Overview comparison between Foxit and Adobe Acrobat Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader and Foxit are two popular PDF readers that offer different features and benefits for users. I was recently approached to take a look at the Foxit and I am currently in the middle of trying out the application to see the positive and negative differences between the two products. In future articles I may get into more detail of what I see the benefits are of replacing Adobe Acrobat with Foxit if I determine that it is a good fit for some of our clients.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is the official PDF reader from Adobe, the company that created the PDF format. It is free to download and use, and it supports a wide range of PDF functions, such as viewing, printing, commenting, signing, filling forms, and more. It also integrates with Adobe's cloud services, such as Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud, which allow you to access and edit your PDF files from any device and collaborate with others online. However, Adobe Acrobat Reader also has some drawbacks, such as its large file size, slow performance, frequent updates, and limited editing capabilities.

Foxit is a lightweight and fast PDF reader that claims to be more secure and reliable than Adobe Acrobat Reader. It also offers many features for viewing, printing, commenting, signing, filling forms, and more. Additionally, it has some advanced features that Adobe Acrobat Reader lacks, such as OCR (optical character recognition), PDF creation and conversion, document protection and encryption, digital signatures, and more. Foxit also has a cloud service called Foxit PhantomPDF Online, which allows you to edit and share your PDF files online. However, Foxit also has some disadvantages, such as its less intuitive interface, compatibility issues with some PDF files, and limited support for multimedia and interactive elements.

In conclusion, Adobe Acrobat Reader and Foxit are both powerful and versatile PDF readers that can suit different needs and preferences. Adobe Acrobat Reader is more suitable for users who want a standard and official PDF reader that integrates well with Adobe's cloud services. Foxit is more suitable for users who want a fast and secure PDF reader that offers more editing and creation features. Ultimately, the best way to choose between these two programs is to try them out yourself and see which one works better for you.

Sign up for Adobe’s Firefly AI Image Generator

If you want to get into the trial for Adobe's Firefly AI image generator you will need to request access to the program. In jumping to this site you will need to fill out your information as well as how you think you're going to use the application. There is no cost involved in doing this. Videos that were shown on the site on using the application are very exciting and I can't wait to have access to Adobe Firefly product.

Two of the features that they are showing are text to image and text effects and they have videos that will demonstrate the use of them. This is not a finished product but a trial of a product in beta testing so they're going to ask you for some feedback. It does appear that you will have some Photoshop type capabilities. It looks like a lot of fun!

Adobe Crative Cloud customer database breached

Naked Security reported on this breach that exposed 7.5 million Adobe customers revealing the following information:

• Account creation date
• Adobe products used
• Subscription status
• Whether the user is an Adobe employee
• Member IDs
• Country
• Time since last login
• Payment status

See full details here: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/10/28/adobe-database-exposes-7-5-million-creative-cloud-users/

Lightroom: Catalog Backup

It is important to not only have multiple copies of your digital photos but if you are using Lightroom to manage and edit your picture collection you should backup this database catalog as well. The catalog holds all of your edits and organization of your pictures. Don’t be caught with your catalog becoming corrupt and not having a backup to fall back on.

I take the few minutes every time I close a Lightroom session to backup my current updates. Having a corrupt catalog is pretty rare but it happens. This simple procedure will keep you from wanting to slit your wrists if corruption error shows its ugly face.

There is a button that you can hit called Repair Catalog if this occurs but it doesn’t always work. So, don’t take the chance and backup.

If you don’t have a backup, you’ve lost all your edits. All your organization. All your star ratings, pick flags, photo books you created, collections — everything — you are starting over from scratch with Lightroom. I don’t want that to happen to you, and the fix is easy — all you have to do is not totally ignore the dialog below that appears when you quit Lightroom.

NOTE: These backups will be saved into a folder named “Backups” and that folder will be in the same folder where your current Lightroom catalog lives on your computer.

This was a tip from Scott Kelby, lightroomkillertips.com that I thought was important enough to reiterate.

Office 365 Streams Update: Embedding to outside source location

Just as an aside this again is created in Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark

Are you using Forms Function in Acrobat?

You will want to look at this article. This is a quick discussion about the origin of forms in Acrobat/PDF files. Things are changing here with one of the two formats that have been adopted being put to bed by Adobe. So if you are using fillable PDF forms take a look at what Foxit has to say about them.

Here is info about this from the Adobe Forums.

Adobe Revel Closing EOL

If you were using Adobe’s Revel to save documents to the service is going to be gone after June 24th, 2016.  Adobe just sent out notification that you will lose any pictures that are still stored on the service after this date. So you will want to be sure that you download what you have there before it goes away. Click on the Download to my computer link here.

Adobe Photoshop Touch slated for replacement

This is Adobe’s advanced photo editor for iPad and Android tablets. Touch will still continue to work as long as it’s downloaded and installed, but no more updates will be produced and it is no longer for sale.

New prototype apps that Adobe is showing appear to be able to provide editing functions approaching workstation speeds.Adobe has provided a video that also shows off options like selective object removal, color swapping, and image warping.

CNet reported that unlike the $10 Touch, upcoming software should be free, but demand a Creative Cloud subscription to sync files with Photoshop CC on the desktop, or the rest of the CC suite.

It is nice to see that programs is this area are progressing. I will be interested to see how well they work on older iPad equipment and Android devices.

Update: Adobe Login Outage

One of the biggest worries about using online applications or connections is losing access to them for a time.

This is a message I received this afternoon from Adobe, at least they are being upfront about the issue:

Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom CC Deal

Everyone seems to be migrating towards monthly revenue models and Adobe is one of the leaders with this model. Adobe’s Creative Cloud (CC) has been available for a while now and if you are CS3 or higher owner you are eligible are eligible for a special Creative Cloud membership offer that includes all of the following for just $9.99/month: Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, 20 GB of online storage, Behance ProSite, access to Creative Cloud training resources, and ongoing upgrades and updates. To be clear, $9.99 is not an introductory price. It is the price for those who sign up by December 31, 2013. This offer will be available the week of September 16th at the same time we introduce the new version of Lightroom 5.2. 

I haven’t seen it populate their site yet but keep you eyes open for this to become available. For those of you who only need Photoshop and Lightroom this is a very good deal. Normally Photoshop alone is $19.99/month but to have all of this bundled together for half the price it is hard to beat the price.

Need Help with LR4? Try a tutorial…

I really liked George Jardine’s Lightroom 4 Video Workshop. I enjoy George’s approach to training you on more than just how to use LR4 but from the beginning, talks to you about what you should need to know about LR4’s file structure and what you should consider when storing your pictures and where you are going to structure you catalog/library. He goes into great depths describing this and I have restructured my picture file storage to mimic his suggestions. It has worked well for me when I have gone on vacation and taken my library with me to make it easier to update process new pictures.

This new series is available to view in both flash and HTML5 formats. The second was helpful to me because I like to watch these videos using my iPad and so far it is working very well. The complete series costs $24.95 for 16 videos and over 6 hours of online video education. He has a easy to listen voice and when you watch each section you will definitely come away with a deeper understanding of the new Lightroom 4 program.

Here are the video titles:

1   The Library Structure Overview   –  14:45
2   The Lightroom Catalog Overview   –  7:43
3   The Lightroom User Interface   –  21:32
4   The Pro Workflow Overview   –  37:02
5   The Lightroom Import Dialog   –  17:31
6   The Library Module – Part 1   –  27:51
7   The Library Module – Part 2   –  42:21
8   The Keywording Panels   –  19:31
9   The Metadata Panel   –  27:52
10  File Renaming   –  22:06
11   Editing Methods in Lightroom 4   –  34:19
12   The Lightroom Filter Bar   –  14:36
13   Collections & Virtual Copies   –   24:38  (Check out the free sample movie, here.)
14   The Export Dialog & Publish Services   –  35:46
15   The Lightroom to Photoshop Workflow   –  17:09 (NOTE! This tutorial movie will be updated shortly!)
16   Photo Library Backup Strategies   –  22:00

Take a look at his blog post for more information if you are interested in this product. I really like his presentation style and recommend adding this tutorial series to your collection if you are really series about learning LR4’s photo library, workflow and asset management functions. He has more detail on the develop modules based on LR3, hopefully he will update these soon as well.

Adobe Photoshop Touch for the iPad Released

Adobe finally comes though for your iPad devices to provide a Photoshop app designed specifically for tablets. Combine images, apply professional effects, share results with friends and family through sites like Facebook, and more – all from the convenience of your iPad.

• Use popular Photoshop features designed for the tablet such as layers, selection tools, adjustments, and filters to create mind-blowing images.
• Use your iPad camera to fill an area on a layer with the unique camera fill feature.
• Select part of an image to extract by scribbling with the Scribble Selection tool. With Refine Edge, use your fingertip to capture even hard-to-select image elements, like hair, with ease.
• Search and acquire images with the integrated Google Image Search.
• Share images on Facebook and view comments right within the app.
• Browse an inspirational gallery for the styles and results you'd like to achieve. Then follow step-by-step tutorials to easily learn techniques the pros use for great-looking results.
• Use AirPrint for wireless printing of Photoshop Touch projects.
• Upload projects to Adobe Creative Cloud* and open layered files from Adobe Photoshop Touch in Photoshop CS5.
• Maximum image resolution: 1600 x 1600 pixels

This is Adobe’s first iteration of this app on the iPad and hopefully new enhancements will be coming quickly to allow for larger file sizes (images) and more features. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Photoshop Touch is actually part of a family of six tablet apps. So along with Photoshop Touch, there's Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler and Proto. As Adobe describes it, Photoshop Touch will let users combine photos, edit photos, apply filters and other effects and poke with layers. Collage is where you drop images, drawings, text into a 'mood board', Debut shows off your pshop files, Ideas is a vector based tool for drawing, Kuler generates color themes and Proto is made for developers.

Muse Feature Tour available from Adobe TV

AdobeTv has 24 free video tutorials that will help you get started using Muse. Muse is the free design tool and creation app that let’s you mock-up and publish your website without having to learn any code at all.

Muse is for graphic designers who want to easily create unique and professional websites. See how you can design and publish original HTML websites to the latest web standards without writing code. It’s as easy as creating a print layout in InDesign!

Key Features of Muse

• Plan your project — Easy-to-use sitemaps, master pages, and a host of flexible, site-wide tools make it fast and intuitive to get your site planned out and ready for design.
• Design your pages — Combine imagery, graphics and text with complete control, flexibility and power (almost as if you were using Adobe InDesign).
• Add interactivity — Drag and drop fully customizable widgets like navigation menus and slide shows, embed HTML code snippets to include things like Google Maps, enable tool tips, rollovers and much more.
• Publish your site — Preview your site with Muse to see how it looks and test how it works. Then convert to a live website using Adobe for hosting, or export the HTML for hosting with a provider of your choice.

Download a free copy of Muse. Here are the free video titles: