Adobe Stock Photos, the royalty-free image service provided by Adobe, will discontinue service as of April 1.

On Feb. 4, CS2 and CS3 customers with Adobe Bridge-enabled applications received e-mail with information about the discontinuation. In a statement on its website, Adobe did not comment on the service's appearance in the upcoming versions of Adobe Creative Suite.

Adobe Stock Photos will be fully operational through March 3, after which it will disable the search feature. Customers may still purchase images through March 31, however, and customer support will be available until June 1. Adobe recommends uninstalling Adobe Stock Photos from the Creative Suite applications to ease...

The second title of Software Cinema's interactive training line for Adobe Photoshop CS3 has been scheduled. The new interactive series is designed specifically for serious amateur and professional photographers.

Recently inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame, digital artist Eddie Tapp teaches the series via broadband connection through Software Cinema's unique Workshops-on-Demand service or a Product-on-Disc DVD. Tapp teaches about the digital process and new effects that have been updated for the new CS3.

The series is a two-disc set titled "Classic Pro Techniques," and focuses on setup palettes for working spaces, and how to work in Adobe Bridge with the processing interface for RAW, JPEGs and more. It also teaches creative and advanced techniques...

HindSight has announced the arrival of a new software product called METAmachine. The simplified browsing utility program streamlines the process of adding keywords, licenses and other metadata to individual or packaged images. The program reads and writes XMP-formatted metadata in TIFF, JPEG, PSD and DNG images.

METAmachine can be used to write a complete set of the IPTC standard metadata into images or to add copyright and contact information or licensing terms, leaving unaltered all other metadata already present in the images. The software is compatible with XPM-compliant DAM software. To write metadata, users can drag images from the Desktop or from a compatible program...

Adobe Systems Inc. recently announced several new digital camera software upgrades, including the release of its Creative Suite software and a new version of Adobe Photoshop CS.

The new release, dubbed CS2, is a major upgrade to the entire suite and includes new versions of InDesign, Illustrator, and GoLive, as well as two new products: Version Cue and Adobe Bridge. The Creative Suite Premium Edition includes Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2, GoLive CS2, Version Cue CS2 and Acrobat 7.0.

Adobe also recently announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Macromedia in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen will continue as CEO, and Stephen Elop, Macromedia's president and CEO, will become president of worldwide field operations for Adobe. According to Adobe, the purchase of Macromedia will provide customers...