Ink Blots

Free human grunt work

It’s pretty hard to sell your fine art or stock images if no one can find them. In order for Web search engines to find your images, someone has to categorize and label (keyword) them. Although computers have taken over a lot of our repetitive tasks, there are some things computers haven’t learned how to do very well, and one of these is image recognition.

At last, someone has found out how to get humans to do boring “grunt” work without paying them anything—make a game out of it! That’s genius behind the Web hit known as the ESP Game, the brain child of Luis von Ahn, a 28-year-old professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Strategy. The ESP Game is a two-player Web game. Each time you play you are randomly paired with another player whose identity you don’t know. You can’t communicate with your partner, and the only thing you have in common with them is that you can both see the same picture. The goal is to guess what your partner is typing on each image. Once you both type the same word(s), you get a new image. Each time you type a word or phrase, you must press enter on your keyboard to submit it to the game. You can type as many guesses as you want, and as soon as a single guess of yours is equal to a guess that your partner has made, you get a new image. You have two and a half minutes to agree on 15 images. The strategy is to type as many words as you can related to the image, hoping that your partner types one of them. Each time you and your paired partner agree on a word or phrase, that word or phase becomes part of that image’s list of “taboo words” that the next group of paired players cannot use.

The Reward. You get points each time you agree on an image with your partner. The exact number of points depends on how many taboo words the image has: the more taboos, the more points the image is worth. If you agree on 5 images you get a bonus of 350 points, if you agree on 10 images you get a bonus of 850 points, and if you agree on the 15 images you get a bonus of 2000 points. You can check how many images you have agreed on by looking at the progress meter at the bottom of the screen.

People have been known to play for hours. Professor von Ahn knew that people who play computer solitaire will happily diddle away countless hours at their machines, and by adding a scoreboard to the ESP Game he knew he could tap into the competitive juices that drive people’s addiction to all forms of gaming.

Why? What is really going on here? What’s really happening here is free labor. Tom “ESP Game” Sawyer is getting you and I to white wash his fence, and making us think it is fun. ESP Game is taking previously unlabeled image collections and giving them keywords that can be used to categorize and retrieve them via a Web search engine! And because of Professor von Ahn’s clever programming, the buyers of his service can be assured that these are very relevant keywords, thoroughly tested by the competitiveness of real humans.

And even a 3-year-old human has better image recognition skills than today’s most powerful computer—which is why Google has licensed the ESP Game and is currently using it with its Google Image Labeler to identify its huge collection of Web pictures.

Self-serving. I wonder what it would cost me to have Professor von Ahn’s ESP Game keyword my collection of 20,000 stock photos? As any stock photographer knows, this is the bottleneck that slows down most image submissions to online agencies.  And even when I get around to doing it, I’m never sure if the keywords I pick are the most relevant!

Limitations. When it comes to technical images and exotic locations, I doubt if I’m going to get quality labels (keywords) using the game approach (I doubt that few 13-year-old kids can correctly identify a ”Whorl Tooth Shark” fossil), so I guess I’m still stuck with doing much of the mundane work myself :-(

Posted by Royce Bair on 06/27 at 11:18 AM
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Sharing images to archive them

Photo “sharing” Web sites can also be a great way to archive your images.

Although I try to back up all my digital files onto DVD-Rs (keeping one copy at the office and one at home), I must admit that I’m always several months behind in my well-intended plans. I’m also terrible about sharing my personal images with friends and family members, and slow to get my stock and fine art images online.

The idea came to me the other day that the photo sharing Web sites might be a good way to solve both problems. By putting all my images online as soon as possible, as part of my regular workflow, I’d not only get my friends and family off my back, but I’d have at least a JPEG image online if disaster struck. Sure, it wouldn’t be a camera raw image, but if my hard drive failed, I’d be very glad to have anything! (Because of storage restrictions, most photo sharing sites only allow compressed files (.jpg) to be uploaded. Even so, the better services will allow these to be at the highest quality compression, and as large as 16MB.)

When I’m shooting photos for stock, I’m always getting requests from models (and friends that I use as models) for prints. And that’s what “photo sharing” sites are all about—these sites allow you to upload your images for a fairly low fee, in hopes that your family/friends or the people at an event (such as a wedding) will want to order prints, and the site can make more money as a “photo printing lab” than as a Web hosting site.

When I’m on the road, there are always people who do favors for me, allowing access and etc., in order for me to get the perfect shot. I’m always promising to send them a picture of something I’ve featured in my photos. But doing proper print fulfillment would almost require a full-time secretary! A self-service solution is to give out pre-printed cards with your photo sharing Web site address (some sites allow custom domain names). You can also write down the gallery title (on the back of the card) that you plan to put the images from the current shoot. This will make your life easier and help keep you honest.

Options and Recommendations: When choosing a photo sharing Web site, pick one that also allows you to post images in password protected folders so you can keep more private images away from the the eyes of the general public. Check the site for reliability. Do they have their own off-site back up system? Be sure the site doesn’t have too great of a restriction on the file sizes of your image uploads—If you can’t upload a full-resolution image (in JPEG format), then you won’t have the benefit of an offline “archive”. Be sure that you can access and download your own images, and not just to order prints from those images. And of course, you’ll want a site that makes good quality prints so that you’ll look professional (most offer “gift” items like printing on mugs, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and some even print on canvas). Some of the photo sharing sites allow you to buy prints for yourself and family members at a wholesale price and set a higher price for everyone else—with the profits of those sales paid to you. One of the best sites I’ve found, that has all the features I’ve mentioned (and more), is SmugMug (for other choices, see my April 27th review on this subject).

SmugMug keeps 4 backup copies of each photo in 3 states. You can retrieve your images at anytime. You are allowed unlimited storage and unlimited traffic for less than $40/year. Their “professional account” version (under $150/year) not only allows you to sell prints online (you set the price), but you can also license your images as stock photos, letting clients download digital versions for the fee you set.

Inkjet Printing Fulfillment: If you like to make inkjet prints for your clients rather than have someone else make photo lab prints, then you’ll want to use a Web hosting site like PhotoReflect.com (through ExpressDigital.com). PhotoReflect charges no upfront or monthly fees, but they do take about a 15% commission on every online order. The orders are sent to by email. You print the jobs and ship them. PhotoReflect sends you a check each month, less the commission fees.  Just remember that the images you upload to PhotoReflect are only low-resolution for Web viewing (since YOU will be doing the print fulfillment), and you won’t get the benefit of the “archiving” feature offered by other services.

Posted by Royce Bair on 05/31 at 09:50 AM
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Go ahead and bribe me

The Wall Street Journal ran a story on May 15 about “blogola” (a play on the word payola)—the gifts, trips and access some companies are giving the high-traffic bloggers in exchange for positive coverage on their sites:

Who says you can’t buy love? Trying to tap into the burgeoning power of blogs as promotional tools and fed up with the jaded attitudes of professional critics and TV feature writers, studios and networks are flooding bloggers with free stuff in hopes the flattered recipients will reward them with positive coverage. Flowing into the trough is everything from fancy gym bags and toasters to video iPods and free trips. Some networks—in the spotlight this week as they unveil their fall schedules to advertisers—have even borrowed a term from the technology industry to describe the strategy: blogola.

The newspaper reported that CBS recently flew a group of “mommy bloggers” to California to visit the set of “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” The Fox News Channel invited several New York media bloggers to an unnamed industry dinner attended by President Bush. The ABC Television Studio cast blogger Michael Ausiello in a speaking role in “Scrubs.”

This story has prompted many bloggers to blog about the ethics of taking gifts. Some have been horrified. Others, like me, just wanted to know when my blogola is going to arrive.

Posted by Royce Bair on 05/19 at 09:10 PM
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Inkjet printing directly onto wood

Kodak’s Continuous Inkjet Technology has opened the way for new digital printing applications in industry. Gruppo Frati is using the high-speed Kodak Versamark DS9100 Printing System to print directly onto wood.

Gruppo Frati is an Italian company that specialises in the production of hardwood-based panels, MDF and plastic laminates for a variety of applications in the furnishings sector. It has customers all over Europe, in South America and South Africa.

From printing on paper to printing on wood. The Kodak Versamark DS9100 system with a 9-inch printhead seemed ideal for printing the 20 cm BipanFlor panels but the Kodak system has always printed onto paper and other conventional printing substrates. Both companies were willing to experiment and entered into a trial period to determine if the process could be benefical to both.

From October to December 2006, the Kodak Versamark DS9100 printing system was put through its paces tackling new challenges, from ink coverage to color profiling, because the printing surface is not white. This was a period of intense activity for the Kodak technicians and of close collaboration with Maurizio Macor, the Gruppo Frati production manager, who tirelessly performed tests. In December, the system passed all the tests and the sale was made official.

Direct digital inkjet printing makes it possible to eliminate a number of steps: printing on paper, application of the paper on the panel and application of the protective film. Not only does this mean significant savings, digital printing also guarantees great printing flexibility. “If we got a request for a particular type of decoration we could only accept large orders and had to limit the range of decorations due to the constraints imposed by roto-offset printing,” says Dante Frati. “Now we can indulge ourselves in creating new decorations from wood shading and graining to other fantasy decorations.”

The Kodak Versamark DS9100 printing system can print up to 150 meters a minute with a resolution of 300 x 300 dpi and at such a high standard of quality that for this application it has won the battle against conventional panels printed using offset and laminated. In the configuration provided to Gruppo Frati there are four printheads for the four basic printing colors controlled by the Kodak Versamark CS400 system controller, which activates the printing heads. Each head has the electronics and software to regulate the pumps, valves and filters that control the ink flow.

Gruppo Frati has recently applied for a patent as a result of the experience of fine-tuning the Kodak Versamark DS9100 printing system for printing onto wood, including integration in a material transport and profiling system. This has led to a commercial agreement with Kodak to sell the system internationally.

For more information on Kodak’s graphic and industrial printing solutions, go to: http://www.graphics.kodak.com/

Posted by Royce Bair on 05/11 at 09:32 PM
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Does D-Roller really work?

Michael Frye posted this question recently on the Yahoo “digital-fineart” discussion group:

I just saw a good review of the D-Roller on Luminous Landscape, but I want to see if any of you have used it, and if so what you think of it. For those who don’t know, the D-Roller is designed to take paper curl out of prints. I tried making my own version a couple of years ago, but ended up thinking it was more trouble than it was worth. Although it did take out paper curl, it was only temporary - the paper would gradually re-curl. I gather that the D-Roller works better with rag papers, but since I’m using mostly Epson Premium Luster, I’d like to hear from someone who’s using something similar. Also, I found that with my home-made version it was very easy to dent the paper if you weren’t careful, and if there was any dust inside the roller it got embedded into the print. Any advice would be appreciated!

We have two D-Rollers (24” and 50” models) in our Bair Art Editions studio, and wouldn’t be without them!  Like Michael mentioned, they are most effective on rag or even wood pulp papers, like Epson’s Enhanced Matte.  They are less effective on photo papers that have an “plastic” RC or polyethylene barrier layer like the Epson Premium papers, but they are still useful even here.

Most of d-rolling (reverse rolling) is done after people do their printing, but some people use use the D-Roller to uncurl sections of roll stock so they can feed longer sheets into their printers for panoramic prints. This is helpful if you have an inkjet printer like the Epson Stylus Photo 3800 that doesn’t accept roll paper, but can still print on stock up to 37 inches long.

I’ve also tried to make my own “d-roller” out of a 1.5” diameter PVC pipe, but it wasn’t as effective.  This patented product has just the
right “apron” (so as not to dent or leave a crease line on the paper) and anti-breaking strips on the sides to make it be more serviceable than my homemade contraption.

The longer you leave the paper rolled up in the D-Roller (1-60 sec.) the more curl you will take out of the sheet. Soft rag papers usually only take about 10 seconds, but smooth (more calendared) papers will take longer, because these fibers retain more or their curl memory. You can de-curl the paper too much and make it curl in the opposite direction, but this rarely lasts for very long—there is typically some latent memory in the paper, and it will often lay flat within a few minutes. In fact, with some of the more calendared papers, like Epson’s UltraSmooth and Enhanced Matte, I will often leaved them d-rolled for a few minutes—enough to make them curl the opposite direction when they are un-rolled, and they will relax to the flat position within minutes. If I don’t apply this extra d-rolling time, they come out looking flat at first, but start to take on some of their natural curl position within a few minutes.

While the D-Roller is very quick and effective, I have found that d-rolling a long production run of prints can be very labor intensive. Whenever I have a large order, and some extra time, I will just reverse-roll the whole printing job on an empty 3-inch roll paper core tube, wrap some scrap paper around the roll, tape it securely so it doesn’t unwind and leave it for several hours or overnight. Reverse-rolling this way is not as quick (as the smaller diameter D-Roller) in breaking the paper’s curl memory, but it is usually just as effective over this longer time period. (Some of the large-format printers have automatic take-up rollers that offer reverse-roll winding. Prices for these accessories start at about $1,000.)

For most jobs of one to ten prints, the D-Roller is just the ticket. For more information, you can go to the D-Roller Web site, or to one of their major online dealers, like Inkjetart.

Posted by Royce Bair on 04/26 at 07:31 AM
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Big head - amazing speed

I’m talking about a BIG inkjet print head. Really big—a nozzle array that’s a full 8 inches wide, with 70,400 ink nozzles! This microscope photo shows a tiny section of the print head, and each of the small white circles is a single ink nozzle.

The ink nozzles are arranged in lines, with 1600 nozzles per inch. These can produce more than 2.5 million ink dots per square inch of paper in a single pass. These tiny nozzles can fire out ink droplets smaller than one picoliter. With this size of a printhead, it doesn’t need to move back and forth to make passes like ordinary printheads. Instead, the paper is just transport past the stationary printhead at a speed of one letter-size (A4) page per second, or 60 pages per minute. (The video clips are so amazing, you might at first think this is a hoax, but the folks at Lyra Research assure us that it’s legitimate!)

This new Memjet inkjet printer technology, that analysts believe will revolutionize the imaging industry, was unveiled last month by Silverbrook Research, and published in an article by texyt.com. Silverbrook says some of the Memjet Technology printers should be ready for the consumer market by the end of this year, starting with a 100mm (4-inch wide) printhead that will be used for home and retail photo printing as well as label printing devices. An A4/Letter printhead should be available in 2008.

The Memjet Technology may be licensed to manufacturers such as HP, Canon and others. Silverbrook expects the printers to eventually cost $200 or less. Silverbrook has plans for a $150, desktop photo printer that can print 30 photos per minute. By comparison, a single 4x6 inkjet print takes about 30 seconds to over a minute to print on most current desktop photo inkjet printers.

The only other inkjet printer able to print anywhere close to this speed is HP’s huge new Edgeline printer, but these printers start at $16,000 and can not be purchased (instead, the company will make customers purchase printing services, rather than the product itself).

HP’s Edgeline printer has a full-width nozzle array design similar to the Memjet, but at about one-half to one-third the speed of the Memjet Technology. That’s still about as fast as a laser printer! Right now, the Edgeline technology is only available for HP’s large copy shop type printers, but this may soon become the death of the big office laser printers. The Memjet Technology could soon compete with small office and home lazer printers.

Posted by Royce Bair on 04/20 at 09:24 AM
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Tiny URLs

How does one handle those looooong Web links?

Are you tired of posting URLs in emails and on discussion groups only to have it break when sent, which causes the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together?

Solution: My friend, Andrew Darlow, recently told me how to convert those long URLs to short ones using TinyURL.com

Example: Here’s the URL link to Epson’s Web site for the page that lists the drivers and downloads for their Epson Stylus Pro 3800:

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=79928&prodoid=63062509&infoType=Downloads&platform=All

This URL has a length of 134 characters, but within just a few seconds the TinyURL.com Web site was able to convert that long URL to a length of only 25 characters:

http://tinyurl.com/yum43g

... a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires. The service is free, and it only takes seconds.

Postscript: Here’s a 212 character Yahoo Maps URL (I’ll spare you the actual link) to a map of my office in Salt Lake City that TinyURL converted to only 25 characters: http://tinyurl.com/2hz5s6

Posted by Royce Bair on 04/18 at 10:56 AM
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Fujifilm enters industrial inkjet market

The Wall Street Journal announced on April 9th, in a one-paragraph statement, that Fujifilm was going to enter the industrial inkjet printing market this month. They will start in the U.S.A. and expand later into Europe and Japan. Fujifilm hopes to produce about $168 million in sales of new printers and ink by the business year 2009-2010. The Japanese photographic film maker will buy their printers from a division of Mutoh Holdings and the Netherlands-based Oce NV. Fuji’s ink cartrdges will be made by the U.K.-based Sericol Group Ltd., which Fuji acquired in 2005.

If I’m not mistaken, Mutoh also makes the 9800 and 7800 Stylus Pro inkjet printers for Epson. The “industrial” inkjet printers that Mutoh and Oce are going to be making for Fujifilm appear to be very large ("grand") format inkjet printers, and will probably be using outdoor solvent inks.

I couldn’t find any news releases from Fujifilm about their new venture.

Posted by Royce Bair on 04/13 at 07:57 AM
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HP Designjet Z6100 Specs

HP Designjet Z6100 - the 60” model is pictured on the left, and the 42” model on the right.

This is HP’s replacement for the popular Designjet 5000 and 5500. HP came out with their Designjet 5500 the same year (2001) that Epson introduced their model 10000 Stylus Pro printer. Both printers were slated as “fast”, but the HP truly was faster for most banner and sign production work—about twice as fast. Despite HP’s apparent speed, Epson was quick to point out that when the HP 5500 was printing at its best photo quality setting, the Epson 10000’s comparable quality setting was faster (and Epson was right). In fact, for professional “photo lab” quality printing, the Epson was much better, and the model 10000 still had two additional higher-quality printing settings for the really critical eye—endearing it (and the 9600 and 9800 models that followed) it to photographers and fine artists.

The HP Designjet Z2100 and HP Designjet Z3100 series printers that HP introduced last Fall were HP’s answer to Epson’s 9800 and 7800 printers, and they offer some additional features Epson doesn’t have, i.e. full-time dual-black ink (matte and photo) plumbing.

Despite HP’s impressive line-up, they still needed a “photographic” printer that was also speedy enough (and wide enough) to attract those in the banner, sign and display industry. The new Z6100 appears to meet that need with its “Double Swath” printing technology—yet it still might have the quality to satisfy the critical, photo “print sniffers” and fine artists. If this is the case, HP will have a great cross-over product with the Z6100.

Here is HP’s 4-page Data Sheet (1.7MB PDF) for the Designjet Z6100.

I do not have a manufacturer’s suggested retail price for the 60” and 42” models, but might have it later this week…

Posted by Royce Bair on 04/10 at 10:13 AM
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New HP Designjet Z6100 Printer series

I received this HP news release from Mary Poniatowski today:

On April 10, 2007, HP will announce a new family of printers for customers producing posters, banners, maps and fine art: the HP Designjet Z6100 Printer series.

This printer is fast!  It provides twice the performance of an HP Designjet 5500 printer, achieving amazing new speeds with outstanding accuracy.  This is possible due to HP technical breakthroughs such as the new HP Double Swath technology and the first ever Optical Media Advance Sensor. 

The new HP Designjet Z6100 Printer series provides exceptional color and fade resistance with eight HP Vivera pigment inks.  The printer delivers a wide color gamut with true neutral grays and produces prints that resist fading for one year in a window and 200 years or more when not placed in direct sunlight. This product will be ideal for photo and fine art customers with higher production needs.

The HP embedded spectrophotometer provides accurate color calibration to deliver unparalleled color consistency print-to-print and printer-to-printer.  The HP Easy Printer Care Tool also lets you easily navigate through color-management, printing and job-management. 

These printers are expected to begin shipping in late May and are available in both 42-inch and 60-inch models, with or without an Adobe PostScript RIP.

HP Photo and Fine Arts partners can expect to see the Designjet Z6100 added to the program as a sales based rebate.

I plan to provide more information tomorrow, as it is unveiled from HP…

Posted by Royce Bair on 04/09 at 07:43 AM
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Four Thirds standard

Seven companies now support the Four Thirds digital camera system open standard.

For high-resolution digital capture, most professional photographers have turned to either the Canon or Nikon digital camera systems, but a few pros, and an even a higher number of prosumers have turned to Olympus, who with Kodak, initiated a new digital system standard called Four Thirds. Since then, the number of companies to support the Four Thirds standard has rapidly risen to seven: Eastman Kodak, Fuji Photo Film, Leica (Digilux 3), Panasonic, Olympus, Sanyo, and Sigma.

All seven of these companies have come together to support a new open standard in image sensor size and lens mount, which means that any of the Four Thirds lenses made by any of these companies will fit and work on ANY of the other Four Thirds camera brand bodies. This is a major step in compatibility between brands! This means that if you like the new, 10 MP, Olympus E-400 camera (the world’s smallest and lightest D-SLR at only 375 grams), but you love Leica optics, you can now have both! It also means that your investment in digital equipment should now have a slower depreciation factor.

Unlike other digital camera systems that have been slowly adapted from our analog 35mm cameras, the Four Thirds standard has been developed for digital from the ground up. Over the years, the design of SLR cameras was like a secret art handed down in the family. Each manufacturer maintained its own standards and traditions. However, to facilitate faster development and innovation of the Four Thirds System, Olympus early on considered establishing it as an open standard.

Designers and engineers at Olympus felt that this was the opportunity to review the optimum size of the SLR camera, and to them, the OM-1 (introduced in 1972) had long been regarded as the original compact, lightweight SLR camera, the camera that first challenged the conventional wisdom of what an SLR should be. In the fall of 1999, Olympus engineers selected the 4/3-type image sensor as the basis for a new digital standard that would provide balance between the picture quality expected of SLR cameras and the compactness needed to ensure high mobility at the highest level. But it was not until June 2003 that the first Four Thirds-based SLR camera, the Olympus E-1 was announced.

The 4/3 Theory: A Four Thirds image sensor has an aspect ratio of 4:3, unlike the typical 35mm SLR style image sensor’s aspect ratio of 3:2—which mimics film. The diagonal size of the 4/3-type image sensor is about half that of a 35mm full frame sensor. This means that the focal distance required to obtain a given angle of view is half that needed for a 35mm film camera. As a result, the optical system can be made much smaller. Moreover, because the effective aperture can be reduced without reducing brightness, the Four thirds system makes it possible to design much brighter lenses.

The foundation for the high picture quality of the Four Thirds system is the lens mount, which is about twice the diameter of the image circle. This extra headroom allows much more freedom in lens design and ensures sharp, clear imaging performance. (By the way, Olympus has a lens mount adapter that allows old OM system lenses to work on the Four Thirds system mount!)

Benefits of Four Thirds System: The advantages of the Four Thirds system are now widely recognized around the world:

* 100% Digital Concept - Digital-dedicated design optimizes performance of the image sensor (the design and 4/3 ratio of the sensor allows for better optical performance, and at smaller sizes).
* High Mobility - Compact design maximizes camera mobility (cameras and lenses are often up to 1/2 the size and weight of regular 35mm digital cameras).
* Open Standard - Ensures expandability and compatibility of products from different manufacturers.

The complete case for the Four Thirds System Standard, which now has great momentum, is explain in a new Web site:

http://www.four-thirds.org/

This includes the Four Thirds “story”, a complete explanation of the “Standard” (and its benefits), the “Supporting” companies and their products (although we did not see all the lenses and camera bodies from Leica, Sanyo and Sigma listed here). While photographers by in large love the old 35mm 3/2 ratio, many are beginning to see the benefits of a new open 4/3 digital standard that has been pioneered by Olympus.

Posted by Royce Bair on 03/27 at 12:55 PM
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Dust Away!

20 ways to clean the image sensor of your digital camera.

While at the 2007 PMA trade show in Las Vegas, I ran into Curt Fargo at his “The Dust Patrol” booth. Although Curt and his associates’ main purpose was to market their new “D-SLR Brush”, Curt introduced me to a new Web site he has created to help demystify digital SLR sensor cleaning, and describes 20 methods to do it: http://www.CleaningDigitalCameras.com

What makes this site unique from all other places that sell sensor cleaning supplies is that their information appears to be very unbiased - they don’t offer information on only one method, but offer information on ALL major methods, and tell you the pros and cons of each method. In addition, Curt is a certified photographic consultant and a professional camera repairman. He has also enlisted the advise of Larry Lyells, Camera Repairs most published author. This is a GREAT resource, with plenty of how-to and make-it-yourself instructions!

I don’t mind giving a plug for Curt’s own invention, the “D-SLR Brush” that sells for $24.95. These fine-bristled nylon brushes (quality made in Germany) are about $75 less than the popular “Sensor Brush” brand. Both brush brands are energized to attract dust by blowing air through it, creating a static charge. This effect is called the triboelectric effect. This not only charges the brush but it helps dislodge and remove any previously captured dust particles still in the brush. With a freshly charged brush, you whisk ever so lightly across the sensor, and the charge on the soft bristles attracts the dust from the sensor onto the bristles leaving you with a clean sensor.

Using this proven method, most dust can be quickly and easily removed from the camera’s image sensor. Less than 5% of sensor dust attaches itself with moisture (or “Welded Dust"), which has to be removed by more time-consuming “wet methods” that Curt describes on his “CleaningDigitalCameras.com” site.

The “D-SLR Brush” and his preventative dust control “ChamberSwab” are sold on his “The Dust Patrol” Web site (http://www.TheDustPatrol.com).

Posted by Royce Bair on 03/23 at 11:51 AM
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Photobot - easiest digital picture correction

Photobot is the easiest digital picture correction software for your “significant other”, but it might even have some applications for the busy professional.

I was introduced to Photobot at the 2007 PMA show in Las Vegas, where it was slated as “The World’s first Zero-Click picture correction software!” The makers claim you can get amazing digital pictures without lifting a finger.

Intrigued, I took home a free 30-day trial CD-ROM and installed the software onto my wife’s PC, for two reasons: 1) The software is not targeted for professional photographers, but is marketed more for the amateur picture taker, and 2) because it won’t run on my Mac (only on Windows 2000 or XP systems).

Now, before you professional types get immediately turned off to Photobot, let me remind you of all those people who constantly bug you to fix THEIR digital images because you’re a “professional photographer”, and it’s so “easy” for YOU! Yeah, right. And the next thing you know, you’ve spent three hours correcting their images because the exposure and color are so bad, but your professional pride won’t let you stop until you get it perfect, and you swear you’ll never let yourself get talked into this again, then you turn right around and do it again for someone else next week.

Before this happens again, turn them onto Photobot and say, “Let me tell you about a less than $30 program that’ll do this for you, and it has a zero learning curve.” Or, you can use Photobot yourself and continue to look cool, but invest only the time it takes to burn a new CD for the corrected images.

I don’t want you making any rash recommendations, so let me assure you that Photobot can do what it claims. I was impressed. It really does not requires you to learn anything or do any clicking, and it will automatically 1) brighten and correct all your bad exposures, 2) give your pictures more vibrant and lifelike color, and 3) reduce any red-eye the camera has failed to correct.

Although Photobot is a brand new software product, it is actually a combination of three older pieces of software that have been integrated together. Tribeca Labs, the makers of Photobot, have taken their $49.00 Photoshop plug-in, Full Spectrum RGB, and added an average auto correction into Photobot. As a stand-alone product for professionals (running on Mac or PC), Full Spectrum RGB is the only technology that expands the spectral capabilities of digital cameras to reproduce all the colors of the visual spectrum, and won the 2006 DIMA Innovative Digital Product Award (http://www.fullspectrumrgb.com.com). You might want to add this product to your list of Photoshop plug-ins, and use their custom sliders for optimum color spectrum control.

Perfectly Clear by Athentech Imaging (http://www.athentech.com) is the second component that has been licensed and added to Photobot. Perfectly Clear applies the physics principles of light to correct the exposure of every picture. This is the same technology that many professional labs use to brighten dark images, and the software won the 2005 DIMA Innovative Digital Product Award.

Red Eye by FotoNation (http://www.fotonation.com) is the third component that has been added to Photobot. Red Eye is the industry leading red-eye removal technology with a success rate of approximately 70%-80% and an industry-best false positive rate of only about 1%. Red Eye is embedded in over 50 million high-end digital cameras. Whatever red-eye your digital camera fails to correct, Photobot almost always finds and fixes.

Here are a few before and after samples of how Photobot corrected some of our family snapshots. It easily corrected all the red-eye shots. It really is quite remarkable. Exposure correction was dead-on. Photobot does improve color vibrance, but on some images, a pro could do a little better with a custom slider control in Full Spectrum RGB’s stand-alone plug-in, or with other Photoshop controls, i.e. hue and saturation. Photobot was not smart enough to change the pictures I shot under orange-looking tungsten lighting to a more natural daylight balance, but I was pleased on most everything else. All images below, Copyright Linda and Royce Bair 2007:

For most images Photobot does a better job at preserving the highlights, while improving contrast, than you can do by manually setting the white point and changing the gamma in Photoshop’s Levels, or by using the auto exposure control in Levels or Curves.

Here’s an enlarged section of the Pika picture (a rodent that lives in the high alpine regions of North America) showing three different different methods of exposure correction, and Photobot wins, hands down.

All three images have the specular highlights on some of the whiskers as the brightest part of the image (value 255), but the lightest fur on the Pika’s neck is also starting to blow out to value 255 in some areas on the “Photoshop manual set white point” image, and is totally blow out on the “Photoshop auto exposure in ‘Curves’” image. Photobot has more accurately preserve the detail of these delicate highlights because it’s patented Perfectly Clear anti-clipping technology analyzes every pixel and compares how each relates to the total image.

The hardest part of running Photobot is installing the software, and even that was fairly easy. Photobot is made to run constantly in the background, looking for new digital image files that you’ve added to your hard drive, where upon it automatically finds and corrects them.

I recommend that you make one custom change when installing the software, and that is to designate a folder or directory that Photobot will only look for image files to correct, and where the user will place any new images for Photobot to correct. Why? Because Photobot will correct the original image file and overwrite it to the same file name. (Photobot does allow you to revert back to the original if you want that option.) For amateurs, I guess this isn’t a problem, because the new image is better than the old one, it’s just that I always like to preserve the original file in a separate place in case I need to fall back to it.

Whenever Photobot discovers new images to correct, a small window pops up on your screen, and you can see the software working in the background as it “wipes” across your images one-by-one to process and correct them. With some dark and underexposed images, it’s as if Photobot wipes them clean with new bright colors! Processing time on my wife’s computer (Athlon 64 3000 Plus 1.8GHz, running Window XP) was about 11 to 12 seconds per image.

Some pros may find little use for Photobot because it will not process RAW files, only JPEGs. However, for many personal projects, I’d love to let Photobot handle the correction. When Photobot corrects and overwrites the original JPEG file, it does it at about a Photoshop “8” compression quality. My Canon EOS 20D full-size (23 MB), fine-quality JPEG files are typically about 1.7 to 2.9 MB right out of the camera. After correcting these images and re-writing them, Photobot reduces them to a new JPEG file size of 350 to 750 KB. That may sound like an awful drop in quality, but close examination at 100% shows little visible image deterioration or artifacts.

PRO APPLICATIONS? Photobot could be useful for professionals. Remember how well Photobot protected the highlight detail in the Pika example? Few professional jobs have more delicate highlights than wedding photography. If you shoot weddings, you might consider setting you camera to shoot in RAW and also save a medium size JPEG image.  You can let Photobot process those JPEGs for proofing. Once the bride and groom have chosen their final enlargement images from those proofs, then manually process only those selected images from the RAW files—saving a ton of time and work. Even if you have a Photoshop Actions script that you like, you might want to give Photobot a try.

CHEAP IMAGE ARCHIVING. One reason Photobot may have in reducing the file size on the overwrite is to keep Internet file transfer times and storage space to a minimum. That’s important because Photobot has set up a Swiss Picture Bank to archive all your digital images. Photobot can automatically transfer your corrected files over the Internet to a Swiss bank where they will remain safe and accessible for generations to come. A free 3-month trial of their Swiss Picture Bank comes with Photobot. The execs at Photobot were still working out the pricing details when I called for more information, but they’re planning to offer 30-year archiving for as little as a penny an image!

FREE TRIAL COPY. Photobot is currently only $29.95. For more information on Photobot, and a free 10-day trial copy of the software, go to their web site at http://www.photobot.com.

Posted by Royce Bair on 03/15 at 03:36 PM
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Whacky, but cool

Whacky, But Cool New Products at PMA 2007…

These whacky, new products have nothing to do with the inkjet industry; however, every year I try to find something new, innovative and totally off-the-wall for my readers at the PMA (Photo Marketing Association) trade show, which this year was held in Las Vegas, March 8-11, 2007. This can be a difficult search, since each year more and more exhibitors show up who are trying to cash in on the success of the innovators that were popular the year or two before.

The number one copycat product seemed to be the custom or “personal photo book”, where you can submit your digital photos and they’ll make a “custom” designed photo book (usually from canned templates). It seemed like there were three or four booths devoted to this type of product down every aisle in this year’s show! My personal favorite is still Asuka Book (http://www.AsukaBook.com), which offers real custom design (your own in Photoshop) and great quality at very reasonable prices.

Despite the boredom, here are three innovative photo-related products, albeit a little whacky, that caught my eye:

Quik Pod - extendable, hand-held “tripod”: Quik Pod allows owners of point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders (up to 16 oz.) to take their own pictures (to include themselves in the scene)! The pod works has a built-in self image positioning mirror. You attach your camera or portable light to the universal tripod mount of the retracted Quik Pod (7.5"), then extend the pod to its full length of 18.5” to hold your camera or light above the crowds, reach into hard to see places, or just to point back at yourself to take your own picture. The Daily Herald reports, “Take a great picture of your family without your hairy arm showing.” The Quik Pod is $24.95 (http://www.QuikPod.com). A “pro” version for $29.95 adds a small tripod feet accessory (screws into the handle) that enables the Quik Pod to stand on its own.

ZIGView S2 Digital View Finder: The ZigView S2 ($479.00) was this year’s DIMA “Innovative Digital Product” winner. This digital view finder inserts into your SLR camera’s viewfinder and relays a real time image to it’s movable (315 degree rotation) LCD screen (2.5"), enabling photographers to have various angles for the best shooting environment. The viewfinder sensor and LCD display modules can be separated with accessory cables (over 21.5 meters) making remote monitoring and control possible. Note: Seculine’s Web site (http://www.secu-line.com) was still featuring last year’s SC-V100R model, and has not been updated with the new S2 model at the time of this writing.

WK-36 Electric Helicopter: This $349.95 Digitronics (http://www.digittronics.com) ready-to-fly, 6-channel, radio-controlled, electric helicopter can stay aloft for about six minutes on one charge from a 3-cell lithium battery. The chopper can carry up to a 1-pound payload, i.e. their $299.00, compact, (6 oz.) High Definition (720 x 480) DDV-6120A Digital Camcorder with motion stabilization, Panasonic’s CCD low light sensor, and a 3” TFT super wide LCD screen. MPEG 4 compression technology. SD memory card based recording. Supports up to 4GB size SD cards (up to 1 hour of HD video recording per GB). Camcorder also functions as a 12-megapixel (3796 X 3472) digital camera.

Posted by Royce Bair on 03/10 at 08:16 AM
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New Life For Fujifilm’s Velvia 50

In a pre-PMA news release on February 22, Fujifilm USA announced that it was re-introducing Fujichrome Velvia 50 for Professionals (RVP 50), a high color saturation, high contrast transparency film at the PMA 2007 Annual Convention and Trade Show in Las Vegas, NV.

Although this is an inkjet-related blog, one still has to capture an image before you can print it. And while I and many others have gone totally to digital image capture, there are still some who use film and were saddened when Fujifilm announced in the beginning of 2005 that they would discontinue making Velvia due to difficulties in procuring some of the key raw materials used to produce the product.

Velvia 50 has been a favorite among many pro shooters, particularly landscape and nature photographers, since its introduction in the mid-1980s. Some have called Velvia 50, “cartoon color” because it exaggerated the colors, especially greens. However, I for one, liked that skew of the world. Until digital capture came along, Velvia was the only film that gave me the vivid color and high saturation that I was looking to see in many of my photographs.

The company received many requests from photographers worldwide to restart manufacturing, as they had used Velvia for many years and consider it unmatched in terms of quality and character. Those requests were taken very seriously by the executives at Fujifilm.

“We are so pleased to respond to requests from our photographer customers in this way and we look forward to seeing the work they will produce with this wonderful new film,” said Christian Fridholm, Director of Marketing, Picture Taking, Imaging Division, Fujifilm USA.

Fujifilm claims that the characteristics of new Velvia 50 will mirror that of the previous Velvia, even though the company will be using some substitute raw materials and new manufacturing technologies. The initial shipments of the new Velvia 50 are scheduled for early summer 2007.

Posted by Royce Bair on 03/01 at 11:56 AM
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