Last year imaging company Scalado showed off an app called Rewind that lets you create perfect group shots by picking out the best faces from a burst of shots and then combining them into a single image. Now the company is back with another futuristic photo app: it’s called Remove, and lets you create images of scenes without the clutter of things passing through (e.g. people, cars, bikes). It works like this: simply snap a photograph, and the app will outline everything that’s moving in the scene with a yellow line. Tap that person or object, and it magically disappears from the scene! Read more…
If you think Content Aware Fill is an amazing Photoshop feature, wait till you play around with the new content aware tools found in Photoshop CS6. In addition to a new Patch Tool for selecting where you want to Content Aware Fill from, the program will also introduce new a Content Aware Move tool that lets you easily move portions of your photographs around and extend them intelligently.
Fujifilm announced back in January at CES that it was working on an M-mount adapter for the X-Pro1, a camera that looks strikingly similar to Leica’s digital rangefinders. The company is now showing off the adapter at the CP+ trade show in Japan. Leica film aficionados who want to play around with digital in style can now choose between paying $1700 for the X-Pro1 or $6000-$7000 for the Leica M8 or Leica M9.
Here’s a first look at two lenses Canon has up its sleeve: the new Canon 24mm f/2.8 IS USM and Canon EF 28mm f/2.8 IS USM. It looks like Canon is making an effort to bring image stabilization to cheaper and wider prime lenses. Currently the “widest” Canon prime lens with image stabilization is the Canon 100mm f/2.8L IS USM. These would also be the first non-L series prime lenses to offer IS. Price and release date for both are currently unknown.
New photos have emerged showing the retro OM-styled EM-5 Micro Four Thirds camera that Olympus is planning to unleash on the photo world. It’s the first camera in a new OM-D line, and offers a beautiful old school SLR aesthetic. The image above, which looks like some kind of ad, reads,
A new digital SLR era is about to begin. Digital SLRs, which simply replaced film with an imaging device did not change significantly in terms of size, weight and user interface. The revolutionary, new mirrorless camera, the OM-D, has an exceptionally light and compact body. Its Electronic View Finder enables photographers to check the Art Filter effect, color temperature, and exposure levels in real-time. When shooting, you can instantly “create” a truly unique world and preserve it in exceptional quality. The “world” will be transformed from something you see to something you “take part” in.
The OM-D is a groundbreaking, new digital interchangeable lens camera perfect for people who want to “take part,” “create,” and “share.”
You can see a higher-res version of the ad here. Read more…
Here’s a cool sneak peek at some of the new features coming to the next version of Adobe Camera Raw. The adjustment brushes will have powerful new options for local adjustments, including temperature, tint, and noise. We also get to see the new dark interface that’ll come by default with Photoshop CS6.
Although the new, rewritten processing engine for ACR7 isn’t available to the public, it’s the same engine found in Lightroom 4, which just became available as a free public beta download a couple weeks ago.
Xerox is showing off a new tool called Aesthetic Image Search over on Open Xerox (the Xerox equivalent of Google Labs). It’s an algorithm being developed at one of the company’s labs that aims to make judging a photograph’s aesthetics something a computer can do.
Many methods for image classification are based on recognition of parts — if you find some wheels and a road, then the picture is more likely to contain a car than a giraffe. But what about quality? What is it about a picture of a building or a flower or a person that makes the image stand out from the hundreds which are taken with a digital camera every day? Here we tackle the difficult task of trying to learn automatically what makes an image special, and makes photo enthusiasts mark it as high quality.
You can play around with a simple demo of the technology here. Don’t tell the Long Beach Police Department about it though — they might use it against photographers.
Adobe’s amazing Image Deblurring demo was the star of the Sneak Peeks event at Adobe MAX 2011, but it was just one of the many demos shown that night. Another interesting photography-related demo was for “Pixel Nuggets”: a feature that lets you search a large library of photos for features (e.g. people, landmarks, patterns, logos). Read more…
Last week we shared a sneak peek at some jaw-dropping image deblurring technology currently in development at Adobe. The video wasn’t the best quality and was captured from the audience, so we didn’t get to see the example images very clearly. Adobe has now released an official video of the demo, giving us a better glimpse at what the feature can do. Read more…
At the Adobe MAX 2011 event in LA last week, the company gave a sneak peek into an advanced Image Deblurring feature that may appear in an upcoming version of Photoshop. Provided with a blurred photograph, the feature uses advanced algorithms to calculate the camera movements that caused the blur, which allows the program to do a very accurate unblurring of the photograph. The video is a bit shaky and the quality isn’t the best, but judging from the audience’s reaction when the example photo is unblurred, the feature works extremely well and caused a lot of jaws to drop.
