The new Nikon D300s is getting some raw-image support from Adobe.
(Credit: Nikon USA)Adobe Systems has released a test version of its Camera Raw 5.5 plug-in so Photoshop can handle raw images from the Olympus E-P1 high-end compact camera, Nikon's new D3000 entry-level SLR, mid-range D300s SLR, and Panasonic's DMC-FZ35 ultrazoom.
Raw images are made of data taken directly from cameras' image sensors without in-camera processing, and they offer more flexibility and higher quality to those willing to put up with the hassle of converting them to JPEG or other more universal formats with software such as Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom, Apple's Aperture and iPhoto, or Google's Picasa. But first, that software must be updated to support each new camera, since raw formats are proprietary and differ for each model.
Adobe released the new Camera Raw plug-in release candidate at its Adobe Labs site. Although there's no corresponding version of Lightroom, software engineered specifically for handling raw images, Adobe also issued a release candidate for its DNG converter 5.5 that can transform raw files from the Olympus, Nikon, and Panasonic cameras into Adobe's more digestible Digital Negative format.
The new software also corrects a problem experienced with "demosaic algorithms in the raw conversion process for Bayer sensor cameras with unequal green response," the company said. Demosaicing is a central step in raw conversion. In it each pixel records only data for only a single color of red, green, or blue, is interpreted so each pixel has values for all three colors. The checkerboard pattern of colors is called the Bayer pattern.
Update 10:30 a.m. PDT August 20:: I asked Adobe about what cameras are affected by the green issue in the demosaic algorithm, and Tom Hogarty, Adobe's Lightroom product manager, had this response:
"Sony, Panasonic, and Olympus are among the more popular camera manufacturers affected by this change. But the demosaic correction provides only a subtle visual improvement to the processing of those raw files."
Some might be disconcerted to find that older raw images might look different when they're opened again with software that uses an updated algorithm. For those folks, I recommend exporting a JPEG or TIF to bake in your editing settings for raw images.
For the rest of us, this illustrates one of the advantages of shooting raw: new algorithms can make photos you took earlier look better than when you first took them.
Adobe also made a related change with the addition of profiles to its raw processing software; these can make photos more closely resemble results from camera settings such as portrait, landscape, or neutral, and I use them by default these days. Improvements to noise reduction algorithms is another area that springs to mind where new algorithms could take advantage of faster PC hardware to produce better photos.
Having the camera make these processing decisions when it creates a JPEG is convenient and fine for the vast majority of people, but for photo enthusiasts, raw shooting benefits from steadily improving software and hardware.
Adobe Systems, taking the same course with its forthcoming Creative Suite applications, will offer the next Mac OS X version of Photoshop Lightroom only on Intel-based machines.
Apple has chosen to discontinue support for Macs using PowerPC processors beginning with its next operating system, version 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, which is due to arrive in coming weeks. Adobe said last week that its next Creative Suite will follow suit. The CS family includes programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, DreamWeaver, and Flash Professional.
Lightroom, which is for editing and cataloging photos, isn't part of the suite, but it's headed the same route.
"The next full version update of Lightroom will not run on PowerPC-based Mac computers," Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post last week. "Lightroom 2 updates will continue to support PowerPC."
Meanwhile, Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack, while fond of PowerPC, took a pragmatic tone on his blog: "By the time the next version of the (Creative) Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They're still great systems, but if you haven't upgraded your workstation in four years, you're probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either."
I use and enjoy Flickr. But with each passing month it worries me more that when I visit a photo page on the Yahoo photo-sharing site, it looks essentially identical to when I first started using it four years ago.
Flickr has typical online photo site abilities to upload, share, and print photos. What sets it apart, though, are features that make Flickr a community: discussions in comments below photos, groups for like-minded photographers to share their work, and social networking attributes that let people stay on top of their contacts' doings.
Flickr revamped members' home pages starting last September, drawing more attention to recent activity such as people who added you as a contact or who commented on your photos. The change was smart: Flickr was a socially wired site before social networking became all the rage, and photography is a great way for people to stay engaged with their friends and relations.
But now it's time for the rest of the upgrade. Here's what pains me most:
• The photo page. With Flickr, you can have large photos or you can have comments and navigation, but you can't have both. Photos are best viewed larger than Flickr's default 500-pixels width. Clicking "all sizes" to see lavishly large views sends you down browser dead end: you'll have to click the back button when it's time to add comments or navigate to the next photo.
• The photostream page. Flickr organizes your photos as one giant filmstrip called the photostream. But viewing somebody's most recent shots on the photostream page again forces you back into the small-monitor past. The default view for me shows 18 small photos, 10 sets, and an ocean of white space even on my laptop.
• The profile page. I rarely look at people's profile pages unless I'm trying to contact them or figure out who's behind a cryptic username. But there should be a way to make the profile page the anchor of a Flickr user's online identity, the public face presented to Flickr users. People judge others by their photostreams, which in my case these days is more about family photos than works of art or moving photojournalism, so I'd like to show them an automatically updated page of my top picks instead.
Fortunately, Flickr is working on several improvements detailed below by product strategy chief Matthew Rothenberg. But he kept mum about timing: "We're planning to be progressively rolling out enhancements over time," he said.
Show 'em how it's done
"Innovation happens elsewhere" is a worn-out Silicon Valley business cliche, but there's some truth to it. It's especially appropriate for Flickr, because the site lets others built atop it using Flickr's API, or application programming interface. Tasks such as flipping through a person's photos, adding comments, looking up interesting shots, and uploading photos all can be done without having to touch Flickr directly.
The Flickroom beta software presents a new face on Yahoo's photo-sharing site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)The power of the Flickr API was shown most clearly to me a year and a half ago, when I tried Photophlow, a site that makes Flickr into a photo-centric chat room. Photophlow lets people collectively breeze through photos, marking photos as favorites and leaving comments as they go
Now there's a new kid in town with some other ideas, a beta application called Flickroom. It's built atop Adobe Systems' AIR foundation and presents a fashionably dark background for viewing pictures. There are plenty of icons and control panels to traverse photos, search photos, join a chat room, and see what your contacts are up to.
Flickroom has some bugs and idiosyncrasies, and fundamentally it's not shifting any Flickr paradigms beyond the user interface. But it does manage to illustrate what can be done with Flickr's raw material. I especially liked the flip through the large sizes of a user's photos.
Another good example of what can be done with Flickr's API is Darckr, which shows what Flickr (not entirely badly) believes to be your most interesting shots set off against a black background. I'm not going to be showing my photostream as my portfolio, but my interesting shots on Darckr aren't so mundane.
There are plenty more. Photoshop.com from Adobe, for example, not only gives a new interface to Flickr but lets you edit your photos, too.
Google's Picasa Web Albums is set up more for showing family pictures than for spawning a community of macro or Holga photography, but it can teach Flickr a thing or two. Google boasted in June of a revamp that makes photos load much faster, even at full-screen size, and it wasn't idle boasting. And even if Picasa photos are framed by more clutter than Flickr's photos, at least the photos can be viewed larger.
Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET) The good news
Flickr may not be moving fast enough for me, but happily, it's not standing still, either.
"The core photo-sharing experience on Flickr is the area we want to spend most of our time on now," Rothenberg said. He pointed toward "the photo page in particular, the photostream, photos from your contacts--all aspects of site core to the photo-sharing mission of Flickr but that haven't really been brought in line."
Also, probably not just to throw me a bone because I'm a fan of location tags in photos, he added, "Even geotagging, (we'd like) to bring it more into the core experience."
He couldn't comment on my specific gripes about wasted screen real estate, though he did mount a bit defense of white space. However, it's clear Flickr understands the issue, because he did take pains to mention Flickr's new search tool launched Tuesday. It can take advantage of available screen size.
Photophlow, though its development is dormant for now, can make it fun for groups to browse and comment on Flickr pictures.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Flickr's absolute priority is a page on which the photo looks good, but the site must also balance that with social and navigational features. "There's a large amount of information we store and display and allow people to interact with--sizes, licensing, location information, comments, favoriting," he said. "We want to make all those options as easy and efficient as possible."
Flickr also wants to improve navigation and organization, two areas that I believe the computer industry always will face. Rothenberg
Lowered expectations
Rothenberg lowered my hopes regarding a handful of other areas I could see improved.
• Threaded comments: I find it hard to traverse longer discussions, in which people sometimes try to address each other with the @username convention, but Rothenberg pointed out fairly that most photos don't have such complicated discussions. "For most people it's question of whether getting any comments on the photo," he said. "We want to make that social aspect of photos matter to members more than it does today."
• Beefed-up Flickrmail: Flickr isn't designed to replace Yahoo Mail or Gmail, he said, but that doesn't mean e-mail and photos don't go together (as Yahoo's acquisition of Xoopit indicates). Rothenberg hinted at future integration: "For a large percentage of people on the Internet, the way they share photos is through e-mail. For Flickr to be the most useful site for our members, it needs to work well with all the ways they share photos."
• Face recognition: A Google-like approach to face recognition doesn't look likely, either. Facebook's social approach to getting people identified in photos is more in keeping with Flickr's style than Google's computer-based method. "We try to optimize toward social interactions rather than algorithms," he said.
• Longer video: Flickr is happy with its 90-second video limit, which was set not because of any hardware limits at Yahoo but because of an aesthetic liking for what Rothenberg terms "moving photos."
• Tags drawn from metadata: I'd love to sift images by camera, lens, shutter speed, and the like, which is information Flickr extracts from data cameras automatically embed in most photos. That's a technical matter Flickr has pondered, but "we don't have any immediate plans," Rothenberg said. "In general we want to make it easier to find the photos most important to you on Flickr. There are other areas we can improve on more immediately."
None of these are really grating issues for me, though, and I can see Rothenberg's point of view. So I'll willingly cut Flickr slack here.
As for the other fixes, I'll console myself that Rothenberg and I see eye to eye when it comes to the site's vision and priority: "Flickr needs to be the best place to be a photo if you're a photo."
Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Adobe Systems is discontinuing Photoshop Album Starter Edition, the lowest rung on its ladder of image-editing software products, and the company is nudging its users toward the online Photoshop.com site.
Adobe launched Photoshop Album Starter Edition in 2003 as a free, bare-bones image cataloging and editing package. Adobe discontinued the line, though, and support for it ended June 30.
So what's the alternative? In a customer note, Adobe puts its online service front and center.
"As part of our commitment to providing customers with a free photo-editing solution, we have created Photoshop.com, an exciting new online service that lets you upload, organize, edit, store (up to 2GB free), and share your photos," the note said. Afterward is a list of steps for exporting photos from the software to the Web site.
The move reflects the growing importance of Web-based applications even for software powerhouses such as Adobe. Web applications, even when using relatively sophisticated technology such as Adobe's Flash, are typically primitive compared to what can run on a computer, but they offer advantages in sharing, maintenance, and remote access from multiple computers and mobile devices. And of course the Web is gradually growing more sophisticated as a foundation for applications.
It should be noted that Adobe's note also encourages customers to "consider an upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7," the consumer-oriented software that right now costs about $37 including a $20 rebate on Amazon. Adobe also sells the combination of Photoshop Elements 7 and a one-year Photoshop.com Plus membership for $90. The Plus membership offers subscribers up to 20GB of storage, tutorials, album templates, and "creativity-inspiring ideas."
A high-powered programmer who'd left Adobe Systems to lead a Microsoft Windows interface design team is heading back after just over a year.
Mark Hamburg had worked on Adobe Photoshop since version 2.0 in 1990 and then was instrumental in designing its photography-specific cousin, Lightroom, which sports a radically different user interface.
Hamburg left Adobe for Microsoft in 2008 to become a "distinguished engineer" leading work on improving operating system usability. He called the job an opportunity that "was a little too interesting to turn down" because he found the Windows' experience "really annoying."
On Friday, Adobe's German public relations staff welcomed Hamburg back in a Twitter post. Added Lightroom programmer Troy Gaul, "Glad to have Mark Hamburg back at Adobe. Looking forward to his renewed impact on our products."
Jeff Schewe, a Photoshop consultant who knows Hamburg, said the Adobe engineer again will work in Adobe's digital imaging department.
"His decision to return to Adobe is more a statement of desire to again work on products in the digital imaging realm rather than a more research driven project," Schewe said in a blog post. Hamburg isn't expected to be working on Lightroom again, though, Schewe added.
Adobe Systems released an update to the flagship CS4 version of Photoshop to squelch a number of bugs that could crash or slow down the image-editing software.
The 11.0.1 update (downloads available for Windows and Mac OS X) deals with the following issues, according to Adobe:
• A number of issues that could cause slow performance have been addressed.
• Pen barrel rotation with Wacom tablets now works correctly.
• Photoshop now correctly recognizes 3D textures edited by a plug-in.
• The quality of the results of Auto-Blend Layers (Stack Images) has been improved.
• A problem that could result in a crash when pasting formatted text has been fixed.
• A crash that could result from a corrupt font no longer occurs.
Adobe Systems released Lightroom 2.2 on Monday night, catching up the photography software's support for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and several other newer cameras, building in the camera profiles feature, and mashing a number of bugs.
The update (downloads available for Mac OS X and Windows) is the second half of Adobe's one-two punch for supporting the "raw" image files produced by several higher-end cameras. The first half came in late November when Adobe updated Photoshop's raw-conversion software.
Canon's 5D Mark II full-frame SLR
(Credit: Canon)Raw files provide more editing flexibility than camera-produced JPEGs, but they also require manual processing. Software such as Lightroom and Apple's Aperture can handle this processing, along with cataloging, labeling, and printing. With the constant parade of new cameras, the software must be frequently updated.
Another change in version 2.2 is built-in camera profiles, which give photographers various options for tone and color for their images. I've been strongly recommending them since their release on Adobe Labs; I apply the "camera faithful" profile when importing my images to give what I feel is a more natural look. However, Lightroom profiles aren't available for all cameras.
Since Canon started shipping the 5D Mark II in late November, photographers have been avidly blogging about the arrival of their new $2,700, 21-megapixel, full-frame SLRs--or not-so-avidly about them being backordered. One refrain notes the absence of Lightroom support; Adobe and Apple write their own raw conversion software, which must be updated for each new camera's proprietary raw file format.
... Read more
I'm a big fan of Adobe Systems' camera profiles, which when editing the raw images that higher-end cameras can produce imbues photos with what I find to be more natural hues. So I was glad to hear camera profiles are moving out of Adobe Labs and into Photoshop and Lightroom.
I apply the "camera faithful" profile by default when I import photos from my Canon SLR into Lightroom. But when I tried to use the profiles on some photos I took with an Olympus E-3, I found I couldn't.
Now seemed a good time to find out exactly which models are supported, and Adobe obliged with a list.
All SLRs from Canon and Nikon, which dominate the SLR market, are supported in the profiles that ship with Adobe Camera Raw 5.2, and that's a good start. But things get thinner after that.
The Pentax K10D, K20D, and K200D SLRs also have profiles, as does Leica's expensive and somewhat exotic rangefinder, the M8. Only two compact cameras, Canon's PowerShot G9 and G10, have profiles.
There are no profiles for Sony, Olympus, Samsung, or Panasonic SLRs so far. No doubt Adobe is working on it, though. I'll update this post if I hear further details.
Adobe Systems on Monday updated its raw-image processing software for Photoshop CS4 with support for Canon's higher-end EOS 5D Mark II camera and building in support for the camera profiles that can give images more realistic colors.
Raw image files from Canon's EOS 5D Mark II now is supported by Adobe Photoshop.
(Credit: Canon)The camera profiles, which I strongly recommend people employ, let you change image tones and colors to better match camera settings such as neutral, portrait, and landscape. They'd been released on the Adobe Labs site, but now are officially built into the Adobe Camera Raw 5.2 software and an accompanying utility, DNG Converter for changing cameras' proprietary raw files into Adobe's Digital Negative format.
The support for Canon's new 5D Mark II SLR is arriving just in the nick of time for the camera itself. Photographer and blogger Rob Galbraith, citing the company, Canon will begin shipping the new cameras to U.S. dealers on Tuesday. The $2,700, 21-megapixel camera, with a full-frame sensor the size of a frame film and a 1080p high-definition video mode, will help Canon counter Nikon's increasingly competitive models, and it's a hotly anticipated model.
The new raw software also supports several higher-end compact cameras: Canon PowerShot G10, Panasonic DMC-G1, Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX150, Panasonic DMC-FZ28, Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3, and Leica D-LUX 4, Adobe said. Additionally, people can save adjustment settings for future use.
The software (for Mac OS X or Windows) can be downloaded from Adobe's Web site.
Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe.com has released a proof-of-concept tutorial for Photoshop selection techniques using Configurator. A final version is due soon.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)After a slight delay, Adobe Systems has begun shipping Configurator, an application that lets people create customized Photoshop CS4 control panels and share them with others.
Configurator runs on Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) foundation and lets people use a drag-and-drop interface to produce the control panels. Adobe's Creative Suite 4 applications use Adobe's Flash technology for its control panels, and Configurator is a way to produce those files. The company announced it Tuesday during its Adobe Max conference in San Francisco.
Adobe expects the software to be useful for those who want to customize the sprawling Photoshop interface so only a specific set of features is highlighted--for example those that crime labs use to process forensic images. It also expects that tutorial authors will flock to the technology to produce interactive step-by-step guides, perhaps with videos included.
John Nack, Photoshop's principal product manager, said earlier he hopes the Configurator technology will be brought to other Adobe CS4 applications later. For more details and some sample panels, check out Nack's blog announcement of Configurator.
