For the last several years, my digital photography workflow has relied heavily upon a few Photoshop automation scripts from Fred Miranda. From unmatched sharpening to image scaling, these Photoshop automations are a must have. Both of these can be purchased from Fred's site and each cost less than US$25.00. To see samples of both, keep reading. Read More...

Tags: photography, photoshop, software

Adobe's Lightroom is my "comfort place" when it comes to managing, editing and publishing my photography. I've used many, many apps in my photo management life (some not so great) and hand's-down, Lightroom is the one for me. Of course, the first time I saw SlideShowPro from Dominey Design, well.... I really wished Lightroom would have support for it. It does now...

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Tags: photography, lightroom, software, adobe, photoshop

I have played around for several years in Photoshop trying to produce good quality black and white images. But hands down, the best way I have found to produce images that look like they were originally shot on Tri-X (or similar) film is to use a great Photoshop automation tool from Fred Miranda. Check out his Black and White Workflow Pro Plug-in. The amount of control you have over your image with this automation plugin is amazing.



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Tags: photoshop, software

For the last year or so, my son has really gotten into Star Wars. And with the new movie out, he decided he wanted to make his own Star Wars movie. So armed with his LEGOs and iStopMotion (a great stop animation application) we created this movie.



So how did we do it? Click through "Read More..." below...
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Tags: stop motion, star wars, software, legos

Adobe has published a specification for a new universal file format for digital cameras. Dubbed the Digital NeGative (DNG) format, Adobe's proposal would not supersede the JPEG format used by almost all digital cameras these days, but the native formats such cameras offer users who want maximum, image fidelity.

According to the Register UK site, these raw formats hold the image as taken, without the loss of data even mildest JPEG conversion involves, or adjustments made by the camera's video processing electronics. The catch is that without compression, raw images are very large, limiting the number of them the camera can hold. Worse, different camera vendors use different, proprietary raw formats.

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Tags: software, photography, cameras, adobe

Perhaps one of the most tedious parts of creating a stitched, panoramic image produced from multiple individual images is identifying the control points in each image pair. What are control points? Basically, control points are locations in two adjoining (overlapping) images that are at the exact same point.



To identify control points, one must have an application like PTMac or PTGui which both have a great user interface for creating the control point pairs (click on the image to see a larger view). To create a successful "stitch" of the source images, there must be a minimum of three control point pairs per set of neighboring images. So in my case, I have 18 source images for this 360 degree panoramic image (18 x 3 = 64 control point sets).

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Tags: panoramic, photography, qtvr, software

I don't buy a bunch of DVDs, but I do like to purchase live concert DVDs. They (usually) sound pretty good. The bummer of course was that you could only listen to them while firmly planted on the couch in front of the TV.

Well, that has now changed for me. I recently purchased Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba. This application allows you to record the audio from any source playing on your Mac--DVDs, streaming audio, you name it. And yes, it is Mac based. The recording can be virtually any file format... mp3, aif, etc. Read More...

Tags: music, software, technology

A challenge with creating panoramic photographs from multiple source images is blending the images together. Even if each of the source images are exposed at the exact same shutter speed and f-stop, some tonal shift is bound to happen.

Such was the case when I took a 14 image panoramic of the Polihale coast in Kauai last summer. All these images where shot at the same shutter speed/f-stop combination, but I still ended up having some shifts.

The image below was created with these 14 source images, then stitched together in PTMac.



When I first heard about Enblend, I thought it might be a nice addition to my panoramic image creation workflow. Recently, the developer of PTMac created a Mac OS X front-end UI for Enblend 1.3. Called XBlend, it takes as its source multiple TIFF images output from an application such as PTMac. So, I thought I would give it a try.

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Tags: qtvr, panoramic, photography, software

About five years ago, I started dabbling in home automation. You know, getting your lights to turn on and off when you want them to... stuff like that. I first had a product called Mousehouse that was, well a good "starter kit." It allowed me to, um... turn off and on lights at certain times. Most of the time.

When we moved into our new house, I really couldn't get the Mousehouse software to work consistently. And to top it off, I upgraded my machines from Mac OS 9 to OS X. Mousehouse was not OS X compatible, so I hung up my X-10 switches for a year or so. Then one day while reading MacAddict, I came across a story on a new OS X native home automation application called Indigo. I have to say, Indigo is hands down, one of the best apps I have used to date. As advertised, it did exactly what it was supposed to do... control my X-10 devices.



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Tags: home automation, software, technology