Source: CNET
Written by Caroline McCarthy

Amazon.com announced on Monday that it has acquired Digital Photography Review, also known as Dpreview.com, a London-based site that specializes in reviews, information, news and discussion forums pertaining to the digital-camera market. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

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Adobe has taken some heat from users for what they claim is its lukewarm support for Windows Vista.

Source: InformationWeek
Written by Paul McDougall

Adobe Systems(ADBE) on Monday said it plans to release a Windows Vista-compatible driver for printers that use its PostScript page description language in July — a full six months after Microsoft’s new operating system was released for general sale.

ImageReady is dead; long live ImageReady.

From John Nack’s Adobe blog comes this bit of advice and explanation regarding the end of ImageReady in CS3.

OVER 500 LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS PARTICIPATE AT MORE THAN 200 VENUES ACROSS THE GTA.

TORONTO — CONTACT, Toronto’s premier annual photography festival, is launching for it’s 11th year and taking over the GTA. From May 1 – 31, 2007, the work of professional, emerging and established photographers will transform Toronto into a huge art gallery as restaurants, government buildings, public spaces, street corners, hotels, schools, museums and galleries become the backdrop for their work.

Source: SiliconValley.com
Written by Ryan Blitstein, Mercury News

Someday soon, you might walk into the corner video store, point your camera phone at a DVD box, and instantly see reviews of the movie on your mobile screen. Or you’ll come home from a family vacation, upload pictures from your digital camera, and watch your computer throw out the ones with closed eyes or no smiles, and maybe even predict which shots you’ll like best.

Ovolab Geophoto 1.1: introducing the loupe for precise positioning of photos.
Press Release: Torino, Italy (Europe) — April 23, 2007 — Ovolab(R) today released version 1.1 of Ovolab Geophoto, its geotagging application for Mac OS X.

Geophoto is an all-in-one application for geotagging, collecting, browsing and sharing pictures.

May, 2007 will be the ten year anniversary of the unveiling of Lenna at the 1997 Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) conference in Boston.

Who is Lenna? Lenna (or Lena Soderberg) was a Playboy centerfold from November 1972. So how did her shot end up as the object of desire for so many “geeks”? (see Lenna’s Playmate page-warning, contains nudity)

According to Jamie Hutchinson in a May 2001 article in the Newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, it was pure happenstance.

Source: Macworld
Written by Jim Dalrymple

In addition to shipping Creative Suite 3 and showing off its first Apollo application, Adobe has released public betas of Premiere Pro and After Effects for Windows and Mac users.

Source: RedOrbit

Jon Peddie Research announces the release of the 2007 Digital Content Creation Report. This year’s report includes sections on 3D modeling and Animation, 2D Animation, Digital Video, Graphics and Imaging, and Audio.

The digital content creation market has seen a healthy period of growth. The total DCC market grew 16% from $2.6 billion to reach more than $3 billion in 2006. The fastest growing segments in the future will be interactive development and video as the web offers new distribution networks and new programming approaches such as AJAX to enable small compelling applications to be developed that extend the power of individual web sites.

Source: PhysOrg.com

Michael Marmor, MD, wanted to know what it was like to see through the eyes of an artist. Literally.

After writing two books on the topic of artists and eye disease, the Stanford University School of Medicine ophthalmologist decided to go one step further and create images that would show how artists with eye disease actually saw their world and their canvases.

Combining computer simulation with his own medical knowledge, Marmor has recreated images of some of the masterpieces of the French impressionistic painters Claude Monet and Edgar Degas who continued to work while they struggled with cataracts and retinal disease.

The results are striking.

Source: Science News
Written by Patrick L. Barry

On the Cover: In one new aspect of computational photography, a dome contains hundreds of precisely positioned flash units. A high-speed camera captures a frame as each flash fires in sequence. Computers can then relight the scene as they reconstruct it.
Debevec/University of Southern California

When a celebrity appears in a fan-magazine photo, there’s no telling whether the person ever wore the clothes depicted or visited that locale. The picture may have been “photoshopped,” we say, using a word coined from the name of the popular image-editing software, Adobe Photoshop.

But today’s image processing is just a prelude.

Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape writes about some of the hits and misses–equipment wise–that 3 weeks on an Antarctic Expedition might bring. I had my own equipment problems; losing 2 lenses due to moisture and an LCS on a camera.

From Michael: I traveled on this shoot with three camera systems – a Hasselblad H2 with a Phase One P45 back and three lenses (35mm, 50-110mm & 210mm); a Canon 1Ds MKII with three lenses, a 24-105mm IS, a 70-210mm f/2.8L IS and 100-400mm f/5.6 L IS; and a Leica M8 with a couple of lenses. In addition I had along a Macbook and four portable hard drives totaling 250 GB of storage. My software of choice for raw processing and editing was Adobe Lightroom.

 X-Rite i1Display Products Unveil Affordability With Uncompromised Color Accuracy To Broader Audience at PMA 07

Press Release: LAS VEGAS, NV – Photo Marketing Association (PMA®) International Trade Show – March 1st, 2007 – X-Rite Incorporated, a global leader and internationally known name in color technology, unveils its dynamic X-Rite i1®Display hardware/software monitor calibration solutions for the growing digital imaging market – including a first-ever look at the latest X-Rite i1Display monitor calibration offering for enthusiasts, X-Rite i1®DisplayLT – at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA®) International Convention Trade Show, March 8 – 11, 2007 in Las Vegas.

Source: SiliconValley.com
By Dean Takahashi, Mercury News

Think about a world where you can print photos without ink, a printer cartridge or a big printer sitting alongside your computer. That’s the promise of Zink Imaging, a Waltham, Mass., start-up whose name suggests its bold goal: zero ink.

Nash Editions: Photography and the Art of Digital Printing is a newly released book by Nash Editions partners Graham Nash and Mac Holbert.

While you certainly may know Graham as a member of the rock band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young you may not realize that Graham is a passionate photographer. Nash Editions almost single handedly developed fine art digital printing. (see the PSN story about Nash’s PMDA Award)

Fine art digital printing was born in the beginning of 1990 when Graham and Mac took a hacksaw to a $125,000 Iris printer (and voiding the warranty) to get it to accept fine art papers. That printer is now on display at the Smithsonian.

This book uses thought-provoking essays and glorious artwork to sum up not only Nash Editions’ achievements but also the state of fine-art digital printmaking.

Source: CNET
Written by Stephen Shankland
News organization Reuters is working with photo editing powerhouse Adobe and camera maker Canon so changes to digital photos can be detected, Reuters CEO Tom Glocer said on his blog last week.

Reuters, the news agency whose image was tarnished earlier this year when a freelance photographer provided doctored photos of bombing in Beirut, wants to ensure such changes can be found.

Press Release: LaserSoft Imaging has released SilverFast 6.5. Apart from many improvements and enhancements, the new version implements “outstanding new features to support your creativity and productivity when using SilverFast software,” according to the company.

Adobe opens up access to photography directory to freelance photographers through the NUJ
Source: Macworld UK

Adobe has at last provided codes that enable UK freelance photography members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to join its photography directory.

Introduction to tethered shooting – If you are able to connect your camera directly to the computer, Lightroom has the potential to let you import image files directly from the camera.

Photographs can be quickly brought into Lightroom, bypassing the need for a camera card and having to configure the Import settings every time you import a batch of images.

This is also referred to as ‘tethered shooting’ and I say Lightroom has the potential to do this because Lightroom will need to rely on other software that can communicate with your camera and download capture files to a specified folder location.

With this in place, Lightroom can be configured to automatically import these images into the library.

DxO Optics Pro v4.1 improves speed and fluidity for greater comfort and productivity. DxO Optics Pro v4.1 is compatible with the all-new DxO FilmPack and is immediately available for Windows and Mac users.

Press Release: PARIS, France — DxO Labs announces the immediate availability of DxO Optics Pro v4.1 — an upgrade to the recently released DxO Optics Pro v4, the company’s flagship automatic digital image enhancement software. Among the many speed improvements in DxO Optics Pro v4.1, users will be particularly impressed with the increased speed with which Raw images are previewed (2-4 times faster than in version 4.0) and the increased fluidity of the sliders (more than twice as fast).

Emphasis shifts to enhanced image processing and ‘hybrid’ still/video models

Press Release: Scottsdale, Arizona — After years of spectacular growth, the market for digital still cameras appears to be leveling off at about $18 billion per year now that most photographers and camera-toting consumers have switched from film to digital photography, concludes IC Insights’ new 2007 IC Market Drivers report.

Source: Houston Chronical
Written by Patricia C. Johnson

In Arequipa, an elegant Peruvian city in the high mountain desert 630 miles south of Lima, two photography connoisseurs discovered a lost world of 1920s elegance.

Beginning in 1999, Adelma Benavente of Arequipa and Houston-based photographer Peter Yenne sorted, inventoried and sometimes restored approximately 15,000 glass negatives from the archives of Estudios de Arte Hermanos Vargas.

In moody black-and-white photos, the Vargas brothers documented fashion, celebrities and the gorgeous city itself.

At Houston FotoFest, Benavente and Yenne have installed City of Night, an exhibit of approximately 80 digital prints and a few archival ones, dated 1912 to 1930, from the historic Estudio Vargas.

Can mathematics explain the art of Jackson Pollock? Can it be used to authenticate paintings of uncertain provenance? Case Western Reserve University physicists address these questions in the current issue of Nature.
Source: Physorg

…with a few friends for the Epson Print Academy in Atlanta this Saturday, December 2nd, 2006.

We’re coming to Atlanta for a special one day Epson event – check out the Epson Print Academy web site for details and online registration. There’s still room available!

Press Release: When it comes to reproducing the highest level of shadow detail and mid-range gray values as quantified by optical density (OD), Epson scanners outperformed competitors in a recent National Software Testing Labs (NSTL) study.