It’s almost a given for new Canon DSLRs to have an HD video recording mode, but older Canons can also capture HD video with the open source software EOS Camera Movie Record. The program allows you to shoot HD 720p video with any Canon EOS camera that has LiveView capabilities. The software runs off of your computer and captures HD video from the LiveView of a tethered camera.
Photographer Peter Arboine has an article up at DIY Photography about how he uses the software to shoot video with a Canon 40D.
Obviously, the fact that your camera has to remain tethered limits use of this video feature largely to studio use, but it’s a neat workaround for Canon owners. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the Canon program has been in the works for over a year, there’s still no Nikon equivalent.
French company Oloneo has just released a free beta for their product, PhotoEngine. The software is a straightforward HDR creator and non-destructive editor that allows you to quickly merge HDR photos. Additionally, it has features that can adjust specific light sources in the photo, to change the white balance or the exposure. This could come in handy when shooting HDR frames that have a variety of different light sources with different temperatures.
Unshake is a free program available for all operating systems that takes your blurry photographs and attempts to make them clearer. While it’s not miraculous or perfect, it does in fact help in making photographs more usable, especially at lower resolutions (i.e. for the web).
Here’s a before-and-after example using a quick snapshot I took this past weekend with an outdated point-and-shoot camera:
If you have problems using the program on a Mac, try opening the Unshake.jar file directly at the last step. Larger photographs might also take much longer to “unshake”, while lower-res (i.e. 500px wide) photos were completed very quickly.
If you’re not naturally an organized person, then figuring out where certain photos are on your computer or external hard drive might be a pain. Adebis Photo Sorter is a free Windows program that uses the EXIF data in image files to automatically rename and/or organize your image files in a new directory, leaving the originals untouched. It supports pretty much all the popular image formats, from JPEG to Raw image formats, and can even help you include EXIF data in the new filenames.
For those of you who have been itching to try the new Content Aware Fill and Puppet Warp features in Adobe Photoshop CS5, today’s your lucky day. CS5 became available for purchase through the Adobe website, and you can now download a 30-day free trial of the software just to play around with the amazing new features if you’re not sure yet you want to upgrade.
If you’ve tried it out already, do you think the new features live up to the hype?
Photo Magician is a free and lightweight (less than 1MB) program for Windows that allows you to batch convert a directory of photographs. It’s similar in functionality to Photoshop’s “Image Processor” feature, with one difference being you can’t select the output quality like you can using Photoshop.
The program also features a “Quick Convert Mode”, which minimizes the program to a little box onto which you can drag and drop folders of images. If you’ve been looking for a quick way to resize images in Vista (like the Image Resize PowerToy allowed you to do in XP), then you might want to check out this program.
Easy Release is a new iPhone app designed to make it easy for you to secure model and property releases.
It was designed by Robert Giroux, a photographer of over 24 years who spent eight years on the staff of Getty Images, and uses the same format and legal language as the release forms used by major photo agencies.
The application replaces traditional paper based releases you would otherwise have to carry around with you by packing all of the forms and required fields inside an iPhone application. All the necessary fields are presented in a step-by-step wizard-style interface, and the signatures are entered directly into the application via the touch screen.
Once the release forms are completed, you can email a PDF or JPEG version of the form to yourself.
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