Technology

Sonder Keyboard Uses E Ink to Put Shortcut Icons At Your Fingertips

Tired of having to memorize new keyboard shortcuts for every application you use? Want to see every Photoshop tool icon right under your fingertips? Sonder is a new customizable keyboard that can help you navigate shortcuts. Each of the main keys features an E Ink display that can be customized with different icons for different programs.

Priolite Brings 1/8000s Flash Sync to Pentax DSLRs

Shooting flash photography with a wide open aperture on a bright summer day can feel almost impossible sometimes. You have a collection of beautiful shots that could use flash, but due to the sheer amount of light coming into your lens your flash units can’t keep up with the situation. You may be able to use an ND filter to cut down on the light, but your flash units will also have to compensate in the process. Now, professional lighting company, Priolite, has a solution they say will allow Pentax photographers to shoot Hot Sync flashes at speeds up to 1/8000th of a second.

Hello Future: YouTube Now Officially Hosts 8K Videos

We can all agree on the fact that 4K is last year’s news and if you aren’t watching video at a resolution at least quadruple that resolution, then you might as well be watching in standard definition. Alright, maybe that's a tad bit extreme and premature, but if you do feel that way, then you’ll be happy to hear that YouTube now officially supports playback of 8K video.

There’s a New Free Browser-Based Film Emulator

Back in 2013, photographer Pat David released a large set of film emulations as open source color lookup tables. Software developer Jonas Wagner just took that data and turned it into a free online analog film emulator. It's a simple web app that lets you give any photo the look of a particular film stock.

DIY: A Raspberry Pi Photo Booth You Use with Your Own Smartphone

Design technologist Roo Williams was recently tasked with creating a better way to capture corporate employee headshots. What he came up with is a Raspberry Pi-powered mobile photo booth that's controlled entirely through the subject's smartphone through a special website. He calls it the "Pi-Booth."

The Seawolf is to Water as Camera Drones Are to Air

Camera drones are all the rage today, but what if you want to take your camera down into water instead of up into the air? That's where the Seawolf comes in.

Created by the company TTRobotix, the Seawolf is a remote control submarine that's designed to carry a small camera for underwater photos and videos.

The iris360 Allows You To Capture 360-Degree Photos for Google Street View

Google Street View is an incredibly powerful tool that has helped to advance mapping in the 21st century. Since the company announced the ability to walk within and view 360-degree photographs of business locations, owners have been taking advantage of the feature to make their establishments stand out. Now, NCTech Imaging has created the iris360, a device that assists in capturing 360-degree images for Street View.

Google Working on Seeing Calories in Food Photos

Camera apps these days already have the ability to analyze your scenes before you shoot them, but what if they could analyze your food before you eat it? That's what Google researchers are working on: they're trying to teach a computer to calculate calories from ordinary snapshots of food.

JPEG Compression Test: Google Photos vs. JPEGmini

In this article I will take a look at Google Photos' new photo compression performance. I've been using a program called JPEGmini for a couple years now to compress my JPEG images. Its compression of JPEGs is lossy, but it claims to do so leaving the perceptual image quality virtually unchanged. As far as I can tell, its claims are pretty accurate, and it has literally helped me cut the size of some of my picture folders in half.

The Google Jump 360° Camera Rig Uses 16 GoPros

Google today announced a new virtual reality system called Jump that uses a special new camera rig created in partnership with GoPro. It's a crazy-looking 360-degree camera array that uses 16 separate GoPro cameras.

This is the ‘Dehaze’ Tool Coming to Lightroom

At Adobe MAX 2014 last October, Adobe gave a tech preview of a new "dehaze" feature that it's currently developing that can seemingly magically remove haze from photos. Above is a new sneak peek video Adobe just posted that shows what's "coming soon to Lightroom CC."

This Telescope Uses 10 Canon Lenses Worth $100,000

Now here's a neat use of Canon's lenses: the University of Toronto owns one of the smallest professional astronomical telescopes in the world that uses an array of photographic camera lenses instead of a single lens. Called the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, it uses ten ordinary Canon 400mm f/2.8L IS II lenses that cost $9,999 each. That's $100,000 in photo gear.

SmartChutes is a Safety Parachute That Can Save the Life of Your Camera Drone

Aerial photography drones are highly useful pieces of technology that help us to broaden our visual horizons. However, popular consumer drones, from companies such as DJI, can cost well over a thousand dollars - something you certainly want to be careful with while flying. A new product on Kickstarter, SmartChutes, believes that they can help you to protect your drone in the event of a catastrophic mechanical failure or pilot error.

Electrophotography: Creating Photos with the Xerox Photocopying Process

Most photocopiers (AKA Xerox machines) these days use a technology called xerography, which is also known as electrophotography. While it's almost always used as a means to create copies of documents, electrophotography can also be used as a photo process for making prints.

Photographer Tom Carpenter is one of the few artists on Earth who works extensively with this process for his images.

How JPEG Handles Colors and Compression

Want to understand the math and science behind how JPEG files store your digital photographs? The YouTube channel Computerphile has a new series of videos on the JPEG. They're a bit long and heady, but you may find them interesting if you've ever wondered about the technical details behind one of the world's most popular image compression methods.

Adobe Sneak Peek: Retouching a Giant 50MP Photo in Prototype Mobile Software

Adobe wants to be the 800 pound gorilla of mobile photo editing. Today the company released the 2-minute sneak peek video above showing off some mobile retouching features its currently developing. In the clip, Photoshop product manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes shows how effortlessly photographers will be able to edit 50.3 megapixel Canon 5DS photos in the app.

Time-Lapses Made with Photos Mined from the Web

Time-lapses are usually created with one or more cameras by one or more photographers working together to document a particular subject, but now scientists have created a new method of time-lapse creation that uses photographs found on the Internet.

Nikon Made a Doggy Camera Mount That’s Triggered by Heart Rate

Photographers often take pictures of things that touch them emotionally. Nikon wanted to help dogs do the same.

As part of a new "Heartography" project, the camera company has created a doggy camera mount that uses a built-in heart-rate monitor to snap photos of things that excite the dog.

Wolfram’s New Image Identify Website Will Tell You What Your Photo Shows

Earlier this month, Microsoft generated quite a bit of buzz by launching a site that can guess the age and gender of people in photos. Wolfram Research just one-upped that.

The software company has just launched a new website called the Image Identification Project that can identify the subject of any photograph you show it.

A Script for Easily Finding Lightning Strike Stills Inside HD Video

Photographer Saulius Lukse recently decided to try his hand at shooting video to capture photos of a lightning strike rather than using a special trigger for still photos. The technique worked well, and is rather efficient thanks to a special script Lukse wrote to quickly find frames containing lightning.

Lily is the World’s First Throw-and-Shoot Camera

Lily is a new robotic camera drone that aims to shake up not only the drone industry, but the camera industry as a whole. It's the world's first "throw-and-shoot camera" that lets anyone capture cinematic aerial photos and videos without needing to do any piloting.

This Canon DSLR Rig Shoots 3D Light Field Photos You Can Move Around In

A Los Angeles-based cloud graphics company called OTOY has announced the world's first spherical light field capture that creates a navigable scene in virtual reality. By capturing light field data with a special Canon and GoPro camera rig, the company created the beginnings of immersive photos you can move around in.

New Algorithm Can Automatically Remove Window Reflections from Photos

Photographers often use products such as the Lens Skirt when shooting through windows in order to reduce or remove reflections. Thanks to advances in computer algorithms, those physical tricks may soon find themselves alongside suitable software solutions.

Scientists at MIT have created an algorithm that can automatically remove reflections from photos that were taken through windows.

These Animations Show How CMOS and CCD Sensors Work and How They Differ

Want to see how CMOS and CCD image sensors work and how they differ from each other? Photographer and animator Raymond Sirí created a couple of simple animations showing the basic idea of how these two sensor technologies go about capturing light, reading it, and storing the information.

The animation above showing CMOS sensor tech was used in a trial against Canon, Sirí says.

QromaScan: Digitize and Organize Prints Using Your Smartphone and Voice

QromaScan is a new photo scanning solution that's the world's first to pair smartphone scanning with voice commands for easy digitizing and tagging. It's simple option for people who want to scan their collection of physical prints without having to spend time and money on high-end scanning solutions or services.

The Roomba’s Cofounder Just Launched a Consumer Camera Drone

A new challenger has emerged in the consumer camera drone fight to take a slice of the market currently dominated by Chinese manufacturer DJI. It's a company called CyPhy Works, whose CEO Helen Greiner was previously the cofounder of iRobot and its popular Roomba robotic vacuum.

Greiner and her company have been working on robotic drones for some time now, but today they announced their first camera drone geared toward ordinary consumers: the LVL 1.

HTC One M9 Can Now Shoot RAW with Latest Camera App Update

HTC is doing a lot to beef up the camera in its One M9 smartphone after the initial release was somewhat underwhelming. Less than a month after improving image quality with a software update, the company has released a new version of the phone's camera app that adds RAW functionality.

A Homemade TTL Light Meter for an Old Rangefinder

Photographer and camera hacker Kevin Kadooka recently built a custom through-the-lens (TTL) light meter add-on for his Canon P rangefinder. Instead of carrying around a light meter with the camera, Kadooka can now get accurate readings straight from his modified camera with his impressively designed system.

Apple Developed a Super Resolution Mode for iPhone Cameras Using Image Shifting

One of the technologies that's emerging in the camera world is using sensor-shifting to capture high-resolution photos. It involves shooting a sequence of shots with the sensor slightly shifted for each one, and then combining the photos into a high-res image. The new Olympus OM-D E-M5 II uses it to create 40MP photos using its 16MP sensor.

It turns out Apple has also been dabbling in the technology as well for its cameras, except with optical shifting instead of sensor shifting.