Posted 11/05/09 at 01:30:00 PM by Mark Edward Soper

RAW mode, a feature of virtually all digital SLR cameras and an increasing number of high-end point-and-shoot cameras, enables your camera to capture all of the image data in your photographs in full quality without distortion caused by JPEG data compression. RAW files enable you to repair white balance and color temperature problems, solve exposure problems, and adjust color intensity and other settings far better than you can with JPEG files. Unfortunately, you must use software that supports RAW files to optimize your picture and export it to a format you can use for other purposes, such as JPEG or TIFF.

Thankfully, you don't need to spend a fortune on software to edit RAW images. Or be a hardcore digital photography buff, either. 

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Posted 11/04/09 at 08:16:12 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The Flickr API is nothing new, but the photo sharing site is now bringing it more front and center. Flickr has unveiled their new “App Garden” that provides a better interface for finding useful photo apps. The new page is more compact than the old API interface. Each app gets a thumbnail preview that links to an individual page. Here, users can tag, discuss, and favorite an app.

There are still a few missing features, though. Flickr is about sharing, but there’s no way to share a list of your apps with friends. It also doesn’t take advantage of Flickr’s friend activity feed to show off what apps you’re using. However, the recommendation system does allow users to recommend individual apps. If you’re a Flickr user, do you like the new interface?

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Posted 08/07/09 at 10:37:09 AM by Paul Lilly

Adobe has announced it is discontinuing its Photoshop Album Starter Edition software, which resides at the bottom of Adobe's image-editing products. No new product is taking its place, and instead Adobe is encouraging users to move their photos to the company's online Photoshop.com web portal.

"As part of our commitment to providing customers with a free photo-editing solution, we have created Photoshop.com, an exciting new online service that lets you upload, organize, edit, store (up to 2GB free), and share your photos," Adobe wrote in a note to its customers.

Then note went on to list steps for exporting photos from Photoshop Album Starter Edition to Photoshop.com, as well as asked customers to "consider an upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7," essentially a stripped-down version of Photoshop CSx  with a much lower price tag.

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Posted 08/06/09 at 12:54:14 PM by Paul Lilly

Maximum PC readers have long had the importance of maintaining backups beat into their heads, but apparently photo-hosting service isn't a subscriber to the magazine. How else do you explain losing thousands of user photos with no way to restore them?

Or at least that's the case if you believe a purportedly scorned user who claims to have had his Flickr account hacked and then terminated. According to Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and soon-to-be art student in Taipei, Taiwan, he woke up to discover three concerning emails in his inbox:

1. [redacted]@hotmail.com has been added to your account!
2. Your password has been changed!
3. Your account has been terminated!

After contacting the Yahoo-owned service about the security breach, Tepsic said he was told "it isn't possible to restore the content of the account." Flickr did offer to restore his screen name and URL, "but unfortunately the images, comments, and other content isn't recoverable."

There's a lot more to Tepsic's customer support nightmare, which you can read here, assuming you're not offended by big, bolded F-bombs.

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Posted 07/05/09 at 09:34:27 PM by Pulkit Chandna

While the world has been busy mourning Michael Jackson’s demise, spammers have been trying to exploit his death. Spammers are sending schmaltzy emails eulogizing the King of Pop. Under the garb of emotions is camouflaged some bad old malware.

“The e-mail, which claims to come from sarah@michaeljackson.com, says that the attached ZIP file contains secret songs and photos of Michael Jackson,” Sophos senior tech consultant Graham Cluley wrote about one such email in recent blog entry.

“However, the reality is that opening the attachment exposes you to infection - and if your computer is hit you will be spreading the worm onto other internet users. Besides spreading via e-mail, the malware is also capable of spreading as an Autorun component on USB memory sticks (an increasingly common trend for malware as use of these devices has become more and more popular).” If you find such an email in your mailbox, just beat it!

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Posted 12/25/08 at 09:02:01 AM by Norman Chan

It was a herculean task. Team Maximum PC at this year’s Comic-Con International consisted of only two people, and there was no way we could attend every packed panel at the event. So instead of bringing you movie and television panel reports you’ve probably already read on SlashFilm or AintitCoolNews, we wanted to be your eyes on the show floor. And that meant showing you what stood out most in the 500,000sq ft space of the main exhibit hall: the cosplayers. Our quest to document as many unabashed costumed geeks as we could find yielding 400 photographs of comic-book, anime, fantasy, science fiction, and film characters. We saw dozens of jokers and batmen, numerous video game-inspired outfits, and even steampunk-era Ghostbusters. The impressive level of creativity and enthusiasm that we saw in these cosplayers was an awesome reminder of why we love geek culture. We hope you can appreciate it as well. 

Click through for, yes, all four hundred photos -- each in thumbnail and full-rez formats. Can you name all of the characters?

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Posted 10/16/08 at 05:24:13 PM by Andy Salisbury

10 billion, that’s a pretty sizeable number. For the sake of this story, let’s see that number in its natural state: 10,000,000,000.

That’s the number of images that Facebook is now hosting, according to a post by engineer Doug Beaver on Facebook’s official blog. While this number might sound like it’s lost in the crowd of other photo-sharing sites, bear in mind that Flickr only hit 2 billion photos a little less than a year ago and Photobucket’s active ticker puts them at 6.2 billion at time of press.

Beaver’s post also listed some impressive stats on the amount of photos that Facebook is now handling. “To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups,” he said, “One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon.” They’re also receiving a staggering two to three terabytes of photos per day, and their photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second.

As monumental as this is, the hardware isn’t free. Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million in May to help cover the colossal costs of hosting all those photos, and it’s not evident that revenues will be level with server demands anytime soon.

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Posted 08/13/08 at 09:46:57 AM by Chris Moody

Just last February, we thought we saw the last of the famed Polaroid instant film, and the iconic instant camera. Those things introduced a generation to anonymous photo processing so you could take candid photos of family in embarrassing predicaments or those steamy photos of friends-with-benefits that were to soon become exfriends-with-drawbacks. Perverts everywhere looked back on Polaroid’s instant cameras with a sense of nostalgia.

Those old cameras just couldn’t complete with digital cameras and photo printers. The picture quality was terrible, it printed the picture no matter what (photos of the ground, foot, or fingers where common), and they were bulky. It was like having around a shoebox around your neck.

Still it seems there must be some section of the population that Polaroid thinks misses the ability for their camera to spit out actual photos. Wired reports that Polaroid is teaming up with UK magazine Amateur Photographer and will work out the details of a new Camera that will have a built in PoGo. MPC took a first look at the PoGo last month and was not very impressed. The only confirmed details are the size of the prints, the PoGo prints 2x3 photos where this new camera will print 4x3, the same size as the old analog cameras. No shaking required (not that the old ones really needed it either).

Do you need a camera that can spit out instant photos? Bad idea or good? Sound off below!

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