Photoshop guru Scott Kelby has high praise for the overhauled Develop Module that’s coming in Lightroom 4. In a recent post titled “Why I Think Lightroom 4 is Going To Sell Like Crazy“, he writes,

Your photos look better processed in Lightroom 4. Period. [...] The improvements in Lightroom’s Development module are so significant, and so much better than what we’ve ever had before, that I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find most anyone still using Lightroom 3 in just a few months from now. In fact, if they didn’t add another feature, it would still be worth the upgrade just to get better looking images.

You can watch a walkthrough of new the new module here, or play around with the new engine yourself by downloading the free Lightroom 4 Beta release. This is also great news for Photoshop users: the same engine is coming to Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Camera Raw.

(via Scott Kelby via John Nack)

The Stolen Camera Finder is a new search engine developed over the past two years by programmer Matt Burns. His idea is to search the web for photographs that have a stolen camera’s serial number embedded in the EXIF information. It uses two web crawlers — the first is a standard one that accesses Flickr’s API, while the second is a Google Chrome browser plugin that silently runs in the background and peeks at the serial numbers of images on any webpage viewed. These serial numbers and URLs are stored in a database, and if you’d like to volunteer your browsing for this you can download the Chrome plugin here.

What you see here is a non-manipulated photograph by Wolcott Wilhelm showing a Chevy muscle car with a see-through hood that shows the engine underneath. It was created by splitting the exposure time between having the hood up and having it down.
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The people behind camera comparison and recommendation website snapsort have just launched lenshero, a site designed to recommend the lens you need at the price you want. After telling the application your camera and what you’re looking for in a lens (e.g. type, focal range, price), the site will spit out some recommendations of lenses that fit your criteria, ordering them by their pros and cons. It’s a neat little app that you might want to bookmark if you’re in the market for some new gear.

We’ve already got plenty of gadgets designed to facilitate photography: there’s auto-focus, face detection, and some crazy features in Photoshop that can effortlessly add and remove entire elements (and people) in photographs. So now why not have a camera that tells you whether you’re taking an aesthetically pleasing photograph?

Designer Andrew Kupresanin created this project camera that utilizes the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine Acquine to judge photo quality even before you take a photograph. The screen in the back of the camera simply shows a percentage rating, in lieu of an LCD display. The camera is actually a Nokia N73 camera connected with a Mac over Bluetooth. Kupresanin seems to be using his experimental project to make a poignant statement about the automation of photography and aesthetics. Kupresanin says on his site:

Within pop culture and society artificial intelligence has been a topic that is approached with hope, fear, cynicism, curiosity and caution. However many intelligent devices have already been effortlessly absorbed into our culture and everyday lives.

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