As the crow flies

  

On-line Photo Editors

The ability to do things on the web is expanding all the time and on-line photo editors are more or less coming of age now. They may not have all the features of Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro (or even GIMP) but they probably have most of the things you are likely to want to use, albeit just occasionally. Here are three of the better free ones.

PixIr, this is a comprehensive photo editor created in flash. so you need a flash plug-in to use it. Whilst it does cover a range of handy photo manipulation tools it is probably the filters that will appeal to most.

Picnik, is available to edit photos within Flickr, it is really easy to follow and less like the current range of photo edit software with their incomprehensible toolbars. Picnik has tabs that are more like wizards and pull down pick list (just graphics options). The frames and and stickers (stick on clip art) are probably the most fun. 

PiZap, is also easy to use and as it rates itself creativity wacky and the worlds EASIST Free onLine Photo editor. There are not as many features but it definitely for fun.

 

All these offer easy upload to a number of social networks, like Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket … etc. All have an optional upgrade or pro membership option so you can store your work online and/or get more editing options.

Gay your life must be

Zooming around

Trying to display wide panoramas on my tiny blog post space has always a disappointment up till now.

That was until I tried out the Microsoft’s  Live Labs tool Sea Dragon, which combines several new technologies to progressively retrieve large amounts of data using a fast, seamless, zoom based interface. Amazingly it works with all types of content, from wall-sized displays to cell phones, regardless of the amount of data or the bandwidth of the network.

Its pretty intuitive just click on the mouse and start moving around, the wheel will zoom you in, or use the plus and minus buttons

Still waiting for spring

How green is your vine?

When you remove the risk, you remove the challenge. When you remove the challenge, you wither on the vine.

A bit of a clean up

I’ve recently got a Western Digital My Book 1 terabyte USB drive, I like it, it was easy to install, I just had to reformat to use NTFS (It is distributed with FAT32 presumably for lowest level compatibility)and decided to move my photo archive to it. A terabyte is a lot of space, my collection only took up 207 GB, 125,820 photos. The trouble is I already knew my archive collection had been polluted a bit, with more than a few duplicates. Finding them by hand in such a large collection was not a task I was looking forward to.

Finding Duplicates with Picasa

After I’d moved my files, it took a while, I pointed picasa to watch the new folders on My Book drive, that took a while to “index” my photos. I thought I’d try out the picasa duplicate finder (its under Tools\Experimental\Show Duplicate files). I learnt I have duplicates in 683 folders. The bad news was unless the duplicates where in the same folder or adjacent folders (which very few where) you don’t get to see the duplicates. So I would suggest anyone still wanting to use this features, does so with extreme caution (after running a backup). Time for a rethink.

Duplicate Cleaner

Next I looked for a specialist duplicate file finder utility on the net, there are lots. I tried a few but the one I liked is freeware and called Duplicate Cleaner by Digital Volcano. I also does a good job with music collections. Basically it does what the name suggests it runs some fair deep searches, with intelligent ways to filter and direct the searches. Duplicates (or more of the same file) are group together and the tab displaying those groups has a useful image preview. What makes this more useful than the others I reviewed is it ability to match content, using Digital Volcano’s own MD5 hash code (a kind of file finger print) instead of just file names. The  bit I really liked best was that you have a choice to deleted to the recycle bin, moved into an archive elsewhere, or replaced with hardlinks (to the original). You can even save (& reload) the duplicates file list as a .csv format.
I now know that I had 934 photo duplicates. I first moved them to a new location, backed them up to DVD and deleted them. Daunting task over!

Leisurely Pace

For PhotoFriday's topic Vehicle

Pivot Collections

Microsoft’s Live Labs have been doing some more neat things with sea dragon (the software engine behind photosythn). There latest experiment is called Pivot and it tries to address how you might interact with massive amounts of data, and especially pictures. It is out on a limited beta release and you need an invite to try it out (you can find access codes at the end of this post) and it is well worth a look now. My head is already spinning with the possibilities of creating my own pivot collections.

What are Collections

In a technical sense collections are just a large group of images (the must be in deep zoom format for sea dragon) with an XML schema. Ok too much detail. Collections are a grouping of images (or text segments) that are in someway grouped into similar items. All the images come from the web, but the searching and zooming is remarkably fast. There can be several levels of grouping, so hierarchies are easy to represent and they can link onto other websites. This is controllable by the person creating the collection. For now there are only a few example collections and be warned they are very USA-centric but looking at them is the best way to understand the excitement.

Browsing a Collection

The real power of pivot is really in the hands of the viewer. You really need to see this for yourself. For example I looked at the 2009 IUCN Red List of endangered species, and there are close to 3000 species. So I fist looked at birds then limited that to Australasia , and wow there are a lot of Australian birds on the list. The big shock was when I sorted them by by Order, suddenly i saw the group of birds I was regularly photographing, the seabirds were disproportionally high in terms of red list species. It is a little hard to describe the flow or you query in a text document with few screen captures but you can zoon in and out with the mouse as well as interact with the collection structure (a list of categories over on the right hand side of the screen). For The record the most endangered Australia species is the orange bellied parrot, no news there but my little friends the hooded plovers are there on the near threatened list.

Access Code

When I requested my invite I got an access code good for 10 downloads and I have already used 1. So all you need to do is be one of the next nine to download pivot and enter this code.
63EA 2482 730D 80C9
If you miss out, don’t stress, just follow the need an invite button on the download page.

Three

Hooded Plovers [Thinornis rubricolliss]

These little guys are having a tough time breeding on the Victorian coast at the moment. But you can follow them on twitter & facebook.

This time of year, breeding season, you normally only see pairs.

For PhotoFriday's Topic Three

tagging people

One of the most significant feature in Picasa 3.5 is the tools to recognize and tag people. It is essentially and expansion of the people tagging introduced into Picasa web Albums. The magic to its inclusion in Picasa 3.5 is that it will scan your collection of photos looking for individual faces, then group these photo so that similar faces are together. each group cab easily be identified by clicking on the add a name below the photo resenting that group and you have created an album for that person. Picasa will also look in gmail for contact details and add them to the album.

 

Once you have tagged a few people picasa will endeavour to add new faces to that album, if the match is only tentative you see a couple of conform icon under the tentative photo. Just click on the green plus to include of the red X to remove the photo from that person’s album.

Once enough photos are tagged the people button, pops up a person oriented search panel on the right hand side of the scene, which includes a handy thumbnail index of people. Uploading photos to your web album can even notify the people in the photos if you have their email addresses in their contact details. Fortunately people setting are not open to the public unless you allow such access.

It isn’t just picasa that had got on the people tagging band wagon. Flickr now has a new people feature. It is not as much gee-whiz fun as the picasa face recogniser and you have to manually identify your contacts in your photos. Ok that’s not exactly true because Your flickr friends can also manually identify themselves in your photos. Its basically fully public unless you opt for restriction on who can see or insert people tags.

Being able to tag & index your photos by the people in them is a truely great benefit, but some of that benefit may become a two edge sword, if all the family details or an embarrassing moment become named (& shamed) in public.

as the moon watches

Hunted n(unidentified) & hunter (wedge tailed eagle) depart followed by an oppurtunistic crow (hoping to be a scavanger) as the moon watches on. Almost a fairy-tale, but6 insure of the message

Bronzed aussies

 
A pair of Sooty Oystercatchers take in the last rays of the sun

The image is in the detail

 
My eye again, ok its actually the other one, but this time rendered in text rather than as a photomosaic. This is truely a case where the image is in the detail (click on it and take a look!)

For PhotoFridays topic is in the detail

Returning to HDRi

The very lightest and darkest parts of an image can often be difficult for a digital camera to capture. Especially if the scene has strong contrast in the lighting, or perhaps looking directly at the sun. The technical reason is that most digital cameras only have a limited dynamic range (the way in which it captures the lightest value to the darkest). When the scene has a wider range of lighting the camera light meter is forced to select the range that it will best try to expose. If it choose to expose for the shadow (as you have pointed the camera there) the lightest parts get over exposed. Point at the darkest areas will leave the shadows dark and without detail.

 

	This series was taken using Bracketing with 0.5 steps in EV

The first way to overcome the dynamic range limitation of your camera is to take a series or bracketted exposure setting (ie with different EV values) Like the set above and hope that at least one of them will turn out Ok! Trouble is the image with the best sky has the land mass in detail-less shadow and the one showing detail of the beach has the sky bleached out.

The technique know as HDRi (which I have mentioned before) lets you combine each of these separate exposures and make up a new image that contains the detail from the extended tonal range. In this case I have used Dynamic Photo and tone mapping to match the range of the human eye. And now I have a photo that looks like the scene I was trying to take.

HDR Abercrombie Creek

hdri abercrombie creek
Originally uploaded by imageo

Basically I'm just testing how the flickr blog this button work now. Well it still seems to work much the same. Your still have to go into You/ Your Account/ Personal Information/ Extending Flickr/ Your Blogs to be able to change the format & layout. Still tedious and not exactly user friendly. So it would still easier to go into the all sizes menu, select the size you want and cut & paste the HTML link into your blog.

Geotagging with Google Maps (vs Flickr)

One of the new features in Picasa 3.5, is geotagging directly via google maps. You where previously able to geotag via google earth, and you still can. To test this I choose this photo of a monument in the main street of Leura, in the Blue Mountains, as it was something I could easily see in the google map hybrid image. Geotagging in Picasa no longer requires looking for a separate function among the tools and opions. Just select the photo (or photos in album mode) you want to locate. Then press the places button, it down on the lower right of the picasa window. A google map is displayed in the places widow that pops up. Simply navigate to where the photo was taken. This can be using the map zoom and panning controls, or type in an address, or location name to the search box at the bottom of this places window. Using the hybrid or satelite display option you can get street level detail and I could easily find the place I took my picture of the monument. Now you just need to click on the green “map pin” marker button and drag it to the location where you took the photo. Click on that position and click on the OK button on the pop window, with a thumbnail of your photos. That’s it. So, within the accuracy of how google maps are mapped onto the geoid , which is a whole different story, I am fairly certain these cooridnates are fairly reliable. They also get nicely embededed in my photos EXIF data.

If you geotag several photos in your album, you can get a view of where they were taken by also having the places panel open as you view the album view open. I must admit I was a little disappointed there where not more ways to retrieve photos using geotags, maybe that will come. OK, there is a green map pin at the top of the Picasa window that retrieved all geotagged photos, but your can still only see them an album at a time.

Next I wanted to compare geotagging the same photo with flickr. I was pleasantly surpised that the hybrid abd satellite images know in yahoo maps is now more accurate that last time I looked. But the best scale representation I could get (you can see the kilometerr scale on the bottem left of my screen capture) is no where near as detailed as the google map equivalent, but I could strret the main street and guess about half way along. So maybe I will be within about 30 meters. Once you have save the location, your main photo display page will show a taken in location down under additional information of the right hand side.

I wanted to check the location accuracy but do you know what? You can’t see the actual coordinates for things you geotag in flickr, you can just see them on a map. So I still don’t really have a good comparison of accuracy. It is at the retrieving end that he difference in flickr win out. You can get a map of all your geotagged photos, explore the world or just for nearby photo by others, use the flickr api, or even via third party gadget & widgets (like mine, down on the right hand side of this blog).

By the way if your upload a photo to flickr, that is already geotagged in picasa, it is automatically give the map button.

Noumenian Dawn

 
Two photos stitched using autostitch

PhotoFriday topic dawn

Joiner inspired Wallpaper

This panorama is in the style of a David Hockney"Joiner",I liked the blue sunny sky with a few puffy clouds so I made this collage to the size to be my screen wallpaper (I have a collection of other wallpaper on flickr where they can be downloaded for free).

"Cubism was total-vision: it was about two eyes and the way we see things. Photography had the flaw of being one-eyed... My joke was that all ordinary photographs are taken by a one-eyed frozen man!" ...David Hockney

Hockney explored the multi-image collage as a way to express three artistic elements which a single photograph cannot have, namely layered time, space and story.


The image below is the equivalent formally autostitched panorama.

Backlit in the full sun