Underexposed

Apple Aperture in action.

(Credit: Apple)

LAS VEGAS--Apple on Monday added support in its software for raw image files from Nikon's top-end SLR, the $8,000, 24.5-megapixel D3X.

Apple's Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.5 also adds support for Epson's Epson R-D1x digital rangefinder camera, according to the Apple support page.

The software enables Aperture 2, iPhoto '08, and iPhoto '09 to interpret the cameras' raw files, proprietary formats that include more information than JPEGs. The update requires Mac OS X 10.4.11, Mac OS X 10.5.3, or later.

A full list of Apple's raw image support is available on Apple's support site.

Aperture's competitor, Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, also got D3X support Monday, which is eve of the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.

(Via Rob Galbraith.)

Until Apple blesses the iPhone with a camera worth talking about, you're just going to have to improve photos by transferring them to your desktop to edit.

Not so fast, slick. Picoli for iPhone ($4.99) is a handy little photo editor that does a great job touching up entire photos--you can color-correct images by using a slider, flip the image, and apply a few effects, including converting to sepia tones.

Watch our First Look video to see how Picoli works and see if you should download a copy for yourself.

Related:
>>All iPhone apps

OnOne Software has announced version 6 of its Genuine Fractals software for expanding images up to mammoth sizes.

These new features include texture presets that more rapidly tune the resizing algorithm, batch processing so bulk operations can be run in the background, tiling to split images up into pieces for printing on smaller printers, a gallery wrap feature to help when printed images are mounted on thick frames, and the ability to work with Adobe Systems' Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2 and with Apple Aperture 2.1.

The Standard and Professional editions cost $159.95 and $299.95, respectively. In the Professional Edition but missing from the Standard is the Lightroom and Aperture support, the ability to resize CMYK images, and gallery wrap. When used as a Photoshop CS4 plug-in, only the 32-bit version of Adobe's software is supported.

Also at the PhotoPlus Expo, the company also announced PhotoTools 2 in $159.95 Standard and $259.95 Professional editions will go on sale in January. With the new version, the company said, it's now easier to find the right choice among the 300 effects and adjustments; changes can be previewed before they're applied, preset adjustments can be saved, loaded, and shared; and masking features to apply changes only to a portion of an image. The Professional Edition includes a variety of photo effects and presets and also works with Aperture 2.1 and Lightroom 2.

The company also announced the $499.95 Plug-In Suite 4.5, which combines Genuine Fractals 6 Professional Edition, PhotoTools 2 Professional Edition, Mask Pro 4.1, PhotoTune 2.2, PhotoFrame 4 Professional Edition, and FocalPoint 1.0. That bundle will be available in January, the company said.

(Via PhotoshopSupport.com.)

Phase One Capture One 4 Pro offers selective color editing controls.

(Credit: Phase One)

Phase One has begun selling Capture One 4 Pro, the newest incarnation of the company's higher-end photo editing software.

The software is designed to handle the raw images from higher-end cameras--in particular Phase One's highly regarded medium-format models with up to 65-megapixel resolution, but other manufacturers' models as well. The pro version costs $399 or 299 euros, compared to $129 or 99 euros for the standard version, the Copenhagen-based company said.

Capture One Pro version has several features missing from the standard version: it can correct some lens problems such as distortion, purple fringing, vignetting, and chromatic aberration for several supported lenses from Carl Zeiss and Hasselblad; it can be used in a "tethered" mode connected directly to a camera as it takes photos; it supports use of multiple monitors; and it can be used to selectively adjust specific colors. And photographers can create customized styles that can be applied later to give a signature look.

Google has brought to Linux the beta version of its new Picasa 3 software for image editing, cataloging, and uploading.

The new release catches the open-source operating system up with Windows, which got the Picasa 3 beta one month earlier. There's still no word about a Mac OS X version, although Mike Horowitz, Google's Picasa product manager, told me earlier that "Macs are important to us...We're always looking for new ways of making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."

A collage mode in Picasa lets people create poster-size collections, sizing and placing each snapshot. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Google)

The new version adds a retouching tool, automatic synchronization of photos on the PC with those stored at Google's Picasa Web site, and a collage mode that lets people combine numerous snapshots into a poster-size collection, Google programmer Lei Zhang said in a blog post announcing the new version. The new version also is faster, he added.

However, it does lack the Windows version's movie maker feature that can turn photos into a slideshow with a soundtrack that can then be uploaded to YouTube.

The software runs using Wine and an open-source software layer that translates a program's Windows instructions into commands for Linux instead. Google has contributed about 850 patches to the Wine project so far this year, Google said. Better video support in Wine is still a work in progress, though, which is why the movie maker feature is disabled.

Update 6:40 AM PDT: I added some links to Adobe information and further detailed some new features.

The most interesting new capability in the Lightroom 2 beta is localized corrections. This image from an Adobe demonstration shows the control for a brush that can adjust saturation, brightness, exposure, and clarity of the area of the photo you 'paint.'

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

When Adobe Systems launched Photoshop Lightroom, it presented users with an all-or-nothing photo editing philosophy. But with version 2, which goes into public beta testing Wednesday, the company is changing course.

Lightroom 2 offers local editing abilities that permit photographers to edit just a patch of an image--whitening a person's teeth, deepening the blue of a sky, illuminating a child in a tree's shadow. Changes are "painted" on with a variably sized circular brush.

Local editing doesn't open the door to the super-detailed pixel-level tweaking of regular Photoshop, but it's a major step in that direction. It's also a timely answer to version 2.1 of Apple's Aperture, released last week with a plug-in architecture permitting local editing such as dodging and burning to brighten or darken parts of an image.

Regular Photoshop certainly won't be consigned to oblivion. Even within the relatively limited task of editing photos, Photoshop offers a wealth of tools, plug-ins, and options that are beyond Lightroom's scope. But local editing could help free Lightroom fans from the awkward round trips taking photos to Photoshop and back.

The new feature doesn't depart from Lightroom's nondestructive editing approach: the changes are recorded as metadata that leaves the underlying digital file unaltered. Reconciling local editing with nondestructive editing was one reason the feature has taken so long to appear, Adobe has said.

Lightroom is designed chiefly to handle "raw" photo formats that come unprocessed from camera image sensors. Raw images offer more flexibility and quality, but they're proprietary and often tricky to handle, and raw images generally must be converted to more universal formats such as TIFF or JPEG for further handling.

Further details from Adobe are available from Photoshop product manager John Nack, Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty, and the Lightroom 2 beta release notes (in PDF form). The software itself can be downloaded from Adobe Labs.

Other features
Local editing is among several new features and some tweaks to the Lightroom interface. Among the other changes:

• Smart Collections, which enables the software to automatically group photos based on various attributes such as a particular keyword. I like this: I get sick of adding new photos to various ever-expanding thematic collections.

• A built-in panel for better searching with multiple parameters such as time, keywords, camera lens, and photo location. Specific search interfaces can be saved.

• The ability to apply sharpening during the export process, which is useful especially given that sharpening an image often depends on where it's going to be used (printed images generally require more than those published online, for example), so sharpening settings might not be something you want saved along with the master file.

• The ability to export a selection of images directly to Photoshop CS3's tools for merging multiple photos into a single high dynamic range or panoramic image. The composite image arrives handily in Lightroom's catalog.

• Dual-monitor support, which Aperture already has. You can open up a second window that can be devoted to various tasks such as showing close-ups as you move the mouse pointer over various thumbnails in the main catalog.

• A 64-bit version that lets the software take advantage of more than 4GB of memory on Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista.

•  The ability to edit photos 30,000 pixels on edge instead of just 10,000--very handy when dealing with panoramas.

• A "print package" feature for printing custom layouts with the same photo in multiple sizes.

• The ability to add the corner-darkening vignetting effect to cropped images, not just to the full-sized uncropped version.

What's missing? Doubtless there will be developments with the plug-in architecture and accompanying software development kit (SDK) that could let others write plug-ins. Photoshop has a rich selection of plug-ins, but it's tougher with Lightroom in part because of the nondestructive editing aspects.

Adobe said a "primary focus" for Lightroom is an SDK for "workflow"--translate that to tasks for import, export, perhaps file management, but not editing. However, Apple figured a way to produce a plug-in architecture that includes editing abilities, so I wouldn't rule it out as impossible. Notable Apple partners include companies such as Nik Software's Viveza technology for adjusting colors and PictureCode's Noise Ninja for noise reduction, both available as plug-ins for Photoshop.

Local editing details
Adobe's tool lets you "paint" the edits onto a section, with feathered edges to soften transitions and an auto-masking option to limit changes just to a particular color range.

Each change can be selected later and modified. I'm not clear yet on the extent to which painting over the same patch multiple times intensifies the effect, but I'm guessing you'd have to fire up a new brush and make another pass.

Lots of people crabbed about the lack of local editing--I've publicly pined for a local tool to simulate split neutral-density filters, a promised feature. But it might actually be a good thing that local editing is only arriving in version 2. That's because photographers got to try out a new set of Lightroom 1 tools that often could accomplish the same goals with a whole-image editing approach.

For example, I find that brightening dark tones with Lightroom's fill tool often yields an image that looks more natural than what results from spot-editing approaches such as dodging and burning. And I like the "targeted adjustment tool" that lets me click on a particular color range to change saturation or luminance. The change is across the whole photo, but often that's just fine.

Whole-image editing problems crop up, though. Say you want to give a shot that uber-vivid blue sky and green grass that you see in the surreal world of prescription-drug ads--but not throw the colors of other blue and green out of whack. For this kind of thing, local adjustments are just the ticket.

In fairness, Lightroom did have some local-edit abilities, such as one tool to touch up dust specs or skin blemishes and another for fixing flash-induced red eye. I like the first, but find the red-eye tool finicky and often ineffectual. (Update 10:20 a.m. PT April 8: I removed a reference to Aperture that incorrectly described its touch-up abilities.)

Free beta, with a catch
With the beta, Adobe is continuing what it began with 1.0, a much more open development process than the company has used historically. Not only is the approach in vogue, it helps diminish Apple's competitive threat, recruit new users, and shape software that's in flux.

I'm sure Adobe hopes the beta process will help eliminate the fiasco of its most recent Lightroom update, too. The company released the Lightroom 1.4 update in March only to pull it when discovering serious bugs. The company told users to reinstall the older version; it still plans to release a 1.4.1 update after further testing, a release that's separate from the 2.0 beta.

Adobe wouldn't say when the final version of Lightroom 2 will be available, though this particular beta version will expire August 31. If the 1.0 beta series is anything to go by, a second beta will be available by then.

The beta is free to anyone, but perversely it expires after 30 days for those who aren't Lightroom 1 users or who haven't been invited by a version 1 customer. Maybe Adobe is trying to generate some viral-marketing buzz that invitation programs sometimes help new Web sites benefit from, but I'm not sure how much cachet an invite will have with the free 30-day version.

CNET senior editor Lori Grunin contributed to this report.

Picnik's image-editing tools now are available within Flickr.

(Credit: Flickr)

Flickr members now can edit pictures online using Picnik's online tools, a significant change in the ability and focus of the photo-sharing site.

A new "edit this" option on each photo's page takes Flickr members to a "powered by Picnik" screen that permits them to change exposure, colors, sharpness, and other attributes, as well as add text, whiten teeth, fix red-eye, crop, and resize. The features duplicate those already available on Picnik's site.

Flickr and Picnik announced the deal in October, saying at the time it would launch "in coming months." Now the company announced the move on its Flickr blog. Some of fruits of the new option can be seen on the Flickr Picnikers group, including some images edited with Picnik.

Flickr pages now sport an 'edit this' option. Too bad all the options don't fit above the photo anymore.

(Credit: Flickr)

Flickr got its start as a place to post photos, sharing and commenting and joining groups of like-minded photographers, but it's gradually growing beyond its roots. And the addition of the editing option marks a subtle change in how users could perceive the site: not just as the online mirror of a photo collection stored at home, but also a repository of finished images that don't exist elsewhere.

It seems unlikely that serious photographers will consider their Flickr photos to be their canonical collection, but the online editing does reflect a gradual shift of the photographic center of gravity toward the Internet. Along with sharing and editing, online sites offer services for printing, selling, geotagging, and archiving photos. And the sole superpower in the image-editing software world, Adobe Systems, is working on its own online editing tool, Photoshop Express.