Photography

Google has acquired a Dublin, Ireland, company called Green Parrot Pictures to help improve the quality of videos posted on YouTube.

The company's technology "helps make videos look better while at the same time using less bandwidth and improving playback speed," said Jeremy Doig, director of Google video technology, in a post on Google's YouTube blog yesterday. It's been used in "Lord of the Rings," "X-Men," and "Spider-Man" films and apparently Google now wants to benefit from it as well.

Doig said the acquisition will help improve video marred … Read more

Finally, a camera app that does something besides give snapshots a retro Polaroid look.

That was my first reaction to Adobe Systems' Photoshop Express 2.0, released today for iOS devices. The new version comes with a $3.99 in-app "Camera Pack" option that has noise reduction, a self-timer, and a quick photo review.

I wouldn't shell out four bucks for the ability to check my photos right after I'd taken them, but Adobe has a lot of experience with noise reduction, and small smartphone image sensors can generate a lot of noise, so that seems … Read more

Goldilocks Episode 9 was edited on and uploaded from an iPad 2.

I first ran into Anna Elizabeth James and Michael Koerbel, the aspiring movie-industry duo of Majek Pictures, through the short film "Apple of My Eye" recorded and edited last year entirely on an iPhone 4.

Since last June, the team has been busy. They've since produced eight installments of similarly produced action series called Goldilocks and an app that lets people download new episodes. And starting Friday, they upgraded their editing studio: two iPad 2s running Apple's new tablet version of iMovie were used to produce Goldilocks episode nine.

"The iPad 2 is definitely more fun than editing on an iPhone," James told CNET in an e-mail. Regarding iMovie, "the feature requests we posed to Apple were pretty much all addressed in this version."

Apple's product demonstrations are designed to elevate people's expectations and aspirations, but don't expect average Apple product owners to be able to reproduce what Majek Pictures did easily. But do take it as evidence that the "post-PC era," no matter how much I don't care for that particular term, will extend well beyond playing Angry Birds and posting updates on Facebook. … Read more

Adobe Systems published a release candidate for Lightroom 3.4 that can process raw images from Canon's latest entry-level SLRs and several other cameras.

The software, along with the accompanying Camera Raw 6.4 plug-in for Photoshop CS5, brings support for Canon's Rebel T3i (aka 600D) and Rebel T3 (aka 1100D), two models likely to be very popular among photography enthusiasts.

Higher-end cameras can record images in proprietary raw formats that capture more information than JPEG but that require processing with software such as Lightroom, Phase One's Capture One, Apple's Aperture, or several other packages. Software … Read more

Google is showing some signs it understands how photography is changing on the Net.

In the olden days, people posted batches of digital photos on the Web in photo albums their friends would look at occasionally. Often half the point of uploading the shots was getting them to a place like Snapfish or Shutterfly that could create prints.

Picasa Web Albums, Google's photo-sharing site, was born in this era. Now, though, photos are becoming an in-the-moment part of people's online social lives, notably with Net-connected smartphones and Facebook sharing with friends. Picasa Web Albums--never a product that advanced … Read more

ScanCafe, a company that digitizes slides, prints, and negatives, has crossed the threshold of 50 million photos scanned.

That's a lot of photos, though the company likes to point out there are something like 550 billion more, by one estimate, that it views as in danger. "We've got to preserve many more, before they are lost forever," said CEO Sam Allen in a statement.

It's debatable whether digital copies of photos will outlast analog ones, of course. Multiple identical copies of digital images can easily be stored in different locations, protecting against fires, theft, chemical … Read more

The camera market will grow 7.8 percent to 131 million units from 2010 to 2011, the Camera and Imaging Products Association forecast today.

As has been the case for some years, cameras with interchangeable lenses are a smaller but faster-growing market. That segment--which now includes compact mirrorless models from Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, and Olympus that are smaller than traditional SLR cameras--should grow 20.2 percent to 15.5 million units in 2011, CIPA forecast.

Cameras with built-in lenses, a much broader market but one in more danger of losses to the growing use of phones for photography, should grow … Read more

In academic circles, light-field photography is nothing new. Now, though, a start-up called Pelican Imaging has unveiled a prototype of the technology geared to improve mobile-phone cameras.

Light-field photography--and the related concept of a plenoptic camera--is a complicated concept involving an array of small images rather than one large one. Essential to the process is computational image processing that can extract an actual photograph from the jumble of raw data.

And not just any image, but several images. Light-field photography captures enough data that a person can adjust focus after the shot has been taken and perform actions such … Read more

PicPlz, a photo-sharing start-up, has released a programming interface that lets applications tap into its tools for uploading and applying artistic filters to images.

"We think that allowing developers access to our upload and filter pipeline brings something different to the table than "just another photo-sharing API,'" the company said in a blog post yesterday. "We're pleased to announce that in the past 2 weeks we've had well over 100 developers apply to be part of our API (far exceeding our expectations)."

Opening an API lets programmers tap into the abilities of a … Read more