Convert a Canon point & shoot into a super camera

"If you're using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you've got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box. With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on your existing camera. Let's transform your point-and-shoot into a super camera just by adding a little special sauce to its firmware."

Read the full article here.

Using Adobe Camera RAW (ACR)

Photoscape

I just added this to the list of links. Here is a description from PC World.

"Photoscape includes everything from a file viewer to a photo editor, slide show creator, batch editor, screen capture program, and more.

Here's yet one more remarkable free piece of software that any self-respecting digital photographer needs on his or her hard disk. There's no possible way to begin to describe the wide range of tools and features this one has--there's everything from a file viewer to a photo editor, slide show creator, batch editor, screen capture program, and more. There are some quite original and innovative tools here, such as combining multiple photos in a single frame. There's also a small, but extremely useful tool--it will take photos that are in the RAW format used by many digital cameras, and convert them to JPG, so that they're more useful.

Even though this program is free, by the way, the creator will take donations if you find Photoscape useful. Pay via Paypal. Given the quality of this software, if you keep using it, consider making a donation."

Strobist Preliminaries

Free software to stitch photos into panoramas

Here is some free panorama software, for those of you who are into that.

The first is called Hugin. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

And here's another, called Autostitch, which is a demo version that expires, but there are 3 commercial versions available.

A Free e-book: Lightroom tips

Joe Barrett at dpreview pointed out that there is a free Lightroom tips book, available here.

Photoshop Express (Web based editing)

Last night at the meeting I mentioned that Adobe has a new online photo editing application, called Photoshop Express. I said I was concerned about item 8 in their terms and conditions, and it looks like a lot of other people were up in arms about it too. The situation is still developing.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/03/a_note_about_ps.html

Thanks George Perina, and South Mississippi Living Magazine!

Thank you George Perina, and South Mississippi Living magazine, for the article featuring the Nutties in the January 2008 issue of South Mississippi magazine. We are indebted to you. Seven of us had photos published: Rhonda Clark, William Lee, Randy Bynon, Tony Anselmo, Gary Cook, Terri Wescovich, and John Rhodes. Congratulations to you all!

Here is the link to the issue, the article about our group starts on page 94.

I'll add a link to South Mississippi Living to the list of links.

Rick Sammon Discusses RAW

Basics: Depth of Field Tutorial

The Japanese learn early (thanks Terri)

See better colors with the Safari browser

I am replacing a long winded essay about how well different browsers render colors. To get right to the point: the Safari browser can render images using the Adobe aRGB color space, there are no other browsers that currently do - the others are limited to sRBG, which is a more limited color space. This is as of November 2007. It is hoped that the next versions of Firefox and Opera will, but for now, Safari is it.

Download it for free here.

A new kind of photo format

I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but I thought this was newsworthy. They've engineered a new photography format called HD Photo / JPEG XR, and it looks like it's getting some serious consideration to be approved as the successor to the good old jpg / jpeg format. Technically, it looks great. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money developing this, so it only makes sense that they have a plan to make their money back somehow. Fine by me if they're doing something like creating additional software which will work with this new format, but I want the format itself to be open and have no restrictions or conditions whatsoever. If so, then I'd be all for it. I'd be happy to see this new format embedded in all cameras in the future.

But if there is a catch, such as you must have the Windows operating system to view & edit these, or Microsoft software (for a price) has to be embedded into cameras to take these type of photos, then I'm certainly against it. I don't want photography going the way of betamax & VHS, or Blu-ray & HD. The article does say that Microsoft "will offer a royalty free grant for its patents", but what exactly does that mean? Is there some wiggle room for some wouldn't-you-know-it conditions? I don't know. But I'll be interested to see how this works out.

Nutties Go Online

July 29, 2007: Now we Nutties have our own blog, for posting pictures, learning, and whatever else we feel like.

This blog is currently set to be viewable by the general public. At a future meeting, we can discuss how this blog could be changed for the better.

Hereby ends my first post.