SnapperTalk

Interesting new piece of freeware for Canon 5D MkII / 7D / 1D MkIV users looking to improve their workflow, called 5DtoFCP from idustrial revolution.
I’ve not had a chance to try it out yet, but this is the blurb from the creators:

“A complete FCS workflow package to get footage from a Canon5DmkII/7D/1D into Final Cut Pro at 25fps. Custom droplets, correctly configured sequence settings and flow chart included to make getting the HD H264 files into FCP easier & quicker.”

If you do try it out, let me know how it goes….

[Update 27/01/10] New version 1.1 out, is said to add “New set of droplets & timelines to work with Final Cut Studio 3″ and “support for FCS3 Compressor 3.5″

5DtoFCP Homepage
5DtoFCP Cinema5D discussion thread
5DtoFCP DVInfo discussion thread
5DtoFCP Versiontracker page

Adobe has posted a new release candidate version of its raw-conversion Photoshop plugin Camera Raw.
Version 5.6 adds support for a bunch of new cameras including the very nice Canon Powershot S90 (see Luminous Landscape review) that I’ve recently acquired and have been quite impressed with. It’s the first point-and-shoot I’ve had that I feel comfortable using at 800 ASA, the noise is very low.
Other cameras of note that it adds support for are the Canon EOS 7D, Canon PowerShot G11, Nikon D3s, and Olympus E-P2.

Go get it here for Mac or Windows.

So the latest version of Apple’s operating system is out – Snow Leopard 10.6 – and most users should be itching to upgrade. Feature-wise it’s not a major upgrade (except for users with MS Exchange email accounts who now get native support in Apple’s Mail application).
But there’s a LOT of changes under the hood and it should run a lot faster. More importantly it introduces new features for application coders such as Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL that enable them to make full-use of multiple processors and the power of the machine’s graphics card.
So in the coming months we should see some more nice speed improvements as programmers of resource-intensive application rewrite them to take advantage of the new architecture.
Laptop users will also appreciate that the new OS is said to use up to 7GB less space on the hard disk.

One word of warning though – not all applications are compatible. Most are, but there’s a few that are broken by the new OS and if you have any apps you consider essential you might want to take a look at this user-compiled application compatibility list before you do the upgrade. Apple also has a list here.

Oh, and if your machine is a PowerPC – G3,G4,G5 – you can forget it…. Snow Leopard is Intel-only.

Reviews of the new OS:

Gizmodo
Engadget
MacWorld
The Register
Associated Press
Wired
NY Times
All Things Digital
Also see Ted Dillard’s Snow Leopard for Photographers blog post

Came across this the other day, which might prove useful for some people… Cameras by Flexibits is a free preference pane for Mac OS X that let’s you manage what happens when you connect different cameras or card readers to your Mac. Normally you can only set one action or application to open when a card or camera containing images is connected to the machine but with this preference pane you can assign different functions to different models of camera, card reader etc. Simple but useful.

If you like the Tilt-Shift lens effect but don’t have any Tilt-Shift lenses, you can now recreate the effect via a new application called, appropriately, TiltShift Generator.

Written by Takayuki Fukatsu, it can be used as an online application direct from the webpage or downloaded to your computer to run as a standalone program and since it’s built from Adobe Air it will run on Windows, Mac or Linux.

Designed for use with low-resolution cameraphone pictures such as those from the iPhone it does choke a little when you throw it a high-end DSLR image but eventually it does produce a result. Quite a fun application to play with, just bear in mind that using this would be considered image-manipulation, so it’s not at all suitable for journalistic photos.

If you do happen to have an iPhone, check out some of Takayuki’s other photography-related applications for the iPhone.

Back in early February I wrote about Skype releasing a new version of its application for Windows containing the new wideband SILK codec. Codecs are the part of the software that encodes/decodes the audio for transmission, and are absolutely central to the whole thing because the quality of the compression the codec is capable of achieving is key in determining the resulting call quality.
This is particularly important for users in places with limited internet bandwidth e.g. many parts of Africa and other developing countries. The new SILK codec Skype engineered promised to provide much better use of bandwidth and so better call quality overrall, particularly for those in countries with poor internet but also for users with high bandwidth, and from most reports it seems to have done so successfully.

Unfortunately the update that contained the new codec was only for Windows, and Mac users were left out… until now. A couple of days ago Skype fairly quietly released a new beta version 2.8.0.438 for Mac OS X and the changelog posted here made no mention at all of SILK codec support.

However I can now confirm (thanks to the heads-up here) that the new beta does indeed use the new codec. To test this I placed a call from a Mac running OS X and the new beta version 2.8.0.438 to a Windows computer running Skype version 4.0 – and as you can see from the technical call info the call was indeed using the new codec.

A few things to bear in mind regarding use of the new codec:

1. It will only be used if both computers are using a SILK-capable version of Skype. If either one is using an older version that is not SILK-capable then the call will use the older and inferior SVOPC codec.

2. As far as I know, SILK does not get used in any case when placing calls to real telephones i.e. when using Skype Out.

I’ve yet to fully test the new version for improved call quality, but am glad Mac users are no longer left out. There are still some questions lingering though – Does the new Skype for iPhone & iPod touch use SILK? When will SILK be available for standalone devices such as wifi phones? Will existing devices be able to add SILK via a firmware update or will users have to buy completely new hardware?

Bearing in mind that both parties have to have the SILK codec for it to be used, these are important questions for all Skype users….

Skype Beta for Mac OS X page
Skype Beta for Mac OS X direct download [DMG file, 41.4mb]
Skype for Mac OS X user forum
Skype 2.8 Beta for Mac OS X user forum

If you have an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch and a Canon EOS 5DmkII… you might be interested in Handi 5Dmk2 – a new quick reference guide application for those devices that contains the custom functions, menu settings, and other options of the camera, for easily checking in the field.
Once installed it can be used without a network connection. They also offer a Canon EOS 50D version. Both are priced at $1.99 from the iTunes App Store.

[via Planet5D blog]

A recent post by someone on an internet forum who’d just had his laptop stolen reminded me about this relatively new, free, and open source tracking tool I came across a while back.

Adeona is software currently being developed by a group of students at the University of Washington and is designed to help you try to locate your laptop should it get stolen. The information you can glean from it includes the internal IP address, public IP address, traceroute, name of wireless access point, and if you use the Mac OS X version on a Macbook with built-in webcam then you can also receive photos of the thief using the isightcapture tool.

There’s been plenty such offerings of a commercial nature before, usually requiring a yearly subscription, but this is the first free one I’ve seen. There’s a number of ways in which all these methods won’t work, or can be disabled by a knowledgeable thief, but being free you have little to lose. I haven’t tried it myself but someone who has done wrote this about his experiences here

Came across this rather nice hard case for MacBooks and MacBook Pros. It’s the kind of case that stays on the laptop all the time and you can actually work from.
The company DecoCases says the case is made from aluminium and magnesium, neoprene-lined, and has an integrated heat conduction plate – which all sounds good for the rough travel photographers inflict on their machines.

Mozilla have announced their expectation that the new version 3 of their popular web browser Firefox will be released this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Why is this a big deal for photographers in particular? Let’s step back a bit…

Colour management of photographs can be a complicated and misunderstood process, but the end goal is always to ensure that the viewer sees the image – with regard to tonality and colour – in the way that the photographer intended.
To achieve this, images are usually saved in a certain colour space such as AdobeRGB or sRGB, which defines the potential range of colours and embeds this information profile in the image in a way that can be understood by any colour-profile-aware application.
So if I view an image saved in sRGB and another in AdobeRGB, my colour-aware application can sense the difference and automatically convert the colours so that what I actually see is pretty much the same. Great huh?

However, if you look at the graph above, you will see that sRGB displays a much lower range of colours – a smaller gamut – than AdobeRGB. Professional photographers generally shoot and save their images in AdobeRGB because its larger gamut is better for capturing the full range of colours and for printing purposes.

The current problem is that most web browsers COMPLETELY IGNORE this colour profile information and assume that the image is saved in sRGB – you can test your browser to see if it is compliant at the ICC Test Page. Therefore when these AdobeRGB images are uploaded to the web and seen on the vast majority of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox 2, Opera, etc) they appear flat and dull – as you can see in the some of the examples here.

Ideally photographers should save an AdobeRGB version for print, and then convert this to a separate sRGB version for web use – but that is of course, a pain. Up until now the only browser that supported colour profiles was Apple’s Safari – which is now available for both Mac and PC. Safari is quite a good browser but has a low market share, and doesn’t offer the wide range of useful plugins and customisations that Firefox does.

Enter Firefox 3. The new version of the browser isn’t colour-profile-aware by default but happily it can be easily fixed by either a hack explained here, or there is already an easy plugin created by Sean Hayes called “Color Management” that does the job – available here on the Mozilla site or here on the author’s homepage. The latter requires no registration.

This is certainly a step in the right direction as far as photography on the web is concerned. It gives me a way to see images on the web as the photographer intended. However the decision to have it off by default means it’s unlikely to help the majority of Firefox users and I find that disappointing, although some of the reasons are discussed here.

Until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer starts recognising colour profiles, and Firefox 3 starts doing so by default, the majority of web users will still be seeing much photography on the web incorrectly represented and not as the photographer intended – but at least I don’t have to any more.

UPDATE 17/06/08: Firefox 3 is now out, I’ve installed the Color Management plugin, and I can say that colour photographs on most websites I frequent look much, much better than before.