This managed to stay in my head when I went off for a break as I got frustrated when I couldn’t get my development environment working properly. I went up to my room and saw the smaller Mario toy I ordered last year.

At that point, I did the obvious.

Flames Fan Mario (feat. Kermit) Gallery:

For anyone wondering, the hockey-themed Kermit was something I got from McDonalds in a Happy Meal a long long time ago.

Hopefully the Flames find a way to come out a winner in this series…the loss tonight didn’t look good.

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There’s a DSLR camera recently released by Canon that’s sparking my interest, and that camera is the EOS 5D Mark II.

I myself own a Canon EOS 20D and with its ability to capture photos at 8.2 megapixels at speeds which are quick enough for me, I’ve been ignoring newer iterations of DSLRs. The EOS 5D Mark II however has an ability which is really appealing; its ability to capture video at quality which looks absolutely stunning.

The Best of Both Worlds

The above screenshot is a still from the short film REVERIE by Vincent Laforet. It was created using a pre-production model of the EOS 5D Mark II with only minimal post-production and when I first watched it, the quality floored me. The camera’s capability to record high-definition video and being the form of a DSLR is just an amazing combination, now you can record video with all the cool DSLR lenses out there.

You can view the short film REVERIE on Vincent Laforet’s website.
I’m also providing a mirror to help offload some of the bandwidth.

With the camera’s ability to record HD video at amazing quality, it offers the best of both worlds. Canon, this camera is at the top of my wishlist.

Some Extra Notes/Specs

• 21.1 megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor with DIGIC 4 Image Processor
• ISO Range of 100-6400 (expandable to ISO L: 50, H1: 12800 and H2: 25600)
• MSRP (body only): $2699 USD

If you’re also interested in viewing the photo quality put out by this camera, you can view some sample photos on Canon’s website.

Just yesterday, I found everystockphoto which is a search engine for free photos. This is a brilliant idea for a search engine as there are free photos on flickr too but searching the photos with those specific creative commons attributes isn’t as easily accessible as everystockphoto provides. Not only that, but sxc.hu and flickr aren’t everystockphotos only sources, there are even more sites that everystockphoto pulls results from making it easier to find that perfect stock photo (for free!) that you’re looking for.

This past week, I’ve been experimenting with this technique and have achieved some pretty satisfying results:

I’ve heard of people that have bought an adapter so that the lens will connect to the lens currently mounted on your camera but I doubt the wide-angle lens I own will fit with an adapter as it is intended for my camcorder. What I’ve done was just hold it up to the lens. Here’s how I go about it:

The materials needed

1. Zoom your lens to its furthest distance possible (my lens is 17-85mm so I zoomed it to 85mm)
2. Adjust the focus to the closest macro setting possible (on my lens, it will be the shortest focal length that can be reached while rotating the ring clockwise)
   
3. Hold up your wide angle lens in reverse to your lens
   
   Hold up the wide-angle lens in reverse like shown, but hold it up flush against the lens of your camera
4. Try to take a picture of something really up close but if it turns out blurry at first, distance yourself around with your feet rather than trying to adjust the focal length on your lens to gain focus — both of your hands are occupied already
5. If you have a flash and are using it, point it directly up so you don’t get a funky shadow due to the extra lens being held in front

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There is a much more simpler way to do this thanks to Morris Ginberg who commented on the post and suggested using the updated Photomerge feature. It seems using Photomerge in Photoshop CS3 does the exact same thing as using Auto-Align and Auto-Blend, but does it all for you in one step (ok, maybe two steps if you count opening the Photomerge window).

So how do you use Photomerge?

Open up Photoshop CS3, then go File > Automate > Photomerge

The Photomerge window will open.

As shown in the image, Browse for your photos, then hit OK.
That’s all to it! You’ll end up with pretty much the same result* as if you were to use Auto-Align and Auto-Blend.

* = Using Photomerge over Auto-Align and Auto-Blend results in a flattened document (that’s one layer). By using Auto-Align and Auto-Blend, it leaves all the layers intact, as well as the layer masks. For advanced users who prefer a non-destructive editing approach, Auto-Align and Auto-Blend might be the better option

If you’d like to test Photomerge immediately but have no photos to work with, feel free to try it out with my photos from the Auto-Align and Auto-Blend example:

And the final result…

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To get started, open up Bridge and navigate to the folder which contains all your tarnished photos.

Although you might not see it, there are specks on these photos. Here is a zoomed up version to help explain the specks I’m referring to:

I never saw this speck of dust while reviewing my photos on the LCD!

Specks can ruin an entire series of photos. The biggest issue is that you don’t even know that there is dust on your lens until you import them onto your computer and review them. Even though many digital cameras allow for review of photos through an LCD display, it is often just too small to catch these specks. Adobe has recognized this issue and came up with an awesome solution to this problem.

The next step in removing these specks is to select all your photos. While all your photos are selected in Bridge, right click any one of them and select Open in Camera Raw…

What should happen next is that you should see a new window with the photos you selected in the left pane. If you’re missing photos that you wanted to retouch, you did the last step incorrectly, so try it again.

You should see all the photos you selected in the left pane

If all is well, press the Select All button above the left pane.

Remove specks one-by-one? Heck no, Bridge will do ‘em all!

Upon doing so, all your photos in the left pane should become selected. This will allow us to do retouching to all your photos at once. This is really efficient because the location of the speck of dust should be consistent throughout your photos. Bridge is also smart enough to know which photos were taken in landscape and portrait mode, so even though you may think that speck is in a different location because of the orientation of the photo, put some faith in Bridge. It will probably know what it’s doing.

And now, the meat and potatoes of the process. With all photos selected, click the retouch tool button:

A new toolbar should appear. By default the Type should be Heal, if it’s not, set it to Heal.

Next, in the main panel (with a large version of your first photo), click a spot which will be your source for healing. As an example with my photo, I aimed for a spot in the clouds (the red circle/dot is the spot I clicked):

Then you will want to adjust how much of this source you will want to take. To do so, adjust the radius in the toolbar that appeared when you selected the Retouch tool. Adjust it so that the circle is about the size of the speck.

Now hover your cursor over that circle and click and drag the circle to the speck.

And just like that, the speck is gone. What you will want to do next is review all your photos because as we can see with my last photo, it turns out the source I used for healing wasn’t appropriate for this photo:

As you may figure, it’s pretty intuitive to adjust your source; just move the green circle.

After you’re done reviewing your photos and are happy with the results, click done and all the retouching will be applied to your photos. (Note: You will need to open up your photos through Bridge to see the changes.)

To see the full results you can get, here is a before and after shot of the ‘shoes’ photo:

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Last weekend, I went on a little fishing trip with my friends and snapped some photos with a point-and-shoot camera. One wouldn’t really think to bother too much with processing photos from an average point-and-shoot camera, so I just imported the photos into iPhoto and left it at that. However, I took a couple of neat photos that I thought could use a little bit of touching up; this is the perfect scenario where “Open in Camera Raw” mode in Bridge CS3 works great.

Adjust Exposure, Shadows, Highlights, Saturation and More

If you’ve used Aperture or Adobe Lightroom, you might have adjusted a couple photos because the shadow/highlight balance wasn’t right, or the colors weren’t punchy enough. These are the type of adjustments you can make in the Camera Raw mode of Bridge. And unlike Aperture, you can make these edits not only on RAW images, but JPEGs, PNGs, TIFFs, whatever format Bridge recognizes.

To access this mode, just right click on the photo you’d like to adjust and select Open in Camera Raw from the contextual menu.

As you can see, you’re presented with the typical adjustment sliders as you’d find in Aperture or Lightroom. You can fiddle around with them and see the adjustments happen in real-time as it should.

See Your Sharpness Adjustments Even Better

To the untrained eye, it’s easy to overshoot how much you should sharpen an image. Here’s a trick that will help you see how much you are actually sharpening your image without the colors distracting your eyes.

If you’re adjusting the details of a photo in Bridge while in Camera Raw mode, you can have the photo you’re adjusting temporarily greyscale while you’re moving the sharpness adjustment slider. All you need to do is view the photo at 100%, and hold down the Option key while moving the adjustment slider to have the photo turn greyscale. This way, it is easier to see your sharpening adjustments.

You can also immediately see the changes from moving the Radius, Detail and Masking slider by also holding the Option key while the photo is being viewed at 100%

The Originals Aren’t Harmed

If you enjoy the security of knowing your originals aren’t modified when messing around with your images in Aperture or Lightroom, do know that Bridge follows the same principal in that it won’t directly modify the original image. When you press Done when you’re finished in Camera Raw mode, it actually will just save the settings in some hidden file, and the changes can only be seen when you open that image up again in Bridge.

To save the modified version of the image you adjusted, press the Save Image button in the bottom left to export it to another file, leaving your originals unharmed.

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I tried my best to merge the photographs in Photoshop CS manually using layer masking and free transformation and managed to merge just three of the photographs together and the result was this:

The first of many tips from the Creative License Tour

On June 14, I attended the Creative License Tour and learned of two features I did not know existed in Photoshop. These features are Auto-Align and Auto-Blend, and this will change the way we take photographs as we know it.

Typically to capture shots which are required for a panorama, you need to take shots which revolve around an axis as shown in the diagram below:

Image courtesy of Apple

With these two new features in Adobe Photoshop CS3, the tripod is no longer needed. When you perform Auto-Align, Photoshop will scan through the layers of the current document and calculate which pixels match with the proper layer, and transforms each layer appropriately to achieve astonishing results. What this means is that you can take a photograph every few steps while walking along a street (without a tripod of course), and Photoshop can do all the dirty work for you.

Auto-Align does all the nasty free-transforming for you

Let’s take those 5 photographs I took last year and use them as an example.
To create a panorama out of these, it requires just 3 steps:

1. Bring all the photographs into one document in Photoshop
   
2. Select all the layers
   
3. Edit > Auto-Align Layers
   
   (After you click it, you will be presented with some advanced options. I use automatic because I trust Photoshop more than I do myself, but feel free to experiment)

And voila!

Ok, so maybe you’re not so impressed yet. The issue is that each photo can have different exposures and the layers are overlapping. This is where Auto-Blend comes in.

Auto-Blend: This is the part where your jaw drops

The Auto-Blend feature of Photoshop CS3 is meant to be used in succession after Auto-Align. Essentially, it masks each layer appropriately after they’ve been aligned so that they blend properly, resulting in one smooth panoramic photograph.

To use Auto-Blend, just follow these two steps:

1. Select all the layers in your document
2. Edit > Auto-Blend Layers

And the result…

And the final result cropped…

When I first saw this demonstrated at the Creative License Tour, I was in total awe and amazement, it’s like Photoshop did some magic trick on me! Even as I did this again for this post, I was still amazed.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments, stay tuned for more tips I learned from the Creative License Tour.

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Throughout the day, I found these tips I’ve learned from various sources to be really really useful. These are also geared towards intermediate digital camera owners (break out of automatic mode if you haven’t done so already!):

1. Use Speedburst mode when possible (a.k.a. Sports mode)
   For the second set of the photos I took when we went to the nearby playground to play Grounders, I applied a tip I learnt from the digital photography school blog on 11 Tips for Better Candid Photography. For any scenario where there is a lot of movement and spontaneity involved, this mode is perfect because you will capture a handful of images. Possibly one you wouldn’t expect yourself to capture such as these priceless photos I took yesterday:
   
   

2. Distance yourself and kill the flash (stay stealthy)
   Also 2 other great tips from that same post from the digital photography school blog. Distancing yourself from the action lets the people you focus on, focus on the matter at hand instead of the camera, resulting in a better candid shot. Personally, I love photos which are more candid. When filming movies, the actors should never look at the camera. I think more photographers should embrace this concept, they tell a better story.
   
   

3. Zoom in and get level (Other views aren’t as immersive)
   Also another tip that I learnt from the digital photography school, though I believe it was advice geared towards photographing children’s birthday parties.

   Zooming in allows you to capture details and essentially crop out other things that are going on nearby which can distract the viewer from the matter at hand. Of course you can take a zoomed out photograph from the beginning, but when you crop just a piece of it and want to print that out, you miss out on the details. Don’t be afraid to zoom in to different subjects and take many photos, the beauty of digital photography is that you can review what you just took later on and clear them out to make more room. If you have high capacity media for your camera, even better; you have the luxury of rejecting photographs when importing them.

   Getting level with your subjects helps the viewer of your photograph get immersed in the setting. It’s not really fun looking at a photo of a person where the photograph wasn’t taken at eye-level.

   

Of course you shouldn’t try to use these tips each time you take a photograph, otherwise you get trapped in the problem where all your photographs look like they were taken from the same perspective/angle. They also might not work sometimes, for example, you will need flash when you’re inside in low-light settings.

Most importantly, if you haven’t done so already, break out of automatic mode and try to experiment with your camera. Learning and getting used to how your camera works is essential if you want good results.

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PicLens

I first stumbled upon PicLens while harmlessly browsing through the Safari extensions available at PimpMySafari.com. Their website described PicLens as a plug-in which was capable of:

• Viewing photos in full screen with a single click
• Glide between photos from within full screen mode
• Play a slideshow of image search results and photo albums
• Browse online photos with your Apple® remote

Now the nicest thing any author of a browser extension can do is also make it simple to remove, just in case it isn’t your cup of tea. Cooliris, Inc. the authors of PicLens, made removal simple so I felt absolutely no harm in trying this plug-in out.

After I finished installing the plug-in, browsing photos on the sites which support PicLens has been really nice. I’ve found myself utilizing this plug-in most for viewing photos in full-screen, especially in Flickr where being able to view the details on a high-resolution photo is a treat.

The way PicLens has also been designed to integrate with Safari makes it such a cinch to use as well. It integrates into your browsing experience by overlaying a simple little button on the bottom left of a thumbnail when you hover your mouse on it.

PicLens overlays a tiny button in the left

To view the photo in full-screen, simply click on that button, and in Mac-like fashion, your screen zooms into the photo and the full-screen interface of PicLens.

PicLens allows you to view photos on the web in full screen

The full-screen interface is similar to the how iPhoto works in full-screen, and it works well. Big playback buttons are located in the bottom left to control your slideshow and you are free to skip to another photo in the thumbnails laid out in the row below. To go back to your browser, just click on the ‘X’ in the top left corner.

I’ve been using PicLens for over a month now and being one of the few extensions of its kind, especially for Safari, it’s a keeper.

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