A camera’s sensor size is a very good predictor of how good its image quality is, but understanding and comparing the sensors sizes isn’t very easy. While televisions and computer monitors are usually measured by diagonal length, sensors sizes are listed with its two dimensions in millimeters. Back in 2008, David Pogue of the New York Times wrote an article about this issue, calling for someone to develop an online tool for converting confusing sensor measurements into the diagonal length of the sensor in inches. Within three hours two new websites were born: Sensor-Size and Sensor Size Calculator.
If you’re the kind of person that constantly misplaces your lens caps after removing them to shoot (Psst! You can ditch them in favor of UV filters), the LensCapTrap can help you hold on to them. It’s an uber simple kit that allows you to attach your lens caps to your camera strap using Velcro, avoiding the annoyance of having your caps dangle like they do with the popular string-style holder. The standard kit costs $6 and provides Velcro patches for two lens caps, though creating your own do-it-yourself version shouldn’t be too difficult either.
Microsoft’s jaw-dropping Photosynth technology has arrived on the iPhone as an app that allows you to easily create immersive 360-degree panoramas. All you need to do is load up the app and sweep your camera around in every direction, and the app automatically snaps photographs filling in the panoramic image (you can also tap it if it gets sluggish with its snapping). Read more…
Adobe announced new tools today that lets developers create tablet apps — called Photoshop Touch Apps — that interact directly with Photoshop CS5. They also created a few apps to showcase some of the possibilities of using a tablet while working in Photoshop, including one called Adobe Nav. Basically it turns your iPad into a separate interface for controlling Photoshop, allowing you to select tools, customize the toolbar, or manage your open files by conveniently showing them as thumbnails. It’ll be available for $2 starting in early May, but we can’t wait to see what other apps developers will unveil before then!
Hiding or censoring part of an image through obfuscation is as easy as selecting the area in Photoshop and applying the Pixelate->Mosaic filter, but what if you don’t have an image editing program at your disposal? If you’re seriously paranoid about your privacy on the Internet, there’s a new service called PhotoHide that helps you quickly add these pixelated areas to any photo. Everything is done through the web browser, and you can download the final image once you’re done.
Doing this to every single photo of you on the Internet would be ridiculous, but you might find it useful for more reasonable applications (e.g. hiding your house or license plate number in a photo).
DOF Calculator is an app for Android phones that helps you easily calculate depth of field and hyperfocal distances. Simply tell it your camera, lens, and aperture setting, and it’ll spit out the numbers you need for optimally sharp landscape photographs. You can download it for free by searching for “DOF Calculator” in the Android Market.
For a quick video tutorial on how hyperfocal distance works, check out this post.
SunCalc is a super-simple web app created with Google Maps and Javascript that helps you determine the best time to shoot depending on the quality of light you want in your photos.
You can see sun positions at sunrise, specified time and sunset. The thin orange curve is the current sun trajectory, and the yellow area around is the variation of sun trajectories during the year. The closer a point is to the center, the higher is the sun above the horizon. The colors on the time slider above show sunlight coverage during the day.
iPhone photography continues to grow in popularity, but transferring photographs to your computer can be a hassle. If you’re sick of having to plug in your device via USB every time you want to sync your photos, you might want to take a look at Cinq, a free app that allows you to wireless transfer full-resolution photographs to your computer as you take them. You simply download the app to both your computer and your phone, and photos taken through the app will automatically be sent to a folder on your computer. The free version is ad-supported, while there’s an ad-free $2 version.
AmoK Exif Sorter is a program written for photographers obsessed with organization, allowing a collection of photographs to be renamed and organized based on the EXIF data embedded in each photo. In addition to the obvious choices for details to include in the file name (e.g. time and date), you can also use any other piece of EXIF info you wish, including things like camera model, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. For organization, the program allows you to copy or move files into whatever folder structure you’d like (i.e. /year/month/day/image.jpg). The program is free, Java-based, and can be downloaded here.
