Tuesday, February 28, 2006

O'Reilly Publishes Two Books For Digital Photographers: "O'Reilly Media has published two new books aimed at digital photographers: "Photoshop CS2 RAW" and "Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking."" (Via The Mac Observer.) 6:12:14 AM

Photoshop Elements 4 for the Mac Looks Great: " Adobe released Photoshop Elements 4 for the Mac today at PMA. I had a chance to meet with an Adobe engineer last night in Orlando to talk about Elements 4 and some of its notable features. Adobe has packed quite a bit of power in this affordable package. First, and a bit of a surprise, Elements 4 now has a streamlined version of Bridge. So there's a fully capable file browser built right into the app. The biggest 'wow' feature however, is the new 'Adjust Color for Skin Tones' control that lets you click on a spot of skin, then Photoshop analyzes it and corrects the color. I saw it tested on a variety of subjects, and it worked remarkably well. Speaking of our people shots, the new red eye correction tool is the model of simplicity. You just enable it and Photoshop finds all the instances of red eye in the image and fixes them for you. The Mac version isn't able to correct red eye on import as in the Windows release, but this approach works quite well. Adobe has included some very helpful selection tools too. The Magic Select Brush and the Magic Extractor tools speed up the tedious task of selecting an element within your picture to adjust or copy and place elsewhere. They don't achieve perfection automatically, but they do get you close enough so that with a little clean-up you're in business. The price for Elements 4 is still $89. This a great value for a powerful image editor. Considering that it includes Bridge and the latest version of Camera Raw, this application is all most hobbyist photographers would ever need. " (Via MacDevCenter.) 6:07:03 AM

Panasonic DMC-L1: "PMA 2006: Panasonic has today announced the fruits of its new relationship with Olympus, the DMC-L1 Four Thirds System Digital SLR. Todays news is really just a 'development announcement' so doesn't have any detailed specifications, however reading through what has been revealed so far this camera does appear to share quite a bit with the Olympus E-330 EVOLT. Another interesting revelation in this release is the confirmation that Panasonic developed the 7.5 MP Live MOS sensor (the same we assume as in the E-330). Other features incldue a shutter speed dial on the top of the camera, full-time live view (same as E-330), Secure Digital storage and a 2.5' LCD monitor." (Via Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com).) 6:06:58 AM

News: Study: Windows Media loses ground to Apple H.264: "StreamingMedia.com compares Apple's QuickTime H.264 codec to other video compression standards." (Via MacCentral.) 6:06:54 AM

First Look: Adobe Photoshop Elements 4: "The latest version of Photoshop Elements adds a feature that will be familiar to anyone who's spent time with Adobe Creative Suite 2 -- the Bridge image-browsing application. Ben Long walks you through this and other additions, including the Adjust Color for Skin Tones feature and the Magic Select Brush tool, in this first look at Photoshop Elements 4. " (Via MacCentral.) 6:06:48 AM

News: PMA: Apple shows Intel native Aperture 1.1: "Aperture 1.1 includes impressive speed improvements, as well as many new features." (Via MacCentral.) 6:06:44 AM

Apple soliciting RAW photos to assist in improving Aperture: "In an effort to improve the RAW conversion quality provided by Aperture (and other applications that rely on the same operating system code for those conversions), Apple issued a call for RAW files from professional photographers earlier this month. The earlier request was made to a select group of working shooters and others; now, Apple has given the green light to make the option of submitting files open to anyone seriously interested in helping the company spruce up its RAW file processing." (Via Rob Galbraith DPI.) 6:06:38 AM

iPhoto 6: Good, But Not Ground-breaking: " iPhoto 6 provides enough improvements and new features that anyone who uses iPhoto at all seriously will find them worthwhile, particularly if any of hte other iLife '06 applications are of interest. By Adam C. Engst, TidBITS " (Via myapplemenu.) 6:06:33 AM

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