Here’s a tool you may not have heard about but may useful at some time in the future. It’s called Clipping Magic, and it’s designed to remove backgrounds from user-uploaded pictures.
The concept is rather simple, you upload an image, mark the areas in the background you don’t want in red, and mark the areas in the foreground you do want in green. The website’s algorithm takes over and (hopefully) produces a background-free picture. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But how does it fare when used for an image with a background you actually want to remove?
Read more…
The Online Lighting Diagram Creator is a web app for easily creating and sharing lighting diagrams. It was created back in 2009 by Sydney-based photographer and web developer Quoc Huy Nguyen Dinh. It’s an extremely simple tool through which you can create detailed diagrams by simply clicking and dragging.
Read more…
Amazon recently added a helpful tool geared specifically towards photographers looking to supplement their camera bag with some fresh glass. This Lens Finder Tool lets photographers input their camera and then spits out a list of all the compatible lenses Amazon caries for that particular model.
Read more…
Did you know that YouTube isn’t just for uploading videos? Google’s popular video hosting service also has a special feature designed just for photo slideshows. If you’ve never considered using YouTube for photos, you may have never noticed the option, but it’s right there on the Upload page.
Read more…
Reikan Technology, the company behind the FoCal automatic lens calibration tool, tells us that it has released a new web-based tool for researching the performance of camera and lens combinations.
Read more…
Focus stacking is when you combine multiple photographs of different focus distances in order to obtain a single photo with a much greater depth of field than any of the individual shots. This can be done by turning the zoom ring on your lens, but this can be difficult to control (especially for highly magnified photos). It can also be done using special rigs designed for the purpose, but those are generally quite pricey.
Photographer and software engineer David Hunt recently came up with the brilliant idea of turning an old flatbed scanner into a macro rail for shooting focus-stacking photos.
Read more…
Bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin published an interesting thought to his blog yesterday that is very relevant to aspiring photographers. He writes,
When everyone has access to the same tools then having a tool isn’t much of an advantage. The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn’t own.
Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I’m betting it’s your attitude.
The photography industry is definitely one that has experienced (and is experiencing) a leveling of the “tools playing field”. Even more so than before, it’s what goes on in the 12 inches behind the viewfinder that sets players apart.
When everyone has access to the same tools [Seth Godin via A Photo Editor]
Image credit: PHNAT.jpg by gary_pix
If you use a Mac and regularly need to resize batches of photos, there’s actually a tool built into your operating system that lets you do just that without having to open any image editing program. It’s called “sips”, which stands for scriptable image processing system. It’s extremely easy to use, but you’ll need to know how to use Terminal to take advantage of it.
Read more…
When Adobe unleashed Photoshop CS5 back in April 2010, one of the big features that had photographers buzzing was Content Aware Fill. With a simple selection and a few keystrokes, the tool could magically delete a portion of a photograph and replace the void with details from the surrounding area. The tool was so revolutionary that when a sneak peek demo went viral, viewers began calling the video fake and too good to be true. It wasn’t.
Read more…
We’ve seen ring flash units that redirect light from a DSLR’s pop-up camera and a hot shoe-mounted flash, but never from a compact camera’s built-in flash. Based on a patent filing published earlier this month and uncovered by Egami, that’s what Nikon appears to be in the process of building.
Read more…
