Underexposed

X-Rite's vision-straining color test.

(Credit: X-Rite)

There are some Web quizzes out there that are fun. Then there's X-Rite's test of how well you can distinguish between subtle differences in hue.

X-Rite, which wants you to buy its technology for precisely calibrating your monitor's colors, published the test, which requires you to put 100 colored chits in the right order. It presents you with a score and a color chart showing where you're unreliable.

I confess I enjoyed taking the test--it was intriguing to pay that much attention to the subtle color perception. For example, the part I found easiest also turned out to be the color range where I made the most errors.

Overall, I scored 90, which is better than random but nowhere near Michael Johnston's score of 4 (lower is better). The site shows how your score compares to your peers' scores, but only crudely: it's too bad there's no frequency distribution to show better how people fared.

I'm not sure how much faith to put in the test, which probably scores your monitor's quality and your patience as well as your visual abilities. But if nothing else, it's a good marketing gimmick.

My mediocre score on the test.

(Credit: CNET News)

Update 6:50 a.m. PDT October 10: Yup, the technology you're using makes a big difference. Thursday's test was on a Lenovo laptop, but then I redid my test on my home machine's high-gamut Dell 2408WFP monitor. My new score was a less disgraceful 17--and the test was much easier, taking me only about half the time.

One more little tidbit: Lori Grunin, who gauges color fidelity all day long as she reviews cameras for CNET, scored a perfect zero. She uses a Sony Artisan CRT monitor.

My score was less embarrassing using the higher-end monitor I have at home.

(Credit: CNET News)

Canon's 17-85mm zoom lens

(Credit: Canon)

Last year, Canon posted an interesting video showing the manufacturing process behind the EF 500mm f/4L IS USM lens that costs about $5,800. Now a photographer has posted his own site that that illustrates why the comparatively lowly EF-S 17-85MM f4-5.6 IS USM costs about $500.

A FredMiranda forum member named Sam posted some photographic details of his lens disassembly after his model suffered a stuck aperture, the mechanism that regulates how much light goes into the lens. Fittingly, the last photo he took was of an exhibit at a Parisian Arab-Islamic museum that features dozens of apertures.

As you might imagine, the lens is an amazing feat of electromechanical miniaturization. I found the most intriguing shots to be of the slotted mechanism that converts rotation of the focusing and zoom rings on the outside of the lens into movement of component assemblies on the inside. Also, the copper windings of the motors controlling the image stabilization are fascinating. I was a little surprised how small the broken aperture actually is. In all, there are dozens of components.

Having stripped some screws and not kept track of the disassembly order, he decided against trying to reassemble it. "Overall, the inner workings were a bit more complex than I expected, but it was a nice linear process taking it apart," he said.

So at the end of it all, he turned the lens into a pencil holder.

Bonus link: Also, if you're in a more constructive frame of mind, the Japanese camera giant also shares instructions on how to make a Canon SLR out of balsa wood.

Photoshop Elements 7 prominently promotes Adobe's Photoshop.com online service.

Adobe Systems has begun shipping its enthusiast-oriented Photoshop Elements 7 image-editing software and Premiere Elements 7 video-editing software--and is offering a promotion to try to lure users to its online Photoshop.com site as well.

The Elements software costs $99.99 each or $149.99 as a bundle. New with this version, Adobe also is offering a $179.99 price that includes a one-year Photoshop.com Plus membership. Ordinarily, a Photoshop.com Plus subscription costs $49.99 a year, so you're basically getting a $20 price break, at least until the time comes to renew for another year.

Photoshop.com offers tutorials, online albums for backing up and sharing your shots, and access to the Photoshop Express online editing tool. The free basic version comes with 2GB of storage, and the Plus level comes with 20GB of storage.

Pricing isn't the only promotion. CNET reviewer Lori Grunin found it annoying how prominently Elements touts the online option in the software itself.

Yahoo Smush It finds Web site images that can be put on a diet.

(Credit: CNET News)

Yahoo, which has considerable expertise in maximizing Web site performance, has long offered advice on how to speed up sites up by minimizing photo size. Now it's released a tool to help Web programmers automate the process.

The Web-based tool, called Smush It, can perform multiple operations to shrink graphics file sizes without impairing visual appeal, Chris Heilmann of the Yahoo Developer Network said in a blog post after tool creators Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov announced the tool at this week's Ajax Experience conference.

Among the things Smush It can do: convert GIF images to the PNG format; reduce the range of colors used in PNG files; strip out textual metadata from JPEG images.

Web developers can upload images to the site, send it a Web site address, or install a Firefox extension that submits a particular Web site with the click of a button. The tool presents users with a downloadable package of the smaller images that can be substituted.

Perhaps Yahoo should try its own medicine. I ran the tool on the Smush It announcement page and found that Yahoo could be trimmed away 23.6 percent of its graphics heft, saving 20KB of data. The Yahoo Developer Network page could be pared down 9.2 percent, saving 19.5KB.

Google has brought to Linux the beta version of its new Picasa 3 software for image editing, cataloging, and uploading.

The new release catches the open-source operating system up with Windows, which got the Picasa 3 beta one month earlier. There's still no word about a Mac OS X version, although Mike Horowitz, Google's Picasa product manager, told me earlier that "Macs are important to us...We're always looking for new ways of making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."

A collage mode in Picasa lets people create poster-size collections, sizing and placing each snapshot. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Google)

The new version adds a retouching tool, automatic synchronization of photos on the PC with those stored at Google's Picasa Web site, and a collage mode that lets people combine numerous snapshots into a poster-size collection, Google programmer Lei Zhang said in a blog post announcing the new version. The new version also is faster, he added.

However, it does lack the Windows version's movie maker feature that can turn photos into a slideshow with a soundtrack that can then be uploaded to YouTube.

The software runs using Wine and an open-source software layer that translates a program's Windows instructions into commands for Linux instead. Google has contributed about 850 patches to the Wine project so far this year, Google said. Better video support in Wine is still a work in progress, though, which is why the movie maker feature is disabled.

The Photoshop.com Mobile beta lets people with Windows Mobile phones view and upload photos.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Adobe Systems has gradually extended its Photoshop brand from its beginnings as high-end image-editing tool to its Elements consumer-oriented photo software and its Express online photo-editing site.

Now, the company has begun taking the next step with Photoshop.com Mobile (see previous coverage). The software is the "easiest way to upload, view, and share photos online from your Windows Mobile phone," according to Adobe.

This software lets people upload photos from their phones to Photoshop.com and view photo albums stored online, according to the site. The beta software, a free download for people in the United States, works on several Windows Mobile-based handsets.

If your device isn't supported, Adobe recommends using Shozu mobile phone software, which lets people upload photos, among other things.

Personally, I'd like to see a mobile phone app that could perform some really basic adjustments--cropping or auto-fixing exposure, for example. But, so far at least, this isn't that application. However, Photoshop itself is about to enter its 11th major version, CS4, and mobile phones are getting more powerful all the time, so the possibility is there.

But more likely, Adobe sees this software as a tool to increase its customers' online activity. Photoshop Express can be used for those sorts of adjustments, although even high-powered phones such as Apple's iPhone can't use it yet. But with gradually increasing network capacity and mobile-phone processing, this market will become much more mature in a few years.

For a few cautions and further details about Photoshop.com Mobile, see the release notes.

Update at 8:23 a.m. PDT: Shozu sent out an announcement of its own, saying its software lets 350 different cell phones upload pictures to Photoshop.com. The software also works with Facebook, WordPress, and Google's Blogger, and can send photos to multiple e-mail addresses.

Google's search-ad business is a money machine, but every now and again the company manages to squeeze out a little revenue from other parts of its business. And on Wednesday, Google announced one such deal with another Silicon Valley power, Adobe Systems.

Google Site Search lets customers endow their Web sites with a customized search engine derived from Google's broader index, and Adobe is using it in two ways, said Nitin Mangtani, Google's lead product manager for enterprise search.

First is Adobe's new Community Help search site, which presents search results from thousands of Adobe-selected sites. There are plenty of sites with Lightroom development presets, Photoshop editing recipes, Flash programming tips, and other such information, so if successful, the Adobe site--in beta for now--could be a more effective way to dig up what's online.

Second, that community search ability is built into Adobe's new CS4 suite of applications for image editing, illustration, video production, and Web site design. Adobe already had moved to an HTML-based help system, so extending to the Community Help site was probably not too complicated.

Google has thousands of customers for Site Search. It's available as a free, ad-supported service, but customers also can pay for ad-free, Google-logo-optional versions costing $100 per year for indexing up to 5,000 Web pages or $500 per year for up to 50,000 pages.

Adobe fits into a higher-end category to accommodate the higher volume of search traffic and the millions of indexed pages, Mangtani said, but declined to share terms of the deal.

Update 3:50 p.m. PDT: Adobe wouldn't comment on the terms of the deal either, but it did supply some more information.

For one thing, here's how it picked which sites to index: "We asked experts in the community--prominent bloggers, training partners, book authors, etc.--which URLs do they keep handy in their bookmarks folder? We also have a few favorite sites of our own that our doc writers and tech leads visit regularly," said Mark Nichoson, product manager for Adobe Community Help, in a statement. "We don't include the Adobe Store or marketing info...and we don't include every Adobe-related site on the Web. Our goal is to ensure access to the most relevant, high-quality sites so that users can get the answers they need, no matter where those answers may be found."

More than 3,000 sites are indexed so far, and Adobe encourages the public to suggest others that should be added.

It's a boon that digital photos can incorporate textual information, leaving behind some film-era complications, such as having to separately record a photo's caption or copyright status.

But there are some problems handling this so-called metadata, and now Canon, Adobe Systems, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and Nokia have banded together to solve some of them.

The companies have formed the Metatdata Working Group and released a first set of guidelines that attempts to standardize some issues that can crop up as metadata travels from cameras to computers, software, and Web sites. On Wednesday, the group announced its work at the Photokina camera show in Germany.

"Whether you're a soccer mom uploading photos to a Kodak gallery, or a pro selling images on Getty, these are issues everybody deals with," said Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging evangelism and the metadata group's chairman and founder.

For example, when moving a photo from one application to another, a vertically orientated photo can get rotated 90 degrees into a landscape orientation, or captions and descriptive keywords can get lost. Part of the problem is that there are multiple ways to record metadata, including EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council), and Adobe's XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform).

The working group has produced guidelines to try to bring common practices to metadata areas including keywords, description, creator, star rating, orientation, and location, Weisberg said. The group dealt with three file formats: TIFF, JPEG, and Adobe Photoshop's PSD.

The Metadata Working Group's guidelines are a free download from the Web site, and anyone is free to implement them without worrying about infringing any of the members' intellectual property, Weisberg said.

Being guidelines, others are free to handle metadata they way they want, but the collective clout of the working group members--the two major operating system makers, the top camera maker, and the top image-editing software maker--mean it's likely others will follow suit.

Up next: Handling raw images
There's more work to be done, though.

The working group got started on the current guidelines a year ago. Now, it's moving on to the next set of issues. "With the first version, we began with consumer scenarios. We're formulating a plan for a second version. It's our intent to address professional scenarios," Weisberg said.

One big issue is handling the profusion of raw file formats produced by higher-end cameras and commonly used by professionals and advanced amateurs. These formats are generally proprietary, so it's hard to handle their metadata. Windows does so by relying on software supplied by camera makers, but Adobe and Apple do their own reverse-engineering work to handle the metadata. So for example, unless a Windows Vista user has downloaded the appropriate support, the operating system's file browser software can't report when a raw photo was taken, even though that metadata is stored in the photo file.

"It is a goal to try to establish guidelines for where and how metadata is stored in raw formats," Weisberg said.

Another possible issue is handling metadata for photo licensing information, which could bring some rights management order to the today's image copying free-for-all, but that's tricky. "We're in the phase of capturing the problem," Weisberg said. "There are no standards in the industry for licensing images that are widely adhered to."

Phase One's upcoming 60-megapixel professional camera.

(Credit: Phase One)

Phase One is fleshing out its transformation from a maker of high-end image sensors for others' cameras into a maker of full-on cameras.

At the Photokina camera show in Germany, the company announced "successful alliances" with Leica Camera, Mamiya, and Hartblei to bring third-party lenses to its Phase One 645 camera system, and it said it will begin selling several lenses of its own by the end of the year. Those lens models are a 28mm f4.5, a 45mm f2.8, an 80mm f2.8, a 120mm f4.0, a 150mm f2.8, and a 75-150mm f4.5 zoom.

The professional camera, with a 60-megapixel sensor and a starting price of $41,990, is also due to ship by the end of the year. Coming in the first quarter of 2009 will be an 80mm leafshutter lens and a vertical grip.

The company also announced at the camera show an upgrade to the professional version of its its raw-image editing software.

Also new from the company is a 15-megapixel sensor mode for the 60-megapixel sensor. This mode combines four pixels into one that measures 12 microns square, extending the sensitivity range to ISO 1600.

The Lensbaby Composer has a traditional focusing ring.

(Credit: Lensbaby)

Lensbaby's selective-focus lenses thus far have brought a seat-of-the-pants, analog feel to the electronic and digital world that photography has become. But a new model announced Tuesday has a more traditional interface for those who weren't happy with the company's earlier approach of squeezing and flexing the lens until the image looks about right.

For the uninitiated, the company's approach deserves a little explanation here. Lensbaby lenses let people focus tightly on a selected spot; the rest of the view quickly recedes into blurriness. It's a bit gimmicky, but it gives a different look than most lenses, it can be fun to play with, and if done well it can really focus attention well on the subject. The product works because its outer lens element can be bent so it's not parallel to the image sensor--in effect, it's a cheap tilt-shift lens.

The new model, the $270 Composer, forsakes the earlier flexible plastic bellows system for something resembling a ball-and-socket joint. Instead of squeezing to focus, the photographer twists a traditional focusing ring. The mechanism looks much cleaner and easier to use than the complicated struts-and-knobs approach of the earlier Lensbaby 3G, though I fear grit could work its way into the mechanism.

The 3G got a redesign, too. It's morphed into the $270 Control Freak. And the first-generation Lensbaby is similarly reworked into the Muse, which costs $100 to $150 depending on whether it uses plastic or glass lenses.

The major new feature of the updated models is what the company calls the Optic Swap System, which lets users change the lenses. The four options are a double glass element, a single glass element, a single plastic element, and a pinhole/zone plate.

The announcement came during the Photokina photography show in Germany.