Sunday, October 11, 2009

Lightroom-News.com Provides Insight To Lightroom Plug-Ins


Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has a plugin architecture that allows third parties to add to the functionality of Lightroom. Often these plugins add to Lightroom’s core functions, but more often they add entirely new features to the program. Plugins are a very different beast to Presets, and sometimes users can get the two confused. Presets are merely stored sets of instructions for Lightroom tools (and for plugins for that matter). Plugins, on the other hand, are additional programming, added to Lightroom.

Read the complete article on the Lightroom-News website.

Six New Digital Camera Reviews

Six new reviews added to the Recent Digital Camera Reviews section.

Canon PowerShot SD940 IS

Kodak Zi8

Pentax K2000 DSLR

Pentax K-7 DSLR

Ricoh GR Digital III

Sony Alpha 380 DSLR

Adobe Announces Photoshop Mobile For iPhone


Adobe Systems Incorporated has introduced Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone application, delivering Adobe industry-leading digital-imaging technology to users on the go. Photoshop.com Mobile provides consumers a convenient way to edit photos, apply effects and share images instantly with friends – all with the flick of a finger. Seamless integration with users’ free Photoshop.com accounts enables photo sharing and data back-up, saving them valuable space on their iPhones. The application is available free of charge at Apple’s App Store.

“As the digital imaging leader, Adobe is excited to bring Photoshop.com Mobile to iPhone users,” said Doug Mack, vice president and general manager of Consumer and Hosted Solutions at Adobe. “Now, with access to powerful editing and sharing tools, iPhone users are armed with the resources to document all of life’s unexpected moments, make them look their best and then re-live those memories with friends and family.”
Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides a fun, seamless experience to view photos with full-screen previews and edit images with gesture-based editing. Consumers can transform their photos with essential edits like crop, rotate and flip. Users can correct and play with color by adjusting the saturation and tint, enhancing the exposure and vibrancy and converting images to black and white.

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone also offers eye-catching special effects. The Sketch tool helps photos look like drawings, and Soft Focus can give photos a subtle blur for artistic effect. With just one click, users can also apply dramatic changes to the look and feel of their photos with effects such as Warm Vintage, Vignette and Pop. Edits or changes can be undone or redone so users can experiment without the worry of losing the original photo.

After making personalized edits, users can upload photos from their iPhone to their Photoshop.com account to view and retrieve their images at a later time from any Internet-connected computer. In addition, Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides the ultimate digital photo wallet, giving users access to their entire Photoshop.com library directly from their iPhone.Photoshop.com offers 2GB of free online photo storage, which equates to over 1,500 photos.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009: CCD Sensor



Above:  Bell Labs researchers Willard Boyle (left) and George Smith (right) with the charge-coupled device, which transforms patterns of light into useful digital information and is the basis for many forms of imaging, including camcorders and satellite surveillance. Photo taken in 1974.
Photo: Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs

Below is the official press release regarding the recent announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics to the inventors of the CCD sensor.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half to Charles K. Kao.  Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong.  "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

and the other half jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith.  Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA.  "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor"

The masters of light
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies. They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration. In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Kao's enthusiasm inspired other researchers to share his vision of the future potential of fiber optics. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970.

Today optical fibers make up the circulatory system that nourishes our communication society. These low-loss glass fibers facilitate global broadband communication such as the Internet. Light flows in thin threads of glass, and it carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic in each and every direction. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.

If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.

A large share of the traffic is made up of digital images, which constitute the second part of the award. In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 year's Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film. The digital form facilitates the processing and distribution of these images. CCD technology is also used in many medical applications, e.g. imaging the inside of the human body, both for diagnostics and for microsurgery.

Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research. The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans.

Read more on the Nobel website.