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DL Cade

Video: Ten Photography Life Hacks That’ll Save You Money

We've shared a few pretty cool life hacks over the years -- for example, check out this super-simple drop test that'll let you know if your AA batteries are juiced and ready to go -- but the video above brings together some of the most useful.

Put together by DigitalRev, these ten photo-related life hacks have the potential to make your photographic life that much easier, while saving you some money as well.

Michael Zhang

Samsung Working on Overlay Feature to Help Strangers Snap Better Shots of You

Asking a stranger to snap a photograph of you is a risky proposition. If the person has no concept of basic photography concepts and techniques, the resulting photographs may be completely different than what you had hoped for -- and you're too embarrassed to ask for another photo (so you wait for that person to leave and for a new one to walk by).

Samsung wants to help solve this problem: they're working on a camera feature that helps guide photo-inept strangers in snapping the shot you want.

Michael Zhang

PhotoExif Helps You Record EXIF Data for Film Photos On the Go

One of the advantages of digital photography is having information about how each photo was shot embedded within the photograph's file itself. This EXIF data is something photographers commonly jot down in notebooks as they walk around and shoot with their analog cameras.

Photographer Oriol Garcia wanted a better solution than manually writing down shot times and details. Since most people have smartphones now, why not make an extremely easy to use app that can document the info of every photograph taken? He ended up creating an app called PhotoExif that can do just that.

Michael Zhang

A Chrome Extension for Looking Up the Histogram of Any Online Photograph

A couple of weeks ago we featured a Google Chrome extension for overlaying "rule of thirds" lines over any online photograph. Now we have a different tool for examining other photographer's photographs: Image Histogram.

Created by developer/photographer Nick Burlett, it's a Chrome Extension that can quickly bring up the histogram of any online photograph.

Michael Zhang

Use “Focus Peaking” in Photoshop to Select In-Focus Areas of a Photo

Last week, we wrote about an emerging digital camera feature called "focus peaking", which lets users easily focus lenses through live view by using colorful pixels to highlight in-focus areas. Photographer Karel Donk wanted the same feature in Photoshop, which doesn't currently offer it, so he decided to create it himself.

Michael Zhang

How to Make Your Gloves Compatible with Touchscreen Cameras

We've featured special gloves and mittens designed for photographers before, but what if your camera uses a touchscreen instead of physical controls? Here's a video by Make's Becky Stern showing how you can sew some conductive thread into your glove to make it compatible with capacitive touchscreens.

Michael Zhang

Camera Size: See How Digital Cameras Look Next to One Another

Mirrorless cameras are designed to be compact, but how big are they compared to DSLRs? How big are popular DSLRs compared to one another? Camera Size is a website that helps answer these types of questions. It's a simple web app that shows you exactly how big digital cameras are compared to one another and compared to reference objects (e.g. a battery).

Michael Zhang

Adobe Pixel Nuggets: Search Your Photo Library for Similar Features

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).

Michael Zhang

JPEGmini Magically Makes Your JPEGs Up to 5x Smaller

JPEGmini is a new image compression service that can magically reduce the file size of your JPEG photos by up to 5 times without any visible loss in quality. ICVT, the Israeli company behind the service, explains how the technology works in an interview with Megapixel:

Our technology analyzes each specific photo, and determines the maximum amount of compression that can be applied to the photo without creating any visual artifacts. In this way, the system compresses each photo to the maximum extent possible without hurting the perceived quality of the photo.

You can test out the technology on your own photos through the service's website.

Michael Zhang

How to Scan Film Using Your Ordinary Flatbed Scanner

If you've tried to scan film using an ordinary flatbed scanner as you would a piece of paper, you've probably discovered that it didn't turn out very well. The reason is because film needs to be illuminated from behind, while conventional scanners capture light that's reflected off what they're scanning. Before you give up hope and shell out money for a film scanner, here's some good news: you can build a cheap and simple cardboard adapter that turns any scanner into a film scanner!