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.
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?
British newspaper The Guardian has teamed up with Canon on a new app for the iPad that features the most recent 100 photographs from their award-winning Eyewitness series. In addition to simply viewing the photographs, they’re also including “Pro tips”, or short blurbs written by the photography team on the “technical and artistic merits” of each image.
If you love good photography and would like to have a steady stream of photography tips (as well as have an iPad), you can grab the app for free from the App Store.
No word on whether the pro tips will ever be available for those who don’t own iPads.
In addition to Content Aware Fill, Puppet Warp is another powerful feature to be included in Adobe’s upcoming Photoshop CS5.
In this demo, it’s used on a layer containing a wooden mannequin, allowing the limbs to be manipulated as you would be able to do in real life prior to photographing it. The feature is then applied to rope, digitally tying it into a knot, and finally to fix distortion in a multi-photo panorama.
While this feature isn’t as mind-boggling as Content Aware Fill, it’s definitely something those of you excited about CS5 can look forward to.
An unofficial iPad Flickr app called “Flickr Photos” has been approved for the iPad app store. The $2.99 app, created by Garlic Dumpling, allows you to do download and view both your own photos and your contacts’ photos in a minimalistic interface. There’s no word on whether the official Flickr application will be ready for the iPad when the store launches, but the iTunes preview page for the official Flickr app already states “Flickr for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store”.
The official app has an average rating of only 3.5 stars, so if a third party app can come along and offer a better experience for using Flickr, it might just take off and strike big in this upcoming “gold rush”.
SwankoLab is an image editing app for the iPhone and iPod that features a complete darkroom simulator with chemicals, timers, and the whole shebang.
Rather than offering simple filters to customize the look and feel of your photographs, you process your digital photos using chemicals combined into custom formulas, giving you a large degree of control over how your photos turn out. You can even save successful formulas in a Formula Notebook built into the app.
The app is by the makers of Hipstamatic, and is set to be released in early April 2010. There’s currently no word on pricing, but an additional 9 chemicals will be available for $1.99.
Adobe is working on a new feature for Photoshop called “Content Aware Fill”, and posted a mind-boggling demonstration of it on YouTube. The description states:
One of the biggest requests we get of Photoshop is to make adding, removing, moving or repairing items faster and more seamless. From retouching to completely reimagining an image, heres an early glimpse of what could happen in the future when you press the delete key.
Basically it allows you to alter or create reality in photographs as easily as selecting an area and running the feature. Gone will be the days when photojournalists are caught with embarrassing patterns created by improperly using the stamp tool. The demonstration is so amazing that many commenters are saying it’s fake, going as far as to say it looks… “photoshopped”?
What do you think of this feature and the sneak peek? Is it too good to be true, or will it change the way we think about photography forever?
We apologize sincerely for the inconvenience caused to our customers by suspending the availability of the Version 2.0.3 firmware.
We are now introducing the Version 2.0.4 firmware. This firmware corrects the malfunction that occurred in the previous Version 2.0.3 firmware, in which the manual recording level changed and made recording impossible.
Customers who have the Version 2.0.3 firmware on their cameras should update the firmware to Version 2.0.4.
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.
Well, that was fast. 
