Photography

Prizmo is an application that allows you to extract the photos and text from your digital pictures. It's highly useful if you want to document an exhibition or make a quick copy of many pages from a book.

You can achieve the same results with a scanner, Photoshop and an OCR application if you have the skills, but Prizmo provides speed, simplicity and a better experience.

Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel has developed a promising technology that enables image resizing that is much more intelligent than rescaling or cropping. See the amazing video for details. Hopefully this tool will find its way into Adobe CS4.

How to get rid of this unsightly effect...There are many technical reasons and some disagreement as to why purple fringing occurs in digital cameras. These factors include the lens, focus, leakage between pixels, and more...

What to do! You have taken a lovely photo, only to take it home and discover this purplish haze around the edges of the subject??

The most common cause of purple fringing is low light with high-contrast boundary areas in an image. So in the case of my example above, I took a photo of a reflective surface on a sunny day with the sun shining behind it.
Oh woe is me! Well.. never fear.. there is a way to fix this photo using Photoshop, I am going to show you the way that was easiest for me, of course there are a number of ways to do this... but I found this method to be the easiest to remember and most effective!

Specifications:
ISO: 50
Shutter: 1/8000 seconds
Aperture: f/32
Date: March 29th, 2006
Time: 1415 hours (2:15PM)
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L @ 200mm (100% cropped)
Camera: Canon 1Ds Mark II

In the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II, I have extreme levels of ISO that Canon does not recommend using and are only enabled through custom settings in the camera; Those are ISO 50 and ISO 3200.

Since my day was almost free at the studio this morning, I thought I would give them a try and see how bad they are. I've taken some shots in both ISO settings, using the camera's automatic metering, with aperture priority @ f/2 (Lens: Canon EF 135mm f/2L). The only Photoshop work done is scaling and 100% crops...

Some books on my desk:
Books - ISO3200 100% cropped
Books - ISO50 100% cropped
Books - ISO50
Books - ISO3200

The reception desk:
Reception - ISO3200 100%cropped
Reception - ISO50 100%cropped
Reception - ISO50
Reception - ISO3200

The product photography table:
Studio - ISO3200 100%cropped
Studio - ISO50 100%cropped
Studio - ISO50
Studio - ISO3200

Sorry for the long load :)

This is just to let you guys know that SXC is back online. It is probably the best place on the net for free stock photos, so check out their latest version at sxc.hu.

(BTW, downloads are currently disabled)

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Aperture arrived at stores across the country yesterday, and today, I got my very own copy!

It looks very good, runs fast, ooh yeah and I got it to work on my "old" Power Mac (by my definition, it's still a great computer, but apparently Apple decided that Aperture is not going to run on it).

I made a lot of screenshots of it, that you can see on this webpage. I'm not going to write about it here in detail, but if anyone has any questions about it, just send them my way! Commenting this thread is the perfect place for them...

Well Apple have released their ‘PhotoShop beater’ and it looks like it’s going to do the same to the Photographers market as FinalCut did to the editing industry.

Apeture
Aperture might be a little overpriced for my liking but the features are amazingly powerful. Not aiming at the design market at all instead this product is headed straight for the desk of any self respecting professional photographer with a screen big enough to accommodate all of the features.

I've always wanted to reach a special effect in mind for portraits at home or on the move that I was only able to achieve using studio lighting.

Last night, I made a drawing of a softbox that attaches on the small flash and experimented with the different diffusers until I reached the effect I wanted.

(Image settings Camera=ISO 100 - 1/200 - f/2.0. Flash=1/128. Lens=135mm)

It seems to me that for many people the most important characteristic when buying a digital camera is how many megapixels it can do. The bigger however is not necessarily better in this case. :)

An 8 megapixel digital camera can be more expensive and more promising than a 6.3 megapixel camera, but don't be mislead by the numbers. It's the detail of the picture that a camera can capture that counts, not the size of the file it records. You may get a bigger picture with an 8MB camera (on the left), but when you down size it to 6.3MB (in the middle) and compare it to an image taken with a better camera that is only capable of 6.3MB (on the right) you can see that the lower megapixel camera can still capture more detail than the higher megapixel camera. When you look at the images at 100% it becomes evident that the picture in the middle is not as sharp and not as detailed as the picture on the right.

Go for a camera that produces smaller, but extremely sharp images. You can still enlarge those smaller images for bigger size prints, but grainy and out of focus images are more difficult to improve. Lens and the quality of the sensor capture is more important than the pixel count. Interestingly, it seems that film and sensors have something in common. The larger the physical size of the sensor or film, the better the image.

Read more about sensors.