In addition to the Photoshop CC and Camera RAW announcements, the Adobe XD team also debuted something entirely different at the MAX conference: the company’s first shot at hardware. Coming in the form of a pressure-sensitive stylus and digital ruler, the two accessories are meant to take the creative brainstorming experience and shift it from pen-and-paper to pen-and-tablet.
In the video preview above, Adobe’s VP of Product Experience, Michael Gough, introduces the two products — code named “Mighty” and “Napoleon” — and walks you though the experience of using them. Read more…
The Internet let out a collective gasp back in October 2011 when Adobe gave an advanced preview of a crazy new image deblurring feature it has been working on. The feature can take a photo that’s blurry due to camera shake, calculate the movements that caused the blur, and “reverse it” to create a sharper photo.
It looks like the feature isn’t too far off now. Today Adobe released the above video that offers a sneak peek at what the tool actually looks like inside an upcoming version of Photoshop. Just as with the demo from two years ago, this video will drop many jaws. Read more…
Here’s a quick demonstration of what Fujifilm’s new focus peaking looks like on the freshly-announced X100s and the X20. When manually focusing the lens, the feature uses white pixel highlights to indicate the high contrast areas of the scene. This is one of two new features — the other being split image focusing — designed to make manual focusing a much nicer experience on X-Series cameras. Read more…
Fujifilm held its CES 2013 press conference yesterday, revealing some facts about the state of its camera business, sharing its vision moving forward, and offering a closer look at its two new fixed-lens cameras: the X100s and the X20. Read more…
Nikon has released a set of sample photographs to give pixel-peepers a first look at the new D5200′s image quality. The photographs, captured by photographer Douglas Menuez, were all shot using “non-professional” DX lenses that cost less than $500. The photograph above was shot using the $200 Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX lens at ISO 200. Read more…
The Canon 6D is the first Canon DSLR to offer built-in Wi-Fi, which allows a smartphone or tablet to be paired with the camera to act as an external remote, viewfinder, photo viewer, and hard drive. If you want to see how the system works, check out this 5-minute video by Dave Etchells over at Imaging Resource. It’s a short demonstration of the free EOS Remote smartphone app in action by Canon’s Chuck Westfall. Read more…
Since launching last year, JPEGMini has become a popular web-based option for trimming the file size of JPEG images without compromising their appearance. The web app magically shrinks photos by up to 5x while keeping the quality relatively unchanged. In May of this year, the company repackaged the technology for Macs as a simple space-saving app. Its next frontier? Mobile photo sharing and iOS. Read more…
Gamification — the application of game design elements to non-game contexts — is a pretty hot idea right now in the online startup world. More and more startups are introducing things like badgets, achievements, leaderboards, points, and progress bars to encourage users to do things such as visit new businesses, answer questions, and, of course, play games. One particularly interesting application of gameification is in the area of education, using fun to motivate learning.
Lunchbox is a stealthy startup that’s planning to introduce this kind of learning to the world of photography. Read more…
We’re in the year of the camera’s app. Not the camera app, which you use on your phone, but the camera’s app, which is found on your camera. A boatload of new cameras this year will have Internet connectivity and app support built right in, giving photographers access to all kinds of custom features and functions that weren’t easily available in the old age of cameras.
While Android is one of the big operating systems manufacturers have gravitated towards, Sony has decided to go the Sony way and make its system proprietary. Instead of running Android, the Sony NEX-5R and the NEX-6 will offer apps through the PlayMemories ecosystem. Read more…
Nikon’s massive 800mm f/5.6 super-telephoto lens hasn’t been launched yet, but English press photographer Leon Neal was given the enviable opportunity to play around with a pre-release copy at the London Olympic Games. After shooting two sessions at the aquatics center with the beastly piece of glass, Neal published a blog post with some sample photos and thoughts on how the lens performs:
The shot above is an unsharpened 100% crop of the frame below with no noise reduction applied. As you can see, not only has the lens done a pretty good job of tracking but the D4 has provided good results at 4000ISO. Image stabilisation seemed subtle with no obvious “clunk” as it kicked in like some lenses. The only discernible giveaway was the soft purr of the IS motor disengaging after I took my finger off the trigger. Likewise, the effect of the stabilisation was equally subtle with only a barely noticeable delay when looking through the viewfinder at a subject.
Head on over to Neal’s blog to read his short review.
