Lets be honest, this reviewer was not looking for much in the PS6 3D set of commands. After all this was just going to match the 4year old 3D and beveling commands of Xara’s Designer Pro at double the price and half the speed. And the first part of our tests seemed to confirm that:…
With so many smartphones coming out in all sorts of versions its hard to compare products. Here are two places that I go for phone comparison data and particularly for the still camera and video camera performance benchmarks. PhoneArena It is fairly simple to setup the comparison – and the review ratings are often bang on. However…
Back in 2008 this blog identified Picnik as one of the best online image editing sites in the business. Two years later in 2010 we were no less enthusiastic about Picnik after Google bought the software and added it to Picasa. And ye Editor is not alone as other recent reviews put Picnik well above…
Burst mode exposures are thought of as an action shot specialty. Any sports action shots provide good example – from diving board shots thru Nascar rumbles to rodeo competitions. If you use burst mode at anywhere from 3-8 frames per second[the upper limit for most good SLRs], you will likely find 1 to 2 super…
The Blur Gallery appears to be incomplete in the first beta of Photoshop 6. And I sincerely hope so and shall show you why here. You can find the Blur Gallery under the Filter Menu – choose anyone of Field Blur, Iris Blur or Tilt-Shift Blur – and then screen above will appear. The sidebar…
Photoshop CS6 beta has been released for free public tasting and trial runs and after two years there are lots of new features to like, especially for dyed in the wool photofinishers. But the most obvious change in Photoshop CS6 is that the UI has been streamlined to look more like Adobe Lightroom 4 or, dare I say…
Most photo editors have good brush capabilities. Adobe Photoshop takes it to a new level and allows users to customize their brushes much like Photoshop Styles – to a surprising extent. But the best painting tool on the market has been Corel Painter with its huge set of brushes, their amazing set of properties, their…
The new ThePhotoFinishes.com recognizes the reality of the past year, almost all of the postings for the site have been to the Picthat blog. In our theOpenSourcery com web development site, the consistent recommendation has been to use a CMS with WordPress being the top choice. So now we are eating our own stew and…
In the previous PF blog post on the booming compact cameras and their rapid technology improvements, credit was given to smartphones for stimulating those changes. However, compact cameras have an advantage that smartphones could not easily crack – better lensing with optical zoom capabilities beyond the reach of smartphones. Then the article goes on to…
Spoiler update: See the bottom of this page… In our previous post on Compact Cameras vs Smartphones, the advantage appears to be swinging to smartphones as they slowly approach compact cameras in the quality of their camera components. But smartphones [smartphones really means "smartphones and tablets" for most of the following remarks] have 3 other key features…
iPhone 4 vaults to the top but begins to trail off in recent months If you follow the Flickr Camera usage statistics, then the answer to question of smartphone vs compact camera is smartphone. Last year compact camera sales fell by 30% as fixed lens smartphone cameras started to displace fixed lens compact cameras [in 2010…
Google is selling SketchUp Pro for $495 – Why? The program, SketchUp Pro is not strange – its a architecture and landscape design program which appears to have not only a nice range of features but also integrates well with AutoDesk DWG and other CAD files. No the novelty here is that Google is doing…
Back on April Fools Day 2009, the headline was RIP: Corel PaintShop Pro. I had just tried the latest version, PaintShop Pro X2, and found it to be awful – slow, bloated and failing like its fellow software boondoggle of the day, Microsoft Vista. Having already seen the downward trend with PaintShop Pro X1 –…
Given the wave of great automatic digital cameras, it would appear easy to produce great Web images. But actually getting from here – good images in the digital camera; to there, great images on your Web pages can present some non-trivial and vexing problems. Here are 3 general problems: 1)On the web, image size still…
DPReview Advantage
There are a number of websites that provide excellent camera reviews such as Popular Photography Magazine, Digital Camera Review, and Imaging Resources . But my favorite has been and continues to be DPReview. The English website is very thorough in their testing, has a great Blog where photographers worldwide chat politely [something the reddit.com website could…
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