Digital Photography Tips and Techniques

According to New York Times, Israel computer scientists have create a “beautification engine”, a new computer software. This is not the typical portrait retouch program you’d expect. The software program uses a mathematical formula to alter the original photo into a theoretically more attractive version, while maintaining an “unmistakable similarity” to the original. It doesn’t remove any skin imperfections, or change eye/hair colors. All it does is to re-arrange the facial features so the distances between them fit into a most attractive form…

Read> Skin Deep - The Sum of Your Facial Parts

So many interesting things happen in the digital photography world everyday and I am having a hard time deciding which ones to blog about. At the end, I guess I could sample just a bit of everything I found interesting. So here is the DPTnT Digital Photography Links, September 17 2008 Edition. Read More…

Smashing Magazine has a list of 35 extremely beautiful HDR pictures. These are really high dynamic range pictures tone-mapped for displays (like your monitors) with limited dynamic range.

If you are interested in checking out more HDR pictures, please visit Flickr’s HDR group pool.

There are so many interesting things happening in the world of photography. I don’t think I can possibly write up each of them as a full-blown blog post. So I have decided to do a links roundup like many others blogs. Here are a few of the photography links I have visited recently.

• Travel essay with Canon 1Ds Mark III. Apparently the pre-production units of the camera are in hands of a few capable photographers.
• Dirty Lens Caps Mean Dirty Lenses. The lens cap goes to lots of dusty places, such as your pockets, camera bags, or occasionally onto the ground. Do you clean it often?
• Do more with your digital photos. What do you do with your photos? Share it on a we site? Email them to relatives and friends? Print it out the traditional way? PhotoWorks Inc has announced new service to allow flickr users to easily create photo gifts - including photo books, cards, calendars and other keepsakes - using their photos already on flickr.
• The Top10 free Photo/ Image/Graphics software. There are a lot more choices of photo editing raw crunching softwares available for $$$. However the budget-conscious types should be able to find most you need for nothing.
• Nikon D300 is coming. Unless you have been living in a cave, you probably have heard about the Nikon D300. The camera should start shipping this week. Nikon Capture NX will be included with the sale of D3 and D300 for a limited time.
• Nokia: Who Needs A Digital Camera? The recently announced Nokia N95 has a 5-megapixel (MP) camera with Carl Zeiss optics. It should be a “very credible alternative for single purpose digital still cameras”.
• Digital Cameras: Buying Made Simple. Are you buying a new digital camera or upgrading old one? This shopping guide may make it simple for you, hopefully.

Graphita Live Studio is a free, easy-to-use web application (nothing to install!) for expressive graphical effects on your own high resolution photos. You can doodle, add captions, and add art objects. It has hundreds of digital effects to choose from and each effect has options for customization. The best of all is that the effects are live and editable so you can go back to fix a mistake you made early in the editing without having to repeat all the steps. You can share your creation easily by email. You can save your work, print on posters, t-shirts, mugs, and greeting cards, etc.

There are so many interesting things about digital photography happening on the Internet daily. In stead of posting them one by one, I think doing a links collection makes more sense. So here you go…

• Drawing in dark photography tutorial - Having a photography itch in the night but cannot go out? Try this at home.
• Five reason to attend photography school and five reason not to - Year, right. You can have it both ways.
• Top ten digital photography tips - This article is really old, but the tips should still work.
• Complete digital photography - This is the blog by Ben Long, author of Complete Digital Photography. I bought the 2nd Edition in 2003. The 4th Edition was published late June this year.
• BetterPhoto contest and summit - Win the contest and you can go to BetterPhoto Summit in Chicago this September for free.

Have a great Friday!

What’s the largest panorama photo you have made? Mine is 22050 x 2955 pixel, approximately 62MP. These guys at xRez.com have gone up quite a notch and produced some gigapixel panorama photos. Check out this 95,000 by 40,000 pixel panorama of Boston (may need MS IE browser). That’s an amazing 3.6G pixel! It takes 612 overlapping images shot manually with a 300mm lens for the final image. Try following the tips. You can do it too.

Travel and photography are naturally the best companion. I love both, just like many of you. AppScout has an article featuring the globally oriented, multilingual capable photography site TrekEarth. TrekEarth allows users to display and discuss photos by regions of the Globe. The site appears to have all the necessary features of the social networking Web2.0 sites. The interface is clean and simple, unlike the mess at MySpace. Read the site feature lists here and the FAQ here.