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Adobe pulls bug-riddled Photoshop update

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Lightroom users plunged into darkness

By Richard Thurston • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 18th March 2008 12:35 GMT

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Adobe has withdrawn a Photoshop product update because it was too buggy and has told customers to uninstall it.

The latest version of Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe's toolbox which helps photographers manage large volumes of digital photos, contains three "frankly unacceptable" bugs, Adobe said. The software company has removed the update from its site.

The bugs, which affect both PCs and Macs, are a time stamp error, a problem with the way files are converted to the DNG (Digital Negative) format, and an error with converting Olympus camera JPEGs into other formats.

Adobe says anyone who has installed the update should now uninstall it.

"The Lightroom 1.4 update for Mac and Windows has been temporarily removed from the Adobe.com site," wrote Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty in a blog post. "Those Lightroom users who have installed Lightroom version 1.4 should uninstall the update and install Lightroom 1.3.1 [the prior version]."

Some users were not impressed. "You have no idea how much pain this caused over the weekend," wrote Richard Stocks in response. "I can only hope the QA folk have learned some important lessons about regression testing so we don't see this kind of thing repeated. To introduce such massive problems into something that was functional really has no excuse."

In a subsequent blog post, Hogarty said Adobe did not know about the bugs prior to release and that his team was "extremely sorry".

"In our eagerness to get new camera support into customers' hands as promptly as possible, we let some bugs slip past our testing that were frankly unacceptable.

"Compared to other Adobe applications, we've taken a much more aggressive approach to releasing frequent new versions with new features, but it's clear we need to take a hard look at our release process to make sure that this aggressive approach doesn't sacrifice quality."

There's now no scheduled release date for the update. ®

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