Archive for the 'Photo & Graphics' category

The document scanner has long been a tool of the most usual appearance and scanning a digital copy of a document is now of such ease that anybody can do it. Nevertheless, there is a large gap between a pro scan of a full book and the slightly better than average Xerox-like copy that we all do.

Most of it comes from the use of masterful algorithms of cleaning, cropping, re-cropping, aligniment, correction, optimisation that are usually included in some very complex and very expensive pro software scanning tools. Thanks to Scan Tailor, this is no longer the cas. It is open source and it does it all like the pros.

Scan Tailor

If you’re like most people, you’d like to have pretty wallpaper on your desktop background. You can always go to wallpaper web sites but most of them are choke-full of ads and they always provide the same usual set. How about getting new ones?

Use Google.

Now, Google is able to search images by size. Just enter your screen size and you will be treated to a galore of images. If you also search for the word “wallpaper”, you are sure to find exactly what you need.

For my own 24″ screen, I could find brightly colored pictures or elegant designs. All designed to be wallpapers, even when no wide-audience web site had found it yet.

Free wallpapers on Google

did I mention that it also works for dual-screen wallpapers? And did I mention that it’s free? (for a commercial use, this would not be an acceptable practice)

The larger our displays, the tougher it gets to find adequate wallpapers. NASA (through a sĂ©lection from Chamorro) comes to our resscue with these exceptionnaly beautiful high-resolution images. Our computer will have a hig-technology look even in 4000×3000 pixels.

Atlantis Space Shuttle

You can notice that these images being free of copyright will allow to produce impressive posters if you agree not to make it a commercial venture. Idea?

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.