Lighten your photos without blowing out the highlights

If you have a picture with really dramatic lighting differences (say half the image is in sunlight, and the other in shadow), then with normal tools it's very hard to make the dark part visible without ruining the bright part. What you need is a way to selectively brighten the darkest part of the image. The newer versions of PhotoShop have a tool for this, but if you don't have that, there is a free alternative that you can use online which may work even better:

shadowilluminator

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX100

This $400 camera, like almost ever camera sold by Panasonic has image stabilization, but no optical view finder. Other important specs:

3.6X zoom lens, wide angle (28mm equiv), with quite blurry corners at wide angle

CIPA: 320 shots per charge.

size: 3.8 x 2.1 x 1.0 in. (0.2in longer than the SD850).

It looks like a reasonably nice camera, with a reasonable CIPA given it doesn't have a optical viewfinder. But like all the other wide angle cameras I've looked at, it has relatively poor optics at wide angle. Image stabilization is nice, but there are lots of other cameras which have this feature. Odly the camera doesn't support USB 2.0, so downloading all those 12 megapixel images is going to take forever.

DCRP review- mildly positive; they complain of high ISO noise, and the fact that it's kind of expense. Instead they suggest looking at a lower megapixel camera from Panasonic, such as the DMC-FX33 or DMC-FX55 instead.

Canon SD950 reviews

There are two new reviews of the SD850 from Canon.

PhotoBlog - positive review, with some good sample pix. They note that the biggest problem they saw was relatively high noise at ISO 400. The review has no discussion of edge blurriness or other lens distortion.


Steve's Digicams - positive review, but very short on details that can't be found in the press release. Steve claims minimal lens distortion and edge blurriness, but has no test pictures to back up his statement. Indeed, this real world shot from his review does show corner blurriness, though it's not an ideal shot to test for this.

Eliminate dead space in your photos

Here's a really cool online tool that lets you resize you photos by removing the repetitive or empty portions of the image - automatically! It's a lot of fun to play with and the resulting images look remarkably natural. You can also tell it to remove specific parts of the image as it resizes, which often doesn't look as natural, but still works remarkably well.

It's a flash program @ http://rsizr.com/

Fujifilm FinePix Z5fd

Lest you think I only follow Canon products, here is some info on a Fujifilm camera. Fujifilm has an interesting feature - they call it a "supperCCD", where super means super sensitive. The idea is that high ISO shots still look pretty good, in terms of noise level, reducing the need for image stabilization. How well does it work? Well, the camera does better than a typical compact at the same ISO, but from the test shots I have seen it does not appear to be as good as image stabilization in low light.

The Fujifilm FinePix Z5fd is much cheaper than the Canon cameras with IS, however - $165 at amazon. It's also 0.2in thiner than the SD850, at 3.6x2.2x0.8in. Compared to the SD850 the corner blur is much less at wide angle(compare 1 & 2), and the lens distortion is virtually nonexistent. But the deal breaker, for me, is that it has no optical viewfinder and the shots per charge (CIPA) is only 200. Canon's CIPA usually isn't much higher with LCD on, but will go up to 500 range with LCD off.

Here is Imaging Resource's review. Given the downsides to this camera I don't expect to collect more reviews.

A book for the Gimp

I've previously recommended the Gimp; a free alternative to PhotoShop that runs under most OSes. The only downside to the Gimp is it doesn't try to clone the PhotoShop interface, which means the learning curve is steeper than it could be. But there's a good book that can help with the learning curve, for much less than a copy of PhotoShop itself will set you back.

GIMP 2 for Photographers: $20 at amazon.

Book review here

Canon SD850 IS powershot - lowest safe price

It looks like the cheapest price for the SD850 is $280 (free shipping) from buy.com (you have to sign up for a credit card, for a $30 discount).

There are other sources, but all at suspiciously low prices which will likely evaporate if you don't purchase several high-prices accessories when they call you back to "confirm your order". You can always check epinions before you buy from a place with a too good to be true price - likely you'll find there is a reason why the price is $50 less than everybody else charges.