Underexposed

Only two and a half months after announcing Picasa 3 beta, Google has done the uncharacteristic and on Thursday has issued Picasa 3.

Here's the clincher:Picasa 3 is the exact same desktop organizer and editor it has been under the beta flag. (This is a good wagon for the Gmail team to climb aboard--Google's e-mail service has been in beta since 2004 and its latest releases have been earthshaking themes and emoticons.)

Although Version 3 beta users won't see changes in this release, those switching from Version 2.7 will enjoy the substantial boost in features. Version 3 stacks on over a dozen more tricks to refine the editing, creative, and sharing options in what has for years been a solid consumer app. Highlights below.

With a little creativity, you can make gorgeous collages like this in Picasa 3.

(Credit: Tara Morrison/Google)

Syncing and sharing
Instead of manually uploading new photos to Picasa Web Albums from Picasa 3, you'll be able to click "Sync to Web" to keep the folder automatically updated. You can exclude photos by right-clicking and choosing "block from uploading" from the context menu.

Sharing has also gotten much easier. In previous versions, you would upload the photos from Picasa and then click within the Web album to e-mail the link to friends. The 'Share' button next to Picasa's syncing button helpfully auto-uploads the album and sends the Web link without compelling you to go online.

No more leaving Picasa for the Web to update or share photos.

(Credit: CNET)

Movie Maker
A terrific but light addition, Picasa 3's new movie maker can take videos from your digital camera and other clips and intersperse them with any other file Picasa supports. You can then upload your video to YouTube or to Picasa Web, or share via e-mail.

Bare-bones editing tools will trim the clips and add a song for background. However, they don't do fading and there's no template to carry your caption style from frame to frame. Video output is currently only the WMV format, and encoding takes a little time--be patient while it renders.

Drop Box
Drop Box is the new default storage locker for newly uploaded photos, for pictures you don't want to assign to an album, and for multitaskers who tell Picasa to take it easy on the bandwidth so they can simultaneously surf and upload. The Drop Box also holds photos uploaded via Orkut, ShoZu, and other third-party photo uploading services that integrate with Picasa Web Albums. This is one of those features that some users will love and many will ignore.

Screenshots
Picasa 3 hooks into your keyboard's PrintScreen key to index captures of your screen, Webcam input, or a video. For casual users, this feature may replace independent screen-capturing software like Gadwin PrintScreen, Capture.NET, and SnagIt. Those who continue to use those apps may find the cataloging amusing or mildly annoying.

You can upload photos to the drop box and start making a movie from Picasa 3's toolbar.

(Credit: CNET)

Other notables
Picasa 3's red-eye reduction tool detects and auto-corrects all the red-eyes in a photo. This substantially cuts out the hassle of clicking and dragging over individual eyes to wipe out the redness, and it works well most of the time. For blotchy faces and other minor blemishes, the retouch tool will awkwardly but fairly effectively let you blot out problem areas.

Finally, the collage tool has gotten more customizable. Before Picasa 3, you couldn't delete, drag, angle, or print in full resolution. Now you can. These substantial additions make the tool an easy way to get really creative (see photo).

There's always room for improvement, especially with the movie maker and red-eye tool, which could use some more precision controls, but this Version 3 release is an excellent effort that will give people much greater control over their photos and Web albums without sacrificing simplicity. All without clinging to beta.

>>Want more detail? See the full list of additions and changes in Picasa 3.

Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe.com has released a proof-of-concept tutorial for Photoshop selection techniques using Configurator. A final version is due soon.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

After a slight delay, Adobe Systems has begun shipping Configurator, an application that lets people create customized Photoshop CS4 control panels and share them with others.

Configurator runs on Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) foundation and lets people use a drag-and-drop interface to produce the control panels. Adobe's Creative Suite 4 applications use Adobe's Flash technology for its control panels, and Configurator is a way to produce those files. The company announced it Tuesday during its Adobe Max conference in San Francisco.

Adobe expects the software to be useful for those who want to customize the sprawling Photoshop interface so only a specific set of features is highlighted--for example those that crime labs use to process forensic images. It also expects that tutorial authors will flock to the technology to produce interactive step-by-step guides, perhaps with videos included.

John Nack, Photoshop's principal product manager, said earlier he hopes the Configurator technology will be brought to other Adobe CS4 applications later. For more details and some sample panels, check out Nack's blog announcement of Configurator.

Click here for more news on Adobe's Max conference.

Pixel Bender enables a new range of effects sped by a PC's graphics chip.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Adobe Systems on Monday launched a technology called Pixel Bender that brings new effects to Photoshop--and some new work for computers' often-idle graphics chips.

Pixel Bender, presently an Adobe Labs project, is a new engine for enabling many image transformations. Examples include a kaleidoscopic hall-of-mirrors effect, a twirled distortion effect, a fisheye lens effect, and a ray-tracing effect. Some effects are available at the Pixel Bender Exchange.

The Red cameras come with a lot of not-so-cheap accessories.

(Credit: Red Digital Cinema Camera)

Red Digital Cinema Camera, a new maker of high-end digital movie cameras, is expanding its turf closer to traditional camera makers such as Canon and Hasselblad.

On Thursday, Red announced a new range of modular camera designs that it plans to deliver mostly over the coming year and a half that can take not just high-resolution video but also still images. The move comes just as Canon and Nikon have begun adding video support to their SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras.

Red hopes to ship a large-format camera sensor in 2010.

(Credit: Red Digital Cinema Camera)

Various new models from Red will be able to accept lenses from Canon, Nikon, and Mamiya, a move that could make them a more serious possibility for professional photographers, but the prices--thousands of dollars to tens of thousands--restrict this equipment to a very small market.

Certainly Red's new cameras will never be as widely used as video-enabled SLRs costing less than $3,000. But Red, if it can deliver on its promised road map, holds the potential now of shaking up professional markets. Its original Red One video camera did, winning high-profile accolades from Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson among others for its ability to outdo film.

What's unclear is how well cinematographers used to video will take to still imagery and photographers will take to video, but the two realms are certainly growing ever closer in the consumer market.

High-end sensors
The models come with a variety of high-end sensors: a 24-megapixel chip the size of the 36x24mm full-frame sensors in the top-end cameras from Nikon and Canon; a 65-megapixel 56x42mm sensor competitive with those in medium-format digital cameras; and one large "617" format sensor that measures a whopping 186x56mm and whose 28,000x9,334 pixel resolution comes to 261 megapixels.

Red divides these new camera models into two lines, the more compact Scarlet models and the more powerful Epic models that can reach higher frame rates with high-resolution sensors. Also accompanying are a wide range of cinematography accessories such as a 1,080p LCD video monitor, an input-output module, lens mounts, battery packs, and wireless controllers. One fascinating combination: a harness that sports a pair of cameras for shooting 3D movies.

Red has a line of lenses for its cameras.

(Credit: Red Digital Cinema Camera)

With the models, Red is trying to establish a new category called "digital still and motion cameras" (DSMC). Whether it will succeed with the jargon is anyone's guess, but the technology certainly is coming: Nikon's new midrange D90 became the first SLR camera that can shoot video, too, and Canon's higher-end full-frame EOS 5D Mark II is about to ship.

The 5D Mark II can shoot 1080p video, but Red's cameras record at higher resolutions geared for digital movie projection systems.

One area where digital photography has wrestled with film is in dynamic range--the difference between light and dark areas. With poor dynamic range, dark areas disappear into black murk and bright areas wash out. Red boasts of a wide range, though, with its full-frame, medium-format, and large-format Monstro-brand sensors all producing 16-bit data spanning more than 13 stops of dynamic range. The cameras shoot video or still images using a raw image format that accommodates the data.

Adobe Systems has delayed by a few weeks the release of some upgrades to its Photoshop.com online service and to its high-end Photoshop CS4 software.

The upcoming Photoshop site upgrades include features to import address book entries from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail to improve photo sharing; an uploading tool to synchronize software on a person's PC with the version stored online; and new pricing options. They had been due Tuesday but now will go live "later this month," Adobe said in a statement Monday night.

Also slipping a few weeks is the Photoshop CS4 Configurator, a tool to let people create customized control panels for the image-editing software. It had been due in October, but now it and another new CS4 option, the Pixel Bender filter gallery, won't debut until later in November, John Nack, senior product manager for Photoshop, said in a blog post. Pixel Bender is a technology enabling high-performance special effects that Adobe hopes will be easier to use than earlier plug-in filter technology.

"We decided to give both tools a little extra bake time, so look for them to appear on Adobe Labs within the next two weeks," Nack said. "Also stay tuned for a Camera Raw update for CS4 that'll include a number of nice little surprises."

Updated 9:03 a.m. PST Nov. 9--See additional information below; the plug-in now can write the geographic data to files.

Jeffrey Friedl, an enterprising photographer and programmer, has released a geotagging plug-in for Adobe Systems' Lightroom, one data point in a trend that shows the image editing and cataloging software is gradually acquiring some of the clout of the more mainstream sibling Photoshop products.

Geotagging is getting easier with cameras such as Nikon's high-end compact camera, the Coolpix P6000, but it's a somewhat onerous process that today requires some technical abilities and sometimes specialized software. Writing the location metadata into digital photo files pay off later, though, for example by letting you see on a map just where you took that vacation photo or look up pictures by typing in the name of the city where you took them.

Frieldl's Lightroom geotagging plug-in reads a GPS unit's track log, then deduces a photo's location based on the time it was taken. Although that's the same basic mechanism many other geotagging programs employ, Friedl's plug-in brings some welcome flexibility to the process by moving the process within Lightroom.

Lightroom and Aperture are gaining in popularity when it comes to processing raw images from higher-end digital cameras.

(Credit: InfoTrends)

More broadly, it shows that third parties are making Lightroom a more useful, customized tool. Another example are the wealth of downloadable editing "presets" that accelerate processes such as whitening subjects' teeth or brightening a dark foreground that's been overwhelmed by a bright sky. However, Lightroom still has nothing like the level of add-ons of Photoshop.

A survey by market researcher InfoTrends shows the gradual acceptance of Lightroom for its core ability, editing the raw images from high-end digital cameras. Professional photographers and enthusiasts like raw images for the flexibility, but unlike JPEGs, raw images must be processed by software such as Photoshop, Lightroom, or Apple Aperture.

InfoTrends asked what software North American companies use to process raw images in 2007 and again in July 2008. Lightroom increased in usage from 23.6 percent to 35.9 percent, while Photoshop declined from 66.5 percent to 62.2 percent, according to a blog post by Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty. Aperture, available only on the Mac, increased from 5.5 percent to 7.5 percent.

Lightroom limits
One of Lightroom's advantages is that all changes made to photos are nondestructive, meaning that unlike many Photoshop effects they can be reversed. The approach also means the changes can be saved as a small set of editing instructions stored in the image's metadata, along with captions and camera information. But one drawback of the nondestructive approach is that it limits the variety of plug-ins Lightroom can accommodate.

But Adobe is gradually expanding the software's abilities. With Lightroom version 1, one of the few ways to expand the software's abilities was with an export interface--an interface Friedl used to build a Lightroom plug-in for exporting photos directly to Flickr, Smugmug, and Picasa. With Lightrom 2, Adobe added a metadata interface that lets programmers add customized metadata to images. It's that ability that let Friedl build the geotagging plug-in.

But for now, though, Lightroom stores only the metadata in its catalog, not writing the changes to the actual image file or to an accompanying XMP "sidecar" that can house an image's metadata. (XMP, short for Extensible Metadata Platform, is an Adobe creation that sidesteps complications of storing metadata in proprietary raw image file formats.)

That limitation means Friedl's geotagging records only "shadow" GPS coordinates. That's still useful, though, since Lightroom users can set the software to embed the real metadata when exporting images as JPEG or uploading them to a Web site, for example, but it's not as good as writing it into the file.

But Adobe expects eventually to enable that ability, Hogarty said in an interview.

"Storing custom metadata in the Lightroom catalog is only the first step, and the ultimate goal is to embed the custom metadata in the XMP metadata block," Hogarty said.

It's not going to happen at a breakneck pace, though. "I can't speak to specific timeframes for when that functionality would be part of the Lightroom API (application programming interface), but I will say that any metadata implementation requires a great deal of consideration and testing," Hogarty said.

Update 9:03 a.m. PST Nov. 9: A newer version of Friedl's plug-in now can write the metadata into files so it's not just carried as shadow GPS data, Friedl said in an e-mail.

"It's still more kludgey than it needs to be, but now at least it's possible to upgrade the shadow data to 'real' GPS data," Friedl said. For raw images, the plug-in writes the metadata to an accompanying XMP sidecar, he said. The updated plug-in uses the ExifTool open-source software package to handle the writing.

"Lightroom still doesn't know about that data, so...you have to do a sync," he added, meaning that a photographer must command Lightroom to read in the geographic metadata. "It's pretty silly that one has to go through these gyrations, but that's how it is. I hope 3.0 will be better."

The plug-in also includes some support for reverse geocoding, which converts latitude-longitude coordinates into the actual names of cities and countries. It uses a new Google interface for the service. Reverse geocoding in general can make it easier for people to search for photos based on their location.

A Photosynth view of the CNN Center in Atlanta, Ga., retrieved with Microsoft's Live Search Maps.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft now lets people using its Live Search Maps service get a more immersive view by integrating the company's Photosynth panoramic viewer technology.

Photosynth stitches multiple images together into a 3D view, and people can in effect gaze around from a virtual vantage point. Areas with Photosynth views can be shown in the "explore collections" view of a map that also lets people see photos and other additions to a map.

I found the feature easy to use--even the Photosynth installation that had given me some headaches when I tried it during its early days. I still don't like the vast swath of empty green wasted space that could have been used to make the imagery even more immersive, though, and so far there aren't a huge number of places with Photosynth photos.

For full instructions on how to use Photosynth on Microsoft's maps, check the Virtual Earth evangelist's blog from Microsoft.

In addition, Microsoft said Wednesday it added 47 terabytes of new aerial imagery on Wednesday showing new views of Spain, Japan, Canada, the United States, Australia, and assorted European countries, according to the Virtual Earth blog.

Apple's photography software now can accommodate raw images from some newer digital cameras through the release of Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.3.

Specifically, the update to iPhoto '08 and Aperture 2 means that the photography software can deal with raw images from three prominent new digital SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras: Canon's midrange EOS 50D, Nikon's video-enabled midrange D90, and Sony's ambitious 24-megapixel full-frame Alpha DSLR-A900.

Also supported is Nikon's high-end compact camera, the Coolpix P6000.

Raw images are taken directly from higher-end cameras with no in-camera processing into a JPEG. That means photographers get more flexibility when it comes to exposure, white balance, sharpening, and other options, but also that photos require manual processing.

For software companies, supporting raw formats requires either that they have to figure out a host of proprietary raw formats, because each camera model has its own, or rely on the manufacturers themselves to support release codecs supporting the cameras. Adobe Systems and Apple take the former route; Microsoft takes the latter.

To check if your camera is supported, see Apple's list of raw-format camera support. Adobe's raw-support list is a little longer, including support for Pentax's newest entry-level model, the K2000, the esoteric Fujifilm FinePix IS Pro, and Olympus' latest ultrazoom, the SP-565 UZ.

Adobe plans new options next week to give its Photoshop.com a bigger social destination and to help the service stay in sync with people's computers.

Photoshop.com can be used to store, edit, and share photos, but today those activities happen largely in isolation. That will change November 11 as the company releases an AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application called AIR Uploader that will let people synchronize photos stored on their own computers and on the online photography site, Adobe said.

Another change will let site members import address books from Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail so that photos can be sent to family members or other contacts more easily. And another social dimension will come with the ability to sign up to receive updates whenever contacts add new photos.

Photoshop.com is closely tied to Adobe's consumer-oriented photo and video software, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, and the online site could mean extra revenue for Adobe if it takes off.

People who've bought the latest version 7 of those packages now can get new Photoshop.com storage options: basic membership costs $19.99 per year for 20 GB of storage, 40GB costs $39.99, and 100GB costs $99.99.

The higher-end Plus membership, which adds album templates and tutorials, costs $49.99 annually for 20GB, $69.99 for 40GB, and $129.99 for 100GB. And for people who don't have the Elements software, online-only customers next week will be able to buy storage at $19.99 per year for 20 GB, $39.99 for 40GB, and $99.99 for 100GB.

Updated 5:12 p.m. PST to note some of the new storage options are available now.

The 3 billionth photo at Flickr is this shot of a door on an abandoned house in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.

(Credit: Garrett Ryan Smith)

I've always been annoyed by the significance we humans attach to numeric milestones just because they happen to involve a lot of zeros.

But 3 billion--the number of photos now housed at Flickr--is undoubtedly a big number, even if its intrinsic excitement diminishes when, for example, translated into octal as 26,264,057,000. It's also more notable when you consider that Flickr's 2 billionth shot arrived less than a year ago.

The 3 billionth photo, with the title camera-supplied name of DSC_2672_1, is a black-and-white shot of a door by Garrett Ryan Smith. (But if it's the 3 billionth, how come the number in the photo's URL is 2,999,245,289?)

Of course, Facebook has more than 10 billion photos. But while that site has a lot of social activity, it's not the haven for photography enthusiasts that Flickr has become. At the Yahoo site, many join groups of like-minded photographers, comment on each other's shots, and share advice on forums.

Flickr noted the milestone on its Flickr blog on Monday.

Update 8:55 p.m. PST: I heard back from Smith, and those of you longtime Flickr loyalists hoping to achieve some sort of immortality through getting the 3 billionth photo may be distressed to hear you were beaten out by a newbie who was looking for a place to share some pictures.

"I have been using Flickr for less than a week now," he said. "My future sister-in law had her first child last week I had my camera with me and took a round of photos...We figured this would be a good way to share the photos with everyone across the United States and also with a family friend serving overseas."

The shot itself is of a door on an abandoned house in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, he said.

"Since Katrina hit I have been back to New Orleans numerous times and still cannot believe what it looks like three years later, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward area," he said.

Editor's note, 3:02 p.m. PST: It appears there are two URLs for the same shot, the one noted above, and this one, with the appropriate 3,000,000,000 at the end.