Digital Camera News and Reviews

I often photograph several hundred pictures every day and sometimes all the photographing can produce a duplicate image. Duplicate images take space on my harddisk and slows down browsing through my image collection.

A company called Bolide Software has made the program Image Comparer that can help you with this problem. The program is a duplicate image finder and it is able to scan your entire image collection to find any duplicates. It will also suggest which image that is best and then you can choose which to delete.
Image Comparer supports search for RAW, JPEG, J2K, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF, TGA and other types of image files.

This program seems like a very helpful tool, especially if you have a big collection of pictures.

The program Silkypix Developer Studio is a program used for converting RAW-files and is now available in version 3.0.
Among the updates in version 3.0 are support for cameras like the DSLR’s Canon Digital Rebel XSi / EOS 450D, Pentax K20D and Sony A350. The new version of Silkypix Developer Studio also includes several improvements for digital printing.
Trial versions of Silkypix Developer Studio 3.0 for both Windows and Mac can be downloaded here. The full version costs $149.

The free photo and image editing tool Paint.NET, is now available in version 3.30. The new version of Paint.NET makes it easier for programmers to further develop the program, including plugins.
Here are some of the other updates:
-It is now possible to save PNG-files in both 8-bit and 24-bit color depths and BMP-files in 8-bit color depth.
-New fragment blur effect
-Polar inversion distortion effect has been enhanced
-Lots of errors in the previous version has been fixed

Read more about the changes here and Paint.NET 3.30 can be downloaded here. The photo editing tool is available for Windows XP, Server 2003, Server 2008 and Vista.

Adobe has released updates for Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4. The updates fixes some issues with the EXIF time date field of images and problems with artifacts in Olympus JPEG files when exported.
The latest version of Adobe Lightroom can be download here and the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw can be downloaded here.


From the Adobe blog:
The Lightroom 1.4.1 and Camera Raw 4.4.1 updates have been posted to the following locations: Lightroom(Mac, Win), Camera Raw(Mac, Win). The updates provide all of the changes included in the original Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4 releases but also include corrections for issues described below and in previous blog posts. The Camera Raw plug-in will also be available later this evening via the Adobe Update Manager and the Lightroom update can be located by choosing ‘Check for Updates…’ under the Help menu. The Lightroom and Camera Raw team apologize for any inconveniences caused by the issues presented in the initial updates

Lightroom

* Lightroom 1.4 incorrectly modified the EXIF time date field of images that had a metadata update applied. This incorrect modification does not appear in Lightroom or Bridge and is only viewable through third party EXIF tools. This error has been corrected in Lightroom 1.4.1 and all files in a Lightroom catalog that have been incorrectly modified will be corrected on their next metadata update. (Metadata can be updated by selecting the files in the Library grid view and choosing Command or CTRL + S to save and update the metadata.)
* Olympus JPEG files could render incorrectly in Lightroom 1.4, displaying an artifact in the exported file.
* Any conversion to DNG in Lightroom 1.4 (Windows Only) would cause the DNG file to become unreadable by Lightroom’s Develop Module or Camera Raw 4.4 in Photoshop. The issue has been corrected and files can be converted to DNG again in order to resolve the issue for existing files. Returning to the original native raw files is not necessary. The affected DNG files can be selected and converted again using the DNG Converter 4.4.1 available at www.adobe.com/dng/. This process is not required but recommended to ensure that a correct validation value is stored within the DNG files.
* Lightroom 1.4 provided degraded import performance relative to Lightroom 1.3.

Camera Raw

* Camera Raw 4.4 incorrectly modified the EXIF time date field of images that were saved as TIFF or JPEG files from the Camera Raw dialog. This has been corrected in Camera Raw 4.4.1
* Olympus JPEG files could render incorrectly in Camera Raw 4.4, displaying an artifact in the exported file.