images

Global alternative asset manager Carlyle Group has agreed to acquire control of Getty Images for $3.3 billion.

According to Carlyle Group, the acquisition will not give it 100 percent ownership in the company. Instead, the asset manager has bought out Getty Images' major owner, private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, giving it a "controlling stake" in the company.

Getty Images co-founder and chairman Mark Getty, along with his family and co-founder and CEO Jonathan Klein, have rolled "substantially all" of their equity into the transaction, effectively making them Carlyle's partners.

Getty Images has been … Read more

Eastman Kodak failed to announce a winner for its patent bid yesterday, saying that the process is still "ongoing."

Kodak, which was supposed to announce the winners by 2 p.m. PT yesterday, said just minutes before the deadline that it was extending the time for its announcement. The company said that its creditors were onboard with the move, and indicated that all participants were still bound by a "court order on confidentiality."

"Kodak and its creditors have agreed to extend the timeline for announcing the outcome of the patent auction in light of continuing … Read more

In graphics software, sometimes less is more, and what you really need is a simple, fast, lightweight tool that can do the most common jobs quickly and neatly. Zeta Centauri's PixelSwapper is just such an app. With basic commands like Rotate, Resize, Crop, and Grayscale, it can manipulate your images in less time than it takes to learn which menu to use on those feature-packed Photoshop clones. PixelSwapper can also convert images between several image formats.

PixelSwapper has one of the simplest user interfaces we've seen for any kind of tool, let alone a graphics editor -- even … Read more

Pixelmator was already one of the great deals in Mac software, offering Photoshop-style image editing at a fraction of the price.

Now it's even better: for a limited time, you can get Pixelmator 2.1 for just $14.99. It normally sells for $59.

Actually, it's been $14.99 since June, but the just-released version 2.1 adds a wealth of new features -- including Mountain Lion support -- while keeping that tantalizing price.

For those unfamiliar with it, Pixelmator offers advanced image editing via a Photoshop-like interface. Said CNET's Jason Parker in his review of an earlier version: … Read more

Imagine being able to navigate our own biological tissue much in the way Google Earth allows us to zoom in on our own backyards. Only instead of mailboxes and fences, you could spot, say, rogue cancer cells.

Researchers out of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands may be making such a future possible by stitching together molecular- and cellular-level images of biological tissues into truly gigantic composite images.

One such landscape -- of a zebrafish embryo -- consists of 26,000 images, is 281 gigapixels, and boasts a resolution of 16 million pixels per inch.

The researchers explain their … Read more

Opening bids for Kodak's digital-imaging patent portfolio from two competing investor groups backed separately by Google and Apple came in far below the $2.6 billion that the troubled company says it is worth.

The photography pioneer received bids from the two groups in the $150 million and $250 million range, people familiar with the auction process told The Wall Street Journal.

Kodak representatives declined to comment on the reported bid range, citing a court confidentiality order.

"The auction process, including information about bids and the identity of bidders, is confidential pursuant to an order of the Bankruptcy … Read more

Microsoft Image Composite Editor (or ICE) is a multiple image assembler that allows you to quickly import images to generate panoramic photos. You just simply have to drag and drop photos into the application, and ICE will automatically scan and combine the images to create a seamless, high-res panorama.

Despite its long, complicated name, Microsoft Research's app is simple and straightforward. You aren't required to prepare photos or perform any complex ordering. ICE automatically scans each image to determine the best method of stitching images together, both vertically and horizontally. Although I didn't expect it to perform … Read more

Including images in an Office document can ensure that all relevant data is located in one spot for everyone's convenience. Maybe you need to include a schematic or blueprint diagram to help illustrate a point, or feel photos documenting a problem or demonstration could give your work a bit more power. In any case, the easy part is putting the images into the document, but what if you need to pull the images out of a file?

Sure you could use a screen grabber for small files, but what about large, high-quality images that don't fit into one … Read more

All fat is not equal. Brown adipose tissue, more commonly called brown fat and abundant in both newborns and hibernating mammals, is the good fat, playing a prominent role in how quickly our bodies burn calories.

Brown fat also produces as much as 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body, according to scientists at the University of Nottingham, so these scientists have developed a thermal imaging technique to measure not only a person's brown fat stores but also how much heat that fat produces.… Read more