Adobe just released it’s latest offering called Adobe – Photoshop Express. Currently in a public beta, this Flash based offering lets a user maintain an online “photbucket”. It combines this with Photoshop’s award winning editing features. Most of the common corrections like red-eye removal, contrast, exposure and brightness adjustments etc are available. Also you have a decent bevy of special effects like sepia, black and white, pop colors etc. In short everything that an ordinary everyday photographer would need.

Having given it a little test run, I found that it actually looks, feels and works with same general Photoshop goodness that most users have come to expect of the desktop software. Some of the effects are pretty impressive, like the “pop-color” effect I used to bring out the red in the above screen shot.

The software service offers the average user approximately 2GB of space to store photos. An subscription based service for more space is in the works. As of now the service can only process JPG images, however who knows maybe in the future more formats may be supported. Lastly, it comes at the amazing price tag of zero (insert relevant currency here). It’s the perfect thing for the average photographer wanting Photoshop like capabilities in processing his images, but not willing to shell out the big bucks for it. (or he could just use Gimp )

Adobe’s move in the online space might also serve as harbinger of things to come in the future. I would expect more such “software as a service” offerings to be available, as we move to a more wired and internet driven world.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Photography, Photoshop Express

Went to the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) for this fabulous exhibition titled “The Painted Photograph: Painted, Poised and of the Moment”. I have to thank my good pal Arun for telling me about this exhibition, otherwise I might have missed an opportunity to see some great pictures. The ground floor displayed photographs by Cartier-Bresson. This floor had some striking photographs by Cartier-Bresson which were selected by a host of writers. My personal favorites include a picture of women in Kashmir and a shot of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In the picture Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie look very depressed, though in reality the two of them are quite happy and successful. Goes to show how appearances can be deceptive I guess. Though the one picture of his that stuck in mind was the very Star Trekish Chinese eunuch from the last days of the Chinese courts. That chap could definitely give Spock a run for his pointy ears.

The top two floors were quite disappointing actually, with pictures of Nony Singh’s children and very narcissistic self portraits by Umrao Singh Sher-gil. But then the first floor more than made up for it.

The first floor featured the work of Pablo Bartholomew , one of India’s famous photo journalists. The exhibit titled “Outside In – A Tale of Three Cities“, features a very voyeuristic view into his life in Mumbai and Delhi in the 70′s and 80′s. The photographs capture the mood and the style of the era very nicely. His subjects range from close friends to mundane objects of daily life. Included are surreal pictures of streets in Delhi , the coastline of Mumbai, taxi’s, college rock shows etc. From smoke laden rooms to guys and gals dancing to 70′s music in bell bottoms, he captures it all in gorgeous and vivid black and white film.

Of course the subject of some his pictures is the hauntingly beautiful Pooh. For some reason, the manner in which he has captured her on film simply increases her allure, makes her something of an enigmatic beauty.

Looking at his pictures, I kind of realized that while fashions and styles might have changed along with our cityscapes, I guess to a large extent we are still quite the same underneath. Sure our topics of discussion, places that we meet up at might be different, but when we take all that away, what remains is the same urge to belong – Man the social animal.

For those of you who want to catch the exhibition, it will be on till the 26th of March from 11:00 am- 6:00 pm (Monday’s closed) at the NGMA (opp. the Museum).

Technorati Tags: Photography, Mumbai, Pablo Batholomew, Cartier-Bresson, NGMA

Technorati Tags: Reviews, digital, DSLR, , Photography, Olympus, E-420

As promised, pictures from the festival here.

Technorati tags: Kala Ghoda Festival, Photography, 2008

I’ve been a regular here since the past few years, and make it a point to catch at least one evening of the festival. Every time I’ve come across some unique thing or the other. This year too there were quite a few surprises.

Just before the entrance, was a huge area largely dedicated to cars and play areas and workshops for kids. There was a stall displaying models of the electric car Reva. One could also take a spin round the block in one of the test drive models. You also had a large Papier-mâché horse, along with huge balloons and ferris wheel made of bicycles. Besides this, there were also specially decorated cars, with spray paint , faux fur etc on display.

When you enter Rampart Row (the street where most of the action takes place), you first come across a huge art installation called “Mosquito” which features a sculpture of a man with wings and one long proboscis like nose. One both sides of the road are art installations and stalls. These range from stalls selling handicrafts to the delicious food from Bombay Blue. The art installations feature topical urban issues. There was even one featuring photographs clicked by blind photographers.

Towards the middle of the road, lies the stage and facing amphitheater. The stage was host to a dance competition as well as exhibition of traditional Indian and Tibetan dances. At the end of the road, just before the Lion Gate entrance to the Naval Dockyard, was a stop where you could get on an electric golf cart like vehicle that would ferry you to the next location – Horniman Circle, where the various music concerts were held.

I sat through a concert by some college band called Chaotic Mess and a very nice Latin Jazz concert by Latin Amigos there. The pond there had the same set of ducks I had seen the last time I went there. I also had a peek at St.Thomas Cathedral, which is almost opposite the garden. The cathedral has some amazing stained glass, and should be a delight to visit some other time.

The festival is definitely worth spending some time at, so if you are in Mumbai and have some time free, head over to Kala Ghoda and have a great time.

P.S. Will post a link to the pictures soon.

Technorati Tags: Kala Ghoda Festival, 2008, Kala Ghoda

So here is a list of software that just does this on Linux:

1. FSpot
   This is a full featured photo management software for the gnome desktop environment. It supports JPEG, RAW, TIFF, GIF among 16 other formats. You can transfer your photographs from a storage device like a hard disk, memory card, USB stick or your camera. F-SPot lets you tag the images, organize them and even provides a time line for images added. F-Spot also doubles up as quick editor for those small fixes. It features a versioning system so that your original photos are always untouched. And you can even export the images directly on to Flickr, Picasa Web, Gallery, or Original
2. GPhoto
   gPhoto2 is a free, redistributable, ready to use set of digital camera software applications for Unix-like systems, written by a whole team of dedicated volunteers around the world. It supports more than 900 cameras. You can use this to transfer photos from your camera to the Linux box using this.
3. Gimp
   GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. The latest version, Gimp 2.4 has a lot of specialized tools for correcting barrel distortion, doing perspective transformations etc. The application has come a long way from its humble beginnings and is by far the most preferred open source alternative to Photoshop. Most of the features that you would need in normal photo adjustments like contrast corrections, tones and levels etc. are present.
4. Exposure Blend
   This plugin for Gimp lets you combine two or more exposures to get an HDR image. Its a pretty handy plugin to have around. For a detailed tutorial on how to use this plugin click here.
5. UFRaw
   Gimp does not have out of the box RAW support, and so you will need additional plugins to process RAW images.The Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate RAW images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads RAW images using Dave Coffin’s raw conversion utility – DCRaw. UFRaw supports color management workflow based on Little CMS, allowing the user to apply ICC color profiles.
6. Rawstudio
   An alternative to using a plugin is to use a stand alone application like Rawstudio. Rawstudio is an open-source program to read and manipulate RAW images from most digital cameras. It has a graphical user interface, so you can simply open a RAW file and experiment with the controls to see how they effect the image. The interface is quite intuitive to use and has simple controls.

This pretty much covers everything that I think is needed to get up and running on Linux. If I have missed anything please feel free to comment and add to the list.

Technorati Tags: Photography, Linux, Gimp, UFRAW, Rawstudio, FSPot, digital, digital darkroom

At the lotus pond, the usual little Grebes were happily fishing in the pond. Walking up the hill me and my dad were lucky to hear some peacocks calling out to each other. Along the pat, we also spotted a butterfly that closely resembled a dry leaf when it closed its wings!. But the highlight of the little walk was when on the way back we spotted two well fed Langurs on the trees above. To date I haven’t seen Langurs in Aarey, so this was an unusual first for me.

It was quite nice to have walk through nature after almost a month of being cooped up in a classroom

Technorati Tags : Aarey, nature, photography

After much googling, I managed to get this free software called Digital Photo Recovery from Art Plus. It worked like a charm, and I was able to recover all my pictures from the card. Don’t know what I would have done without this software, thanks Art plus for making great software.

Technorati Tags: Photography, XD picture card, Digital Photo Recovery, Art Plus