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Flickr on Tuesday entered a partnership with Getty Images to offer its users a way to potentially make money off their photography.

The Yahoo-owned photo-hosting community will be a new resource for Getty, which can now contact Flickr members directly through the site and ask them if they want to share one or more of their images for use in a special Flickr-branded Getty collection.

Flickr members interested in getting their images featured in the special Getty gallery will have to simply wait to be contacted. Otherwise, Getty and Flickr are encouraging aspiring photographers to post their content on the Getty-owned iStockphoto, which also happens to have been a hotbed for Flickr photos in the past.

Flickr-hosted images that have been chosen to be included in the new collection will get a special link to the Getty page where they can purchase a license to use the shot.

In order to get paid and allow their images to be used, Flickr members must sign a Getty Images contributor contract, which stipulates that the photographer is the owner, and has any necessary model releases and originals. It also outlines the various rates based on size and intended commercial usage.

Those rates, not yet available, are likely to follow some of Getty's standard rates. As part of the deal, the only transaction is being shared directly between the photographer and Getty, meaning Yahoo will not be getting a share of that fee. According to Yahoo's rep, "Getty and Flickr have a separate business relationship."

The move is a special deal for Flickr, which currently does not allow for commercial transactions on the site outside of using partners for services such as photo printing. It's long been expected that Flickr would get around to implementing a system like this, if only to take advantage of the size of its collection, which averages thousands of user uploads every minute.

Update: Changes have been made to this article since it first posted regarding the link to the Getty purchase pages on Flickr as well as the nature of the business partnership between Getty Images and Yahoo.

R.J. Pittman, Google's director of product management for Consumer Search Properties, shared some details of future versions of image search. In the interview with Beet.tv's Andy Plesser, Pittman said that Google is developing visual crawling software that can be used for facial recognition and scene analysis. In addition images can be matched with display ads and utilize geotagging information for various applications.

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This fall, film enthusiasts will have the opportunity to watch an American classic like they've never seen it before. The Godfather trilogy has recently been digitally remastered to look cleaner, brighter, and as as fresh as its original release in 1972.

In Friday's Daily Debrief, I chat with CNET News.com's executive editor, Jim Kerstetter, who also happens to be the office film buff. He explains the painstaking process of the digital facelift and why the preservation of such classics is important for posterity. Also, hear what kind of directives director Francis Ford Coppola gave the technicians cleaning up pivotal moments in his masterpiece.

How's this for pressure? In the care of Daphne Dentz and her colleagues was a masterpiece of American filmmaking: The Godfather.

A year ago, Dentz was sitting in an editing bay with other members of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging (MPI). Also in the room was none other than the movie's director, Francis Ford Coppola. He was there to observe as they set about digitally restoring his 35-year-old classic.

On a bank of computer monitors, The Godfather's opening scene began to play; the melancholy trumpet; the now famous line: "I believe in America...," and slowly forming out of the blackness is the face of a man seeking vengeance.

Stop everything. Coppola, a famous perfectionist, told the technicians: "I want his head to look like it's floating in purgatory."

An instruction like that from Coppola might have intimidated Dentz, MPI's vice president of digital services, if she didn't know MPI had the tools to give him what he wanted. Six years ago, Warner Bros. developed digital technologies designed to make copies of damaged or decaying film negatives and return the movies to their original viewing quality. The studio wouldn't discuss how much they spent. (You can be sure it wasn't cheap).

A scene from Gone With The Wind before restoration.

(Credit: Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging)

The same scene but after restoration.

(Credit: Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging)

For decades, film reels languished on studio lots without any attempt made to preserve them. But technology has rushed to the rescue once again. The digital age has handed Hollywood the tools to correct faded colors, blurred images, and garbled sound.

Warner Bros. wants to rescue some of America's greatest film treasures, while at the same time cash in on a valuable film library. Execs from all the studios have learned that they can release restored versions of classic films on disc and extend their economic lifespan. This is what Paramount intends to do when it re-releases the The Godfather in September, according to a story in American Cinematographer.

Another reason to give the pictures a facelift is that many of them can't stand up to the magnified scrutiny of the digital age. Imperfections are more exposed than ever on high-definition TVs, according to Ned Price, vice president of mastering for Warner Bros. technical operations.

"Consumer expectations are rising," Price said. "You now have Blu-ray and the quality level that the consumer has access to is higher than it was before. What was acceptable 10 years ago is no longer acceptable today."

To do the restoring, Warner Bros. built proprietary software, custom-designed monitors and editing tools. On the studio's lot is a storage system that can handle 600 terabytes of data. This is a lot of information.

Two terabytes can hold an academic library. The U.S. Library of Congress said a year ago that it stores less than 100 terabytes of information.

MPI always works in the same resolution as the original negative, typically 4096 x 3112 pixels or, in industry lingo, "4K." By digital camera standards, that's not much: only 8 megapixels. But by video standards, that's a whopping amount: A single frame on 4k can be 50 megabytes, said Bill Baggelaar, MPI's vice president of engineering. At a rate of 24-frames per second, the numbers add up fast.

For example, The Godfather trilogy required 160 terabytes of storage, Baggelaar said.

Of course, the real challenge isn't storing the data. The trick is moving it around. "Minimally, a 4k movie is 12 terabytes," Baggelaar said. Even at "fibre-channel speed, it still takes a while to move 12 terabytes."

MPI's system is fast, primarily because of Hewlett-Packard, Baggelaar said. HP powers the Warner Bros. storage area network, a "massive" fibre channel. Most of the SAN runs on Linux.

"One of the reasons the HP storage works so well for us is we have to be up 100 percent of the time," Baggelaar said. "We don't have downtime. We don't have the ability to lose data while we're in the middle of production and their storage is extremely reliable.

"If you're taking one version of the movie and you have 12 terabytes of data and every day you're changing some component, during a one-month project you're going to generate a couple hundred terabytes of data," he said. "That amount is just not cost effective to back up."

A restoration starts with the creation of a digital copy made from a film's negative. This is not easy. Some negatives may be physically damaged; torn and spliced together with tape and can easily come apart during the scanning if they aren't cared for properly.

Once the copy is made, the negative is sent to be preserved in specially built vaults while the digital copy is sent to MPI, which then "starts picking it apart," Price said.

One group of technicians goes to work on color correction and another on removing dirt and scratches. A third group--called data conform--makes sure the negative has all the right pieces. If it doesn't, they find them. Sometimes MPI must work with duplications of the negative and it's not uncommon to find that someone years earlier edited scenes into them. MPI removes them.

The goal is not to improve the filmmaker's work but to re-create it.

In the case of The Godfather, the negative was in rough shape. The images looked mottled. There were no details in the film's black tones. It was dirty, scratched, and torn in places.

To illustrate how the film looked when MPI started, Kathleen Largay, a colorist, showed me a clip of the restaurant scene, where Michael Corleone guns down Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo and the police captain. The color is washed out. A scratch runs along the bottom of the picture. There are few shadows visible.

Then she showed me what it looked like after the team used its computers to remove scratches, hairs, dust, and stains. Suddenly, rich earth tones are present. The gold color of the olive oil sitting on the table twinkles in the light. There's more contrast between white and black, enough for me to see all the tension in Al Pacino's face just before he opens fire.

The MPI team worked closely with Paramount executives, who knew exactly how the picture should look.

One area where the team came up short was in reproducing the same kind of blacks. The sad truth is that digital technology doesn't block out light as well as film, so it doesn't produce the blackest black. This was important for The Godfather, as the movie was one of the darkest ever made.

"With film you have light shining through a piece of acetate or some base that has some property blocking light," Baggelaar said. "The light is actually being blocked to create black. But in a digital projection scenario, there is always light being thrown out by a projector. Just like an LCD monitor, unless you turn it off it's not really black. One of the technical challenges was giving them the blackness that they wanted with the limitations of the equipment. I think we did a nice job by the end. "

It took seven months to finish the entire trilogy. How long would it have taken without digital tools? Well, it would have never been attempted, Price said.

"You would have to go through frame by frame to correct this," Price said.

There was a lot of back-patting at MPI after Coppola saw the results. According to members of the group, the auteur told them that he hadn't seen the film look that good since 1972, the year it was first screened.

There are a lot of image editors out there, but few of them are designed with professional photographers in mind, and even fewer are designed by photographers themselves. Capture NX 2 for Windows and Mac is one of those rare editors designed by professionals but is easy enough for hobbyists to use, and Nikon has just given it a major overhaul.

Capture NX simplifies and enhances common photo editing tools in a customizable layout.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Available for purchase at $179.95 or upgrade at $109.95, the program introduces a revamped interface, closer integration with other Nikon programs such as View NX, and a battery of new tools that simplify and enhance the photo-editing work flow. This should make any photographer seriously consider making the jump for nearly every kind of edit.

Although Capture NX's improvements on the photographer's work flow are undeniably helpful, the most unique new tool in the program are Control Points. Based on proprietary Nikon technology called U Point, the control points allow the user to make selective changes instead of global ones. From sharpening to color changes, the points can affect image-wide edits, but their true power lies in the ability to narrow tweaks to a user-defined space.

There are several control point-based tools. The Black, Neutral, and White Control Point tools, which look like eyedroppers in front of circles on the toolbar, are used to manage color. By clicking on one and then clicking on the image, a small circle appears with sliders extending from it. Moving the sliders adjusts both the desired effect and the diameter of the circle that radiates from the control point. If you don't like the positioning of a point, but are happy with the effect, click and drag the point to a different location on the image.

The Selection Control Points eliminate the need for editors to manually mask off the part of the image they want to change. They function the same way as the color control points, except that they can be used to sharpen, reduce noise, adjust contrast, saturation, and more. Once a point has been created, the control panel that natively lives on the right of the editing window can be used to select the desired effect.

Control points and sliders make Capture NX's photo-editing workflow easy to manage.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Another excellent new tool is the Auto-Retouch brush, which does exactly what its name implies. What's impressive about this version of the popular tool, found in many programs, is that it can accomplish with one click what other programs take four or five. This may not sound like much initially, but when repeatedly removing dust or skin blemishes the saved time is noticeable.

Other improvements to the program include common hot keys and further compatibility with Nikon's View NX software, making batch edits and creating common settings a cinch. The Quick Fix menu also cuts out repetition by offering up a selection of standard changes ranging from curves to lens correction. The Quick Fix wouldn't be as useful as it is if it were inaccurate, but clearly a lot of work has gone into making the algorithms controlling the tool flexible and effective. The Soft Proof tool that lives at the bottom of the open image window makes accurate printing pain-free.

One of the subtle improvements of the program is the manner by which layers have been worked in. Called Steps here, they are woven seamlessly in the work flow, making control of previous changes as simple as unchecking a box. Most of the changes are made via sliders, controllable both from the image and from the Edit List, which is where the Adjustment Window lives.

However, the layout of the various components is malleable--users can hide, minimize, and drag windows around at will with no delay in processing time. This happens, in part, because Capture NX 2 is much smaller than Photoshop, which needs to appeal to designers as well as photographers. One drawback of Capture NX is that it's not capable of creating an image montage easily. However, since those are rarely high resolution images because they're made up of many smaller photos, it's not a glaring oversight.

Capture NX 2 combines multiple editing options into one manageable panel, cutting out extraneous mousing around.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Capture NX supports TIFF-16, TIFF-8, JPG, and Nikon's own proprietary NEF format. It does not support Canon's CR2 or other RAW configurations, which should decrease the appeal of the program to non-Nikon photographers. Images can be saved as TIFF, NEF, or JPG, metatag information can be kept or destroyed as the user sees fit, and changes saved to a NEF can be easily undone by unchecking the changes from the Edit List.

Overall, as a lifelong Photoshop user for my personal photo editing and printing needs, Capture NX 2 is nothing less than spectacular and should be considered by any photographer looking to enhance their work flow by cutting out tools that they never touch and emphasizing the ones they always need.

UPDATED: The relationship between Nikon, Inc., and Nik Software has been corrected. Although the Japanese division of Nikon does have an equity stake in Nik Software, Nik is an independent company. View NX and Capture NX are owned and published by Nikon, Inc. Also, Capture NX 2 and View NX do not support non-Nikon RAW formats, as previously reported.

Gadget retailer The Sharper Image plans to close all of its remaining stores, its new owners announced Sunday.

The company expects to sell $50 million in inventory as it shutters 86 stores across the United States, joint owners The Hilco Organization and Gordon Brothers Group said in a statement.

The group, which purchased the gadget retailer's assets in a bankruptcy auction Thursday for $49 million, said it has developed a licensing strategy for wholesale, retail, direct-to-retail, e-commerce, and catalog businesses.

The Sharper Image filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February, with plans to shut about half of its 184 stores and reorganize. The San Francisco-based company said it had lost more than $135 million since early 2005. The company put itself up for sale in April.

This post was updated at 11:55 a.m. PDT to better describe the scope of TCG's work. It was also updated at 12:52 p.m. PDT with the corrected spelling on Clare Munn's name. We also corrected the photo credit and Sandhu Gurkirpal's title, both of which had been provided incorrectly by a company representative.

The Communication Group, a San Francisco-based marketing firm, isn't just about touting its clients' environmental friendliness. It's about showing them how to be more environmentally friendly.

TCG CEO Clare Munn

(Credit: Clinton Fein)

The firm, also known as TCG, is helping corporations take their first green steps through what it calls its Green Prepare program, a 12-step process for companies to become greener. The program was the brainchild of TCG Chief Executive Clare Munn, who had run a similar type of eco-labeling program for companies in Zimbabwe before the country's economy collapsed. After starting TCG and going through the tedious green certification process, she realized that there might be a market for eco-labeling here, too.

In the first stage of the Green Prepare program, a TCG consultant does a walk-through of a client's office or workplace and comes up with 12 steps for sparing the environment. The steps might include simple fixes like, for offices, making sure printers are set on double-sided printing and using recycled paper, and that there's a cartridge toner/battery recycling system in place. Other steps might be using filters on water taps for getting drinking water rather than buying water in plastic bottles, or using energy-efficient light bulbs. Nothing revolutionary, but still things that might be neglected in many workplaces.

When the company has completed 6 of the 12 steps, it signs TCG's "Blue Step Promise" to strive to complete the rest and is awarded a certificate and logo in return that the company can then display.

The idea is that the Green Prepare program might also serve as the first step for corporations that want to become green-certified through other regional programs, Munn said.

Livermore, Calif.-based skincare product company GS Cosmeceutical, which used TCG to develop its Web site, recently got involved in the Green Prepare program.

"It has been an eye-opener," said Sandhu Gurkirpal, the company's chief operating officer. He became more aware, for example, that computers should be disposed of via certified green network recyclers.

Gurkirpal is also considering changing the company's cleaning process for the pots used in making its skin care products. Today the pots are boiled, but they might as well be high-pressure steamed, he said, which could save both water and energy.

GS Cosmeceutical has also become a supporting member of OASIS, or the Organic and Sustainable Industry Standards, which helps determine when products can be called organic. Gurkipal emphasized that the company's recent efforts are about more than image and helping the environment. "We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't think we could save money."

The next step for him is to figure out what TCG calls the company's "green story"--something a company already does for the environment that can be used as part of its overall communications strategy. Maybe it's using energy from renewable sources or furniture from recycled material, or maybe it's creating an incentive program that encourages employees to identify practices that aren't environmentally sound.

While all the Green Prepare services up to this point are free, TCG will charge for creating and communicating the green stories. These, however, are not compulsory to create.

Update 5 p.m. PDT: I added some more details about text ads not working well in image search and about quotation search at Google News.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google is beginning an "experiment" that incorporates graphical ads with image search results.

"What we're announcing today is a new suite of image-related experiments. We're pairing images with images for the first time--display ads with image search," product management director R.J. Pittman said at a Google media event at company headquarters here.

Google got rich off of text ads that appear next to textual search results, but the company is working to build up its display ads too. Its acquisition of DoubleClick was instrumental in the push.

As demonstrated, the ads are set off from regular results with a pale yellow background. But the company clearly wants the ads to be useful.

"How can we introduce advertising in a way that actually improves your image search experience?" asked Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, at the event.

Google began showing the image ads in the last two weeks to a small subset of users, Mayer said. It's not clear when it will be fully ready, but Mayer estimated 2009.

A sample view of the display ads in Google image search.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

She declined to comment on the revenue implications of the move, but said Google doesn't want to sacrifice usefulness for the new ad opportunity. For example, Google tried text ads on image search but didn't like what it found, and therefore went back to the drawing board.

"They degraded the user experience on image search," causing people to search less, Mayer said in an interview. "It's not a huge amount of fall-off, but we weren't willing to cash in user happiness to make revenue."

It's one of handful of search projects under way at the company that Google was willing to share at its "factory tour" event.

Another development, now available, is the ability to search quotations of those who've been quoted in stories indexed by Google News.

The feature lets people search for quotations from a specific person and sift the results quotations by name or how recently it was said.

What happens when you don't have good image processing in your search engine? You get inconsistent results, as seen in this page returned for the query "McDonalds".

(Credit: Google)

Google is starting to provide a fuller picture of the work it's undertaking to create a practical tool for image searches.

On its Google Research blog Thursday, the company offered a brief introduction to VisualRank, a system that sorts out images by means of visual cues rather than by text associated with the images. The write-up is a distillation of a much longer paper (PDF), "PageRank for Product Image Search," that two Google researchers presented last week at a conference in Beijing on Web technologies.

The VisualRank system is not yet live, and Google intimated that the image search technology would not become more widely available anytime soon. It did say that "in the coming months" it would offer more details on an "approach that has an easy integration with both text and visual clues."

In its initial VisualRank efforts, Google's research focused on product queries. That's in part because product queries correspond well to the type of "image features" that were central to the study. In addition, the company said, those types of queries are "popular in actual usage" and users have strong expectations about the results they expect, which gave the researchers key examples to address.

Google's VisualRank algorithm sorts images by how similar they appear to an inferred original.

(Credit: Google)

Google has also begun to broaden its initiative to take in other query types, including those related to travel.

As it moves forward, the search giant says it's exploring three main directions:

First, estimating similarity measures for all of the images on the Web is computationally expensive; approximations or alternative computations are needed. Second, we hope to evaluate our approach with respect to the large number of recently proposed alternative clustering methods. Third, many variations of PageRank can be used in quite interesting ways for image search. For example, we can use some of these previously published methods to reintroduce, in a meaningful manner, the textual information that the VisualRank algorithm removed.

Over the years, image search has been a significant challenge for Google and others, like start-ups Polar Rose and Riya, with most of the progress being in a fairly limited set of facial recognition characteristics. Last year, for instance, the company said that its Google Image Search could tell the difference between a picture with a face in it and a picture that lacked a face, though it couldn't distinguish between one face and another.

That sort of feature is increasingly common in digital cameras, which in some cases even recognize when a person is smiling or not. Camera makers are also working toward technology that knows who you photographed.

But recognizing a face or other object is a different order of business from delivering meaningful search results based on facial features or on object type.

Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, has opened a lab at Tsinghua University in Beijing to delve into a wide range of media search types, including still images, video, and music.

Dust off your college calculus, because Google's image rank (IR) formula involves eigenvectors and iterative matrix multiplication.

(Credit: Google)