Attempting to capture the different ranges you see with your eyes on camera is quite difficult. For the most part, digital cameras attempt to accurately capture an image but sometimes details are lost in the shadows or in the highlights. In high dynamic range (HDR) photography multiple photographs of varying exposures are taken of the same subject and later combined to produce a photo with a greater dynamic range than if only 1 photo was taken.
There are many ways to go about creating an HDR image and if you're an Aperture user, the folks at Creaceed may have a solution for you with their Hydra 1.5.3 plug-in. While currently wearing the beta badge, Hydra allows Aperture users to select up to 4 photos to create their HDR image and also offers the option to auto align your selected images, allowing you to take photos without the use of a tripod. This is an important feature, as when you are overlaying multiple photos it's important that they all line up perfectly. Controls are well laid out and results are fast and impressive.
While producing a quality HDR image is more than just having the right software, Hydra attempts to ease the post production work allowing you to concentrate on the most important part... what's happening through the lens.
If you're no Photoshop guru, but you have fun applying different novelty filters to your pictures, you might like Dumpr. It's web-based, very simple to use, and has a pretty decent library of effects: sketch, Lomo, reflection and jigsaw puzzle, to name a few. You can upload photos from your own hard drive, or paste in URLs from some of the major photo hosting services, including Flickr and MySpace.
Dumpr isn't really meant for advanced users, although buying a Pro account will get you access to a few more effects. Despite the ... interesting ... choice of name, Dumpr is pretty fun to play with, and it's great for quickly doing things to photos that would take a while for a novice to learn in Photoshop. It also has a few Flickr-specific features, like searching for pictures similar to your favorites, and rating Flickr photos. We're still not sure about telling our friends we're going to Dumpr some photos of them, though.
How do you do decide which photosharing site to go with? If free is your criteria, there are certainly many options to choose from. Most free photo sharing sites are ad supported and come with a certain GB capacity limit. If you upgrade to a pro account, which can run anywhere from $20-$25 per year, there are typically no limits and no advertisements.
We took a look at the most popular photosharing sites' features and did a comparison to help you decide which photo site is best suited for your needs. We compared Flickr, Photobucket and Zooomr and then test drove each of the sites to see how well they did. Check out our unscientific findings after the jump.
Does the world really need another photo sharing website? Maybe, if that site is Photie.com. Photie's design is strikingly simple. It's easy to navigate, signup is a snap, and there are plenty of interesting photos to check out on the front page. The main attraction here, though, is the ability to upload photos of any size.
Photie doesn't have all the pro features that sites like Flickr and Smugmug offer, but there are plenty of users out there who think of those as frills. A free service with a nice, clean design and no cap on file sizes looks pretty good if you don't want to deal with stuff like social networks, mobile uploads, and signup fees. This is just uploading and tagging, like nature intended it.
The site is still in beta, so we'll keep an eye on it and see how it evolves. Frankly, we're hoping it stays with the friendly "less-complicated-than-Flickr, much-classier-than-ImageShack model". Before you start with the "not another photo site!" comments, give it a look. We think some users will find it's just what they needed.
Warning: Because Photie displays recently-uploaded photos on the front page, you might not want to click through at work. There was nothing controversial up front when we took the screenshot above, but it's best to be careful. Thanks to readers Alex and Todd for catching this.
Digital photography has become a way of life for lots and lots of web users and there is no shortage of services out there to host your digital pictures (Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, Windows Live Spaces, not to mention social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace). As more and more day-to-day computing tasks move to the cloud, the market really needs a solid, web-based editing suite. With Adobe Photoshop Express, which launched its beta today, we get just that.
We look at a lot of web software and services, but have to say that Photoshop Express one of the slickest web-based applications for photos that we have ever used. Although services in the past like Picasa or Picnik have offered some basic photo editing capabilities, what Photoshop Express is doing is in a completely different league. Like many other photo services, Photoshop Express will let you share and display your online photos; each user account is given 2 GB of space to store and share photos (this is free, additional space and extra features will be available in the future, pricing TBD) and you can embed links to the Photoshop Express hosted galleries or direct-embed individual images.
HDRwalls offers a welcome change from hum-drum single color desktop backgrounds or the limited selection of built-in OS wallpapers. They currently have about 500 High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos in resolutions ranging from 800x600 to 1920x1200. They also provide sizes for iPod Touch, PSP, Blackberry, and iPhone.
HDR photography is the result of increasing the dynamic range of a photo through tone mapping and combining multiple exposures. The HDR group on Flickr has great examples and offers tips to create your own HDR images (and maybe even use them as desktop backgrounds).
Are you a digital photographer? Like to bring your camera wherever you go and snap like crazy? Why not enter the world of buying and selling your stock photos?
Lucky Oliver is a community of photographers, designers and artists who all buy and sell stock photos. The images and illustrations in Lucky Oliver are high enough quality for both web and print work, and are pretty affordable and starting at only $1.00. For people interested in submitting images to the image portfolio, there is a photographer's guide on what type of images the team is looking to sell. Photographers have to prove themselves to get started in the system by submitting their three best photos. When they are in the system though, royalties can be range from $0.30 to over $12.50 per use.
No more stealing images from Google for projects, this is an affordable way to get the job done without breaking the bank on high priced stock photos.
Forget about all the text on Digg, this is all about pretty pictures. Picli is a social image voting gallery. Their system closely resembles your typical Digg / netscape / Reddit social voting system, with a twist, it's for pictures only. This interesting gallery twist to the social voting scene provides a constantly changing image gallery for showcasing creative work.
Users sign up for a free account and submit photos to be ranked and voted up. Users can also vote and comment on the photos of others, getting them up higher on the Picli list, and sharing insights and opinions. There are some great pieces of artwork displayed here, including fractal outputs, drawings, photography, and image manipulations.
Flickr is making our holidays a little cheerier with some bonuses for Pro and Free members alike. The biggest bonus is for Pro users, of course: Beginning this month all Pro account will have totally unlimited storage and bandwidth. While probably only a fraction of Pro users were bumping up against the old 2GB-per-month upload limit, who can argue with unlimited? Free users have cause to celebrate, too: The per-month upload limit for free accounts has been bumped up to 100MB, a 500% increase over the previous 20MB limit. A Pro account still costs $24.95 per year, and a free account clearly still costs nada. For those "Giving the Gift of Flickr," Flickr also has a new system that lets you buy a Pro account activation code that will work for both existing Flickr users and those just signing up, and they also have a cute little card you can print out to stuff in that special someone's stocking.
But wait, there's more! The Flickr crew have blessed us with a cute holiday easter egg: If you add a note to one of your photos with the text "ho ho ho hat" or "ho ho ho beard," Flickr will add a cute santa hat or beard to the photo wherever you put the note. You can see it in action on the dashing Merlin Mann. Lovely!
Looking to update your desktop wallpaper? Having trouble finding anything good. Ask Wallpapr to find something for you. It's a nice, simple Ajax app that will spit out a bunch of photo wallpapers from Flickr's Wallpapers pool on command. Just enter a tag (e.g. clouds, skyline, food, whatever you're into) and click on 20, 40, or 100 to get that many thumbnails, or leave the tag field blank and get a nice variety. Every photo in the pool is at least 1024x768, and clicking on a thumbnail will take you straight to the photo download page. Excellent!
Looking for a cooler way to display your photos? Check out Photofront. Photofront bills itself as "a better frontend for your photos," and it's pretty slick. It integrates with your Flickr account and has a surprising array of features and options. You can choose from among several layouts and transition styles, including a neat "photo drop" effect, and there's an optional "adaptive background" feature that will change the background around each photo to match the photo itself. You can also control the display of titles, descriptions, EXIF data, and so on, and Photofront supports direct linking to individual photos. Photofront is a free hosted service, but if you pay a one-time $10 fee you can get rid of the Photofront logo plus a few more features and the ability to host it on your own web site.
Vancouver-based ACD Systems International this week released version 9 of their popular ACDSee Photo Manager software for both the consumer and Pro lines. The big news is the Quick View feature, which allows for almost instantaneous opening of pictures in your library, both in ACDSee and in Explorer. Neat. I'm not quite sure how they're doing it, but I assume it involves storing a screen res bitmap somewhere. Also included are Showroom, which allows you to view slideshows from the desktop with various effects, and a Shadow/Highlight tool that promises to "save photos you would've probably deleted."
Of interest to Pros are three new features: Calendar Events View organizes shots based on the date and time in the EXIF/IPTC data so you can quickly find pics from certain jobs, Auto Categories tags photos based on embedded data, and Private Folders allows you to password protect photo sets. Great for hiding the porn on your work computer or making sure your girlfriend doesn't accidentally find out what you've been doing with the camera phone while she sleeps. No word, though, on whether the password protection involves encryption, so if you're carrying the prototype pics of your company's next super secret product around on your Thinkpad, you may want to look for something stronger.
Remember Monday when I reported on Flickr's new geotagging features, which gives users a nice drag-and-drop interface for "tagging" photos with the location they were taken at? I thought it was cool, but expected it to take off fairly slowly. According to the official FlickrBlog, though, in the first 24 hours more than 1.2 million photos were geotagged by Flickr users. In his post on the blog, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield writes, "When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we'd hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later). Crazy!" Crazy indeed. Browsing around the Flickr map it's obvious he's right--there's way more pink polka dots on the map now, even in my little rural corner of the world. Butterfield also writes a bit about the technical side of Flickr, which will be of interest to my fellow web dev geeks.
Today Flickr seriously pumped up its geotagging support and added Yahoo! Maps integration. The announcement in the Flickr blog links to a few screencast tutorials that make geotagging, i.e. associating photos with particular locations on the map, look pretty easy. It's done through the Flash Ajax-based Organizr tool, and basically you select a bunch of your photos and then drag them to the location you want to tag them with on the map. Similarly, you can explore other people's photos with a new map interface. You can go to flickr.com/map to see everybody's photos and search by location and/or tag. Naturally, it's all done through the Yahoo! Maps API, which means you can zoom and pan around as well as see a satellite photo or hybrid view of the map. The Flickr update also includes integration with Upcoming.org: you can now tag your photos with a special tag for an Upcoming.org event and they'll be displayed on the Upcoming page for that event. Neat.
Camera phones are undoubtedly alluring, but even the best of them produce mediocre images. Aaron Straup Cope, unsatisfied with his results, built filtr, a shell script for FreeBSD and OSX that will takes your blah camera phone photos and lets you apply one of seven filters to it: dazd, heathr, postcrd, postr, stndpipe, rockstr, and filtr. There's also movr, which will turn a video file into a series of images, apply one of the above filters to each. All of the results are interesting, universally moreso than your average camera phone pic. It's a shell script, like I said, so if you're not comfy with the command line (and willing to hunt down and install a few dependencies first), filtr may not be the tool for you. You can download filtr for free here.
Attempting to capture the different ranges you see with your eyes on camera is quite difficult. For the most part, digital cameras attempt to accurately capture an image but sometimes details are lost in the shadows or in the highlights. In high dynamic range (HDR) photography multiple photographs of varying exposures are taken of the same subject and later combined to produce a photo with a greater dynamic range than if only 1 photo was taken. 
HDRwalls
