Digital Photography Tips and Techniques

Corel announced the Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 photo editing software. It appears to be a low cost alternative to Adobe Photoshop for only $99. Below are the key features mentioned in the press release. The Reviewer Guide(pdf) has more detailed demonstration of its capabilities.

Powerful Photo Editing Made Easy
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 offers a number of new features and significant enhancements to bring the power and creative possibilities of digital photography to more users. New features in Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 include:

Express Lab
The all-new Express Lab mode enables users to view and edit dozens of photos in the time it used to take to edit just a few. When using Express Lab, users can rapidly crop, rotate, apply color adjustments and perform other common tasks on large numbers of images without having to open each image individually. Now even new users can edit photos with the speed and efficiency of a professional photographer. Express Lab includes full support for all file formats including camera raw.

Graphite Look and Feel
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 features a new graphite workspace that puts the focus on the photo. The new interface also provides a neutral background for unbiased color adjustments.

HDR Photo Merge
With the NEW HDR Photo Merge, users can easily create photos that capture the full details found in the shadows and the highlights of a high-contrast scene. Users can combine two or more photos taken at different exposures and use the Clarify feature to automatically “dodge and burn” bringing out the contrast. Read More…

ImageMagick is a free software package to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, write, and convert between over 100 different image formats. If you have a large number of photos to process, ImageMagick is the perfect choice with its powerful command-line tools. Here are some examples on how to batch re-size jpeg photos in the current directory using “mogrify”. Read More…

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.

Nikon released a new update to its Capture NX raw workflow software. It has a long list of bug fixes. Some also reported significant performance improvements. It can finally remember the “Save as” settings! Get the US version here.

Nikon USA recently announced two DVD’s targeting Nikon DSLR shooters. Part of the press release states:

“Hosted by award-winning National Geographic Traveler photographer Bob Krist, the DVDs take SLR camera owners on an entertaining and informative journey from the very basics of their Nikon digital SLR camera to advanced shooting situations where they can unlock their camera’s potential. The first DVD, titled “Fast, Fun & Easy: Great Digital Pictures,” delivers 35 minutes of helpful information, making it easy and fun for new Nikon D40 and D40x digital SLR camera owners to begin taking great pictures immediately. The second DVD, titled “Understanding Digital Photography,” is great for picture-takers who are ready for the creative photographic opportunities available beyond their camera’s automatic settings. “Understanding Digital Photography” covers fundamentals that are relevant to any modern digital SLR camera while featuring the easy-to-use Nikon D40 and D40x models, as well as the popular Nikon D80 and the professional-level D200. “

Read the complete press release on Nikon Press Center. You can also watch preview videos for these two titles: Fast, Fun& Easy, and Understanding Digital Photography. They are affordably priced at $9.95 and $14.95, respectively at Nikon Mall.

Perhaps you have heard the story that someone got hold of the latest and final Harry Potter book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, painstakingly photographed it page by page and posted the book on the internet. Now this person may be busted because he/she forgot to remove the EXIF data from the photos, which contains the camera’s (Canon Digital Rebel 350D) serial number. This news article quoted a Canon official who said,

“From what we know, the device is one of the original Rebel cameras, probably a 350D, and given that they’ve been out for three years, it’s likely the owner would have had it cleaned or repaired in that time.”

This means, the owner could be identified from Canon’s service record if the camera was serviced by Canon even if the person did not send in the registration card right after purchase.

For honest law biding people like you, you may still be interested in viewing the EXIF information for learning purpose, or want to manipulate the EXIF data of your photos for some reasons (add comments, copyright notice, keywords, add EXIF to scanned photos, remove the manufacturer serial number for privacy concerns, etc). Here are a few free software that you can use:

• ExifTool by Phil Harvey. Platform-independent (Windows/Mac/UNIX). This is a great software. Did I mention it is also free? It has both GUI and command-line interface. This is probably all you need, unless you feel it is too complicated for you and have money to spend for other commercial softwares.
• Jhead. A public domain command-line software with source code. Command-line tool helps a lot if you have tons of photos to process. This one does not require perl as the ExifTool.
• Opanda iExif. A free EXIF viewer that supports the latest Windows OS and can be installed as a plug-in for IE and Firefox. A pro version ($19.99) is also available. To edit the EXIF data, you will need the $49.99 Power EXIF Editor.
• PhotoME. Very powerful photo metadata editor. Supports native RAW files from various manufacturers. It has browser integration support so you can view EXIF data of any photo displayed in your web browser.

When it comes to enjoying the great photos on websites like Flickr, Google (Yahoo) Images, Facebook, etc, you might have noticed how distracting various other elements on the page are: comments, ads, flashy colors, smilies… Some sites do support slideshow mode. However it takes you away from where you are and you don’t get to choose which images to view. Here is a great software to get rid of all the cluttering stuff and leave you just the photos you want to see, in full screen! It has some other neat features too. It is definitely worth checking out. PicLens (1.5BETA) by Cooliris, Inc. Please note that it only support Firefox 2+ on Windows and Safari on Mac.

Once you install it, you won’t notice much going on when visiting supported photo sharing site before you put the mouse cursor over an image. You will notice a button appear in the lower left corner of the thumbnail image. Click on it. In a few moments (depending on your connection speed), you will see a full screen version of that image showing up. At the bottom of the screen, you will see a row of thumbnail images (of all the images on that page), together with some easy to use navigation buttons.