Hackszine.com: Photography Archives

Archive: Photography

Page 2 of 2 << 1 2

October 23, 2007

Secret Photoshop shortcuts

WebDesignerWall has a big list of undocumented Photoshop shortcuts that you might find useful. Most notable are scroll wheel zooming by holding down Cmd+Opt, scroll wheel document panning by holding Cmd (or Cmd+Ctrl to toggle between left/right and up/down) and, my new favorite, moving a selection by holding the spacebar while dragging. The latter lets you reposition the top-left location of the marquee while you are still making it, which is about as useful as it comes when you are trying to select something to the exact pixel.

Photoshop Secret Shortcuts - Link

October 7, 2007

Recycle a mouse into a camera shutter release

Using an old mouse and a 3/32" stereo jack, Dave Schlier hacked together a nice little shutter release for many Pentax and Canon cameras. One mouse button is used to trigger the half-pressed autofocus mode, and the other triggers the shutter to take a photo.

It will work on Pentax and some Cannon cameras that use a 2.5mm (3/32") stereo monopug that use the middle and inner pins as separate contacts and the outer (large) pin as common.
Supplies: 3/32" stereo jack (solder connections), 3 or 4 wire cable (I used phone wire), old 2-button mouse.

It's a fun way to make use of an old mouse. With the right connector and some slight adjustments, you should be able to adjust this to work with any camera that uses this type of remote shutter release.

Mouse remote shutter release - [via] Link

September 25, 2007

Using the Wii Remote to correct perspective in digital photos

Daniel M. German found a way to automate perspective correction and projection adjustments for his wide angle photography. He does this by using a Wiimote to record the pitch and roll of the camera at the time a photo is taken. This information can then be fed directly into panotools, instead of manually entering control lines and processing the images to calculate these tilt values after the fact.

I modified an open source DarwiinRemote to record inclination. It happens that if you keep the WiiR in a stationary state, its three accelerometers can be used as two inclinometers. Fortunately most of the time, when one takes a handheld photo, one keeps the camera steady. Steady enough to read the inclination of the WiiR.
I also modified the driver to record the reading from the accelometers, the estimated inclinations, and the timestamp. I would then use the timestamp to match the images from the camera to the readings from the WiiR.

This is a cool idea. I would not be surprized to find high end cameras internally recording and stamping this information into photographs in the near future. A lot of consumer cameras already support panoramic stitching, so with digital accelerometers and tilt sensors being as cheap as they are, why not internally support adjustments like perspective correction or projection remapping?

Using the Wii Remote to correct perspective - Link

September 18, 2007

Open Source Seam Carving

For those of you who didn't catch our previous post about seam carving, it's a smart image resizing algorithm, invented by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan. Where you would normally have to choose between cropping or squeezing/stretching an image to change its aspect ratio, the seam carving method will attempt to find horizontal or vertical paths within the image that can be removed without altering "important" parts of the image, such as people or other objects that would look funny if squished.

There are now a couple of open source Actionscript implementations as well as a GIMP plugin that enable you to "liquid rescale" your photos.

I'm thinking that with a few simple tweaks, you could hack one of the Flash versions load a user-specified JPG or PNG and provide an interface for adjusting the image. It'd just be a simple matter of doing a screen capture to pull the result back into the image editor of your choice.

There's also a Photoshop plugin that claims to do this, but it's closed source, unavailable for macs, and the test version doesn't work for images larger than 640x480. To that I say, "Phtfphpht," but I've included a link in case you are interested. To be fair, it's probably cool... I'm just more excited to see the open source versions surfacing.

References:
GIMP Liquid Rescale (lqr) plugin - Link
Content-aware image resizing in Actionscript (Joa Ebert's original source) - Link
Seam carving in Actionscript (Mario Klingemann's optimizations) - Link
Pictual: Photoshop plugin for smart resizing - Link
Seam carving: content-aware image resizing - Link

August 21, 2007

Seam carving: content-aware image resizing

Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan have presented the coolest digital image effect I have ever seen. "Seam carving" allows an image to be resized non-uniformly, so you can change the height to width ratio in the image without cropping, but also without distorting important features in the image (such as faces).

If I understood the demonstration correctly, the algorithm detects horizontal and vertical paths which span the whole image and have the least gradient magnitude along the span. When resizing an image, the pixels along these seams are stretched or removed, leaving the rest of the image untouched. Areas of an image that absolutely need to be preserved can be manually excluded, and the seam generating function will negotiate paths around those pixels.

You need to watch the video to really see this in action, but the technique can also be used to remove whole portions of an image without perceptible artifacts. Essentially, you could cut an Ex out of your old vacation photos and the rest of the image would distort itself, unnoticeably, to fill in the gap.

Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing - [via] Video: Link PDF: Link
High-res copy of the above video @ Dr. Ariel Shamir's site - Link

June 10, 2007

HOWTO mount a camera to your bike

I've seen a couple gorgeous films lately of couriers flying through traffic, narrowly avoiding cars and pedestrians, all filmed from a bicyclist's perspective (example).

Most of these are shot from helmet cam, but there's something cool about the perspective from a fixed bike mount as well. The latter is really easy to do on the cheap, and there are a couple Instructables that'll show you how to build a secure mount for your video camera with just a buck or two or hardware.

Video Camera Mount for Bicycle - Link
Bicycle Camera Mount for under $1 - Link

May 13, 2007

Take digital photos through a microscope

There's a way to take photos through a microscope, telescope, or binoculars with a regular digital camera and no special lense adapter. The trick is to use the macro mode on your camera. With a bit of positioning and focus tweaking, you should be able to get a clear photo. If you use a tripod with your camera, you can set it up once and continue taking additional shots - Link.

May 5, 2007

String Tripod

Taking photographs at a slow shutter speed can really benefit from the camera stabilization afforded by a tripod, but often times lugging around and setting up a tripod isn't so practical. The string tripod is an old photographer's trick that will give you a reasonable amount of stabilization, while still allowing you quite a bit of rotational freedom of movement.

Oh, and it costs under $5 to make, sets up quickly, and will easily fit in your camera bag.

String Tripod - Link.

April 13, 2007

Gimp Running Natively in OS X

A lot of progress has been made toward porting the GTK+ library to OS X, and recently intructions went up on how to build Gimp for native OS X operation. That's right, without X11 getting in your way. It's still not ready for prime time, but I'm really excited about where it's going. If you're a programmer and have some brain cycles to spare, this might be a fun project to contribute to.

How To Compile Gimp for Mac OS X -[via] Link.

April 11, 2007

AppleScripts for Adjusting iPhoto Dates

If you've ever forgotten to set your camera's clock or adjust the time for daylight savings time, you probably know what a nuisance it is to manually correct your photo's timestamps. Joe Maller addressed this problem by writing a few AppleScripts that allow you to shift and reset dates and times for album photos in iPhoto. This could save you a lot of time if you need to correct the dates on several photos at once. After you've installed the tools, you just select images within iPhoto and run the script from the menu bar.

Joe's iPhoto AppleScripts -Link.

March 26, 2007

Picasa Data API

Take a peek at Google's new GData API for Picasa. In addition to providing RSS feeds for albums, tagged photos and user comments, you can use the API to add and remove photos, albums, comments and tags from your own applications. This might be a nice way to manage image data (and offload image storage) within a web app.

Resources:

March 15, 2007

Roll Your Own Flickr

Custom Flickr

Paul Bausch has finished rolling his own Flickr substitute and just wrapped up his first round of extra features, including support for EXIF data, syndication, and tagging.

If you're just joining us, Paul's been rewriting his personal photoblogging and software from scratch and documenting the process. Here are all the posts in his OTFG (Off the Flickr Grid) series:

When the Flickr community is all abuzz at the news of six layout options for Pro users, it's inspiring to see someone designing his own infinitely flexible system from the ground up to suit his own needs. As a die-hard Flickr user, I'm already jealous of Paul's black background.

Related:

Flickr Hacks

March 14, 2007

Control a Nikon Camera from Your Computer

I thought putting my camera on a tripod and using the timed shot was a good trick for gadget close-ups, but this is tons more fun. Nikon's Camera Control Pro ($79, 30 day trial available) lets you remotely control a compatible camera from your computer. I can't figure out how to do a preview, but it's still really helpful; it lets you do a lot more than just trigger the shutter. You have access to most of the configurable features of the camera.

Are there similar tools out there for other cameras? Let us know in the comments.

Nikon Camera Control Pro Trial Posted - Link
Nikon Updates Camera Control Pro to v1.3.0 - Link

Related:

Digital Photography Hacks

February 23, 2007

Skitch It

Skitch

Plasq, the company that brought us the fun and useful Comic Life that now ships with all new Macs, recently released a new product in private beta. Skitch is:

a refreshingly simple application that lets you easily resize your photos, jot down a quick sketch, take a lightning fast screen capture and share images online...

This looks like a lot of fun. I tried registering for their mailing list but encountered some trouble with their captcha. Anyone have any personal experiences to report? I can't wait to get my hands on it.

(Via Merlin, who appears to be one of the early beta testers)

February 9, 2007

Turn Off iPhoto's Auto-Import

Make Magazine 0002
It freaks me out when any application does any thing automatically when media is inserted - a DVD, CD, camera, storage card - it doesn't matter, I don't like it. Perhaps it's because every auto-run type thing on my PCs were just attempts to install some weird software to do something awful. So, if you don't want iPhoto to automatically open when you insert a card or camera on your Mac just open up "Image Capture" and disable it in the preferences. I figured this would be in iPhoto, but it's not, so perhaps this is helpful for someone, or the Google.