photography

To accommodate all those high-resolution photos you've shot with your new (or old) dSLR, Epson has doubled the hard disk size of its Multimedia Photo Viewers. This year's models, the P-6000 and P-7000, offer 80GB and 160GB, respectively over the P-3000 and P-5000's 40GB and 80GB.

Though screen size and resolution hasn't changed from the previous models--4 inches at 640x480--they incorporate Epson's latest display technology, dubbed Photo Fine Premia. Though the technology remains basically the same--it combines red, blue and two green filters in a single pixel rather than spreading them across pixels--the company claims … Read more

One of my favorite Facebook features is auto-tagging. It happened to me last night by accident and ended up being one of those very rare moments of using a product where I got a big grin on my face. The feature comes into play when the service recognizes that a photo or video upload happened around the same general time of an event you said you were planning to attend through Facebook's party planning tools. If your photo or video upload occurs within these conditions you'll be prompted to have it automatically tagged and dropped into the event'… Read more

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Want to know more about common digital photography problems like noise and blown-out highlights? Choosing between RAW and JPEG formats? Take Your Best Shot is now available from O'Reilly Media for $34.99. The book is written by Tim Grey, a member of the Photoshop World Dream Team of Instructors who has been answering digital photography questions for years on his popular DDQ: Digital Darkroom Questions daily e-mail newsletter, and his printed Digital Darkroom Quarterly newsletter.

Take Your Best Shot is 252 pages and organized by subject so you can look up any issue. "Today, many photographers feel … Read more

As an avid amateur photographer, my biggest problem with my online media has nothing to do with editing images, but organizing them first. I can click off several hundred photos of the family dog or a hiking trip, but before I even start tweaking colors of a sunset, I have a tough time even finding the right photograph. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 aims to help consumers with that common problem.

In Tuesday's edition of the Daily Debrief, I speak with senior writer and serious photographer Stephen Shankland about the new software released Monday. Retailing for $299 new or $… Read more

With Adobe Systems' release of version 2 of its Photoshop Lightroom on Monday night, the company no doubt hopes customers will be drawn by a number of new features in the software for sorting, cataloging, and editing photos.

But the company believes an external factor will also help the software: the booming sales of high-end SLR cameras. These high-end models are helping usher in many of digital photography's biggest changes, and Adobe is trying to intercept the trend with Lightroom.

From 2007 to 2008, digital SLR shipments increased a dramatic 41 percent to 7.5 million units, according to market researcher IDC. And though plenty of those cameras went to gadget-happy doctors or to snapshooters who won't exploit the cameras' full features, plenty of others went to the photography enthusiasts at whom Lightroom is aimed.

"Prices are coming down, so more people with entry-level SLRs are experimenting," said Tom Hogarty, the Adobe senior product manager in charge of Lightroom. "If you pick up the camera for the sake of creating an artistic thing and not just recording a family event, you've really taken the plunge into serious photography. Anyone at that level is an ideal Lightroom customer."

One significant feature common to SLRs is the ability to shoot "raw" photos--the images taken directly from the image sensors without the camera baking in its own assumptions about what's right.… Read more

We finally get CNET photographer Sarah Tew into The 404 lair and I screw it all up in the preshow. 'Twas totally unintentional, Ms. Tew, I promise! Ahh, this big, dumb mouth of mine. Anyway, Sarah was dragged in by Corinne Shulze, another CNET shooter visiting from the City by the Bay. In nothing short of a miracle, they still agree to do the show and we get right into it.

Wait, not quite...we have to talk about medical ailments and weekend buffoonery, right? Corinne tells us about her fight with a MUNI rail (you should've seen the … Read more

AOL is scrapping some online destinations but will push others harder in an attempt to improve its finances, according to internal memos.

Among those products to be shuttered are Bluestring, a site to share videos, music, and photos; Xdrive, a general-purpose online storage service; and AOL Pictures, where people could store and share photos, according to a July 14 memo from Kevin Conroy, AOL's executive vice president of products and marketing. The memo was published Thursday by TechCrunch.

"These consumer storage products haven't gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the … Read more

Over at Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey notes:

A recent post by photographer J.M. Goldstein raised a very interesting question about Flickr and its API, namely whether or not Flickr was policing its API well enough and doing an adequate job protecting the rights of photographers and artists that post to the service.

I would have thought the answer was obvious. No.

Or, perhaps more accurately, Flickr has apparently decided either deliberately or as a matter of generalized neglect that providing its users with more sophisticated and granular tools to protect their content isn't a priority.

While there is much that I like about Flickr, … Read more