photography

Closing the circle on the Sony ad and "Timing Is Everything"

A few weeks back, I posted about Sony using a 1965 John Dominis photograph to illustrate how "Timing Is Everything." Given that the picture in question could hardly have been taken with a Sony digital camera (which wouldn't exist for decades), I thought it a poor choice to illustrate the technical prowess of Sony's latest digital SLR.

After I wrote the original post, I noticed something else when I was studying the original photograph and the one in the ad; they weren't quite the same. I thought it a slightly amusing oddity but not much … Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Here's some of the backlog from a virus-induced hiatus that knocked me out for a couple days.

PhotoAcute Studio. Leading super-resolution technology for better photos. PhotoAcute's product description: "It increases image resolution, removes noise without losing image details, corrects image geometry and chromatic aberrations and expands the dynamic range." PhotoAcute Review. Uwe Steinmuller's testing of super-resolution software that combines multiple images into one. Lightroom Journal: Lightroom 1.3.1 and Camera Raw 4.3.1. Lightroom update fixes Nikon D100 and Olympus E-3 compatibility problems, tweaks SKD's FTP export module. New Lightroom Galleries--O'Reilly Digital Media Blog. … Read more

China moon photo--real but faked

A controversy over last week's photo of the lunar surface, allegedly from China's lunar spacecraft Chang'e, appears to be resolved. It's real, but it isn't. An expert says the photo's resolution shows that it is of recent origin. However, for some inexplicable reason, someone on Earth edited the photo and moved a crater to a different location.

Read the full story at MSNBC.com.

More Commercial Creative Commons conundrums

A few days back, I posted about the difficulty of distinguishing commercial from noncommercial usage with respect to the Creative Commons license.

There's an ongoing legal case that concerns another aspect of Creative Commons commerciality. As Josh Wolf describes the original story:

On April 21, 2007, during a church camp, Chang's counselor snapped a photo of her and uploaded it to his Flickr account. He published the photo under a CC-BY-2.0 license, which allows for commercial use of the photo without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.

In less than two months, the photo had been cropped … Read more

Adobe Lightroom and color spaces

Noted photographer Stephen Johnson writes in On Digital Photography that "Color management could also be known as color confusion, marketing hyperbole, or the black hole." One of the most potentially confusing aspects of color management is color spaces. This is a vast topic but, essentially, color spaces are mathematical representations of the way that we perceive colors. Different colorspaces work better for different purposes. They also stir strong opinions--viz. Dan Margulis' Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace.

The good news is that the typical photographer doesn't need to worry … Read more

Photo slide shows on DVD

Along with "What's the best free video-editing software?" one of the most frequent questions I receive from CNET Download.com users is, "How can I put my photos on a DVD that anyone can watch?" For everyone whom I wasn't able to respond to personally, here's a quick overview.

First off, the most important issue is the DVD player for which you're creating the slide show. Many DVD players nowadays don't need a specially formatted disc to view digital pictures, and some have built-in slide-show features for viewing JPEG images. The … Read more

Does the Noncommercial Creative Commons license make sense?

Back when I was writing software for PCs, it was pretty common to see licenses offering some program free "for noncommercial use" or some similar wording. The basic idea was that if you got people using some application at home, maybe they'd want to use it at work too--and then they'd buy a commercial license. Besides, very few of those home users were about to send you a check anyway. It's a little bit like using an open-source business model to build volume and awareness with free, unsupported software and then make money from support contracts when a company wants to put the software into production.

There's a difference though.

No widely used open-source software license that I know of makes a distinction about how the software is going to be used. Rather, open-source licenses concern themselves with essentially technical details about how code is combined with other code and what the resulting obligations are with respect to making code changes and enhancements available to the community. But none of the major open-source software licenses restrict use to schools or personal PCs or anything like that.… Read more

Good vibes for Nikon's 18-55mm lens

As an increasing number of competitors add sensor-shift image stabilization to their consumer dSLRs--Olympus and Pentax, to name but two--OIS diehards Nikon and Canon have to keep up by moving lens-based stabilizers farther down their product lines. Earlier this year, Canon updated its staple f3.5-5.6 18-55mm kit-optimized lens with the IS moniker and technology, and now it's Nikon's turn to follow suit with its AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f3.5-5.6G VR lens.

For those of you who lack the Nikon lens-speak decoder ring (though there seems to be an e-version on bythom.com), the lens … Read more

'Seam carving' photo resizing now for video

MONTEREY, Calif.--In August, researchers unveiled a new way of shrinking or expanding photos called seam carving. Now it turns out the technique applies to video, too.

Ariel Shamir, a senior lecturer at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel and a visiting scientist with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, showed off the technique at the 6sight digital-imaging conference here last week. (Adobe Systems has hired another seam carving researcher, Shai Avidan.) The technology analyzes a picture for vertical or horizontal "seams"--the term the researchers use to describe a path traversing the photo where pixels are … Read more

A treat, fix, and update for Adobe Lightroom users

Adobe on Thursday issued three upgrades for users of its Photoshop Lightroom software.

The biggest news for some may be that Adobe Labs is offering a preview copy of Lightroom Export SDK, an application that will allow Lightroom users to export photos to Web sites, third-party software, and devices.

Meanwhile, the Lightroom 1.3 update should fix compatibility issues with Apple's Leopard Mac OS X 10.5. Previously, Adobe had warned that Leopard users could experience problems when trying to use Lightroom, though it was still safe to use most features. Adobe had previously announced that the fix would … Read more