opensource

SourceForge Accused of Bundling GIMP with Adware

If you've downloaded a copy of GIMP for Windows from SourceForge in recent days, you may want to double check to make sure you didn't get other programs installed as well. Some copies of the "open source Photoshop" were apparently being offered with for-profit adware bundled with the installer.

Photog! Transforms Your Offline Pictures Folder Into a Photo Website

If you'd like to quickly create a custom photography website and are familiar with installing software through a command line interface, there's a new free and open source program you can check out. It's called Photog!, and is a simple photography website generator that can turn your pictures directory into a simple yet elegant photo website.

Lytro Makes Interactive Web Player Open-Source, Partners with 500px for Integration

A major drawback of Lytro's technology has been the closed ecosystem its files are trapped in. Unable to be edited in programs such as Lightroom or viewed on the Web without a proprietary image viewer, the experience is lacking the ubiquity needed to gain the acceptance of the masses.

Well aware of this problem, Lytro today takes the first of what we assume will be many steps in the right direction, by announcing that their images will now be viewable on the Internet via a new, open-source WebGL player.

How to Quickly & Easily Set Up a Webcam to Take Perfect Midair Shots Every Time

Getting shots of people in midair can be a source of fun and fascination, but making them requires either a fair investment in remote triggers or a surplus of time and luck.

With a little bit of ingenuity, however, mechanical engineer Andrew Maxwell-Parish (aka Electric Slim) has made the process easy, cheap and reliable using a laptop, webcam and open-source software.

Eric Kim Allowing High-Res Downloads of His Work for Free, Going ‘Open Source’

Street photographer Eric Kim has always believed in the value of 'open source.' Usually a term reserved for software and code, open source is a development model that promotes free public access and redistribution rights for a product.

Much of what Kim has put out into the world -- be they videos or ebooks -- he's made available in the same way: use, alter and share as you'd like. And now, he's adding his photos to the list of things the public has almost unlimited access to.

OpenReflex: A Fully Operational DIY 3D Printable SLR

The magic of 3D printing has led to the creation of a few pretty cool DIY projects we've featured in the past. In the world of cameras, we've seen everything from lens adapters to flash diffusers make their way into the real world via the 3D printer and some plastic.

What we had never seen before now, however, was a fully operational 3D printed SLR camera, but freshly graduated design student Léo Marius has created just that!

Free Nikon DSLR Tethering Software for PCs, Tablets and Smartphones

Nikon DSLR owners who want to control their cameras from their PCs have a few options available to them. But while most of them offer basic functionality (i.e. aperture, shutter speed and shutter release control), the free, open source software digiCamControl seems to offer a bit more.

Photoboop: A Portable, Battery-Powered Photo ‘Booth’ that Sets Up in Seconds

Photo booths are seeing a renaissance in the world of photography recently. We're not so much talking about the photo booths you'll find at the mall, where you feed them a dollar and they take your picture. We're talking about little contraptions that pros are building/buying nowadays and bringing along with them to parties and wedding shoots.

One great example is the Instagram-inspired DIY photo booth put together by Alexander Morris. Unfortunately, that one required a bit of electrical DIY skill to put together yourself, so for those of you looking for something similar minus the DIY part, Photoboop may be the perfect solution.

Samsung Releases Galaxy Camera Code, Hackers Talk of Voice Calling

Samsung released the open source kernel files for its new Galaxy Camera late last week, something commonly done in the smartphone world -- at least with certain platforms -- but a foreign concept in the world of digital photography. This opens the door to all kinds of possibilities as hackers begin to peer into the cameras brain and dream up new possibilities for how it should work.

Developers are already talking about the possibility of introducing voice calling to the camera -- a feature Samsung left out of the camera, presumably to avoid cannibalizing its smartphones.

New Open Source Exhibition Format Asks Artists to Bring Their Own Projectors

"BYOB" is an initialism that's readily understood by college students who party. To artist Rafaël Rozendaal, however, it means something entirely different. In 2010, Rozendaal launched Bring Your Own Beamer, a series of novel "open source" art exhibitions in which participants were asked to bring their own beamers (AKA projectors). The recipe for the concept is extremely simple: find a venue with plenty of wall space (and outlets), invite a bunch of artists and art-lovers, and have images projected all over the walls for everyone to enjoy.

Wave this Programmable “Light Saber” to Light Paint Words and Images

Gavin of Sydney, Australia created an awesome 2-meter long programmable staff that makes painting giant words and images as easy as waving/walking the staff around during a long-exposure photograph. The staff, which he call the LightScythe (we would have called it the "Lightsaber"), was inspired by the Wi-Fi light painting project we shared here earlier this year.

The hardware is pretty simple. There’s a 2m programmable LED strip inside an acrylic tube, which is controlled from a small receiver and battery pack. A laptop PC with a wireless Xbee link sends the image data to the scythe at a specified time. [#]

Make Adjustments in Lightroom with Physical Sliders

Lightroom adjustment sliders are nice and all, but wouldn't it be neat if fine adjustments could be made using our hands and physical sliders rather than a mouse and virtual ones? There's an open source program called PADDY for Lightroom that allows you to map adjustment settings in Lightroom to external devices, including MIDI faders with sliders and knobs. Here's the description:

3D Webcam Capture Demo at 60 FPS

Kyle McDonald is a programmer working on building open source utilities for realtime 3D scanning using structured light, a technique that requires only a projector and a cheap camera.