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photography

Fotonauts crafts Wikipedia for photos

An estimated 500 million images are captured every day, but less than 5 percent end up on major photo sharing sites. Uploading photos is not the easiest task and most photos are locked into a specific photo sharing service and have all rights reserved licenses. Jean-Marie Hullot, wants to liberate photos from silos and offer news ways to organize and discover images.

The former CTO of NeXT and Apple's application division, Hullot showed off fotonauts,a kind of Wikipedia for photos at TechCrunch50. Currently in private beta for Windows and Mac users, the Web application stores 1080p thumbnails of … Read more

Google adds Android app for Flickr photos

Google released on Thursday a new sample application called Photostream that will let phones running its Android phone operating system view photos stored at Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site.

Although Photostream is intended to be a tool to illustrate the use of various Android features, it also looks like a potentially useful application for when the phones start shipping later this year. The open-source program lets people browse a particular user's photos, in groups or individually, and create separate shortcuts to different Flickr accounts, according to a description at the Android developers blog.

Google is trying to attract developers … Read more

Sony photo-sharing site aims to improve your pics

I'm fairly certain the world didn't need another photo-sharing site, but Sony disagrees. Its newish Digital Darkroom Web site is, however, a little more than just another Flickr with marketing for Sony's cameras.

Digital Darkroom (not to be confused with the other site by the same name and no relation to 1988's Beyond Photography: The Digital Darkroom book or 2007's The Creative Digital Darkroom book) is part of Sony's Backstage 101 online learning center and features online photography tutorials along with a way to share and view pictures.

There are public galleries and "… Read more

First Look video: Photoshop CS3 (Mac)

Photoshop CS3 for Mac is still your top choice if you're serious about image editing. Loaded with features for color-correction, photo enhancements, filters, effects, and layer management, Photoshop is the pro-level image-editing software to measure all others by. If you'd like a closer look at some of the features Photoshop CS3 has to offer, check out our First Look video to see if you're ready to download the trial.

Canon rolls out 6 printers for every occasion

Tuesday, Canon announced six new printers that are sure to appeal to a variety of users including small- to mid-size business professionals, photography enthusiasts, students, and creative hobbyists. This new release includes four new Pixma printers and two new Selphy compact photo printers. Let's take a closer look at the offerings:

Pixma iP3600 $80 9600x2400 color dpi resolution Dual paper trays for plain and photo paper Five color individual ink cartridge bay Bundled with one ChromaLife100+ ink set and Easy-PhotoPrint EX software Pixma iP4600 $100 9600x2400 color dpi resolution Reported print speeds of up to 26 pages per minute for black, and up to 21 ppm for color Auto-duplexer with two separate paper trays Easy-PhotoPrint EX software includes Auto-Photo Fix for easy edits… Read more

Disassembled electric appliances

Ever wondered what the inside of your waffle maker looks like? Yes? No? Well, even if not, you might be surprised how interesting small electric appliances are when you take them apart.

Brittny Badger has produced a wonderful series of still-life photos of disassembled small electric appliances, such as a waffle iron, electric knife, and a can opener. Rather than the usual slapdash tear-down photos one sees of the latest tech gadget, these are artfully composed images that show the inner complexity of mundane objects that we typically take for granted.

As my colleague Denise Gershbein says:

Seeing the sheer … Read more

Photoshop Elements 7 preview: A little whiz, mostly gee

With the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements, Adobe's laying on the Web subscription message really thick. Take, for instance, the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one of the applications. The standard Organize, Edit, Create, and Share options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared with the large, rotating slide show heralding the many benefits of the free and $49.99 Plus memberships for Photoshop.com (more project templates, remote backup, and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might as well have sold the space as an ad; it's that annoying. (For more on the online and mobile aspects of the Elements release, read our coverage on Download.com.) And that's too bad, because Photoshop Elements remains a very nice midrange photo editor, but all of these bells and whistles--some pretty off-key--increasingly detract from its core strengths.

The program's main advantage is that it's cheaper than Photoshop and Lightroom, but remains powerful enough for most photo retouching tasks. Thus, the improved raw workflow is quite welcome--improved, in that you can bypass it entirely if you want. For example, to create a slide show of NEF (Nikon raw) files, it simply applies the default raw-processing settings and treats them like JPEGs.

Also quite useful is the new text search box in the organizer, which is a fast, easy way to filter by keywords or basic metadata. Very basic metadata; you can only search on time, data, camera, and caption text. But that should be sufficient for this class of user.… Read more