Photography

Adobe Systems released an update to its Photoshop and Lightroom products on Thursday night to support raw images from a raft of newer cameras from Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others.

Raw image formats, which record the unprocessed image sensor data from various higher-end cameras, offer higher quality and more flexibility than JPEGs but require more processing and take up more space. Adobe, Apple, and others write their own modules to decode the proprietary formats.

Adobe's update supports several newer SLRs from Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and Sony; compact cameras from Olympus, Panasonic, and Canon; and several medium-format camera models from … Read more

Apple released one of its routine Mac OS X updates on Wednesday to let its computers handle raw images from a handful of new Nikon and Canon SLRs as well as from Canon's newer high-end PowerShot G11 compact camera.

The update lets Mac OS X 10.6 as well as Apple's iPhoto and Aperture software handle the raw image files taken directly from the camera's sensors without in-camera processing. Raw photo formats offer more quality and flexibility at the cost of convenience and file size.

The update supports Canon's new professional EOS-1D Mark IV and high-end … Read more

Camera makers tout the ruggedness of their higher-end products, but apparently even an entry-level SLR can withstand a 3,000-foot drop under the right circumstances.

So discovered Marius Ivascu, a parachuting instructor in Florida whose Canon Rebel XT detached from his helmet mount and took the fast way back to Earth on a skydiving trip. The camera mount detached when Ivascu deployed his parachute, recounted Calin Leucuta, a photographer and friend of Ivascu who earlier had sold him the camera.

After searching for less than a half hour after he landed, Ivascu found the camera and a video camera that had been mounted next to it.

"The video camera cracked open, dead, done deal. The Rebel took the fall a little better, just a crack in the left side of the plastic body," Leucuta said on his blog. "With a glimmer of hope, Marius presses the playback button: Quelle surprise! The camera turns on, displays the last image taken, like nothing happened." … Read more

The camera industry is in the throes of a digital photography revolution. But a new version of Nikon's 300mm telephoto lens announced this week, a $5,900 model intended for professionals, shows at least some parts of the photography market are constant even as the rest is overhauled.

Digital photography is profoundly different from the film era for many reasons. Here are some: new image sensors can enable photography in conditions too dark for film. The same camera can shoot video and still shots. Cameras can record not just when you took a photo, but where you took it. It's easy to publish photos globally on the Internet or to alter them significantly with software. And steadily increasing computing power lets cameras do everything from detect smiling faces to correct lens shortcomings.

And yet islands of stability remain. The high-end lens, with its complex optical engineering and premium pricing, is one of them.

Many SLR users don't venture beyond the kit lens that comes with their camera--an 18-55mm zoom that's reasonable for indoor shooting and basic tourist photography. Those who want to photograph the kids' soccer matches can step up with a telephoto zoom--usually one reaching to 200mm or 250mm and costing a few hundred dollars.

So why all the extra price for a bit more focal length to reach 300mm? … Read more

It appears that the Google Goggles search-by-sight tool could soon work not just with mobile phones, but through Google's Chrome browser, too.

"I am working on a 20 percent project to facilitate the input of Web image searching," Google programmer Xiuduan Fang said in a post Tuesday to the Chrome Extensions mailing list titled "Chrome extension for Web Goggles. The 20 percent figure refers to a Google program that permits engineers to devote a fifth of their time to projects of their own choosing.

"We would like to have some browser extensions so that the … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google's first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone. On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.

The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what's been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.

"It is our goal to be able to identify any image," he said. "… Read more

Google and Microsoft have joined a group devoted to creating a way that cell phone buyers can easily comprehend the quality of their camera phones.

The International Imaging Industry Association said the tech titans signed up to help with the third phase of the Camera Phone Image Quality Initiative, in which a variety of companies try to create measurements to capture various test results.

Mobile phones that can take photos are ubiquitous today, but with tiny image sensors and lenses and severe budget constraints, they vary widely in their ability to take good photos. Mostly all that buyers have to … Read more

Finally, it looks like the Drobo storage system I've been waiting for has arrived.

I've been struggling with the right way to deal with data as I move from a desktop machine with abundant internal storage to a laptop that can't fit my burgeoning photo library. Earlier four-drive Drobo models, with FireWire and USB ports, looked better at backup than storing live files I'd be using constantly.

But Monday, Data Robotics announced the Drobo S, a five-bay, $799 storage system that adds an eSATA connection to the mix.

Drobo systems use technology called BeyondRAID that stores data across a mixture of different drives. It offers redundancy and automatically rebuilds your files when you replace an older drive or add a new one that's more capacious. Drobos don't come cheap, but they offer longevity, and right now Amazon is selling 1.5-terabyte drives for $99.

So why should the prospect of dropping $1,000 on a storage system excite me? Because of eSATA.… Read more

Adobe Systems released beta software on Wednesday to support raw images from Canon's higher-end new compact cameras, the Powershot S90 and G11, Olympus' rival E-P2, Panasonic's FZ38, and a host of SLRs.

The software updates are betas of Lightroom 2.6, the Camera Raw 5.6 plug-in for Photoshop CS4, and the DNG Converter 5.6. All the software uses the same raw-image processing engine.

Raw images provide more flexibility and image quality but require more processing; typically only higher-end cameras support raw file formats. Most folks are happy with JPEG, but many photography enthusiasts prefer raw.

It'… Read more