Archive for the 'Photo & Graphics' category

Fabian Tischer is obviously gifted to create small videos from visual effects supposed to be simple (but actually quite tough to master) in order to offer us some cool movies:

Check his page often in the future. I believe that his future work will be worth it.

I consider that the most useful and often the most interesting wallpapers for your computer desktop are images that are relatively feature-less. A picture full of little details continuously grabbing your attention is a major nuisance. It’s much better to have either a very smooth image or a photo containing a lot of continuous tones.

Windows 7 official wallpapers

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

Fresh Impact Crater Formed between February 2005 and July 2005
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

• 800×600
• 1024×768
• 1152×864
• 1280×960
• 1440×1080
• 1600×1200
• 1920×1440
• 2048×1536
• 2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

You know it: JPEG image format allows to compress a photo picture without too much loss. But there is some loss. For real.

You want an evidence? Open an image, save it in JPEG; Start over 600 times. The image deterioration will cumulate:

2009 starts with some new equipment in Roumazeilles.net home:

• An HP LaserJet 1005. The lowest B&W laser I could find at HP (I am faithful to this brand even if the last LaserJet 1022 failed suddenly far before the end of its normal useful life). It’s a Windows-based printer used on the local network, but it seems that printing over the LAN is nearly instantaneous. Magic!
• An Epson Stylus Photo R1900. Replacing an eon-old Stylus Photo 750, it should bring color photo printing in A3+. It’s amazingly silent.

Copyright (C) Peter Nowacki

Peter’s web site.

Stacey Whaley is a painter using the most modern tools available and depending heavily on the mathematical principles of fractals (those graphical figures that tend to repeat themselves at different scales when you zoom in or zoom out).

Apophysis - Copyright (C) Stacey Whaley

In most cases, when people follow this path, the result is quite predictable and there are a few compulsory forms (like the Mandelbrot set) that pop in the pictures. Please, check the admirable result of the example above. Stacey is able to create something that is clearly fractal and simultaneously bringing all the personal content that is the mark of the true artist.

Check all her work in http://intergalacticart.blogspot.com/, even if the updates are too few for our pleasure.

Isn’t it somewhat difficult to continuously check the status of security updates for the many software programs we have installed on our PCs, sometimes not even knowing it? Here comes Secunia PSI to help in this daunting task. It permanently observes the version of the programs on your PC and verifies if there is an available update. Thus, it efficiently protects us against the computer security risks we too often are submitted to.

Secunia PSI

I collected a long list of tutorials (mostly in English) on my other photo website: Tutorials for Photoshop and The GIMP.

I am quite found of any tool that allow to search inside the contents of images on the web. One such tool is Multicolr Search Lab Flickr set. I really like it because it is able to look for images based on their colors. But not only that. Today they include a lot more images since they collected 10 millions Creative Commons images from Flickr.com.

Multicolr Search Labs

It was an impressive tool, it’s now a useful tool.

This is easy to reduce a color photo to a B&W image (any photo software or any B&W photocopier can do it). But the reverse operation seems difficult at best, impossible in most cases. However, a team of French scientists from the French INRIA (Guillaume Charpiat, Matthias Hofmann et Bernhard Schölkopf) presented recently an algorithm that succeeds to rebuild the color information from a B&W photo. And with some success.

On the image on the left, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been converted to black and white (A), using color data and textures from a similar image (B), the algorithm built a color image again (C) not too far from the original (D).

Analyzing this work, I’d say that part of the differences between the result (C) and the original (D) come from the quality of the conversion to Black & White which led to an image quite hard (a bit more contrast than needed).

Impressive result on photos, you can expect to see it applied to moving images (and movies).

Source: Futura-Science.

Photoshop CS4

Newsrooms are full of weird coincidences. For example, we just learned that  two products often presented as direct competition were launched this Fall. To my right, here is Adobe with its boxing champion, Photoshop, loaded up to version CS4. To my left, Linux and its community of free developpers pushing the challenger on the ring, version 2.6 of The Gimp.

I am still convinced that this is not an even fight (and Photoshop is favored by bookmakers, for those still doubting it) but both announces are interesting and should be reviewed shortly.

Photoshop CS4 is a new step forward based on the award-winning user interface that made it a best seller and on top-level performance. To this market reference product, Adobe adds the following image-edition-oriented features:

• Accelerated computation using the modern graphic cards coprocessor and the Windows 64 features (when available, of course), and many tools needed to support a 3rd dimension in graphics design (painting on top of 3Dmodels, 3D compositing, etc.)
• Several new tools
• Adobe Camera Raw v5 is improved again to include complementary tools applicabel to RAW photo files (local editing, gradual correction filters, etc.)
• Bridge CS4 is notably accelerated

The Gimp 2.6

On the other side, The Gimp is now available as version 2.6. Here again, improvements are notable, even if a little smaller:

• A number of improvements to the user interface (but I still thing that this is the weak point of this software program; Recommendation: Look into GimpShop which is a hack to The Gimp in order to make it appear similar to Photoshop)
• Improvements to the selection tool
• Improvements to the drawing brush
• 32-bit GEGL data management (perfectly adapted to keep maximum quality in 12- and 14-bit RAW files)

All this will probably start again comment wars supporting one or the other solution. But remember that The Gimp is simply free. On the contrary, Photoshop CS4 (even if getting the upgrade license and despite the many available options) will still be very expensive (Master Collection at $2,499).

What can be forecasted of the most important (in my eyes ) announces expected before the Photokina fair in Koln.

Beware: We said announces, not releases.

Already done:

Beware: This will be updated as often as needed. This may lead to repeated publications in the RSS feeds and some publication date changes.

This is right that many people feel obliged to use Photoshop to manage their photo images. But in most cases, nearly any other tool would be as good. I think first about the excellent IrfanView which is free and does a lot of digital photo management.

But it is also true that if you really want to use all of the xtensive feature set of Photoshop or if you appreaciate its rich interface (defintely well-thought with the user in mind), The Gimp will not be enough for your photographer needs. Here comes the a really surprising software program: Pixlr.

It essentially took the Photoshop interface ideas (really VERY similar to Photoshop), it is a software application written by Ola Sevandersson to be used online (but still in beta status). Nothing to download, free (as in free beer), legal, operating damn well.

What is also notable is that it is available with an interface customized in different languages (including English, of course, and 10 others.

Totally approved.

What I do (or should be doing, since -like everybody else- I can’t stick to my good resolutions) in order to obtain beautifully detailled photographs. It’s even more important if you want to make them ready for printing in large size (on your brand new A3 inkjet printer or poster-size at a print shop).

A quality lens

The first advice I should give it to choose a high-end lens. Even if the trans-standard zoom lens of the kit for most digital SLR cameras provide very good results in an exceptionnally compact form factor, that we all love to use. But these are also the result of so many compromises where image quality cannot be always the only factor.

Professionnal zoom lenses (the most expensive) are often capable of really impressive achievements, but prime lenses (with a fixed focal lenght) can reach quality levels that no zoom lens can reach. Some say that this is their unique (and only) selling point: Quality.

Thus, in the Minolta-Sony lens catalog, I rushed onto the white tele-lenses from the APO G pro family that, even today, produce exceptionnally good images (for a price no less astonishing if you don’t purchase them second-hand). But each serious camera/lens manufacturer has a few very nice lenses in its catalog.

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I have collected a few posts at LifeHacker that I wanted to share with you because they are concentrating on some easy and powerful techniques to be used with Photoshop.

• Create Eye Catching Color Effects on Black-and-White Photos
• Create Photorealistic Reflections in Photoshop
• Reduce Redundancy by Creating Photoshop Actions

Several times, I talked about the limitation to photo image quality by light diffraction but I failed to go into the details. To the general request of one reader who asked, I will try to give some explanations to better understand why the digital photographer must absolutely take that into account to make better pictures and to choose its camera.

The first thing to know is that light diffraction is a very general phenomenon and quite natural. It’s been a long time already that scientists and engineers noticed that -on the one hand- light rays are slightly deflected while running through a very small orifice and -on the other hand- two light rays can interact with each other on the condition that they are have very paths nearly perfectly parallel. This is even one of the most significant and founding elements of quantum physics. When you combine both those phenomenons, you will notice that light going through a very small opening like camera lens diaphragm will produce not exactly the expected neat circle but a more irregular and circular shape that you can see in the illustrative figure that goes along this paragraph: Usually named an Airy disk or Airy disc.

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