PhotoSoftware

Family memory keepers have increasingly done away with the digital shoebox and are sharing photos, videos and digital photo albums on home TVs and across the Internet. Memory keepers are usually married females who enjoy taking photos and videos (especially when children are involved) and are very comfortable in working with editing and sharing solutions such as Pinnacle Studio 12.

The needs of the camera/camcorder/content production user are no longer being met with a single solution. For example, Pinnacle’s research shows there were measurable differences among the age groups as well as male/female, married/single and the number of children in the households.

The company found that the female of the household is not only taking over the management of capturing family moments and memories, but also wanted to do more with them than simply leaving the images on memory cards or storing them on the family’s computer hard drive. Read more

Usability and Performance Enhancements in New Photoshop CS4 Edition

It's time for another improved version of Photoshop, and this new version's full name is "Adobe Photoshop CS4".

Photoshop CS4 is part of Adobe's new Creative Suite 4 product line. This line includes various Adobe creative programs that spread across print, web, mobile, film, and video production. It is also Adobe's biggest software release to date which encompasses 13 products, 14 integrated technologies, and eight services! Wow, that's a lot of creativity, but let's get back to the new Photoshop CS4.

My first thoughts upon hearing about a new Photoshop edition were “What could they possibly do to make it better? It already has everything.” While it seems that way to me, Adobe was able to subtly, but noticeably, improve on their flagship product with several convenience and performance enhancing features. Read more

December 10, 2008—Datacolor, a global leader in digital color management technology, today announced it will extend its manufacturer’s mail-in rebates on its line of Spyder color calibration systems including Spyder3Pro, Spyder3Elite and Spyder3 Studio due to overwhelming demand by professional photographers and photo enthusiasts. The rebates, initially offered as a special, limited-time offer during the Photo Plus Expo show in New York, will now be extended through December 31, 2008. The rebate program will continue to be offered in addition to any other promotions currently offered by retailers nationwide.

“We are very pleased with the industry’s reaction to our rebate program which was initially created as a ‘show special’ during Photo Plus in October,” says Rob Rosborough, general manager, Datacolor Consumer Business Unit. “It is also encouraging to see the level of recognition and importance proper calibration and color management is receiving among creative pros. Datacolor will continue to provide innovative and easy-to-use products while offering rebates and other economic pricing options to help make calibration a viable part of their workflow,” Mr. Rosborough added. Read more

If you’re like us you’ve got a long holiday gift list and a short budget. Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales were fantastic but buying a consumer electronics product to give this year just didn’t seem right. We wanted to give something people would really like, really cherish. Money was important but it was really more about showing people we really cared.

Our son actually came up with the idea because he had begun the monumental task of saving all of the still analog photos and videos we’d taken over the past five – 10 years and was digitizing them to put on the family's Verbatim 1TB home server. It was great…huge capacity and supported all of the leading interfaces. Scanning all of the photos is time consuming but is necessary if you want to bring them into the 21st century. Converting VHS tapes to digital is a snap.

Our closet held stacks of tapes – birthdays, family outings, events with our folks, grandparents and the kids. We’ve known for a long time that there’s nothing permanent about tape and if we didn’t get the content digitized the moments, memories could simply…disappear! The special moments, the memories are suddenly…simply memories. Read more

In the last article, I explained what online photo sites can do for you, and why you might want to use them. It's time now to get down to business: choosing the one that's right for you. What specific features should you look for? And which are most appropriate for your personal level of technical sophistication?

By and large, every one of the online photo sites accomplishes the same goal. Each lets you upload a collection of digital photos, and they make it easy (or at least it's supposed to be easy) to share them with other people. They also let you (that is, encourage you) to order prints of your photographs, and perhaps other customized items.

But, naturally, few sites stop there. Each site has its own unique features to make you choose that company instead of one of the other dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- available. Sometimes, the "extras" are the special attention they invest in making the process easy for computing novices, or maybe they're fancy tools to add bubbles or comic-book style captions to the photos. Other times, the site has unique capabilities to link your photos to other sites and to help you participate in a public community. Read more

Now that digital photography has almost completely superseded film, people are finding that they can be much more creative with their pictures utilizing the many software tools available for working with digital images. Perhaps the most popular program for those who are even halfway serious about digital photography is Photoshop Elements. This is a less intimidating and less powerful version of Photoshop--- the gold standard of digital image editing. Photoshop Elements has proved so popular that a few enterprising software companies have devoted resources to making it even more productive. One of the most respected of these is onOne Software, Inc., best known for its highly-respected line of professional photography software. Mike Wong, one of the executives at onOne Software, called to tell me that onOne has just introduced Essentials 2.1 for Photoshop Elements users.

Essentials 2.1 is a new and improved version of onOne Software’s original plug-in for Photoshop Elements, and this new release borrows even more technology from onOne Software’s professional line-up of products, all of which have been fine-tuned specifically for Photoshop Elements. Read more

Oosah is a relatively new web-based service that lets you store and manage all of your photo, video, and music content from services like Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and YouTube (MySpace and Photobucket coming soon) in one place. Have photos on your camera? Upload them directly from your digital camera to Oosah without having to transfer it to a PC or Mac first. It is a fully web-based file management system that lets you create file folders, and file folder hierarchies, just like you can do on your desktop system. And with a desktop-like look and feel (including use of standard drag-and-drop and keyboard commands), creating slideshows and galleries is simple.

Want to share your photo? Oosah has more sharing options than most sites, including email, RSS, linking/embedding, SMS, podcasting, and even downloading and burning to CD/DVD, and local high resolution printing of photos. Read more