Category — Photography

Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop Express, it’s online consumer-grade photo editing and storage program. Unlike other versions of Photoshop (and Photoshop Elements), Photoshop Express is completely Flash-driven and resides solely in your web browser rather than on your computer’s hard drive.

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Wireless capability is being built into some digital cameras today, but here is a device that you can add to an existing camera to make it WiFi-compatible:

The Eye-Fi is a 2 GB SD (Secure Digital) memory card that incorporates built-in WiFi to transmit images wirelessly from your digital camera to your computer. Using their provided software, you can also have those photos automatically submitted to a photo sharing site of your choice (out of the list of available choices).

Photojojo.com says that they will soon offer a CF (Compact Flash) adaptor so that you could use the Eye-Fi card in a DSLR using CF-type memory.

Here’s an interesting development by Canon to try to help photographers protect and enforce the copyrights of their images.

Basically, Canon has filed for a patent on a system that examines the iris of the photographer looking into the viewfinder and embeds information about that photographer into each image that is captured.

I don’t quite understand fully how that helps, even after reading the full article available here, but it’s a story worth following.

I recently had a friend complain that my blog posts were too “Mac biased” and, therefore, useless to PC users. While I won’t apologize for being an adamant Mac fan, I’ll try to throw them a bone here with this little gem:

PicLens is a browser plugin that is, in my humble opinion, one of the coolest innovations for viewing images from the web. You really have to see it to fully understand what I’m talking about, but basically it allows the user to view a “feed” of images in a full-screen, interactive environment.

I know that it works with Flickr, Google Images, Picassa, Yahoo, and Facebook at this point, but, if there are not already others, I’m sure there will be soon!

It is available for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. The newest feature, the 3D “Wall” of images, only works in Firefox and IE. I’ll take this opportunity to throw out my Firefox plug. My advice: quit using Internet Explorer. If you are a PC users and don’t have it, download Firefox here.

Head over to piclens.com to download the plugin that’s right for your browser. Once the plugin is installed, anytime you mouse over an image on a site that works with PicLens (Media RSS enabled), a small play button will fade in. Click that button to begin the experience. If you need more help, you can click the Tutorial link on the piclens.com site.

Questions? Leave a comment here, I’ll respond. Enjoy.

I stumbled across an interesting post today about a new product being researched by Adobe. It’s basically a camera lens comprised of 19 smaller lenses that allow a scene to be photographed from multiple angles simultaneously.

With the proper software, one could control the depth of field of the image (captured on a single frame) after the image has been captured and downloaded to the computer! Pretty cool!

The video below, apparently from Photoshop World, shows a glimpse of the amazing possibilities:

A new application was released yesterday by Pangea Software called Bracketeer. This Mac utility allows photographers to combine different exposures of the same image into a new “enfused” image with a much higher range of tones.

At first glance, this looks pretty cool, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it much. I’ll re-post with more information once I’ve tried it. Pangea also has a panorama software available. There are free demos available, but it’s only $20 for both programs, so if it works, I’ll throw down for that.

Adobe Systems has announced today that they plan to discontinue the Adobe Stock Photos service that has shipped as part of Bridge, one of the Creative Suite applications. This royalty-free stock photography service introduced with Adobe Creative Suite 2 Software in May 2005 will be discontinued effective April 1, 2008.

I, personally, have never used this service. It seems like a good idea for Adobe to do away with it and focus on other projects. Many users of Adobe’s programs are photographers anyway and not likely to purchase stock photos. To me, stock photography management seems like a pretty rough market to break into…even for a company like Adobe.

You’ll want to go ahead and remove the Stock Photos Service from your Adobe Creative Suite Applications. The uninstaller program can be found here for Mac and here for Windows.

Click here to view Adobe’s FAQ on Stock Photos.

Selling a few items on eBay. Check out all my listings here.

I’m selling the following items:

• HP Photosmart 8450 InkJet Photo Printer
• PortaTrace 1118 - 11″x18″ Lightbox
• GretagMacbeth ColorChecker Custom White Balance Card

The Library of Congress has begun uploading photos to Flickr, the popular photo sharing website. This move brings a measure of credibility to Flickr and takes some of the “stuffiness” out of the Library of Congress.

The current collections available include news photographs from the 1910s and goverment-sponsored photographs of the U.S. from the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Click here to access the Library of Congress’ Flickr feed.

Click here to view the NPR story that alerted me to this news.