Google added a neat feature called “Face Movies” to its Picasa photo software last week. This feature uses facial recognition technology to help you create a movie slideshow where a person’s face is aligned in each photograph. An example of something you can do with this feature is to create a slideshow of your child growing up (like in the example Face Movie above).
Many of Sony’s new digicams have a nifty “Sweep Panorama” feature that allows you to create panoramas of up to 224 degrees by sweeping your camera across a scene. The camera then takes the numerous frames it captured during the sweep and combines them together into a panorama for you.
If you own an iPhone, a new app called 360 Panorama allows you to go a step further. Instead of creating traditional panoramas, the app lets you quickly create 360 degree panoramas by sweeping your camera in every direction. Each 360 panorama should take about 20 seconds to create, with the app filling in pieces of the panorama on an on-screen grid as you’re sweeping.
Now for a couple downsides. First, due to the app’s processor intensive nature, it’s only available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. Also, the app has iffy reviews on the iTunes store, with customers saying that it’s a work in progress. Still, it’s a pretty neat idea, and if they get it working smoothly and correctly it would be a nice feature to add to your phone for a cool $3.
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.
Photographers can now use their iPad or iPhone to view images remotely during a photo shoot — if they’ve got a Leaf or a Mamiya digital back. Today, Mamiya and Leaf announced the release of a new App compatible with Leaf backs, as well as Mamiya’s DM-series and RZ33 digital cameras and backs. When tethered shooting on a Mac, the Leaf Capture Remote v 2.0 App allows one or more iPad or iPhone to function as a remote image viewer over Wi-Fi.
There is no live view mode, but images are available to view as they are taken. There are obvious benefits to workflow with this sort of program, since the photographer can move around while reviewing the results from shots. Also, several people can view and flip through the images on different devices, which could come in handy in large photo shoots.
The App is free from the Apple store, and works in tandem with Leaf’s Capture server, which must be installed on your computer.
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.
Dermandar is a free flash-based web app that will automatically and seamlessly stitch photos together to form a panoramic photo. The resulting panorama can be viewed as a side-to-side scrolling image, or in “3D” mode, which is an interactive display that can be rotated, zoomed, and has a more obvious axis of rotation. Some of the most interesting images available for public view in the Dermandar gallery are actually 360-degree views.
You can upload up to 100 panoramas to the site, comprised of 2 to 4 images for partial panoramas or 7 to 24 for 360-degree images — plenty of photos to allow for overlap as well.
It’s a pretty cool tool, complete with sharing and embedding options. It also has a fullscreen mode that makes the viewing process very immersive.
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.
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