Google has a new feature that photographers may enjoy: you can now customize the Google homepage with your own photography. Visit the Google homepage, and you should see a “Change background image” link on the bottom left hand corner of the page. If you don’t see this link, try logging out of Google and then visiting the page.

You can use images from a preset collection, a public gallery, your Picasa account, or your computer via upload. If you can’t see this feature for some reason, it should be rolled out to you shortly.

If you need to fix some red-eyes in a photo, but don’t have an image editor handy, Red iGone is a quick and easy way to get the eyes corrected. It’s a simple web-based application that requires only that you select the eyes to be corrected. After that, all you need to do is download the fixed photo.

Here’s an example photograph that we ran through the app:

We were pretty surprised at how well the adjustment worked. It’s a great app for when you only want to fix red eyes and nothing else. PicTreat also offers web-based red-eye reduction, but it touches up the rest of the photo as well.

Just last week we wrote that the Museum of London had released an augmented reality iPhone app that overlays historical photographs over live views of the location.

If you don’t live in London, you can play around with the same concept using Historypin, a website that allows you to pin historical photographs onto Google’s Street View. The screenshot above shows a photograph of London bikers in 1926. Even though the views aren’t “live” like with the iPhone app, it’s still neat to see old photos in the context of present day images.

Here’s a useful tool you might want to bookmark: findexif.com. It has a super simple web interface in which you simply paste a URL to a photograph in order to display the EXIF data embedded in the image. It should work for any photograph that hasn’t had the EXIF stripped out for some reason, and can be a great way for you to learn how certain images were made. Here’s an example page showing the EXIF data of a photograph I made a while back.

Update: Jeffery’s Exif viewer is another neat web-based tool for showing EXIF data. Thanks @Getcolormanaged!

Dermandar is a free flash-based web app that will automatically and seamlessly stitch photos together to form a panoramic photo. The resulting panorama can be viewed as a side-to-side scrolling image, or in “3D” mode, which is an interactive display that can be rotated, zoomed, and has a more obvious axis of rotation. Some of the most interesting images available for public view in the Dermandar gallery are actually 360-degree views.

You can upload up to 100 panoramas to the site, comprised of 2 to 4 images for partial panoramas or 7 to 24 for 360-degree images — plenty of photos to allow for overlap as well.

It’s a pretty cool tool, complete with sharing and embedding options. It also has a fullscreen mode that makes the viewing process very immersive.

Head on over to the create page to get started!

(via Lifehacker)

Nikon has a couple neat interactive tools that make it easy to explore and compare lenses. Their lens simulator lets you see what resulting photographs might look like with any lens and camera combination, while their new lens positioning map displays the NIKKOR lineup on a grid with aperture and focal length as the two axes.

Once you’ve found lenses or combinations you like, you can save them for future reference.

(via Digital Journal of Photography)

Mugtug Darkroom is a new browser-based photo editor that uses HTML5 rather than Flash. It was presented at the Google I/O web developer conference yesterday to show off what’s possible with HTML5, the proposed next version of HTML that’s gaining steam.

Web apps taking advantage of HTML can take advantage of new scripting APIs that allow such things as offline data storage and drag and drop functionality.

The app is indeed impressive, but only worked in Firefox 3.6 for us. It might or might not work for you depending on what browser you’re using.

After loading up an image via upload, URL, Flickr, or Picasa, you can do many of the basic edits you might do on a photo in more advanced programs like Photoshop.

Looks like there’s big improvements coming to our internet experience in the very near future.

Picsean is a new travel magazine that resembles Laura Brunow Miner‘s Pictory. Photographers submit their best photographs and stories to themes, and the best submissions are selected and featured.

However, unlike Pictory, Picsean will publish a magazine separate from the website featuring the work, and pays photographers based on how many pages the work spans in the magazine at the rate of $100 per page.

While there haven’t been any magazines released yet, there’s a number of existing themes that are currently accepting submissions.

photobattle.me is a fun little web application that pits two submitted photographs against each other and asks the visitor to vote on which photo they think is better. Of course it’s entirely subjective, and photos can be of different types and flavors, but it’s an interesting way to see what the general public thinks of your work compared to other photos.

You can submit up to 9 of your photographs into photobattle, and the 10 most successful photographs are displayed on a scoreboard.

The app was built using Rails by Canada-based developer Kyle Fox. Fox also works for Fotojournal, a newly launched photoblogging service that we covered recently.

If any of your photographs make the top 10 list, leave a comment letting us know!

Thanks for the tip Noah!

PicTreat is a free online application that allows you to quickly and easily retouch portraits using patent-pending face detection and correction technology.

By “correction”, they mean the application can make your skin “smooth and shiny”, remove “irritating skin flaws”, fix red-eye, and correct color balance.

While we would prefer not to promote our culture’s obsession with outward appearance, we wanted to examine the technology behind this application.

Here’s an example of a before and after displayed on the front page:

To test exactly what the application does to a portrait, I decided to use the portrait of President Obama that I referred to recently. However, the app apparently couldn’t find any “blemishes”, and returned a nearly identical image — albeit with mildly smoother skin.

Thus, I decided to test how the service retouches a photograph by altering the photograph manually. Using Photoshop, I added some red-eye, added some spots to his face, and gave the photo a green tint. Here are the original, altered, and PicTreated images:

The app successfully corrected the artificial red-eye, restored the color to almost what it was originally, and left the random spots I added alone (which it should, lest it remove things like birthmarks).

In spite of the interesting technology behind PicTreat, many may find the app offensive due to the fact that it intentionally removes such things as freckles (a taboo among photo editors) and uses the slogan, “everybody’s perfect”.

What are your thoughts on this kind of service?

Image credit: Obama portrait by the Obama-Biden Transition Project