By Hays Goodman
Associate Editor

Lately, Adobe has been making significant efforts to extend many of their products past the traditional desktop environment and farther into the realm of pure data manipulation and management.

For example, the latest version of Illustrator — version 10 — allows the user to flow eXtensible Markup Language-formatted text into a table, or to link a graphic template to an Open Database Connectivity data source. This could allow the user to generate new graphics on-the-fly as new data becomes available, such as new pricing information to generate a new “Weekly Special” graphic. A monthly weather summary could get transformed into a bar chart for publication in a magazine without having to retype all the numbers. With all that integration, however, the product still requires a designer at the end state to manually turn out the file, regardless of whether or not the data flow is automatic.

Adobe AlterCast attempts the next logical step: Remove the human element from the loop. By delegating image manipulation to external variables, the Web developer can now wade into previously uncharted waters. Uses could be quite varied, depending on the industry. For example, a publisher of electronic catalogs might need to generate thousands of new thumbnail images of products when a new product line becomes available. That same publisher might have previously not been able to combine a “sale” graphic with a price because that would involve a graphic designer opening a multi-layered Photoshop document (PSD) just to change the price on a number of products. For small Web sites that can be more of an annoyance than a major issue, but for large ones it’s a critical business challenge, especially if the site wants to be cutting-edge in its use of graphics and illustration.

As you might expect, newspaper Web sites also process a large number of images, often on a daily basis. Sites will frequently need to generate thumbnails, add photo credits, or do finer manipulation like adding drop shadows or borders. If this happens in multiple departments, the costs can add up quickly in terms of both license purchases for Photoshop and time spent by personnel on image manipulation.

Greg Anderson is a senior systems analyst for The Seattle Times, where the company operates the Web site seattletimes.com. The paper has functioned as a beta test site for Adobe in the past, and the AlterCast product was no exception.

“I started working with the beta version as soon as it became available,” said Anderson. “We had a particular production workflow that we thought it could help with — we needed a way to get quality photos that are published in the paper, resized and out to the Web site.”

AlterCast has the advantage of being designed after a number of Web workflows were somewhat mature, meaning Adobe was able to pick technology optimized to the job at hand. An open architecture is at the application’s heart and AlterCast has application programming interfaces for common languages such as Java, Perl, Visual Basic, COM and .NET. The Seattle Times is using the image resize function, which can create as many as three output sizes from one input using a script, using a naming protocol specified by the user. Anyone who has used a Photoshop “Action” in version 6.0 will be familiar how the extensible naming schema works.

Anderson described how the paper integrated AlterCast into the production workflow.

“Right now, the photo desk outputs all photos for our CCI editorial system. One copy is sent to the system, and another copy gets routed to AlterCast, which runs on its own server. AlterCast monitors a set of folders for the input of new images, resizes that photo to three different sizes, puts a 1-pixel border around it, and drops it off into three different output folders.”

AlterCast runs on a 700 megahertz desktop computer with a Windows 2000 server, and so far, according to Anderson, the application runs efficiently and resource consumption has been minimal. In addition to the Windows NT and 2000 server family, it also runs on Sun Solaris with a minimum of a 167 MHz Sun UltraSPARC processor.

Although at the present time The Seattle Times is using AlterCast primarily for its resizing and multiple image-saving option, the application is capable of more advanced operations, particularly when the base image format is a PSD, the native Photoshop format. AlterCast then has access to all of the layers in the image. It can replace text on a layer, can understand layer effects, adjustment layers and layer masks, can access animation data saved from Adobe ImageReady, and can read all optimization settings within an existing PSD. In the case of text replacement, the text can be previously entered into a text entry field or can be pulled live from a database. Anderson remarked that the more advanced capabilities of AlterCast would probably be called upon in the near future, to dynamically generate charts and graphs from raw numbers, for use both in print and online.

“The nice thing about AlterCast is that if developers are familiar with Perl, Java, PHP, ASP or any major scripting language, they’ll be able to quickly use AlterCast,” Anderson said. “So far, it’s been very stable and the ability to specify image sizes in terms of width and height, and the ability to constrain those, has been very useful … We’re processing about 125 images a day right now.”

AlterCast is priced on a per-processor model, starting at $7,500 for a single processor and maxing out at $60,000 for multi-processor, enterprise-level installations. In addition to marketing the product through resellers, Adobe has created a Fast Start Program that provides solution providers with technical support and marketing support, as well as training and certification programs.