TechCrunch is running a story on a shirt someone saw at MacWorld. If you look at it, the Picasa logo appears. After someone talked to a google employee at the show, they said that Picasa for Mac is under development, and will be launched this year!
While iPhoto is awesome, I really cant stand the new ‘events’ workflow. If you dont like sorting your pictures into events, you are screwed. I still keep my photos sorted in events, but I also usually have ‘themed’ sets, or just random stuff collected, and to always see the events is just annoying.
And by the way, sorry for the lack of posts here. Things may be changing a lot in the coming months, and I will keep everyone updated!
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Friday, October 26, 2007
Updates and new photo for Friday!
Sorry for the complete lack of posts, but I have been really busy at my job that I have not been able to put as much time as I wanted in this site! Things are finally calming down at the office, so I really plan on getting a few more posts up here.
My wife and I are also about to take a big step soon and purchase our first Digital SLR, I'm currently looking at the Digital Rebel XTi. I still haven't fully decided, and I'm thinking of a writing a few posts to compare the XTi to other Canon's as well as other similar cameras.
I really would like to have some more people sign up in the Flickr group so we have some new pictures to choose from, but this weeks picture comes from a friend. Click the picture to enlarge and see the rest of her shots!
My wife and I are also about to take a big step soon and purchase our first Digital SLR, I'm currently looking at the Digital Rebel XTi. I still haven't fully decided, and I'm thinking of a writing a few posts to compare the XTi to other Canon's as well as other similar cameras.
I really would like to have some more people sign up in the Flickr group so we have some new pictures to choose from, but this weeks picture comes from a friend. Click the picture to enlarge and see the rest of her shots!
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Canon 8600F Review
Recently I was in the market for a new scanner, especially one that would allow me to scan in my 35mm negatives I have from classes as well as the film im taking now with my Canon Rebel 2000. After shopping around for a while, I settled on the Canon 8600F.
The 8600F uses the tried and true CCD imaging rather than modern lower end scanners that use LCDs. The largest benefit of this is the warmer and deeper colors it produces with scans. One downside is that this scanner has to take a few moments to warm up before you can start using it.
After hooking everything up to my PC, I started scanning rolls of 35mm film. It comes with attachments for 35mm negatives, 35mm mounted slides, and even 120mm format film. I scanned in a roll of film I took at Maymont Park here in Richmond.
When I first took this roll, I had it developed by the Ritz Camera nearby. Instead of getting prints, I just had them make a CD of all the images. After getting the CD back, only about 4 images of the entire looked even decent. But after scanning in the entire roll with the 8600F, almost the entire roll looked amazing!
I have noticed that I have to use some of the special features built into the scanning tools to get my negative scans to look right ( I feel this is due more to the film than the scanner ). Its great that the software that comes with the scanner really takes the work out of this for me. I can go through each negative separately, make whatever simple changes I need to do (most of the time I just have to adjust the tool they use for fading), and then do the final scan. It takes almost 15 minutes to scan in 12 slides of film with these settings, but the results are amazing.
While this scanner may be overkill for someone just wanting to keep a digital copy of paper documents, its a great entry level device for photographers. In some reviews, this scanner has even got better reviews than some previously available dedicated film scanners. Im very happy with my purchase, and would recommend it to anyone wanting to move their film into the digital world.
Check out some of these other reviews:
The 8600F uses the tried and true CCD imaging rather than modern lower end scanners that use LCDs. The largest benefit of this is the warmer and deeper colors it produces with scans. One downside is that this scanner has to take a few moments to warm up before you can start using it.
After hooking everything up to my PC, I started scanning rolls of 35mm film. It comes with attachments for 35mm negatives, 35mm mounted slides, and even 120mm format film. I scanned in a roll of film I took at Maymont Park here in Richmond.
When I first took this roll, I had it developed by the Ritz Camera nearby. Instead of getting prints, I just had them make a CD of all the images. After getting the CD back, only about 4 images of the entire looked even decent. But after scanning in the entire roll with the 8600F, almost the entire roll looked amazing!
I have noticed that I have to use some of the special features built into the scanning tools to get my negative scans to look right ( I feel this is due more to the film than the scanner ). Its great that the software that comes with the scanner really takes the work out of this for me. I can go through each negative separately, make whatever simple changes I need to do (most of the time I just have to adjust the tool they use for fading), and then do the final scan. It takes almost 15 minutes to scan in 12 slides of film with these settings, but the results are amazing.
While this scanner may be overkill for someone just wanting to keep a digital copy of paper documents, its a great entry level device for photographers. In some reviews, this scanner has even got better reviews than some previously available dedicated film scanners. Im very happy with my purchase, and would recommend it to anyone wanting to move their film into the digital world.
Check out some of these other reviews:
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Using an external image editor in iPhoto
After recently switching to the Mac, I have been using iPhoto '08 for managing my photos. While I really like iPhoto '08, especially some of the new features, I cant edit photos to the extent I was used to on my PC. The main tools missing from iPhoto for me is the Dodge and Burn tools.
While looking around online for information about Adobe Photoshop Elements 4, I ran across a few places that mentioned using Elements as an editor, and then using iPhoto for management. I got a copy of Elements 4.0 with my new Canon 8600F scanner.
Going through the preferences for iPhoto, I came across a feature I have not seen before, 'Edit in External Editor'. You can find this in the General Preferences (Select 'Preferences' from the iPhoto Menu). Searching online, this would allow you to edit an image in another editor when you double click it in your library. When you save the image and close the external editor, the change is reflected in iPhoto.
I tried this on my setup, and it worked perfectly! I was able to take an image that needed some detailed work, click on it in iPhoto, have it open in Photoshop Elements, changed it, and then closed Elements. When going back to iPhoto, the image had been updated in my library already!
If you would like a little more control over your image editing, I highly recomend checking out this feature in iPhoto. Im not sure when it was added, but I do know it exists in both iPhoto '06 and '08.
While looking around online for information about Adobe Photoshop Elements 4, I ran across a few places that mentioned using Elements as an editor, and then using iPhoto for management. I got a copy of Elements 4.0 with my new Canon 8600F scanner.
Going through the preferences for iPhoto, I came across a feature I have not seen before, 'Edit in External Editor'. You can find this in the General Preferences (Select 'Preferences' from the iPhoto Menu). Searching online, this would allow you to edit an image in another editor when you double click it in your library. When you save the image and close the external editor, the change is reflected in iPhoto.
I tried this on my setup, and it worked perfectly! I was able to take an image that needed some detailed work, click on it in iPhoto, have it open in Photoshop Elements, changed it, and then closed Elements. When going back to iPhoto, the image had been updated in my library already!
If you would like a little more control over your image editing, I highly recomend checking out this feature in iPhoto. Im not sure when it was added, but I do know it exists in both iPhoto '06 and '08.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Photoshop Express - An online version of photoshop
When reading through some of my blogs today, I came across a post made late last week on the blog of John Nack, the Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop. The post was about "Photoshop Express", a new application currently in development at Adobe.
Click the image above for a larger screen shot of Photoshop Express. It looks pretty simple to me now, but of course this application is still under development in Adobe, and there currently is no set release date yet either.
Photoshop Express will not be a replacement for Photoshop CS3 or Elements, but a third product. The product would be a free online image editing tool. Adobe recently released Premiere Express not to long ago, which is an free online video editing tool. Photobucked and YouTube already use this tool in production.
While this tool will defiantly not be a pro-focused tool, it will come in very handy for those looking for a cheap, easy way to edit their photos. There are quite a few online image editing tools out there already, including Picnik and Phixr. I personally have used Picnik a few times and find it very handy. I can easily see Adobe using the power behind their Photoshop product to really make Express stand out above and beyond the other current online photo editors.
Click the image above for a larger screen shot of Photoshop Express. It looks pretty simple to me now, but of course this application is still under development in Adobe, and there currently is no set release date yet either.
Photoshop Express will not be a replacement for Photoshop CS3 or Elements, but a third product. The product would be a free online image editing tool. Adobe recently released Premiere Express not to long ago, which is an free online video editing tool. Photobucked and YouTube already use this tool in production.
While this tool will defiantly not be a pro-focused tool, it will come in very handy for those looking for a cheap, easy way to edit their photos. There are quite a few online image editing tools out there already, including Picnik and Phixr. I personally have used Picnik a few times and find it very handy. I can easily see Adobe using the power behind their Photoshop product to really make Express stand out above and beyond the other current online photo editors.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Photo Management - Mac
For the Mac, the best photo management software by far is iPhoto, which is a part of iLife. Apple recently updated iPhoto (and the rest of the iLife suite) for 2008, which focused on a rewrite of Apple's movie editing software iMovie as well as the addition of some new special features to iPhoto '08.
The biggest feature added to iPhoto this time is the concept of an event. Basically, iPhoto will try to group your photos for you from the times in the metadata of the photo (Ill discuss this metadata in a future post). The iPhoto '08 update also included integration into the new .Mac Web Gallery, a unified search, updated templates and printing features, as well as more powerful editing features.
I had to migrate all my photos from my PC using Picasa into iPhoto on the Mac. This process was actually really easy (I will be writing about this as well in the future for any of you other 'switchers').
iPhoto has many of the same features as Picasa. A user can group and tag their photos, and then work on these sets in many ways. iPhoto also makes it easy to move these sets off of your computer by getting them printed in a bound book (a friend of mine just ordered one of these), getting individual prints, or uploading your photos to an online service.
I also find the image editing features of iPhoto to be superior to those in Picasa, although I still find myself preferring to use Photoshop to actually adjust photos if they are being printed or presented in other ways. But for the most part, I can use the built in tools of iPhoto to update my photos before moving them up to an online service like Picasa.
One of the biggest features with iPhoto happens to be the iLife integration. Below are a few examples:
- You can tell iTunes to sync particular events or photos from iPhoto to your iPod
- You can create a movie of your photos in iMovie
- You can add photos to a movie or template in iDVD for menus of DVDs you create
- You can easily copy photos from your library into an iWeb website.
Backup is a VERY important topic for any document related tasks, and your photos are a big part of this as well. While I have not used it, iPhoto has a 'Burn' option under the 'Share' menu which I think could be used for this purpose - it will burn these images to a CD.
Overall I personally prefer iPhoto over all the other Photo Management programs around. Not only does it have the sleek and fast Apple 'touch' - I find it easy to use but very powerful at the same time, like all other Apple products.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Photo Management - Picasa2
I have personally been using Picasa since Google purchased the software and made it freely available. It has a very sleek and smooth interface, indexes VERY fast, and makes it really easy to do quick touches to your photos.
The best way to describe how I use Picasa is easiest to describe how I save my photos in the first place. I usually create a new folder with each 'event' in My Pictures folder, and then use Picasa to index all of these. Picasa will then show all the folders in the left menu side of the application, and then I can use the slider to go to specific events. I then have Picasa create backups of my library every month. This is a very simple work flow, and seems to be what Picasa is based around. Depending on your setup, you can even have Picasa recognize when you plug your camera in and automatically get your pictures.
One of the biggest benefits of Picasa is the Google integration with everything. You can easily upload your images to Picasa's Web Albums, email your images with Gmail, and post your pictures with a few clicks to your Blogger blog. While I really like everything ELSE google integrates, I dont really like Picasa's web albums, and therefore rarely use any of these features. Luckily you can upload pictures to flickr through email though, so I have done this before.
Picasa also provides the user with a multitude of things to do with your sets of images, everything from sending them to a printing service, making your own screen saver, and even backing up your photos (which is VERY important). All of these are really easy to use, and most other software packages dont include features like these.
I have compared Picasa against many other software packages on Windows used to manage photos. I personally like Picasa mostly for the slick (and actually very responsive) interface. If you have a particular software tool you use on Windows to manage your photos, please leave some feedback so we can discuss it on the site!
The best way to describe how I use Picasa is easiest to describe how I save my photos in the first place. I usually create a new folder with each 'event' in My Pictures folder, and then use Picasa to index all of these. Picasa will then show all the folders in the left menu side of the application, and then I can use the slider to go to specific events. I then have Picasa create backups of my library every month. This is a very simple work flow, and seems to be what Picasa is based around. Depending on your setup, you can even have Picasa recognize when you plug your camera in and automatically get your pictures.
One of the biggest benefits of Picasa is the Google integration with everything. You can easily upload your images to Picasa's Web Albums, email your images with Gmail, and post your pictures with a few clicks to your Blogger blog. While I really like everything ELSE google integrates, I dont really like Picasa's web albums, and therefore rarely use any of these features. Luckily you can upload pictures to flickr through email though, so I have done this before.
Picasa also provides the user with a multitude of things to do with your sets of images, everything from sending them to a printing service, making your own screen saver, and even backing up your photos (which is VERY important). All of these are really easy to use, and most other software packages dont include features like these.
I have compared Picasa against many other software packages on Windows used to manage photos. I personally like Picasa mostly for the slick (and actually very responsive) interface. If you have a particular software tool you use on Windows to manage your photos, please leave some feedback so we can discuss it on the site!
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