I sometimes think Adobe is fighting the wrong fight. The current spat between the two over Flash is well documented (and I rather like Jeff's take on it). But Adobe's real strength, to me, is in its Creative Suite product, and Photoshop in particular. And last night I had my first chance to play with the latest version of it. I've been looking forward to the new Content Aware abilities (see posts passim), because I'm in the process of digitising and restoring a whole bunch of old family photos. 

Here's what I started with last night:

Pre-restoration
Faded, damaged, parts of the edges missing. It's not in a terrible state, but it would be pretty time-consuming to restore under previous versions of Photoshop. 

30 minutes later, extensive use of the content-aware tool and this is the result:

Mabel_louise_farren_sepia
And, you know what? I'm pretty pleased with that. I intend to go to work with some more challenging images in the next few days.