Monthly Archives: February 2007

Color Corrections, Masking, Sharpening, Touch ups

I used to argue that the four most difficult tasks in photofinishing and photo editing were color corrections, masking, sharpening and touch ups. But the good folks from Adobe, Corel, Ulead and a host of plugin suppliers have been slowly but surely whittling away at these problems. Color Corrections have moved well beyond Hue/Saturation/Lightness and [...]

Corel Painter X

Corel recently launched version 10 of its Painter program:

Now what makes this program of interest to photofinishers are three things:
1)Corel is now specifically addressing the needs of photographers and photofinishers with a number of feature;
2)Corel has also speeded up the processing of Painter - this has been targetted specifically;
3)Painter continues to [...]

Redfield Plugins

Here are two plugins from Redfield. Let me describe them briefly:

Redfield’s Craquelure allows photofinishers to apply a texture imprint onto their images of varying size, depth, rotation, and other properties. Craquelure has 12 basic texture templates from which photofinishers can apply an imprint of varying scale onto a part (using masks) or all [...]

Sign of the Bulls-eye

These ads are appearing all over graphic design and publishing sites:

Think of them as bulls-eyes for Adobe’s major product lines:
Expression Web targets Adobe Dreamweaver
Expresion Design targets Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop
Expression Blend targets Adobe Flash
Expresion Media taargets Adobe Premiere Elements and Flash Video
Like Madame Defarge of Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities, Microsoft will stick to its [...]

New Sony Video Sensor Deliver 6Mpixels

Sony announced this week a new video image sensor that does the following:
1)takes images at 60 frames per second
2)and at 2921Horizontal pixels by 2184Vertical pixels = 6.4Mpixels
3)and can seamlessly take still images at this full resolution
4)and performs at high speed plus alternate resolution versus speed settings.
Go to the Sony site here for the full details [...]

Winter Comes Home

All through December and the first half of January I was gearing up psychologically and physically to do battle with Winter. But Winter was feinting - some cool nights, and a little snow but then followed by those Glow in the Night and “it must be Global Warming” days of early January. In short it [...]

Kodak Shakes-up Inkjet Printing

With the following printer Kodak likely will shake-up inkjet printing:

The shake-up will be due to 4 major factors:
1)The printer is well targeted plopping right into the multifunction market;
2)The printer is fast delivering 30ppm B+W, 22ppm color - very fast;
3)The printer’s ink is archival lasting 100 years versus 5-10 for competitors;
4)The printer’s ink cartridges will cost [...]

Picaboo, SmileBox and Tabblo

Three new gallery sites have appeared on my radar screen as the scramble for the billions of film camera dollars that used to go to your neighbourhood drug or film store are now headed for harvesting at your drugstore, online or on your home printer. A number of film, drug, and electronic stores are [...]

Video Rising

A number of readers have commented on the Video Rising review and say that ” video is not rising and the your prediction that Video cameras will replace 50% of Digital SLRs is really far fetched. If anything, functionality is converging as video cameras take still images, so too do still cameras take ever [...]