The Lightroom "early adopter" discount ends on April 30. For customers in the US, that means the price jumps from $199 to $299 on May 1. The early adopter program in Canada and UK also ends today, with the UK price increasing from £125 to £175 (ex VAT).

Lightroom is available for both Mac and Windows, and is an outstanding photo manager that provides an easy workflow from upload to output. It's a bargin at $199, so if you've been thinking about making the move, go over to the Adobe Store before the offer ends.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story

I was browsing Strobist this morning and discovered what he termed as the coolest free white background ever. Photographer Mike Schellenberger had figured out that by opening up a standard ice chest, such as a Coleman, turning it on its side, and placing small objects inside, you could use it for a photo background for product shots. It's actually very cool (oops!~) and worth a peek.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story

ExpoDisc Custom White Balance -- Simply Better Color. Simply Better Pictures. Visit www.expodisc.com

Digital SLR shooters have several advantages over their comrades who use point and shoot compacts. But the cross that every DSLR photographer must bear is sensor dust. Unless you never change your lens, at some point you will have to deal with this problem.

Ben Long has gathered some helpful information over at Complete Digital Photography. He points to an excellent feature he wrote over at Creative Pro, plus offer lots of other goodies too such as video on cleaning techniques.

Ron Galbraith also touches on some of the new devices available to help identify and battle dust in his post about the Sensor Loupe.

There's plenty of good information in these articles. And if you haven't been thinking about sensor dust at all, you might want to investigate a little. It could save you lots of post production work up the road.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story

Nearly every digital compact these days records movies. But... when's the last time you took advantage of that capability? Here's a little incentive.

You can record movies with your digicam, then move the best of them to your iPod to share with others. It's really simple. You'll need QuickTime Pro, which is a $29 download from Apple (Mac or Windows version). Open your digicam movie in QuickTime Pro, choose File > Export... In the Export popup menu, choose "Movie to iPod." Click Save.

Now all you have to do is drag the iPod movie to iTunes and sync your iPod. You now have home movies with you on the go.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story

You can add geocodes to your existing photos with a nifty new Mac application called HoudahGeo. What's interesting about HoudahGeo, is that if you have a GPS device, you can provide a track log file from the receiver and have the application add the data to your photos. What's really helpful though, is that you can add the geocoding yourself with a user-friendly interface that requires you only to point to a location on a provided map.

I tested HoudahGeo by having it add geodata to a handful of pictures I have, then I opened the images in iPhoto and looked at their EXIF data in the Get Info box. Sure enough, the latitude and longitude information was there in Get Info.

You can download a trial version right now, and if you like it, can buy for $24.95.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story

Add Magic to Your Slideshows -- FotoMagico presentations are so amazing that your audience will be asking how you did it.

Like many digitally curious photographers in the early 1990s, I tried my hand at Kodak Photo CDs. I couldn't afford an expensive film scanner at the time, so I would have Kodak scan my negatives as part of the film finishing process. I would receive back from the lab the prints, negatives, and yes, a CD with high resolution scans of my images.

Now, 13 years later, I'm looking at that stack of CDs in my studio and thinking that I should import my pictures into an Aperture library. After all, who knows how long those discs will last?

The first thing I discovered is that Aperture can't import directly from a Kodak Photo CD. The encoding was proprietary, and Aperture can't read the file format. "Rats!" I thought. But then I remembered that iPhoto could once read those discs. I gave it a try, and sure enough, iPhoto imported the "16-base" versions of the images on the Kodak Photo CD. The resolution was a decent 3072 x 2048 with a file size around 7 MBs. Not bad, even by today's standards. There was no useful metadata to speak of, but I could fix that later in iPhoto or Aperture. I put the Photo CD images in a iPhoto custom album.

I then opened Aperture, selected File > Import > Images... and pointed to my iPhoto Library folder. Aperture (in its infinite wisdom) reads the custom albums you create in iPhoto, and it allows you to import pictures organized by album. I chose the iPhoto album that I had created for the Kodak Photo CD, renamed those awful Kodak file names with Custom Name with Counter, added some metadata, and clicked Import.

I've now safely relocated all of my Kodak Photo CDs into my Aperture Library for my 1990 images. That wasn't so bad after all...

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story, Kodak Photo CD

CS3 users as well as Elements 4.01 for Mac and Elements 5.0 for Windows have a new Camera Raw plug-in available for download. The latest version supports the Panasonic FZ-8, which is a camera that I've favorably reviewed.

For more information about the Camera Raw 4.0 update, you can read about the Mac version or the Windows version on the Adobe site. Mac users can also read how to install the plug-in on their systems.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story

Join Derrick Story for a Digital Photography Field Trip in Orlando Florida on May 11. And don't miss his sessions on Camera Raw and Photoshop Lightroom. CRE8 Conference - May 9-11, 2007

I spotted this in my Software Update. Here's the scoop directly from Apple...

Aperture 1.5.3 addresses issues related to overall reliability and performance in a number of areas, including:

• Generation of thumbnails for adjusted images
• Entering and exiting Full Screen mode
• Working with large sets of keywords in the Keywords HUD
• Restoring from a vault

Among the specific issues that have been addressed:

• Previews now update properly when images are sent to an external editor.
• Leaf Aptus 22 and Aptus 75 images are now imported with the correct orientation.
• When folders are imported as projects, the folder structure is now correctly preserved when identically named subfolders are included in the hierarchy.
• Reconnecting referenced images that have been externally edited now works more reliably.
• Setting the ColorSync profile in the Aperture Print dialog now correctly suppresses color management settings in the Mac OS X Print dialog.

I have this theory that as my Aperture and Lightroom libraries grow in size, so will portable hard drives to house them. I've just moved up from 120 GB portables to 160 GB models to accommodate my burgeoning photo collections.

Now, Toshiba has provided me with a glimpse of the future with its just announced 200 GB USB 2.0 portable drive that includes back up software for Mac and Windows. The software works in concert with the drive providing one-button back up. This could be especially handy for those who aren't using Aperture or Lightroom and don't have built-in photo management back up solutions.

The Toshiba drive also features shock mounting for durability on the road, and includes a 4-foot USB cable. You can buy the drive directly from Toshiba for $210.

Personally, I prefer FireWire drives. They just seem to work slightly better with my Macs. But this Toshiba drive is alluring. And if you get one, please send me mail with feedback.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story

For years, the first thing I told photographers about Photoshop was to avoid the Brightness/Contrast adjustment. Your images would fare much better using Levels or Curves. But Photoshop CS3 has changed that. Brightness/Contrast now behaves like an intelligent tool.

The new version actually compresses highlights and shadows instead of clipping them. This is a tremendous difference that you can test for yourself. If you have the beta version of CS3, open an picture, then go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast...

Play around with the sliders and watch what happens to your photo. Now, click the Use Legacy box and make the same adjustments. The resulting image will look much worse than your first effort with the box unchecked - I guarantee it. The Use Legacy box enables the old algorithm that most of us avoided.

You can learn more about this improved tool by reading the latest dekeBytes that walks you through the process of using the new Brightness/Contrast. What will they think of next?

Technorati Tags: digital photography, The Digital Story