SnapperTalk

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.

Professional photographers have their needs taken care of by Photoshop, Photo Mechanic, etc when they have to resize/recompress photos. However when you are dealing with amateurs or other people who have no training in image-editing, there is often a need to explain in very simple terms how to resize an image appropriately for emailing or sending via FTP, often over a slow internet connection.

This happens frequently when dealing with members of the public who have photos of newsworthy events, or indeed inexperienced stringers, and in such cases I have frequently advised them to download and use JpegCompress – which used to be free, but is now commercial software.

As an alternative, I recently came across PhotoRazor. It is a free and very easy-to-use piece of software that’s only 934kb to download, and can both resize and recompress single images, or indeed a whole folder of images. It’s Windows-only I’m afraid – if you know of similar software for Mac, or indeed other such software for Windows, please leave a comment. I also understand there are a number of online image editors available now, but I wonder whether to resize you have to upload the full-size image first, which defeats the point for those on slow connections.

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]

This one’s for my journo friends who sit in your office tapping your story away on that plastic Dell desktop, immersed in technology and the internet age, but secretly pining you were living decades earlier and click-clacking away on a manual typewriter.

You know who you are.

Now you can recreate at least some of that old-school journalist minimalism with the free Q10 full-screen text editor.

No menus, no user-interface, no icons, pretty much nothing at all to distract you from the actual process of writing. Just a blank screen and the romantic key sounds of a manual typewriter to fuel the inspiration for that latest government press release you’re rewriting…

The Canon EOS 5D MkII can shoot video in either 640×480 (VGA) or 1920×1080 (1080P, Full HD) resolution, both encoded with H.264 video compression. Playing video files in the former is easy, but the sheer amount of data that needs to be processed with 1920×1080 resolution can tax even quite modern computers.
VLC has been my video player of choice for many years as it is free, open-source, and will play virtually everything you can throw at it – but disappointingly I couldn’t get it to play 5D MkII videos without major stuttering or no playback at all.

Thanks to this post on the Photography Within blog, I’ve now found a trick that enables VLC to play these files very smoothly – you just have to change one setting:

Go to Tools > Preferences
In the lower left of the box click the checkbox “Show settings – All”
Then go to Input & Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg and look for the option called “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding”
Change it from “none” to “all”
Restart VLC

I’ve tried it on Windows and all the 5DmkII videos that were problematic before now play perfectly. It also works on Mac, though you may not need to do it on that platform.
Bear in mind this method DOES reduce the playback quality (by not doing any de-blocking noise reduction), so if you aren’t having problems with playback then don’t do it, but if you are then it’s pretty useful.

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

One of the best reasons to use WordPress to run your blog is the massive range of plugins you can add to enhance its functionality. Here’s my list of the best:

Administration:

Fluency Admin – cleans up the whole admin interface
Admin drop down menu – add’s drop down menus to the Admin pages and is compatible with Fluency Admin
One Click Plugin Updater – get notified of plugin updates, do them all in one click, and install plugins in one click without needing to FTP them using the OneClick Installer for Wordpress FireFox add-on
WP Enhanced Plugin Manager – adds additional functionality for upgrading plugins
WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Massive timesaver letting you upgrade WP installation to latest version semi-automatically
WP Super Cache – static caching to reduce load on your server
WordPress Database Backup – easily back up your WP database

Security & Anti-Spam

Spam Karma 2 – Essential plugin to prevent against comment spam. The alternative is Akismet which is bundled by default on new WP installations but which is inferior in my opinion.
SABRE – Adds measures to stop spambots registering as users of your site
Bad Behaviour – adds some security measures to prevent against spam and other malicious attacks
WP Security Scan – scans your WP installation to look for security holes
Hotlink Protection – Prevents other websites from hotlinking to images on your site
©Feed – Adds a copyright notice and digital fingerprint to the end of each post when seen in RSS feeds, enabling you to see who is stealing your content
Easy Contact – Adds an anti-spam contact form for readers to send you a message without revealing your email address

Search

All in One SEO Pack – automatically optimizes your site to be more search engine-friendly
Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator – automatically generates an XML-Sitemap to allow search engines to more effectively catalog your site
Search Everything – Customise exactly which pages, posts, categories etc are seen by the internal site search

Statistics

Ultimate Google Analytics – enables you view all your site’s statistics using Google Analytics
WordPress.com Stats – A pretty decent statistics package though requires (free) signup at www.wordpress.com if your blog is self-hosted.

Misc

WordPress Mobile Edition – automatically detects if the reader is using a handheld device or phone, and reformats your site for optimal viewing
Subscribe to Comments – allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments

You can find more WordPress plugins here

If you were holding off trying out Tineye the image search engine I wrote about previously, because you were put off by the beta/invite status of it, then you’ll be interested to know that as of Aug. 15th they’ve introduced instant-signup and invitations are no longer required.