Saturday, June 22nd, 2013

Falling foul of the new Adobe cloud subscription service

I’ve been concerned a bit lately about Adobe’s cloud offerings mainly because they check the internet periodically to see if you are paid up. If you are teaching and don’t have internet available, I’m always just a little concerned that I may be locked out of my programs as a result.

Today I did get locked out – but not because I didn’t have an internet service. I subscribe to Adobe Captivate and it wouldn’t accept my id and instead wanted a serial number. Now even I know it shouldn’t ask for a serial number for a subscription service. So, I got onto Adobe Customer support – a monumental exercise in frustration. They made me change my Adobe password to see if that would work – seriously? Well of course it failed. They then gave up and put in a support ticket for me and basically told me to go home and they’d email – sometime.

Seriously?

Thank goodness for Twitter. I got online and began to vent! Adobe picked up right away and offered help and nonsense in about equal portions. They asked the obvious – yes I did try to sign out and in again, they offered up this gem – @HelenBradley Is Captivate the software you want to access? I’m afraid is not included as part of the Creative Cloud – Yeah! you know, I worked that out 7 months ago when I signed up and started paying $19 a month for the program! Not the problem clearly!

Eventually they too gave up and offered a help call – when would I be available? Now? Yes.

Next I get tech support. I give them control of my computer, they poke around for a long while, they give up and call in Captivate people. Oh! didn’t you know? this is a known bug – WTF! Why the Captivate group don’t bother telling support this is a problem I don’t know.

Support promises to escalate the issue. They give me a 30 day trial so I can do my work. They assure me all is hunky dory. It isn’t though is it? Because Captivate trials have time restrictions on content so any client work I do will expire and refuse to run about the time the client tries to go live with it!

At least we can now do some work but we have to await a fix before we can send it off.

This is my second call to Adobe support in a month – the other was a registration problem on an other program – in that case I had had a drive fail and needed to re-install Photoshop which you can’t do because you can’t unregister the old version because the drive failed. A delicious Catch 22 situation which took about an hour longer to sort out than it should have.

In summary, Adobe support is pretty pitiful most of the time and add the overhead of subscription software that has checks that if you can’t meet them can result in your software not running is just a bit scary.

Right now I’ll be days behind on a project. I paid an assistant to sit and listen to me try to sort out the software he was supposed to be working on and I lost an afternoon of my own work. Way to go Adobe!

Update #1 – Adobe breaks Master Collection

Ok, so a few days after my first experience with Captivate being unusable (because it is a trial version and any content you make is time limited) help came back to me. They tinkered with my machine for around a half hour and pronounced the problem fixed.  For my inconvenience they credited my $19 a month subscription with 4 days credit – wow. thank you Adobe – what, to you is around the cost of a Starbucks coffee is for me hours of lost time and wages paid to an assistant who can’t do what he is paid to do.

Now, the next time my assistant comes to work after this, Captivate is, thankfully working just fine. However, he preps his stuff in Photoshop and – he tells me with horror – his Photoshop Master Collection just switched to Trial Mode. Seems that the Support folk in turning Captivate into a trial managed to turn eveyr piece of Adobe software into a trial version – Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver – the list goes on.

Now luckily none of those programs are ‘cut down’ versions when they are trials so I spent 30 days ignoring the problem. The problem of course was that when support made my master suite a trial version they didn’t unregister the software so I couldn’t re-register it because I had already used my 2 installs! Whew.. it takes effort just to understand the mess much less try to explain it to someone. And overall, my feeling was that I needed a dose of Adobe support like I needed root canal!

In the end, however, the passage of time meant that the trials expired and I had no choice but to go back to support. First to explain how the problem happened (hum… your support people took away my registration and made it a trial and I can’t register it because I can’t deregister it and I’ve already used my two registrations) and then ask for what I want – hmmm – register my software? Then they tell me they can’t unregister it (curiously they could 3 months ago when my hard drive crashed and I had to get the program unregistered so I could reregister it). Could they add another registration to my account? Truly, like I care how you are going to solve this problem, I just want it solved. So, yes, thank you … another registration would be great.

Total time for the support call (including searching for the link to get help) was around a half to three quarters of an hour. Unusually, from my recent experience with Adobe the process went fairly smoothly and the problem got solved. It just shouldn’t have been a necessary call  for so many reasons! So, so far so good.

Update #2 – Adobe Cloud (Dis)connect

Hmmmm I think I spoke too soon. Fast forward 2 weeks. Assistant is at his desk about to do an urgent project for a client. He looks at me – what happened to Captivate he asks? I can’t get in. It is asking me for a serial number. WOW! a wave of deja vu washes over me. Yep, you got it, Captivate (the subscription program I pay $19 a month for) is asking for a serial number. You know – subscriptions don’t have serial numbers – so, long story short, we’re locked out of Captivate – the program won’t start. Nada.

Now, before I tell you how it all got sorted out and how I spent another 45 minutes+ on getting support to fix it, imagine for a minute (if you will kind reader) that I teach Captivate. I check my notes and presentation the night before – all is just fine. I turn up to the class – people have paid $199 a head for this 3 hour class. I turn on my computer and Captivate asks for a serial number. That’s the scenario that really scares me witless. Adobe hasn’t got this cloud/subscription model right. They keep telling us that we can still use the program after the subscription is expired – what they don’t tell you is that your software might not understand it is a subscription – and it might do that without warning – and it might do it over and over again – it has done just that to me.

This time Adobe support could fix the problem on the spot but it took time and they had to take over my computer and download and install software onto it to get it sorted. I lost time – again – my assistant couldn’t do his work – again. It is all starting to sound very much like a broken record. I wish I didn’t have to write this. I wish I could be writing great Photoshop posts and making YouTube videos but until Adobe sorts out its problems I think people having problems have an obligation to tell their stories in the hope that Adobe will listen. I did get a survey from Adobe about the support, I did complete it, I did say most of the things I’ve said here in the survey and I did offer to be contacted if they need more info.

I hope there are no more additions to this post.  I just worry that that won’t be the case.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 5:01 pm12 Comments links to this post

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

5 Gotchas in the Lightroom Print Module

When you’re setting up single or multiple image printing in the Lightroom Print module here are some things to be aware of:

Nonexistent Drag and drop

You can drag and drop pictures onto a print template in Lightroom in some circumstances but not in others. This can be confusing but there is some logic behind it.

When you select a Lightroom template from the Template Browser, make sure to open the Layout Style panel on the right at the same time. Templates can be one of three layout styles and each operates differently. Knowing what style a template is will help you understand its behavior.

If it is a Single Image/Contact Sheet template then you must select images on the filmstrip to add them to the contact sheet and they appear in the layout in the order they appear in the filmstrip. You can’t drag and drop images from the filmstrip into a Single Image/Contact Sheet layout.

If the template is a Custom Package then you can drag and drop an image into any of the containers on the screen. You can also drag and drop an image into any position in the layout and it will sit on the screen even overlapping other images.

If a template is a Picture Package, then you can fill it by clicking an image in the filmstrip. A picture package prints multiple images on a single sheet of paper. If you select two images in the filmstrip, you’ll then have two pages in your picture package – one for each of the selected images. You can drag and drop an image into a Picture Package but when you do, you’ll create all sorts of issues. Not only will you add a new image to the layout page you are seeing on the screen but you’ll do the same for all the pages in the current layout. It’s generally best not to drag and drop images into an already tightly designed picture package layout.

Understand Border behavior

If you have a Photo Border enabled for a either a Custom Package or a Picture Package then the width of the border will make the image smaller. The color of the border is the color of the page background if you have a page background selected. If not, it will be white. If you set an Inner Stroke then it too will reduce the size of the image but it can be set to your choice of color.

So, for example, if you want a black page background but a white border around your images, set the page background color to black and use the Inner Stroke rather than the Photo Border to apply the white border to the image.

Identity Plate Behavior

When you add an Identity Plate to a Custom Package it appears once on the page and you resize it to suit and place it where you want it to go. However, it only appears once in the layout so, if you add a second page to the print layout, the identity plate will appear only on the first page.

Alternatively you can add the identity plate to every image by selecting Render On Every Image. Now the identity plate will appear on each image rather than on each page but it will appear in the very middle of the image and  you can’t move it.

So, if what you want is your name on each printout as an Identity Plate, create a Custom Package design with an Identity Plate but not set to render on every image. Make sure the identity plate is in the correct position and fill the page with images and print or save it. Then fill it again with a new set of images and output the result and repeat as required.

On the other hand, an Identity Plate added to a Single Image/Contact Sheet prints on every page of the document in the place you position it in.

Any size JPG output

You can print your layout to a JPG file that you can then upload to the web or send out for printing. To do this, from the Print Job panel, click the Print To: dropdown list and choose JPEG File.

Set the File Resolution and then the Custom File Dimensions for the page. Then, when you’re done assembling the images, click Print to File to print the layout to an image file rather than to a printer.

Crop your images

When you’re working with a Single Image/Contact Sheet, if the image is set to Zoom To Fill it will be made large enough to fill the container on the page. If the image height and width does not match the size of the container then part of the image will be removed. You can adjust the positioning of the image within the container by dragging on it with the mouse.

If you have a Picture Package or Custom Package selected you can move an image within its container also, but to do so you must hold the Ctrl key (Command) on the Mac.

The different behaviors of images within what appear to be similar layouts in Lightroom can be confusing but once you understand that different layout styles bring with them different key combinations and behaviors you’ll be on your way to creating great looking prints in Lightroom.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Outlook 2010: backup gets worse (if that’s possible)

If you thought Microsoft has, over the years, right royally messed up the process of backing up your Outlook PST files then the situation with Outlook 2010 has only got worse.

For Outlook 2002, 2003 and 2007 users Microsoft provided a Personal Folders Backup Tool that you could download from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=9003 which would install a backup routine into Outlook.

Having done this you could then select File > Backup to backup your PST file.

Over the years of course, this has prompted questions as to why the thing wasn’t built in to Outlook in the first place? It is a stupid and ill-considered omission in my book, but let’s put that aside for now because the problem only gets worse for Outlook 2010 users.

You see the Personal Folders Backup Add-In doesn’t work with Outlook 2010.

As I say repeatedly it’s Microsoft’s world and we just live in it. Microsoft knows that there’s a problem and explains that the failure of the add-in is due to the new fast shutdown functionality in Outlook. If you visit this website http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2030523 you can click the Fix It For Me link and Microsoft will fix the problem for you.

Don’t even bother asking why there is a problem in the first place. There should be (and it’s inexcusable that there is not)  a backup routine built in to Outlook to make it easy for you to backup your PST file.

Consider this – everything you receive or send via email is in that PST file – and that includes attachments! Lose it and you lose the lot. Worse still, there is a physical limit to its size – beyond around 2GB the thing can become horribly unstable. So you will need to back it up or risk losing it all if your computer crashes or the thing becomes corrupt.

So, if your using Outlook 2010, run (don’t walk) to this site: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=9003 and download and install the Personal Folders Back up tool for Outlook 2002, 2003 and 2007 (yep! I know you’re using Outlook 2010! Then go to this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2030523 and run the Fix It Tool – you have to have the backup tool installed first.

If you don’t like clicking Fix It buttons then there’s a detailed explanation in that same Knowledge Base article explaining how to fix the problem manually – basically it’s a fairly simple registry fix.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:35 am9 Comments links to this post