetting or review before you use it?

We do. There are two ways we do this. When somebody wants to bring a piece of code in from the outside world–open-source or commercial–you need to put it inside a special directory we call “third party.” They’re required to put in a file called readme.google (that describes) where they got that software, how it’s licensed, what category that license falls under. We look for things that are obvious. There are some projects that have dubious intellectual property provenance, and we know those, and we know the people who run them, and we tend not to use those ever.

Since Google doesn’t distribute a lot of software, we have it easier than companies that ship hardware and software. We have a couple situations where that does happen–the Google Search Appliance, some of the downloadable applications. Those get a little extra attention. Similarly, when we have larger projects like Google Android, we have a higher ceremony–every two weeks we get together and see if the license picture has changed.

The tracking model works really well for us. We have tools written where a program manager or a release manager can turn on a certain level of warning within the build tool and it will tell them what open-source software they have and how they have to comply with it. At that point we set up a mirror for them as they get closer to release.

So that’s the first way we track things. The second way is whenever a Googler puts in a changelist now–this is something we’re just starting to do–we compare it against all known open-source code on the Internet using our Code Search product. We compare the changelist that comes from your average Google engineer against that database of code and we look for intersections. When we find an intersection, we take a look and see if it’s truly a copy. And if it is, we make sure it’s in the right directory and that it’s properly labeled. And we call up the engineer if it isn’t and make sure it gets tagged properly so we can do the right thing by these licenses.

That tool is kind of in its infancy. We’re trying to figure out ways to automate what it does. But it’s great because it scales programmatically. Our group’s goal is not to break builds or stop development. It’s to enable developers to use as much open-source as possible. We think it’s healthy, because then they’re not writing that code, they’re writing other code.

Do you vet code for patent or copyright?

No. We have legal people on our lists. We have two main lists that track these things. Open-source licensing for incoming code and open-source releasing for outgoing code. Legal has a presence there. Patents are incredibly tricky.

Is it easier to get hired at Google if you have experience maintaining your own open-source product or patch?

If you have made a name for yourself in open source, clearly it helps. If you have a healthy project in open-source, I believe it helps. One thing I see on hiring committees is when somebody has an open-source history, it’s really great. You can just look at that history. Interviews are great, but they’re not very deep. They’re only 45 minutes long. So how can you really get a feel for if a person is good at programming, at computer science?

Or at social relations, for that matter.

Open source really reveals that incredibly quickly. You can look at their code, at their activity on mailing lists, how they deal with bugs from real people, and real user problems. That’s an incredible resource.

The Summer of Code isn’t really a recruiting program. If it is, it’s a really expensive one. Last year we created about 2 million lines of open-source code across the 900 students who took part. Of those probably a third are going to stick around with their projects, because the rest have to go back to college.

We have a couple students who have been in the program two or three years. The whole point is to support kids over the summer so they can go and program and not get some other job that has nothing to do with computer science. It’s our fourth year doing it. This year we’ve go 1,109 students doing it across 95 countries.

Click here to see our photos

Lincoln and THX representatives brought a new MKS by our offices to give us a demonstration of the technology. This car not only features a hard drive-based navigation system, but offers Sirius Travel Link, which integrates traffic, fuel prices, and weather with the navigation system. Better yet, the THX audio system gets music from Sync, which lets you hook up just about any MP3 player. Using this system, you can tell the car which bands you want to hear. We subjected it to some of our standard testing tracks and found the listening experience to be very impressive. We’ve published some preview photos of the MKS, and have a full review scheduled for late September.

Click here for photos of the 2009 Lincoln MKS.

These recovered balls of recyclables at the Davis Street Transfer Center in San Leandro, Calif., will likely end up in China.

(Credit: Hanna Sistek/CNET News)

Ever since I came to the United States from my native Europe, I have been curious about the country’s recycling practices. What happens to the mess of old newspapers, plastic boxes, food cans, and wine bottles that piles up each week? (Back home, we have to arrange it all neatly in separate containers.)

I got the answer when I visited the Davis Street Transfer Center, a waste management center in San Leandro, Calif. Here is a photo gallery showing how that facility sorts through those messy heaps.

I was surprised to find out that, after being sorted at the center, a large portion of recyclables ends up in other parts of the world. They are simply handled as commodities, and prices are set by the global market. The rising price of crude oil has, for instance, boosted the value of plastic waste, which is made of oil.

“We sell to the highest bidder for most materials,” said Rebecca Jewell, a recycling manager at Davis Street. “This includes plastics, paper, and cardboard. In most cases, the highest bidder is one Chinese company or another.”

According to Jewell, the recovery system at Davis Street is advanced enough to produce stacks of tossed-out material, 98 percent of which are PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastics, which are popular in China. Other waste stations with less sophisticated sorting lines might sell recyclables to countries with lower demands on purity, like India or Bangladesh, she explained.

Shipping it overseas
It is very common for Western countries to ship their recyclables overseas to be processed and turned into new materials. But the byproducts of the recycling process can be devastating to local environments. (This Sky News video report features a city in China that’s home to a major recycling center and is dealing with toxic pollution. And this video, made by Northern California Recycling Association, also confronts the effects of shipping waste overseas.)

Electronic waste is even worse. Each year, millions of pounds of electronic waste, or e-waste, are generated in the United States, and an estimated 50 percent to 80 percent of what gets collected is exported to other countries, according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Check out their report “Exporting Harm” (PDF).

The tricky thing about e-waste–such as computers, televisions, and mobile phones–is that it often contains toxic elements and is very labor-intensive to recycle. If simply buried in landfills, the toxins will eventually trickle down into the ground, potentially getting into groundwater or otherwise causing environmental problems. Exporting e-waste to poor countries only moves the problem offshore. Also problematic is the fact that, in many cases, centers in other countries have lower worker safety standards than would be required of a center in the U.S.

So where does the e-waste end up? Here are some known and suspected global destinations, according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. According to the coalition, 500 shipping containers with used computers reach Nigeria every month, cumulatively representing about 400,000 computers and monitors.

The lack of e-waste recycling systems is “the worst global example of waste mismanagement,” according to the Basel Action Network. Its 2005 report (PDF) examines the effects of e-waste dumps in Africa.

In the rest of the world, toxic trade to developing countries is prevented by the Basel Convention, which the U.S. has signed but not ratified.

Less formal campaigns, such as the Take Back My TV Campaign, show an increased interest among consumers.

Europe has tougher standards, like the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive, which forces producers to take back a variety of household appliances, including electronics. Another directive, Restriction on the use of certain Hazardous Substances, requires manufacturers to phase out hazardous substances in their products.

Could YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen become this generation’s version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the famed newspaper reporters who broke the Watergate scandal?

Probably not, but their site has quickly become a competitor to investigative journalists everywhere. There used to be a time when people with information about corporate misdeeds, government corruption or police brutality would go to CNN, The Washington Post or their local newspaper. But who needs traditional media when anyone can just film wrongdoers in action and post it online?

Citizen journalists illustrated their growing power this weekend when a tourist videotaped Patrick Pogan, a New York City policeman, body slamming a bicyclist in what appears to be an unprovoked attack. On Sunday, the videographer posted it to YouTube. Sure there were also eyewitnesses, but the video may prove most damning for it differs dramatically with what the officer said happened in his report.

The policeman has been assigned to desk duty and the department has launched an investigation. Once again, YouTube has handed individual members of the public the ability to challenge a version of events presented by a powerful entity.

When one reflects on the controversies in this country’s history that sprang from information obtained by average citizens, it’s clear most of them were delivered to the public after first being filtered through a major news organization or government body.

The leaking of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg; the film of President John Kennedy’s assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder, the police beating of motorist Rodney King videotaped by George Holliday.

Had those events occurred now, it’s possible some of them would have ended up on YouTube. Would the public have reacted the same to those events? For years, Zapruder and some news organizations refused to show the scene of Kennedy’s head being blown apart until 1975.

Did that decision spare an already demoralized public even more shock? Or did it rob them of the opportunity to learn everything about the death of their president?

“In the old world, (traditional media) used to be the gatekeepers,” said Geneva Overholser, director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California and a former Ombudsman at The Washington Post. “The fact is those gates have been torn down…We have to figure out how to use the new tools of new media and how to work with citizens who are producing this kind new journalism.”

The video-sharing phenomenon has emerged at a time when much of the public is mistrustful of the information provided by the government and professional news organizations. Some have turned to blogs and message boards for news. But YouTube, like no other site, has earned a reputation for providing citizen journalists with a podium that has the potential to reach millions across the globe.

The rewards of allowing individuals to report the news is easy to see. Corruption, brutality, and injustice have been exposed in situations where members of traditional media weren’t around.

Government crackdowns in Burma and Tibet meant foreign journalists were often unable to get footage of the civil unrest in those countries. Sure enough, the world could see what was happening at YouTube, where witnesses posted videos.

A policeman near St. Louis suggested that he could send Brett Darrow, 20, to jail on trumped up charges. While Darrow’s car-mounted video camera was rolling, the officer shouted: “Do you want to go to jail for some (expletive) reason I come up with?” And later he added: “I don’t really care about your cameras.”

It’s probably safe to say the officer does now. He was later fired.

But was he right when he said he could he have successfully railroaded Darrow? Would anyone have believed Darrow had he been without the video? Would the police department, which later fired the officer, been under as much pressure to take action if Darrow had only gone to the local paper or TV station with the video?

The other side of the argument is whether someone could someday misuse the power provided by YouTube and the Internet to distribute false information. Videotape has been tampered with before. And even when it’s not, it can still be used to inflict damage.

A young woman on a train in South Korea refuses to clean up her dog’s poop. Someone videotapes the event and the woman becomes a figure of contempt on the Web and known as “The Dog Poop Girl.” She’s stalked by people who see her on the Web and eventually the public condemnation forces her to quit school and go into hiding.

Providing audiences with verification of stories produced by unknowns could be an important contribution for traditional media, said Overholser.

She said that newspapers and local TV stations can also provide content, gather interviews and flush out stories produced by non professionals. That’s what the New York Post did after the body-slamming NYPD video surfaced. The Post was quick to post a report on their Web site that included the officer’s name, what he said in his report (that the bicyclist ran him over) and that he was a third-generation policeman.

“I would argue that when something likes this appears on Youtube,” Overholser said, “and I see stories about it at Washingtonpost.com or Latimes.com, I would like it to mean that the papers have verified that the videotape is legitimate.”

With Adobe Systems’ release of version 2 of its Photoshop Lightroom on Monday night, the company no doubt hopes customers will be drawn by a number of new features in the software for sorting, cataloging, and editing photos.

But the company believes an external factor will also help the software: the booming sales of high-end SLR cameras. These high-end models are helping usher in many of digital photography’s biggest changes, and Adobe is trying to intercept the trend with Lightroom.

From 2007 to 2008, digital SLR shipments increased a dramatic 41 percent to 7.5 million units, according to market researcher IDC. And though plenty of those cameras went to gadget-happy doctors or to snapshooters who won’t exploit the cameras’ full features, plenty of others went to the photography enthusiasts at whom Lightroom is aimed.

Lightroom 2.0 is geared for editing flexible but complicated ‘raw’ images taken directly from higher-end cameras’ image sensors. (Click image to enlarge.)

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

“Prices are coming down, so more people with entry-level SLRs are experimenting,” said Tom Hogarty, the Adobe senior product manager in charge of Lightroom. “If you pick up the camera for the sake of creating an artistic thing and not just recording a family event, you’ve really taken the plunge into serious photography. Anyone at that level is an ideal Lightroom customer.”

One significant feature common to SLRs is the ability to shoot “raw” photos–the images taken directly from the image sensors without the camera baking in its own assumptions about what’s right.

Raw images offer more editing flexibility than JPEG, so it’s better for aficionados who need to correct underexposure or an orange color casts. But raw images require processing into more standard, universal formats for sharing–thus software such as Lightroom, Apple’s Aperture, Phase One’s Capture One, and others.

Lightroom 2.0 has a revamped interface and several new features, most notably a much broader ability to edit selected portions of an image. And it’s got a surprise that wasn’t in the beta version: exposure gradients that can help with the classic photography problem of showing both a dark foreground and a brilliant sunset. (See the full feature list below.)

The new version costs $299 new or $99 as an upgrade.

What is this Lightroom thing anyway?
Lightroom occupies a new niche in Adobe software’s history. Its interface, built from scratch, hints at things to come to the broader world of Photoshop and photo editing overall. Unlike Adobe’s earlier products, it’s designed for the new crop of photos challenges, when people come back from a vacation or a photo shoot with hundreds of images.

Many folks are happy just copying their pictures off their cameras, but for enthusiasts, there are other challenges. Besides editing photos, they must weed out the duds, edit and organize the keepers, label them with where they were taken and who’s in them, and print or upload them to photo-sharing sites. With no negatives anymore, they might want to leave the originals digital files intact. And later, they often have to dig them out of the archives.

Adobe has a large, successful franchise with its regular Photoshop software. It now comes in the ordinary CS3 version, a higher-cost CS3 Extended version, a lighter-weight Elements version, and the free online Express version. Lightroom doesn’t fit neatly into this lineage, though. It’s both more and less than regular Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom features a task-oriented interface. Shown here is the ‘Library’ view for sorting, tagging, and organizing photos. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Less because it’s specialized for photos: it can’t handle Photoshop tasks such as carefully removing a distracting background, compositing multiple shots together, overlaying text, or applying dramatic special effects.

More because its interface encompasses more tasks: Photoshop CS3 and its ilk let people edit images one at a time, but Lightroom handles the digital photos a batch at a time. Photographers can apply editing changes made to one image to other similar shots, label photos with tags such as shoot locations and copyright notices, print groups of photos or export them for use on the Web.

Some of that extra utility is a natural extension of handling photos. But it’s also something of a power grab. Lightroom wants to be the center of your digital photography universe, stepping into roles that the operating system or utilities might offer.

Getting along with Photoshop CS3
So is any of the power grab aimed at regular Photoshop?

Not really, though Lightroom 2’s ability to edit selected areas of photos does reduce reliance on Photoshop.

“There are some things in Lightroom 2 that delve into what Photoshop has been used for in the past, such as dodging, burning, and gradients,” Hogarty said. Photoshop’s approach dates from the film days when photographers would process only the best couple images from a photo shoot, and that approach is still important today, Hogarty said: “Photoshop excels at doing the detail work for high-value images.”

Adobe is taking a page from the Lightroom specialization playbook for Photoshop by trying to make it more customizable to specific users and tasks. But in contrast with Lightroom, company is trying to do so without sacrificing the software’s general-purpose nature, said John Nack, senior product manager for Photoshop.

“We want to make it possible to be everything you want and nothing you don’t,” Nack said. “One of the tough things has been dealing with the enormous breadth of Photoshop. We end up presenting same interface to architects as a Web designers as radiologists as prepress folks.”

To achieve that goal, Photoshop’s interface will become more open-ended and even programmable, he said.

“You’ll see some of the things we’ve learned about Lightroom–making things browsable and less modal–come into Photoshop,” Nack said. In other words, it’ll be easier to shift Photoshop from one task to another.

Lightroom 2’s single biggest change is the ability to selectively edit portions of photos, such as this shadowy area that’s been lightened. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

With a “Configurator” application that should be released by Adobe Labs within a month or two of release the next version of Photoshop, Adobe will let users create and share their own Photoshop control panels written in Adobe’s Flash programming language, Nack added. “Our goal is to make it possible for expert users to reconfigure the environment on a task-by-task basis and share those workspaces with other people. You don’t have to write code. You can knock together an interface and make it sharable.”

Lightroom 2.0 features
More graceful handoffs between Photoshop and Lightroom arrive with the new Lightroom. It can use Photoshop CS3’s panorama tool to stitch multiple shots together into a single image and its high-dynamic range tool to merge photos taken at a variety of exposures into a single image. And Photoshop can import raw files from Lightroom as a more flexible “smart object” whose properties can be edited with the raw-image dialog box.

Another significant change is better external relations. A new metadata API (application programming interface) will let other software interact with the data Lightroom attaches to files, which means for example that a Flickr uploading application could tag images in Lightroom’s database with a custom field indicating the file has been stored at the photo-sharing site.

For now, though, that extra metadata is stored only in Lightroom’s catalogs, not in the XMP files that accompany raw images for purposes of storing metadata or in Adobe Systems’ Digital Negative (DNG) format intended to standardize raw formats, Hogarty said.

“The next step is to write to XMP,” Hogarty said. “I think that’s an absolute requirement.”

Among other new features: