dSLR Dad

The following is part Six of a much larger dSLR Dad Holiday Gift Guide:

Think Tank Photo is a company that has burst onto the scene and come out with products that meet the needs of both professional and serious dSLR Dad’s alike. They carry any number of shoulder or belt bags, rugged airport carry-on, or their fantastic modular system. You can download a copy of their catalog (more…)

Ian Lyons over at Computer-Darkroom has posted an in-depth review of the latest version of Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom.

So, here we are at Lightroom version 1.3 and the question most users will be asking is – what’s new? On the surface very little, but just like an iceberg there’s lots beneath the surface.

You can read the entire article here.

Press Release:

To help celebrate the holiday season, we at Think Tank Photo will be giving away one of our camera bags every day for a month, starting on November 16. All you need to do is click here and you will be directed to a very simple form where you can register to win in this random drawing. [Note: the only bag not eligible to be won is our Airport Security roller and you may enter only once.]
We also have holiday coupons and special offers that we’ll be announcing throughout November and December, so be sure to sign up.

Man, talk about getting all of your ducks in a row before the Holidays. Adobe has announced updates to Photoshop CS3 (download 10.0.1 for Mac, Win), Bridge CS3 (2.1.1 for Mac, Win), Camera Raw (4.3 for Mac, Win), and Lightroom (1.3 for Mac, Win). Each download page contains more details about the corresponding update. Thanks to John Nack at Adobe for the summary:

Photoshop 10.0.1 update mainly addresses the many issues with the print module and preserving XMP metadata (including copyright) via Save For Web. This update does not have a fix for Mac OS X Leopard.

Bridge 2.1.1 adds a new preference to enable High Quality Preview.

Lightroom 1.3 improves compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard, adds a 1:1 preview render option when importing, and numerous bug fixes. LightroomNews aptly named it an ‘iceberg update’, not so much on the surface, but look out below. New cameras supported in Lightroom, Camera Raw, and the DNG Converter include: Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon PowerShot G9, Nikon D3, Nikon D300, Olympus E-3, Olympus SP-560 UZ, and Panasonic DMC-L10. The applications also now support the sRAW format produced by the Canon 1D Mk III, 1Ds Mk III, and 40D.

There is also a preview available of the Lightroom Export SDK for developers on Adobe Labs. They can find out more details at the Lightroom Journal.

Microsoft’s HD Photo format has been picked by the Joint Photographic Experts Group to be a new standard called JPEG XR (XR is short for ‘extended range’). No matter what you may think of Microsoft, this is great news. Here is a description from Wikipedia:

HD Photo is an image codec that gives a high-dynamic-range image encoding while requiring only integer operations (with no divides) for both compression and decompression. It supports monochrome, RGB, CMYKRadiance. It may optionally include an embedded ICC color profile, to achieve consistent color representation across multiple devices. An alpha channel may be present for transparency, and Exif and XMP metadata formats are supported. The format allows decoding part of an image, without decoding the entire image. Full decoding is also unnecessary for certain operations such as cropping, downsampling, horizontal or vertical flips, or cardinal rotations.

All color representations are transformed to an internal color representation. The transformation is entirely reversible, so, by using appropriate quantizers, both lossy and lossless compression can be achieved.

I invite all you dSLR DAD’s to head over to Bill Crow’s blog over at Microsoft. As the project manager for HD Photo, he has posted some great information.

You can also listen to his insight as a guest on This Week in Media, Episode 51: Something not JPEG. This was a fantastically informative show, a definite Must Listen.