Channel 9 - Entries tagged with Photography

Mobile Photosynth Panorama App

Larry Larsen — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:35:56 GMT

The Photosynth team has put together a new application to create Photosynth panoramas on your mobile device. Photosynth panoramas are a little different from typical synths in that they are a single stitched image of a space, rather than a lot of individual images from different angles that are bound together in a explorable volumetric space.

Eric Bennett joined me at Vertical World to talk about how it works using Tony Ernst as our climbing shooter. You can read more about this release on the Photosynth blog, and see the Panorama that Eric created on Photosynth.net, you can also see the one Tony created. This new release is available now in the iTunes App Store with other platforms to follow.

TechFest 2011: Mobile Photography- Capture, process and View

Laura Foy — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:38:51 GMT

The mobile phone is becoming the most popular consumer camera. While the benefits are quite clear, the mobile scenario presents several challenges. It is not always easy to capture good photos. Image-processing tools can improve photos after capture, but there are few tools tailored to on-phone image manipulation. We present phone-based image enhancement tools that are tightly integrated with cloud services. Heavy computation is off-loaded to the cloud, which enables faster results without impacting the phone’s performance.

Click here for a deeper dive and the RIN (Rich Interactive Narrative).

MSR tackles image blur

Larry Larsen — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:29:21 GMT

Microsoft Research posted a page about some work they are doing around getting better images through a "deconvolution" algorithm that deblurs images through detecting movement in the accelerometers. What does this mean for the future? Could mean better images in a future phone, SLR's that run Windows Embedded, or better face to face chats with mobile devices.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Now Does Geotagging

Sarah Perez — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:34:00 GMT

Thanks to the recent refresh of the Windows Live Essentials beta, Windows Live Photo Gallery now supports geo-tagged photos via Bing Maps. Geo-tagging (adding location information to a photo) helps you see, on a map, where a particular photo was taken. By supporting geo-tags within Photo Gallery, you can optionally sort your photos by location within the application.

Also, thanks to the new feature that allows you to publish a series photos directly to Photosynth (Create menu –> More Tools –> Create a Photosynth), the geotagged option will allow the synth to be rendered and then placed on Bing Maps. Then all you would have to do to finish your synth is add a title, tags, and a description.

To get the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery which supports this feature, just head over to the Windows Live Essentials beta homepage here and hit the “download now” button.

(via the Bing team blog)

MSNBC Launches New Photoblog

Sarah Perez — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:28:00 GMT

MSNBC has just launched a new and improved photoblog (the one called “Photo Blog,” actually). The site is run by Robert Hood, who has been on MSNBC’s multimedia team since 1996 in addition to freelancing for The New York Times and the LA Times. His team is responsible for all the photography and video on MSNBC.com.

The blog itself features thought-provoking, interesting, beautiful or otherwise eye-catching photos from around the world. Each photo is accompanied by a short description and a link to a related news story elsewhere on MSNBC or a photo slideshow.

Posts are also tagged so you can browse more of that same genre. Registered users can leave comments. And at the bottom of the page, a social networking bar lets you share the blog via Facebook, Twitter and email.

More design tweaks and features are coming “in the near future” promises a quick post about the new site.

In the meantime, you can follow the site via RSS or email or simply go here: photoblog.msnbc.msn.com

New Technologies for Multi-Image Fusion

TechFest — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:05:00 GMT

As video and still cameras have become almost ubiquitous, people are taking increasingly more photographs and videos of the world around them. Often, the photographer's intent is to capture more than what can be seen in a single photograph, and he or she instead takes a large set of images or a video clip to capture a large scene or a moment that extends over time. One can combine these images to produce an output that improves the input images, such as creating an image with a large field of view, a panorama, or a composite image that takes the best parts of the image, a photo montage. But creating these results is still non-trivial for many users. One challenge is in creating large-scale panoramas, for which the capture and stitching times can be long. In addition, when using consumer-level point-and-shoot cameras and camera phones, artifacts such as motion blur appear. Another challenge is combining large image sets from photos or videos to produce results that use the best parts of the images to create an enhanced photograph. We will present several new technologies that advance the state of the art in these areas and create improved user experiences. For panorama generation, we will demonstrate: ICE 2.0. Stitching of panoramas from video. Generating sharp panoramas from blurry videos. For generating composites, we will demonstrate: Video to snapshots. De-noising and sharpening using lucky imaging.

Techfest: The Future of Looking Back

Larry Larsen — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:25:00 GMT

Coming out of Microsoft Research Cambridge we have a project that explores how we might view our past through photos and videos that we've collected. But this is more than just photo collecting and digital frames; it's is a look at the value people place on sets of digital data and why they are attached to the digital bits along with a look at the tools we can help create to let people creatively engage with them.

Techfest: The Future of Looking Back

Larry Larsen — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:56:00 GMT

New Technologies for Multi-Image Fusion

TechFest — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:59:00 GMT

OneAlbum

TechFest — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Today, my album refers to a collection of photos I have taken. But many photos relevant to me -- such as photos of me or my children—are in my friends' albums. OneAlbum automatically finds relevant photos in my friends' albums on social networks or in shared albums, brings them to my album, and shows them side-by-side with the photos I've taken. For example, if I was at a party, I'll see all photos from that party—those I've taken and those my friends took. The technology behind OneAlbum is a novel, unsupervised face-recognition algorithm. It analyzes the photos in my album to find automatically the faces of people I most care about, based on frequency of their appearance; no tagging is required. Then, using the social-network graph and other information, OneAlbum crawls my friend's albums looking for photos of people that interest me. The algorithm was tested on real large-scale albums including tens of thousands of photos and achieved accuracy rates as high as 90 percent.

How to Photosynth a Car

Larry Larsen — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:12:00 GMT

The North American International Auto Show started this week, and one of the things I'm sure we'd all like to see is incredible Photosynths of cars. But Photosynthing cars is one of the more difficult things to do. The lines and the details on the shape of the car that Photosynth would normally use for edge detection are often changed visually because of the gloss of the finish. Next time you're looking at a shiny car, notice how as you move around it the surface of the car almost morphs through colors and reflections.

The Photosynth team has put together a blog post to give you some tips on how best to shoot a car for a synth, inside and out. The quick answer is lots of photos and to focus around areas of detail like rims, grills, and decals if the car happens to have them. Full tips can be found here.

Seadragon.com Goes Live

Larry Larsen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:47:00 GMT

Huge images on the web just haven't been fun in the past. Between the downloading, the snapping from scaled to full-size, and navigating around, it's just not the experience that high def images should have. Well that's about to change. Using Seadragon, you can now point the web service to your massive image (hosted on your site or any number of services) and it will be create a Deep Zoom image that you can then share through email, Twitter, Facebook, or embed on a site.

Keep in mind you can use the Deep Zoom Composer to make your own Deep Zoom images locally if that's how you roll. Or you can use DeepZoomPix.com (until December 31st 2009) if you want a place to host your Deep Zoom images. You can also upload your big pictures to PhotoSynth, which will turn them into Deep Zoom images (and try to connect them, so not the preferred way to manage disparate images). But for large images that are already online, Seadragon.com is the perfect tool for creating a window to the larger image.

Seadragon.com Goes Live

Larry Larsen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:48:00 GMT

Huge images on the web just haven't been fun in the past. Between the downloading, the snapping from scaled to full-size, and navigating around, it's just not the experience that high def images should have. Well that's about to change. Using Seadragon, you can now point the web service to your massive image (hosted on your site or any number of services) and it will be create a Deep Zoom image that you can then share through email, Twitter, Facebook, or embed on a site. Seadragon.com runs on the CTP version of Windows Azure that's available to all of you today.

Keep in mind you can use the Deep Zoom Composer to make your own Deep Zoom images locally if that's how you roll. Or you can use DeepZoomPix.com (until December 31st 2009) if you want a place to host your Deep Zoom images. You can also upload your big pictures to PhotoSynth, which will turn them into Deep Zoom images (and try to connect them, so not the preferred way to manage disparate images). But for large images that are already online, Seadragon.com is the perfect tool for creating a window to the larger image.

Here's where to see the Seadragon in the screenshot. http://www.seadragon.com/view/6x

Fly Me To the Moon

Larry Larsen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:11:00 GMT

40 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin Jr. set down on the surface of the moon (with Michael Collins waiting up top) achieving the dream of billions of humans who came before them. Neil was the shutterbug of the mission and took a number great pictures despite the brutal conditions (moon dust is like talcum powder, try getting that off your lens with your thickest gloves on.)

What happens when you take some of the best images from the Apollo program and feed them into Photosynth? That's what I wanted to find out. Here is a Photosynth from images taken off from the Apollo 17 Command Module's 28th Revolution around the moon. After it loads, hold the 'CTRL' key to see the point cloud, Photosynth has created a 3D model from the images. If you press the 'a' key you can see the arc of the orbit from the side. These images are very high res so use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Now for Apollo 11. Before looking at these synths increase the Photosynth interface size ('f' key), you might want to put on some Major Tom or Dark Side of the Moon too. I spent hours looking at this synth after making it. It's an amazing way to explore man's greatest destination. I created some highlights to help you navigate around the really cool stuff. The first is a particularly synthy set of images. Next is the iconic footprint image, you can click on it to toggle to the before picture. Until I synthed these photos I didn't even know there was a picture of the surface where the first footprint would be. The next highlight is a view looking out of Eagle at the flag, and then Eagle from the outside. I highlighted an image that didn't map to any others that when zoomed in looks like a folded pair of sequined socks, no doubt part of the Moonwalker conspiracy theory.

I also made an Apollo 11 synth that is just 3D anaglyph images, you'll need some Red/Blue glasses. It's best viewed with grid view. Here are the 3D images from Apollo 12.

Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon, has the best pictures. By 17, mission planners have image stitching on the mind, there are hundreds of overlapping photos. For this synth I used 1022 images, a mixture of black and white and color. My machine crunched this synth all night long and by morning gave me this amazing collection.

Scroll down for a list of Photosynth keyboard shortcuts.

Apollo 11 Campsite

Apollo 12 Campsite

Apollo 17 Campsite

Apollo 11 3D Images

Apollo 12 3D Images

Apollo 17 - 28th Revolution

Photosynth Viewer Keyboard Shortcuts

Zooming and Neighbors

Scroll wheel	Scrolling the mouse wheel zooms you in or out. The zooming is centered around your current mouse position.
+ or -	Zoom in or out around the center of the window.
← or →	Move left or right to a neighboring photo, when one is available.
↑ or ↓	Move inwards or outwards to a neighboring photo, when one is available.
u or j	Move up or down to a neighboring photo, when one is available.
Tours and History

Spacebar	Go to next photo in the spatial tour.
Shift-spacebar	Go to next photo in alphabetical order by filename. (Depending on your camera, this is usually shooting order.)
. (period)	Go to next photo in alphabetical order by filename. (Depending on your camera, this is usually shooting order.)
, (comma)	Go to previous photo in alphabetical order by filename.
Z	Go to the last image you were on. (Like Back in a Web browser.)
Z	Undo z. (Like Forward in a Web browser.)
Fun with the Point Cloud

Ctrl	Holding the control key down temporarily hides all photos allowing you to see the point cloud in all its glory. Dragging a halo with the control button down lets you spin around the entire point cloud. Try it!
P	Switches among three modes: points, images, both.
Useful Shortcuts

Enter	Center the current image
F	Toggle full-screen
~	Toggle between 2D and 3D
M	Go to the next 3D group in the synth
Y	Toggles world-up verses image-up. This is useful when Photosynth has trouble working out which way is up.
Free Navigation (Only in 3D view)

A	Strafe left
D	Strafe right
W	Move forward
S	Move backward
E	Move up
C	Move down
L	Rotate left
‘	Rotate right
[	Rotate up
;	Rotate down

New Photosynth Features in June Update

Larry Larsen — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:27:00 GMT

The Photosynth team released their June update and it's looking better than ever. The site has had a design tweak, you'll now see a featured synth on the home page. The search results are much improved and you can sort your result set by popularity, date, author, and even synthy-ness.

One of the coolest updates is the ability to "highlight" the photos you want. In the image for this post, you can see the grouping of photos that make up this statue. A previous update made it so you can hover over the object and get arrows that allow you to dolly around the object. But what if there's a few really good pictures you want to point out? By highlighting these photos you'll see they show up on a right side rail. Try it out here, or here.

You can go back and choose highlight photos on any of your old synths. Just log in, browse to your synth, click the new "Edit Synth and Highlights" button. Now you can browse your synth, when you get to a picture you want to highlight, click the Add Highlight button. You can put in a title, caption, and change order of the highlights.

Microsoft's 92 Megapixel Camera

Larry Larsen — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:07:00 GMT

Today we announced a new larger format 92 megapixel camera for aerial photography. You may not have even known that Microsoft makes cameras, but this is how we get the really good quality from the Bird's Eye view on Live Maps. Stemming from an acquisition of Vexcel several years ago, the UltraCamLp is the latest in aerial photography. Whereas the previous UltraCamL was 64 megapixel, the UltraCamLp at 92 megapixels takes photos that are natively 11,704 x 7,920 pixels, making it the largest footprint medium format camera system for small aircraft.

Wait, you say, medium format? Does that mean there is a large format camera? Why yes, that would be the UltraCamXp coming in at a whopping 196 megapixels. The UltraCamLp will be in service in flying season 2010.

Advanced Image Editing in Windows Live Photo Gallery

Sarah Perez — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:18:00 GMT

The Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is a tool created by Microsoft Research which can be used to create panoramic images. It’s essentially the same technology that Windows Live Photo Gallery uses “under the hood” when you create panoramic photos in the software (just like Alexa does in the latest commercial – and lest you think these kids are far more tech savvy than you – I can assure you that the process is dead simple).

But unlike the panoramic technology that runs in WLPG, the ICE software provides a few extra features, too. The most important one is the orientation tool. With this, you can change the orientation of a photo to give the impression that a tilt/shift lens was used. For example:

You could also use a perspective projection instead of a cylindrical one with the tool. Example:

Or you could set the mid-point of a 360-degree panorama:

ICE also adds a variety of export options including Deep Zoom and HD View. Use ICE to export to either of these two options and it will generate a web page that handles viewing these images in a much more efficient manner (they tend to be very large images by default). For Deep Zoom photos, the web page will use Silverlight to allow for interactivity with the image. HD View is like Deep Zoom but also adds some extra affects – it can rewarp the panorama on the fly using a fish-eye lens, auto-exposure adjust for looking into those deep shadows of the panorama, and it will support wide-color-gamut monitors. HD View is still more experimental technology and will require a special plugin. You can get it here.

Add to Photo Gallery!

Now you can take this advanced ICE photo manipulation technology and integrate it into Windows Live Photo Gallery. Just download it and install it. You’ll then see a new menu item in the WLPG “Extras” menu:

To use ICE, simply select a group of images and then launch it using the new menu item.

(via Windows Live Photo & Video Blog)

Seadragon + GigaPan

Sarah Perez — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:22:00 GMT

You probably heard about GigaPan recently – maybe for the first time, if you weren’t already a photo enthusiast – thanks to this widely shared and discussed image from the Obama inauguration. The GigaPan technology creates high-res gigapixel panoramic images which can then be zoomed in and out on and explored. Recently, some folks have begun doing even more interesting things with the GigaPan technology – they’ve been combining it with Microsoft Seadragon.

Take, for example, Jason of Odyssey Expeditions, who created this Seadragon Ajax viewer for GigaPan images. It’s still being worked on, but it’s pretty cool. There’s also Daniel Gasienica’s pipeline for loading up GigaPan images into the new Seadragon Mobile iPhone app. Just enter http://gigapan-mobile.appspot.com/feed/ as an RSS feed in the Seadragon Mobile app to see his GigaPan images – one being David Bergman’s Obama inauguration photo, of course.

(via dragonosticism)

CES 2009: Keep your digital photo frame fresh with Windows Live FrameIt

Nic Fillingham — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:42:00 GMT

Last Christmas Santa Claus brought me a digital photo frame. It was one of the models that displays photos from an SD card that you slot into the base of the frame. I had a spare SD card lying around so I put it into my PC and transferred some photos over from a recent holiday and then put the frame on a bookshelf.
12 months later and the frame still has the same photos repeating on an endless loop... sure I could pull out the SD card and put some new photos on there but it would be MUCH easier if I could just log into a web service and tell the frame to pull photos from my Flickr account, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Live Mesh,.. maybe even display the latest weather or news headlines? Imagine that,....
...Enter Windows Live FrameIt

Polaroid Lives on in Windows Live Writer

Sarah Perez — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:17:00 GMT

A lot of people were sad to hear that Polaroid planned to stop manufacturing their instant film this year. Now, as we’re only months away from the final retail stocks being completely sold out, we have to accept that we’ve finally reached the end of an era in photography. For folks like myself and others born before 1980 (and even some born since), Polaroid pictures were a big part of the family photo opps. They covered my corkboard bulletin boards in the 80’s and 90’s and even made their way into the family photo album on many occasions. But since the debut of digital camera, sales of Polaroid’s instant film slowed down to the point that it no longer made financial sense for the company to continue to manufacture the film. Well, at least the Polaroid can live on in a way, thanks to Windows Live Writer. When you insert a photo into Live Writer, you can choose “Instant Photo” from the border options available. That gives the photo the appearance of a Polaroid picture. No, you can’t shake it…but it’s all we’ve got left. Long live our blogged Polaroids!

Photokina 2008 - Drew Gardner shows us the 60MP P 65+

Nic Fillingham — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Renowned British photographer Drew Gardner was at Photokina 2008 this year helping demonstrate the 60.5 mega pixel, Phase One P 65+ digital back.
Phase One is a Danish company that specializes in high-end, medium format cameras, digital backs and RAW processing software.
For those of you (like me) unfamiliar with the term digital back, Wikipedia tells us that it is "a device which attaches to the back of a camera in place of a film holder and contains an electronic image sensor. This lets cameras which were designed to use film take digital photographs".
The sensor on the P 65+ is absolutely mammoth, and comes with a price tag to match, but as Drew explains (and shows us) the results are both spectacular and well worth it.

Photokina 2008 - Seitz 6x17 Digital, 160 Million Pixel Camera

Nic Fillingham — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:11:00 GMT

One second,... That's the time it takes for the Seitz 6x17 Digital camera to capture 160 Million Pixels!

We checked out the Seitz booth at Photokina 2008 and got the man himself to give us a demo of this monster slit-scan panoramic camera, the largest and fastest in its class.

If you like the idea of medium format panoramic photography but don't have a spare 25,000 Euros you might want to check out Microsoft Image Composite Editor.

Photokina 2008 - Minox Spy Cameras

Nic Fillingham — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:33:00 GMT

The Channel 10 cameras were in Cologne, Germany last month for Photokina 2008 and on display was the latest and greatest in digital photography and imaging products and technologies.
One of the companies that caught my eye was Minox - manufacturer of the original miniature spy camera - who had a new line of covert picture taking devices that look like they've come straight out of Q's laboratory.
Check out Minox.com for more info

Straighten Up Your Photos With Live Photo Gallery

Sarah Perez — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:52:00 GMT

If you’ve ever taken a snapshot in a hurry, then you know that those pictures can occasionally end up blurry, uncentered, and crooked. A good camera can help you take clearer, crisper action shots and a little cropping action can fixed the un-entered shots, but what about those photos that end up crooked? Even cropping a slightly sideways pic won’t fix that problem. However, with the new beta version of Windows Live Photo Gallery, there is a solution for crooked photos.

The new Live Photo Gallery actually has a built-in “Straighten Photo” feature. To use this feature, select your photo and click on the “Fix” button in the top toolbar. Then, just click the “Straighten Photo” option. Your picture will automatically straighten itself out! And if you need to fine-tune the adjustment, you can optionally use the slider to adjust the angle. Just move the slider to the right to rotate the picture clockwise and move it to the left for counter-clockwise. The grid that appears can help you align your photo perfectly.

Here’s an example of both the before and after (see below).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

(Thanks to Arwa Tyebkhan for this tip…and example photos!)

Photosynth + Windows Live Photo Gallery

Sarah Perez — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Martha Rotter recently discovered a nifty feature in the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery. Apparently, if you have the Photosynth software installed on your PC, the first option under the new “Extras” menu in Photo Gallery will be “Create a Photosynth.” Once selected, you can then just navigate through your photo collections within Photo Gallery to locate and select the photos you want to be a part of the synth. After you have all the photos selected, you can just create a photosynth from right there in Photo Gallery. That’s some nice integration!

If you haven’t tried Photosynth yet, give it a shot! This amazing application lets you stitch your pics together to create panoramic images like you wouldn’t believe. Laura has a great instructional video to help you get started: check it out.