At a special Windows 10 Devices event in New York City today, Microsoft unveiled a number of major new products that photographers who use Windows may want to look into: a Surface Book convertible laptop, Surface Pro 4 tablet, Lumia 950 smartphone, and a Display Dock that lets you use your Windows phone as a mini PC.
Fan’s of Microsoft’s Photosynth technology may be a bit disappointed to learn that the company is retiring their mobile applications for iOS and Windows Phone. Microsoft won’t be ditching their entire Photosynth efforts. However, they note that they will be instead focusing on the more immersive solutions introduced in the Photosynth technical preview. Those who have already downloaded the applications can continue to utilize them, but they are now officially unsupported.
In the age of digital photography, many of us turn to online cloud solutions to help us backup our precious moments. However, the question that many of us want to know is what permissions a perspective service has with our content. With a form of hysteria sweeping the Web, we have decided to take a look at the industry’s top storage solutions and what their terms of service say about the files you upload. By using any of these solutions, you are automatically accepting their terms.
Back in August 2014, we reported that Microsoft was working on some game-changing software that would magically transform first-person videos into stabilized "hyperlapses." Today, the company officially launched that software, called Hyperlapse, for Windows, Windows Phone, and Android.
How Old Do I Look? is a simple demo website created by Microsoft engineers who are working on information management and machine learning. Given any photo showing a face, the system will do its best to guess the age and gender of the people in the shot.
Today Microsoft announced that it has released its Office Lens app for iOS and Android. If you've never heard of it before, Office Lens is an advanced camera app that turns your phone into a scanner. Take a picture of a document or a whiteboard, and the app will automatically turn the image into a straight and clear scan.
What's neat is that the app can also be used to quickly and neatly digitize a print instead of putting the photo through an actual scanner.
Microsoft Research has announced version 2.0 of its Image Composite Editor (ICE) software, a free program that offers advanced panoramic photo stitching technology. If you're on a Windows machine and need a way to combine multiple photos into single shots, ICE is a download you may want to look into.
There's a royal rumble going on in the world of cloud storage, and photo storage is one of the battlegrounds upon which the war is being waged. Dropbox launched a photo storage and sharing service in late 2014, and Amazon recently added unlimited photo storage to its Prime membership.
Now Microsoft is getting more serious with photography as well: this past week the company announced updates to its OneDrive service that greatly improve the photo experience.
If you thought that 41-megapixel camera in the Lumia 1020 was a bit... excessive... then you're probably going to find the newest rumors about the 1020 followup a bit crazy. Apparently Microsoft intends to pack even more megapixels onto the next camera's sensor, making it far and away the highest resolution camera phone in the world.
Videographers need not apply, but photographers interested in picking up their first 4K Ultra HD monitor for photo editing have a heck of a deal they can take advantage of today. Microsoft is currently selling the 28-inch Dell P2815Q 4K Ultra HD monitor for only $300.
That's $200 less than retail and one of the cheapest prices we've ever seen on a 4K monitor.
Microsoft has an announcement that will undoubtedly shake up the file storage industry: the company is offering unlimited cloud storage on OneDrive to anyone who subscribes to their Office 365 service.
If you ever hand your phone over to family and friends with hesitance, afraid they might swipe over one photo too far when you’re trying to show them a few photos, Microsoft Research’s new app Xim might just save you from a few nerve-wracking moments.
During the Max conference, as he was preparing to demonstrate some of the touch functionality baked into Photoshop CC on the Microsoft Surface Pro 3, Adobe's Josh Ulm said, "when we started to explore touch, we knew that we would have to radically shift the user interface."
What we didn't know at the time is just what he meant by "radically," but the ad above gives us a sneak peek at just how touch-capable Photoshop, Illustrator and other Adobe applications will eventually be.
A recently-released product by Microsoft that allows content creators to embed digital images on their websites is being called a “massive infringement” of copyright images in a lawsuit filed by Getty Images against the computer giant.
Researchers at Microsoft just changed the POV video game -- there's no doubt about that. Using a newly developed algorithm, they transform long, boring first person videos shot with helmet cams into super smooth hyperlapses that look like they were shot with a Steadicam.
Future iterations of the already-impressive Nokia Lumia PureView cameras might sport Canon tech, thanks to a newly-signed patent agreement between the Japanese camera company and Microsoft, who recently bought Nokia.
Check out this trippy video showing New York City sidewalks in Matrix-style "bullet time." It was created by filmmaker Paul Trillo, who partnered up with Microsoft to create a special camera rig consisting of 50 individual Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphones mounted to an arc.
This week's Apple news has been dominated by the rumored Beats acquisition, but it's in the area of photography where the company made some real confirmed strides.
As of yesterday, Microsoft no longer supports Windows XP. And in honor of one of the longest-living operating systems, the above video takes a look at the story behind what is arguably XP's most recognized quality: the 'Bliss' wallpaper that came stock on every machine.
There's no rule against having a little fun while proving a technological point, even if you're Microsoft.
So when the software giant's research arm wanted to flex some image-editing muscle by creating a 20-gigapixel panorama of Seattle, they decided to bring local artists into the picture (literally) and encourage them to do creative stuff while the camera was clicking away.
The most common files stored on Microsoft's SkyDrive (and, we'd guess, just about any cloud storage service) are photos. As such, the company has decided to give its cloud storage service a facelift by providing a couple of highly-requested photo-centric features.
Fujifilm is best known for its camera and film products, but the company is now using its photographic expertise to invade new markets as well. The company is reportedly using its background in silver to create touchscreen displays that are bigger and more affordable than current offerings.
Microsoft announced yesterday that it has entered into a patent licensing agreement with Nikon for Nikon's Android-powered digital cameras. While the details of the agreement were not revealed, Microsoft did say that it will begin collecting royalties from Nikon for certain camera models.
Just in case you’ve been wondering: yes, the latest versions of Adobe’s photo-editing programs are all compatible with the …
Humans like preserving their memories. That's one of the big reasons we take pictures. What if you didn't need to actively do anything to preserve those memories? What if you could simply wear cameras that constantly capture photos and videos that are safely stored for your later viewing pleasure? With the rate at which technology -- particularly storage technology -- is increasing, we may soon find "lifestreaming" to be the next big thing.
Microsoft apparently thinks so, and wants a big piece of that pie. The company has filed a patent for "life streaming", and hopes to one day be the data store for all your passively-recorded memories.
Ever wonder what the most viewed photograph of all time is? One leading candidate is Bliss, the photograph chosen by Microsoft to be the default wallpaper of Windows XP. Showing rolling green hills in Sonoma County, California, the image was shot by the side of a highway by professional photographer Charles O'Rear using a medium format camera. It has reportedly been viewed by over 1 billion people since it first emerged in 2002.
Recently, Microsoft has been showing off many of the new features we'll be seeing in the much-anticipated official release of Windows 8, and the most recent sneak peek Microsoft gave us was of the new Photos app. The app offers a native way for Windows users to organize, view and share all of their photos regardless of what they were taken with or where they're stored.
The Microsoft team tasked with building Windows 8 has published a blog post with various user suggestions they've decided to implement in the OS. A big thing they're focusing on is file management -- something that isn't usually touted as a "feature" but is important in day-to-day computer usage. One useful improvement is having the OS read the EXIF data in JPEG photos to automatically present the correct orientation.
It looks like Microsoft is finally putting its war chest and brilliant minds to good use: the company has …
After being spurned back in early 2008, Microsoft is supposedly on the hunt to acquire Yahoo once again. The …
Talk about a Kodak acquisition seems to be heating up as giant tech companies — including Google, Microsoft, and …
What if you could take perfect group photographs by first shooting multiple frames and then selecting the best portions …
Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator. We may soon be using software that can easily …
The Internet was abuzz yesterday due to a secret meeting at Adobe's offices between the head honchos of Microsoft (Steve Ballmer) and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen). The New York Times reports:
The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion was Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could team up in the battle against Apple. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.
Whoa. Acquisition. That's a pretty deal. So big, in fact, that the rumor drove Adobe's stock price up 11.5% yesterday, adding about $1.5 billion to their market cap.
At SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles last month, Microsoft researchers showed off some new technology that improves existing digital blur reduction techniques by outfitting a camera with motion detecting sensors.
The team created an off-the-shelf hardware attachment consisting of a three-axis accelerometer, three gyroscopes, and a Bluetooth radio, attaching the setup to a Canon 1Ds Mark III camera. The researchers then created a software algorithm to use the motion information captured during the exposure to do "dense, per-pixel spatially-varying image deblurring".