Underexposed

Seitz's 160-megapixel 6x17 Digital camera

(Credit: Seitz)

Got $45,600 burning a hole in your pocket? Try out Seitz Phototechnik's 160-megapixel 6x17 Digital camera. And save a bit more of your allowance for a lens, too.

The mammoth device is able to take an image measuring 60x170mm, a big notch up from high-end SLRs with a 24x36mm frame. It's got huge handgrips on either side that cry out to be grasped, but it's 18 inches wide and weighs 10 pounds, so it looks either like a great workout or tripod material to me.

It can be purchased with a tablet PC to operate it, too. That's doubtless handy, because a single high-resolution file is 307MB in raw format, the company said.

The 6x17 Digital employs a digital scanning back made by Dalsa. Scanning cameras employ a linear light sensor detector similar to that used in flatbed scanners; it moves across the field of view to take the photo rather than using a two-dimensional sensor that captures the entire scene simultaneously. It's a good way to get high resolution, but it comes at a cost: it takes a single second to take a full-resolution 7,500x21,500-pixel image.

(Via Gearfuse.)

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."

The GigaPan project begins with this $300 robot.

(Credit: Global Connection Project)

Carnegie Mellon University on Wednesday announced a $300 robot designed to easily enable people to create super-high-resolution panoramic pictures--and a Web site to let anyone in the world dive into them.

The GigaPan robot, built by Charmed Labs, can accommodate most compact cameras and is designed to be relatively inexpensive, said Illah Nourbakhsh, a Carnegie Mellon associate professor of robotics. Images then are uploaded to the new GigaPan Web site. They also can be viewed through the Google Earth software.

The researchers' project aspirations extend well beyond just flipping through snapshots of foreign lands. "What if you could do imagery that is so high-resolution that the act of looking at the image is an act of exploration?" asked Nourbakhsh in an interview.

The GigaPan project enables people to pan across and zoom into the high-resolution images, such as this one of the Harmandir Sahib, or Golden Temple, in India. You can use either of the interface buttons in the image. (Text continues below the image.)

The GigaPan work is part of Carnegie Mellon's Global Connection Project, which is designed to connect and inform citizens across the world. Sponsors include Unesco and Intel.

About 300 GigaPan robots will be built initially, with recipients carefully selected to provide good images of the globe, Nourbakhsh said.

The new version 4.2 of Google Earth indicates where GigaPan images show up with a small 'g' icon, then lets people fly 'into' the panorama.

(Credit: Google Earth)

Photography has been around for many decades, but a new era of almost obsessive-compulsive recording is arriving. I noticed it first with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an astronomy project to capture detailed images of almost a quarter of the night sky, but now more terrestrial projects are under way. One notable participant is Google, which is photographing as well as mapping roads and which acquired an aerial photography company called ImageAmerica.

At the same time, others have been trying to capture detail--for example, Microsoft's work to create 10-gigapixel images or the Gigapixl Project to capture (using digitally scanned film of all things) images between 1 and 4 gigapixels.

The GigaPan project aims for both breadth and depth: lots of photos and lots of detail.

To encourage broad adoption, Carnegie Mellon aimed to make the robot relatively cheap and designed it to work with inexpensive cameras. "We're trying to democratize it," Nourbakhsh said of the GigaPan project. Some comparable projects today require expensive equipment and time-consuming methods, he said.

To see GigaPan pictures in Google Earth, you must select the 'GigaPan Photos' layer in the 'Featured Content' list.

(Credit: Google Earth)

The robot takes a series of images--ideally about 300 for each location. An actuator pushes the camera's shutter release button, then the robot repositions for the next shot. The user sets up the robot in advance to figure out what field of view the camera can handle, and later where the upper left and lower right portions of the ultimate image should be. The camera then figures out where it needs to point.

The sub-images are stitched together with supplied software into a single view that's then uploaded to the GigaPan site. Nourbakhsh said images have to be at least 50 megapixels in size.

To explore the image, the Web site uses a modified version of the Flash-based image viewer from the Flash Earth site. Users can zoom in and out with a mouse scroll wheel and can click and drag to pan.

This GigaPan Web site image shows a view of Switzerland.

(Credit: GigaPan)

So far, there are 468 images on the GigaPan site, and the researchers hope for fast growth. "We have a lot of disk space waiting for these panoramas," Nourbakhsh said--between 5 and 10 terabytes, plus bandwidth to serve the images up over the Internet.