Crave

Editor's note: From now through the end of December, various Crave experts will be sharing their top five (mostly) tech-related wishes for the holiday season. See what we crave, and maybe you'll get some ideas!

I'll be honest. What I want is Canon's EF 500mm f/4L IS USM telephoto lens, but it costs $5,600, so let's move on to some options that aren't quite so detached from economic reality for a mostly amateur photographer such as myself.

Obviously my camera is a Canon SLR, but I'm reasonably happy with my setup right now, so here are some items I covet that are more modestly priced and that happen to be neutral as regards camera manufacturer.

RawWorkflow.com's WhiBal white-balance card

(Credit: RawWorkflow.com)

1. WhiBal white-balance card. I shoot raw images, which means data is taken directly from the camera's image sensor without any in-camera processing. I like it because it gives me more flexibility for matters such as exposure adjustment. Second in importance to exposure, though, is fixing white balance--for example the orangey color cast you'll often see when shooting under incandescent lights or the bluish tinge of pictures in the shade.

The flip side of raw photography is that it's more manual labor than just grabbing the JPEG, but to me it's worth it. I mostly just eyeball the white balance, but sometimes keying off parts of an image--the whites of someone's eyes or gray and black clothing--gives an easier way to set white balance with software. But for more precision, the WhiBal cards from RawWorkflow.com give an easy way to be more rigorous. You take a photo of the durable card, which shows a standard 18 percent gray, then set the white balance in software off that part of the photo. With modern raw-image editing software, you can synchronize the white balance for a series of images off the one you took with the card. The $19 keychain model looks about my speed. ... Read more

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Episode 25

(Credit: xTrain)

Want to learn the secrets to creating beautiful HDR photographs? xTrain, a provider of online video training courses has announced a new high dynamic range (HDR) Mastery online video course by Photoshop expert Ben Willmore. HDR is the process of taking a sequence of exposures, allowing you to lighten the underexposed areas and darken the overexposed areas of a digital image to better simulate what the human eye would actually see.

The online course shows learners step-by-step the best practices of creating HDR photos. Students learn how to best choose subjects for HDR, such as watching for movement and clouds, and when to find the ideal light for HDR. Ben Willmore's HDR Mastery course is divided into four classes: shooting for HDR, merging exposures, processing HDR files, and enhancement. The cost is $79 to enroll. Monthly and yearly subscriptions that provide unlimited access to xTrain courses are also available.

Note: following along with the course requires PhotoMatix Pro software, which can be found at www.hdrsoft.com for $99. PhotoMatix Pro is what is used in the course to create the HDR photos. Having Adobe Photoshop also is very helpful to follow along, but not essential.

This image, from a Panasonic paper at the ISSCC computer-chip show, shows a sensor with a better ability to span bright and dark areas in a photo. It works by combining three shots into a single high-dynamic range image using a new Panasonic image sensor.

(Credit: Panasonic)

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 areas--for example both the subtle tones of both a bride's white wedding dress and a groom's tuxedo--that lie beyond the abilities of the camera taking a single shot.

In research shown here at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Tokayoshi Yamada of Matsushita Electric Industrial--better known as Panasonic to most people--showed technology that he said lets an image sensor capture that high-dynamic range information.

With today's sensors, "You can get either highlight or shadow detail, depending on the exposure time. To get much wider dynamic range images, we need to combine these different-exposure images," Yamada said.

Yamada showed a 177x144 pixel image sensor that takes three photos of the same scene in rapid succession. In one example, he said, the first exposure lasts 1.5 microseconds, the second 150 microseconds, and the third 15,000 microseconds (not far from a 1/60 second exposure). Extra circuitry built into the sensor records the data from the multiple exposures and uses an assortment of electronic capacitors to combine it into a single image that spans a greater dynamic range.

The image can span a dynamic range of 140 decibels compared with ordinary sensors with a 60dB range when working at a frame rate of 15 frames per second, the researchers said.

In his presentation, Yamada showed a resulting image taken of a regular incandescent light bulb. With conventional sensor technology, a few of the words printed on the bulb were visible, but most were washed out in a blown-out white patch near the bulb's filament. In the Panasonic sensor's image, not only were most of the words visible, but also the helical coil of the filament was.

Combining multiple exposures has been possible before, but only using technology that recorded the multiple exposures in separate areas called frame memories, Yamada and his Panasonic colleagues said in a paper on the subject.

Despite efforts such as Fujifilm's SuperCCD sensors, camera buffs are often frustrated by the image sensor dynamic range of that's significantly weaker than what the human eye can detect. Although the Panasonic research shows some promise, though, photo nerds should rein in their hopes: the research showed only a black-and-white images so far and is suited "for automotive and security cameras," according to the researchers' paper.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Good news for photo enthusiasts who wish they could they could use Photoshop Lightroom for high dynamic range photography and panorama stitching: support is on Adobe Systems' radar screen, if not necessarily its roadmap.

That's the word from Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of professional digital imaging product management and the executive who oversees Lightroom, Photoshop, and the Digital Negative (DNG) format. I spoke with him Wednesday during the Macworld trade show here in San Francisco.

Connor is intimately familiar with these two fast-changing domains in digital photography. High dynamic range (HDR) photography combines multiple exposures of a single subject into a single image that better spans the full range of dark and light tones; a good example is a photo of a cathedral interior that shows both the bright stained-glass windows and the dim stone arches. And the ultrawide views known as panoramas have been around for decades, but the ability to stitch digital photos together--for example with Photoshop's new Photomerge feature--has injected new energy into the area.

It's fair to be optimistic about HDR and panorama support in Lightroom, but don't hold your breath. Both are within the scope of Lightroom, Connor said, but he was careful not to promise whether or when that support might actually arrive.

Of HDR, he said, "It's definitely a natural thing to do. I don't know when. At some point, cameras will be capturing HDR. At some point, Lightroom will have support for that."

And of panorama stitching, Connor said, "An argument can be made for it. It's more about recreating a scene than about creating something that isn't there in the first place."

The Lightroom vision
Those endorsements, however qualified, illustrate Adobe's philosophy with Lightroom. Unlike with traditional Photoshop, Adobe envisions Lightroom as a tool to get the most out of what the camera recorded when a photo was taken.

Certainly Lightroom can alter a photo with some special effects, but, Connor said, "We want to stay true to optimizing what you saw when you shot it."

For that reason, Lightroom is chiefly designed to work with the raw images--the files taken directly from a camera's image sensor without in-camera processing into the more limited but convenient JPEG format. Lightroom's core operation is "developing" many raw images into finished products, but the software also can be used for cataloging and describing photos and for printing them and sharing them as galleries on the Web.

Photoshop, in contrast, permits not just photo editing but all kinds of original creation, from compositing multiple images to digital painting and sketching to elaborate visual effects on text. Also different: Photoshop presents myriad editing options at any moment, but Lightroom's interface is designed to march along with a photographer's import, edit, and export "workflow."

One of the key features in Lightroom--and another major difference from Photoshop--is nondestructive editing. Not only is every adjustment in Lightroom reversible, but the software keeps track of those changes and stores them as metadata associated with the file. That means an underlying raw image is preserved but can be accompanied by instructions such as how to crop it, adjust its tones, and sharpen its edges.

The SDK challenge
That nondestructive philosophy poses a big challenge for Adobe: how to design a software development kit for Lightroom. SDKs can let others extend a product with new features, and indeed Photoshop's rich array of third-party plug-ins illustrates the value of the approach.

Adobe has released a beta SDK with a very limited scope, but Adobe plans to expand it, Connor said. One tough balancing act the company faces now is deciding how much developer attention to focus on building the SDK and how much on building new features in Lightroom.

A Lightroom SDK is thornier than one for Photoshop because the latter can accept a filter that permanently changes an image, Connor said. Image-processing plug-ins are "trickier in Lightroom because it's nondestructive," and filters must be applied and reapplied in real time as new adjustments are made.

In addition, because adjustments are stored as metadata, there's a risk that an image edited with a plug-in on one machine will look different on another machine lacking that plug-in, if it can be opened at all, Connor said.

Adobe began developing Lightroom, code-named Shadowland, between the release of Photoshop 7 in 2002 and Photoshop CS in 2003, Connor said. But the company that brought the first such product to market was actually Apple, with its Aperture software.

Aperture fueled Adobe's competitive flames for Lightroom, Connor said. "It did raise the urgency. We didn't want people to think we were ignoring (that market) or that Lightroom was just a response," he said.

But Aperture also did Adobe a favor. Adobe's biggest hurdle with Lightroom was defining what the product was for, and Apple actually ended up doing a lot of that work, Connor said.

Adobe took a very work-in-progress approach to Lightroom, releasing multiple open beta versions, then 1.0, then 1.1, then 1.2, and most recently, 1.3. Significant new features were added with each update, leading me to suggest that version 1.3 might be best thought of as the real 1.0.

Indeed, things look a bit more settled now, and Connor suggested Adobe's attention is now turned toward a more substantial update. (He wouldn't even commit to a version 2.0, much less say when one might arrive, but you can bet it's in the works.)

"I can't rule out" a version 1.5 update," Connor said, "but I think we've done the bulk of what we wanted with the updates."

Click the image to see our round-up

As carmakers continue to integrate HD Radio into their models at the factory level, an increasing number of car-stereo makers including JVC, Sony, Dual, and Alpine have brought out HD-compatible aftermarket products over the past few months. Check out our roundup of the latest options for getting HD Radio while on the road.

Click the image to read the full review

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Alpine's CDA-9885 joins Sony's CDX-520 and JVC's KD-HDR1 in the category of HD Radio-compatible car stereos. The in-dash system combines attractive styling and a easy-to-use music search interface with great-sounding output and a host of expandability options, but those upgrading to HD Radio will have to deal with a clunky module and a hefty price tag.

Click on the image to read our full review.

JVC KT-HDP1

(Credit: JVC)

Following the release of HD Radio-compatible products from Sony and Dual this week, JVC today released details of what it calls the industry's first plug-and-play HD Radio receiver. The KT-HDP1 is an transportable AM/FM/HD Radio multicast tuner that can be used as portable device or can be permanently installed in a car. The KT-HDP1 is the second HD Radio-capable device from JVC, following its in-dash KDR-HD1 car stereo that we saw earlier this year. The portable tuner is on its way to Best Buy stores now, where it will be on sale for around $130 excluding installation kits.