imaging

Apple camera support catches partway up to Adobe

With Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.2 update on Monday, Leopard now can handle the unprocessed "raw" images produced by several new higher-end digital cameras.

Among high-profile newer cameras that Leopard now supports are Canon's top-end EOS-1Ds Mark III and its top-end compact camera, the PowerShot G9. Nikon's new SLRs, the D3 and D300, also are on the list, as is Sony's Alpha A700.

Raw images provide more flexibility and detail than JPEGs, but to use them, people must convert the unprocessed camera data. Apple's Mac OS X handles this conversion on … Read more

Killer Download: Top free screen capture utilities

Every computer user needs a good screen capture utility at one time or another. Whether doing a Web research project, getting a slick new desktop background, or just adding to an image collection, the flexibility of these utilities make them much more useful than the full-screen capture in Windows. As a reviewer of software, I often need to take screenshots of programs I'm reviewing. A screen capture utility lets me capture the whole program, or just a section of the screen depending on what I want to call out.

Windows comes with the Print Screen function which saves a … Read more

Collect the Web with Ript

Ript is a new, free software application in beta development that lets you collect images and text from the Web, then compile and arrange them into pages you can print or share with friends and family. It's a simple freeware idea that makes sense...and it's from Oprah? Well, sort of. The publisher is the Oprah Winfrey-founded Oxygen Media, recently acquired by Universal.

Ript works via an overlay "Pile"--representing by a stack of documents--that sits on a layer on top of all your applications. You can work with your programs as you normally would, and … Read more

End of the line for Canon's midsize sensor?

It looks like Canon's intermediate-size APS-H sensor line, found in the 1D Mark III SLRs used by photojournalists, may be at the end of its life span.

The sensor is larger than the APS-C sensors used in mainstream Canon SLRs such as the EOS-40D or the new Canon EOS Rebel XSi, but it's smaller than those in a 1Ds Mark III or 5D, which is the size of a full frame of 35mm film. With Nikon now selling its first full-frame model, the D3, and Sony planning to launch its own full-frame competitor by the end of 2008, … Read more

Spam continues to increase, Symantec says

Spam now accounts for 78.5 percent of all e-mail traffic, according to a new report from Symantec. That's up from previous months. And Europe, not the United States, can now claim to be the source of most spam.

Other notable points culled from the "State of Spam" report for February 2008 (PDF) include:

There was an appreciable decline of image spam during January 2008. The overall file size of spam messages has also decreased. Product spam, the largest category, makes up 28 percent of all spam. Internet Web hosting and Web design spam makes up 23 … Read more

Panasonic sensor tackles key photo problem--dynamic range

SAN FRANCISCO-- Panasonic showed technology on Monday that could shift the digital photography trend of high-dynamic range photos off the computer and directly into a camera image sensor.

And it works through a variation of a familiar photographic technique called exposure bracketing. For years, photographers challenged by tough lighting conditions have taken multiple pictures of the same scene at different brightness levels--bracketing--to help ensure one photo has a good balance shadow and highlight details.

More recently, with the advent of computers, these bracketed exposures can be combined into a single high-dynamic range (HDR) image that captures both bright and dark … Read more

The stretch limo of printers

Looking for a fast printer? If you happen to have 33 feet of wallspace and a spare $280,000 lying around, this may be the perfect one for you.

The Canon ImagePress C6000 can print up to 70 pages a minute at 1,200-dpi resolution, according to OhGizmo, with a capacity for 10,000 sheets of paper. To achieve that insane rate, this monster needs a built-in computer of its own with a 10.4-inch LCD, 800MHz processor, 1.5GB of memory, and 80GB hard drive.

Still, we remain unimpressed. For that kind of money, it should make a decent latte.… Read more

Kodak aims for 5-megapixel phone cameras

Eastman Kodak hopes turning one aspect of chip design on its head will help improve cell phone cameras--or at least help their image quality catch up with their megapixel increases.

"We believe we've created a new camera sensor product that rivals that of real cameras, but it's small enough to be used in a camera phone," said Fas Mosleh, manager of CMOS market work for Kodak's professional and applied imaging group.

There have been nice cameras in high-end mobile phones such as Nokia's N95, but Kodak believes its technology, built into a 5-megapixel sensor … Read more

Facebook, MySpace image uploaders vulnerable to attack

Updated at 3:37 p.m. PST with statement from MySpace and Facebook.

Within the last week, researcher Elazar Broad has disclosed two ActiveX vulnerabilities in the tools that MySpace.com and Facebook users use to upload images to their sites. On Sunday, Broad disclosed a buffer overflow vulnerability within the Facebook image upload control. Last week, Broad disclosed a similar buffer overflow flaw within MySpaceAurigma's ImageUploader ActiveX; the MySpace vulnerability also affects Facebook users.

Facebook and MySpace use controls repackaged from Aurigma Imaging Technology. Vulnerable to the recent attack scenario are FaceBook PhotoUploader 4.5.57.0, Aurigma … Read more