PicLens is a free plugin for Safari that lets you view photos in full screen with a single click. Once you’ve activated PicLens, you can play a slideshow of photo albums or search results, even browse the photos using your Apple remote. PicLens supports several sites: Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, and Ask.com Images.

Bottom Line: Stop squinting. Lean back and enjoy browsing photos online in fullscreen cinematic mode with PicLens.
From: Cooliris
Price: Free
Platform: Macintosh (Universal)

Photojojo

Via TUAW. Apple

http://handpickedsoftware.com/wordpress/?p=306

POLANOID.NET is building the largest collection of Polaroid pictures on the net—nearly 10,000 images as I write this—and creating a community for Polaroid enthusiasts everywhere. Membership is free, the site is beautifully designed, and the pictures are charming.

Lightroom looks impressive, if not quite as slick as Aperture on the surface, and seems to have a distinct performance advantage. Aperture has been faulted for its hefty system requirements, sluggish performance and lofty price.

I can’t comment too much on the comparison between these two apps. I don’t own Aperture. I was intrigued by Aperture 1.0, but I don’t have enough use for it to justify the $499 price (I think Aperture is more on a par with something like Motion and should be priced accordingly—$299).

The entry of Lightroom should mean more competition in the photography workflow category. It will be interesting to see what Jobs & Co. announce tomorrow. I’ll make these predictions: we’ll see more Aperture-like features in iPhoto and the price of Aperture will also come down, if not tomorrow, then sometime in the near future.

Learn more about Lightroom
Watch the video: General Overview of Lightroom Beta 1 Features
Download Adobe Lightroom Beta

I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks like a great tip.

Photocritic.org has posted a how to called “Extreme Macro Photography on a budget,” which shows you how to build your own macro lens out of a Pringles can.

And if you’re into Pringles, it seems there are a lot more uses for the cans, from a pinhole cameras to wi-fi antennas.

Via hicksdesign

If you’re not satisfied with printing your photos in an iPhoto Book or an iPhoto Life Poster, why not blow up your favorite picture and plaster it over an entire wall? ID-Wall.com claims to be able to enlarge your photo up to 16 times the original printable size with no loss in quality. You can preview what your image will look like using the online software. Printing is via a flat bed inkjet printer (that must be some printer).

Dougal writes:

Banding is a common problem when going to print when an image has had a few changes, particularly from adjustment layers. (I use Photoshop, I don’t know about Photoshop Elements).

The resulting image can have severe “banding”. This can be seen in the histogram…

The solution is the addition of a tiny bit of noise, (Filter/Noise) I usually try about 2% to start with a 250dpi image, the amount of noise needed will vary with image resolution. This is invisible on the image but will cure banding (this should be the last thing you do to an image).

Here’s an example:

The above picture is probably not salvageable; it’s out of focus, the colors are washed out and the highlights are blown. You can see this in the histogram below. Notice the spike at the far right, which shows how many pixels are blown to white.

I won’t try to save the image, but let’s see what happens to the histogram when I adjust the levels.

There’s no bringing back the highlights, so I just tried to boost the colors. You can see the difference in the image below.

The colors are richer, but the new histogram after applying the changes shows banding (notice the gaps in the histogram below). The banding would almost certainly be visible in the printed image.

After applying Filter > Noise > Add Noise (Amount: 2%; Distribution: Gaussian; Monochromatic: Checked), you’ll notice there are no gaps in the new histogram:

You might see a bit of noise onscreen (I haven’t included the noisy image here because the noise wouldn’t be visible at this small size), but it won’t be visible in your print.

Thanks Dougal!

I’m a little behind on making my iPhoto books for June and July, but I just came across this tip from Jim Heid on making an iPhoto Life Poster using Tiger’s Automator, and I’m thinking of trying that this month instead of a book. Jim offers an Automator action and an Automator workflow to crop and assemble 96 photos into a thumbnail poster. You can then order a 20-by-30-inch print from within iPhoto. The posters are only $22.99, plus $3.98 shipping, a bargain compared to the price of a book (about $40 bucks).

Check it out.

Note: My original post included some settings for Unsharp Mask that are less than ideal for prepping photos for printing. I inadvertently included settings that I use to “burn the haze” from digital images, a tip I picked up from Dan Simon’s Digital Photography Bible. Simon recommends applying Unsharp Mask with settings of 16 for the Amount (I prefer a bit more; I use 20), 40 for the Radius, and 0 for the Threshold. No harm; these settings will enhance your pictures, but you’ll probably want different settings to prepare them for an iPhoto book. You’ll find more desirable sharpening settings (and a corrected Photoshop Action), at the end of this post.

The Problem

You’ve assembled your book in iPhoto and everything looks great. The images are sharp and colorful, with good shadow detail and highlights. But when you open your freshly printed iPhoto book, the images look a bit soft, the colors look flat, and the images are a bit dark. What happened?

The problem lies with the paper and ink. Different papers absorb ink differently. If a paper absorbs too much ink, the image will lose some of its sharpness. Shadow detail is lost as the ink “spreads” in the darker areas of the image, so that everything beyond a certain level (usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 94 to 96 percent gray) prints as 100 percent black.

There are three adjustments that can improve your images and improve the quality of your finished iPhoto books.

1. Adjust the color to keep your images from appearing flat.
2. Carefully lighten the image or—ideally—increase the output level to preserve your shadows (this can also help with softness).
3. Apply a minimal amount of sharpening.

Correcting in iPhoto

You’ll need to use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements for best results, but if you’re stuck with iPhoto, here’s how to improve your images using the tools you’ve got.

Most digital images can benefit from a bit of color adjustment and if you shoot in RAW format, color correction is essential. You can always try clicking on the Enhance button to give your image a boost. Sometimes this works just fine, but the results aren’t very consistent. To get more control over your image, click on the Edit button, then click the Adjust button to bring up the Adjust palette.

Let’s take a look at this palette. At the bottom, you’ll see a histogram, a bar chart showing the distribution of light values for each channel (red, green, and blue) in your image. Keep an eye on this histogram when you adjust your image by moving the various sliders; it will show you the effect of your changes.

Tip: You can see what your original image looked like at any time during your adjustments by pressing and holding the Control key.

The top two sliders are for adjusting Brightness and Contrast. My recommendation: if you can, stay away from these, or use them sparingly.

Try adjusting the Brightness slider to right and notice what happens to the histogram. You’ll see the entire graph shift to the right. That means all of the image is being brightened, including the shadows, midtones, and highlights. Keep your eye on the brightest part of your image and notice what happens. You’re shifting the dark values to gray and the light areas to white, and the result is an image that looks washed out.

Move the Contrast slider and notice what happens to the histogram. If you move the slider to the left, decreasing the contrast, you squish the values at either end toward the middle. You’re moving the shadows and the highlights toward the midtones, decreasing the tonal range. Move the slider to the right, increasing contrast, and you’re moving the midtones out toward either end, increasing the shadows and highlights at the same time, and loosing the midtones.

Instead of using Brightness and Contrast, try setting the black point and white point. If your histogram doesn’t extend to both ends of the graph, your image is lacking shadows and highlights. Drag the black point (the left slider under the histogram) to the right until it is just at the point where the leftmost bars in the histogram begin. Drag the white point (the right slider) to the left until it is just at the point where the rightmost bars end.

The next group of three sliders are for color correction. As I’ve already written elsewhere (read the post here), you can easily adjust the temperature and tint in one click by holding down the Command key and clicking in an area of your image that should be a neutral gray.

You may want to boost the saturation in your image, making the colors more vibrant. If you drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left you’ll notice that the three graphs in the histogram merge into one blue graph as your image loses all color and turns to gray. To boost the saturation, nudge the Saturation slider to the right, or click on the tiny color bars to the right of the slider to bump up the colors, being careful not to overdo it.

Once you’re satisfied with the color, jump to the Exposure control. This control is a little tricky to explain. If you look at the histogram as you move the exposure slider to the left, you’ll see that it compresses the tonal range toward the shadows. But moving it to the right flattens the range and shifts all the values toward the highlights.

I’m not sure exactly what it does, but it’s not the same as adjusting the midpoint with Photoshop’s Levels dialog. Just look at the three images below. The image on the left is the original, the exposure in the middle image has been maxed out in iPhoto, and the image on the right shows the effect of moving the midpoint all the way to the left in Photoshop. It may be difficult to see in these thumbnails, but iPhoto has blown out the highlights to white, while Photoshop has washed out the image, but maintained the highlights.

If you don’t have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you’ll have to adjust the Brightness or Exposure to keep from losing detail in your darkest shadows. Adjust the Exposure a few clicks, or bump the Brightness up a bit. I wouldn’t give it more than about 5 or 10 clicks to the right, depending on your image. Be careful not to lose important highlights.

Finally, sharpen the image. iPhoto doesn’t do a very good job of sharpening, so it’s hard to overdo it. But zoom in on your image and look for any halos around the edges. If you see halos, you’ve gone too far.

For more tips, read this Macworld article, “iPhoto 5’s secret weapon” by Ben Long.

Correcting in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements

You’ll get much better results by adjusting your images in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

First, correct the color. You can use the Levels dialog. Try clicking on the Auto button. Like the Auto Enhance button in iPhoto, this sometimes works just fine. But if you want to fine-tune your levels, adjust the black point and white point (as described above). You can also use the eye droppers in the Levels dialog to set the black point (select the left eye dropper and click on an area of your image that should be black) and white point (select the right eye dropper and click on an area of your image that should be white). You can remove a color cast by clicking the middle eye dropper and clicking a neutral gray in your image to set the gray point.

Second, correct the output. The only way to properly do this is by using the Levels command in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. The Output levels slider is at the bottom of the Levels dialog. Slide the left Output level to the right, or type a number in the left field above. I’ve found that a value of 12 works well for iPhoto books.

Finally, add a bit of sharpening using Unshap Mask. Select Unsharp Mask from the Filter>Sharpen menu. I use these settings as a starting point: Amount: 125%; Radius: 1 pixel; Theshold: 4. These settings will be just fine for most images, but keep in mind that this is only a starting point. The correct settings will depend on a number of factors, including subject matter (for example, you may want less sharpening for portraits), your camera (if you’re not shooting in RAW, your camera’s in-camera sharpening may be too little or too much), and personal preference. Experiment to find the right settings for you.

Get a Little Action

When I’m putting together a book, I’ll adjust each image individually. But if you want to get a quick idea of how an image might look, especially if you shoot RAW, you can try my iPhoto Book Prep Action. This action does everything I recommend for preparing your images before printing an iPhoto book: It applies Auto Levels, adjusts the Output level to preserve shadows when your iPhoto book is printed, and applies my sharpening settings using Unsharp Mask.

You can download the action here. NOTE: Use the Action at your own risk. Your mileage may vary, and I can’t responsible if you’re not happy with the results.

In an age of digital photography and Photoshop manipulation, it’s refreshing to rest the eyes on photographs that are more about the moment than the mechanics. I hadn’t heard of vernacular photography (vintage, or found, photography) until I landed on bighappyfunhouse, a vernacular photography blog by Ron Slattery. At bighappyfunhouse, Ron serves up found photos (like ready, pictured above), and free pie. You’ll also find a long list of interesting links.

Vernacular photography is also more popular than I would have thought. I did a Google search and found 4,520 pages, including three Flikr groups devoted to vernacular photography: vernacular photo, Fashions Past, and Found Photos.

There’s something fascinating about these photos. It isn’t just nostalgia. We all have pictures like these in a shoebox in the closet, or in faded albums in the garage, but perusing your own past is too personal, too potent with memory. These anonymous pictures are captivating, full of innocence and mystery. They aren’t dated; they’re timeless. Viewing them, you become a fly on the wall in a different world.

Ron also publishes a blog called Slats.org, where he posts “[s]treet photos from around Chicago taken with a cheapo point and shoot camera by a man with questionable taste.”

The Polaroid may have gone the way of the 8-track tape, but that doesn’t mean you can’t Polaroid-o-nize your favorite pictures. Just drop by the Polaroid-o-nizer Web site and Onize your favorite images. The Polaroid-o-nizer™ adds a Polaroid-like frame to your pictures, gives them a stylish tilt (you can specify the angle of rotation), and lets you add captions. The only hitch: the images you Onize must be on the Web somewhere, so if you want to Onize images of your own, you’ll have to upload them.

The Polaroid-o-nizer is so popular there’s even a Flikr group called Callingcard composed entirely of Onized images.

Note: The Polaroid-o-nizer Web site has been down for some time, so I’m making it available on Futurosity. You can access it here.

Get the updater here. Read my review here.

The Flickr Montager grabs images from Flickr based on your search tags and creates a photo montage from the results. You can roll your mouse over the tiles and see thumbnails of the images. Click on a thumbnail and Flickr Montager creates a new montage based on that image. Sometimes the results are difficult to recognize (or maybe just very creative and abstract), but sometimes they are spot on. I typed “mac” in the Search Tags field to get the above result.

The Flickr Montager is the work of Billy Fowks, who also publishes an excellent photo blog, Devious Gelatin.

Via Lifehacker.

Managed to pull myself away from the computer long enough to visit the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco today. I just bought a new Tamron 28-300mm XR Di lens and wanted to check it out. I’ve posted some of the images in a new gallery. You can view the gallery here.

These images were taken with my Nikon D70. I would have taken more pictures, but the Conservatory is like a sauna inside.

These images are for personal use only. No commercial use.

When you adjust the temperature and tint, you’re actually adjusting your image’s gray balance, and iPhoto gives you a way to do that directly.

1. Open your image for editing in iPhoto by selecting your image and clicking the Edit button in the bottom left corner of the iPhoto window.
2. Now, look for an area in your picture that should be a neutral gray. Click on the area while pressing the Command key.
3. The Adjust palette will appear and the Temperature and Tint sliders will move to make the adjustment.
4. It may take several attempts to find just the right balance. You don’t have to undo your work. Just Command-Click on another part of your image until the colors look realistic. Feel free to experiment, too; sometimes altering the color balance can produce interesting effects.
5. If you like, you can also try nudging the Temperature and Tint sliders to fine-tune your gray balance selection.
6. To save your adjustments, just click the close button on the Adjust palette. To discard your work, click the Reset Sliders button before closing the palette. If you accidently close the palette before resetting the buttons, just select Revert to Original from the Photos menu.

That’s it. Your image should look better, usually after just a couple of Command-Clicks.

I just stumbled on this while searching for new widgets and, while it may not be the most exciting widget, I was even more excited to discover the daily dose of imagery.

The Daily Dose widget grabs the latest photo from the daily dose photoblog and displays it on your Dashboard. The daily does of imagery is the work of Sam Javanrouh, who started the “experimental project as a visual practice.” I haven’t followed his images back very far in time (the site displays a single new image each day and you can scan back day by day), but judging by the past few weeks, I’d say his experiment is working. I like his eye.

He also offers an extensive list of links, which I’ll be perusing soon. Check it out.

If you’re looking for a little inspiration as a photographer, Robert Clark’s cameraphone pictures are both motivating and humbling. Under the sponsorship of Sony Ericsson and American Photo, Clark is travelling around the country in a van, armed with a Sony Ericsson S710a, a 1.3-megapixel camera phone.

The Image America site is home to the project, displaying the latest pictures along with a Gallery chronicling his journey. Clark is a photographer with cred, published in National Geographic, Time, Sports Illustrated, and Vanity Fair, among other premiere publications, as well as recepient of a World Press Club award for his photographs of the 9/11 disaster. It’s no surprise that his images are graphic and evocative. What is surprising is his keen eye for capturing such impressive images of ordinary life—a lone figure crossing a street, a dog howling on a dock, a chair leaning against a wall on a sagging porch next to a sign reading ANOTHER HISTORIC HOME SAVED—with such a modest camera.

I recently bought a Motorola RAZR V3 phone, which has a camera, but my camera of choice is my Nikon D70. Yesterday I went to a dog show and snapped 43 pictures, most of them variations on an instant I was trying to capture, and I wasn’t very successful at that. It sounds like a lot of pictures, but I was there for a couple of hours, surrounded by hundreds of people and, at least according to the newspaper, some 1500 dogs. And I saw only a handful of opportunities to press the shutter. The hardest thing about photography is seeing. I’m sure that I could have easily filled my 1GB memory card, which holds about 175 RAW images, if I’d only opened my eyes. I took 171 pictures at the Butter and Eggs Days Parade. Some days are better than others.

Robert Clark’s simple, humble photographs are helping me to see.

I’ve been printing a book every month this year as part of my personal photo journal, and I delete all of these fields except for the caption. But twice now, when the books arrive, a stray text field will appear on two or three pages.

Sure enough, when I open iPhoto and look at my books, the errant labels are there, even though I proof each book several times before I place the order. Unless I’m loosing my mind, there’s some glitch somewhere that allows these stray labels to appear even after you think you’ve deleted them.

In future, I’m going to make sure that I quit iPhoto and open it again to proof the books before submitting my order. That should save the file (I don’t think you can save changes to a book as you work any other way), and show me if any fields still have text. Be especially careful if your images are full page, since the labels can sometimes blend in with the image. And proof while viewing single pages, not spreads, so you can see the small type more easily. Even on my 30-inch Cinema Display, it’s tough to see the captions when the colors blend in with the image.

I’d be very interested to hear from anyone else who may be having problems with text not printing as expected.

Last weekend was Butter and Eggs Days in Petaluma, California (where I live), and that means a parade. I still haven’t found the time to write (I’ve been working on lots of reviews for Macworld), but I managed to get away on Saturday and take a few shots of the parade.

You can view the gallery here.

All images were taken with my Nikon D70. I didn’t have time to enhance them in Photoshop. I converted them to black and white in iPhoto, applied the Enhance effect, and made a few tweaks in the Adjust palette. Here are a couple of tips:

1. You can adjust the Gray balance by Command-clicking in the image. Experiment to find the right gray.

2. I recommend sharpening digital images (especially if you are going to print them to an iPhoto book). I sharpened these images by 10.

Note that these photographs are for personal use only. NO commercial use. These photographs are not model released.

I haven’t had an opportunity to post anything for a couple of weeks, but I just stumbled on this free Flash image viewer from Airtight. I’ve uploaded some recent images shot near my home in Petaluma, California. We have lots of barns, cows, fences, and power towers, as you’ll see. I’ve also been playing around with the Film & Grain Fx actions by dos bosun, available free from Adobe Studio. The action applied simulates a Holga Plastic Camera.

I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to play with the new features of iPhoto, but I did manage to create two books. The results were stunning.

I’d created a book last year as a gift for some friends. They were duly impressed and it was very satisfying for me to hold my photos printed in a bound book. But the printing seemed grainy to me (I never did track down if that was a fault of the printing or something in my pictures). Still, they liked the book enough to come over recently to create one to give as a birthday gift (I haven’t yet persuaded them to convert to the Mac).

I was almost ready to try MyPublisher, which is only available on Windows. I played with the Bookmaker software in VirtualPC. The layout features are more flexible than iPhoto, but the fonts and book design are not as elegant as iPhoto’s. Their prices used to be cheaper, but they recently raised them so there’s no incentive to leave OS X (always a painful experience) unless you want to take advantage of their Deluxe books, which are oversized at 12- by 16-inches.

This time around, the printing in the iPhoto books seems to be of a higher quality. I put together two books. The first is a selection of pictures I took over the past few years with my Canon PowerShot S200, a 2.0-megapixel pocket camera. Some of them were not taken at the highest quality setting and had to be upsampled in Photoshop before the little warning icon in iPhoto would disappear. But the pictures look fine.

The second book is a collection of pictures I took last month. My resolution for 2005 is to take pictures regularly and print an iPhoto book every month. At the end of the year, I hope to have a 12-volume photo journal showing my evolution as a photographer. These pictures were taken with my Nikon D70 and the book is beautiful.

The images are crisp and the color is vivid, if slightly darker than what I expected. Overall, I’m very pleased with the quality of the printing.

For tips on preparing your photos for an iPhoto book, see my post on Making the Best Quality iPhoto Books (Updated).

I’ve been reading Tim Daly’s excellent guide to creative printing techniques, The Digital Printing Handbook. This beautifully designed book will help you get the most out of your printer.

I’ve been having fun experimenting with techniques for printing on unconventional papers, like watercolor paper. But printing on unconventional paper can be tricky. Most artist papers, for example, are significantly more absorbent than papers designed for inkjet printers, producing unpredicable results. Images may be dark or, because of chemicals in the paper, unexpected color casts can appear. Obtaining good results requires patient trial and error. A great way to save time (and paper) is to print a “ringaround,” a collection of thumbnail images that show the effect of minor variations in color and brightness.

For example, here’s a picture I took on a recent trip to Beverly Hills:

And here’s a ringaround of a detail:

Tim Daly has created a Photoshop Action (used to create the above ringaround), described in the book, but unavailable on his website. I attempted to email him, but the message was bounced back. I scoured the web and found a post in a forum at the Digital Camera Magazine Web site. Since it was so difficult to locate, I’ve made it available for download here (my thanks to Jeff Singer and Gerry Robinson). Be sure to read the Read Me file for instructions. If you have any problems, make sure that your resolution is 200 or 300 ppi and that you select the corresponding Action.