For those of you digital photography enthusiasts who use Aperture, here's a little bit of info on how I deal with going out of town with my laptop, but wanting to do the "real work" on my desktop when I get home. It turns out that if you are careful …

I didn't realize the Blendtec guys would do this, but it's a very cute advertisement, especially for a tech-savvy camera, like the new Olympus, which has been getting rave reviews. Watch as fearless blender, Tom Dickson, discovers there's something more to blending than destruction.

With Apple having announced some new machines with really nice price points within the last week, I've been asked by some friends what my suggestions would be for copying the data to a new machine and removing data from the old one. Here, I'll try to put forth my current …

Microsoft announced at the PMA 07 conference the beta release of their new image file format HD Photo. The company says that it creates smaller file sizes, while producing better output than JPEG and can offer lossless and lossy image compression while retaining full dynamic range and color gamut data …

Admittedly, you're not going to be seeing this thing in use for the next SuperBowl, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are hoping that it will enable them to get pictures of the Higgs Boson particle (a key element in the Standard Model of particle physics). According to an article …

Apple's Aperture product page now states that upgrades to the Universal Binary version of the product (released in November) will be available for free from software update instead of for $49 with a DVD distribution, as originally announced at MacWorld earlier this month. Thanks to MacFixIt for the pointer. Final …

Well, we stood in line for 1.5 hours and we are stuck in the overflow seating area for the Stevenote. Click through for details. iPod tuner/remote combo - small and allows you listen to FM on your iPod for $49. premier of new iTunes/iPod ad 14M iPods sold …

I can't wait to get my hands on this at the Apple Store. Apple's announced that they've begun shipping Aperture, their new professional photo handling package. I've been waiting to see it in the stores before actually purchasing it, and now they're shipping it, so it shouldn't be long now …

MacWorld has an excerpt of an article from MDJ about Adobe's attempt to take the confusion out of the raw formats from various digital cameras by creating a standard. The proposed standard, called DNG (for Digital Negative) is an add-on to the TIFF and TIFF-EP formats that Adobe owns (courtesy …

It may just be $50, and not $6M, but Apple's upgrade to iPhoto works as promised, it is bigger (handles larger libraries), stronger (does a bunch more stuff, like photo sharing), and faster---oh, so much faster! So, if you have a lot of photos (or if you will have a …

So, you want a high resolution photo of Bryce Canyon? Here it is. May Lyons of Tawbaware (he appears to make mostly digital camera support software) has created what is believed to be the largest stitched image ever created. Weighing in at just over a gigapixel, this image required almost …

A thread on ArsTechnica places the Dual 2.0GHz G5 in the number one spot of tested machines running Adobe PhotoShop with a combined score of 547. This beats out its nearest competitor, the Dual Xeon 3GHz with a score of 488 and an 3.2GHz (800Mhz bus) Pentium 4 …

The final paper session at SIGGRAPH 2003 was on Meshes. Frankly, I don't know if I will do this set of talks justice, as I took every few notes through most of them, partially because the speakers were getting a little dry and partially because my brain was completely saturated …

The Dynamics section contained a number of papers on dealing with rigid and soft body dynamics. Because most of the papers deals with the math involved in simulating physics for these mechanisms, I won't provide a lot of detail, but there were a couple of talks that were particularly interesting …

The Design and Depiction papers contained some very different applications, from creating effective assembly instructions to automatic magazine and web layout and finally two methods for creating effective non-photorealistic renderings. Designing Step By Step Assembly Instructions This paper was an interesting collaboration between cognitive psychologists and computer graphics researchers. The …

I came in half way through this paper session, because I had started the day in Fluids and Smoke. The two papers that I witnessed in this session concentrated on lighting and reflections in human tissues and hair, and both had some interesting insights. Image-based Skin Color Simulation by Extracting …

The last day of SIGGRAPH 2003 (Thursday) was the only day during the week that forced paper-goers to choose between multiple sets of papers. The first and last sessions provided this problem, giving way to five paper write-ups with a few fewer papers each than the previous days. As usual …

Since I've got a DVD version of the 2003 Electronic Theater presentation, I figured I'd do a showing of it before I leave to go to the Canyon. The plan is to do the showing next Sunday (8/10) afternoon at 5pm. Please RSVP if you are interested in coming …

This paper session seemed to be a bit of a catch-all, covering everything from a new UI for editing 3D objects to machine-created architecture and then finally the simulation of complex environments with texture depth maps. Twister: A Space Warp Operator for the Two-Handed Editing of 3D Objects Twister is …

There were four papers presented on points at the conference, each of which dealt with handling large numbers of points or re-sampling polygonal data for representation with points. Considering the use of large scanned data sets, this area of study is very important to current practice in film. Combining Edges …