Roy's Blog

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Now this is high resolution photography! Image Gallery

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Photoshop Elements 3 is really great.

I highly recommend Adobe's upgrade to Elements. This incorporates all the features of Photoshop Album and Elements with some great new tools. For a first impression, take a look at this article.
I especially like the healing brush, calendar timeline for sorting photos, and the ability to read RAW files.

This site has excellent resources:
Elements User: Photoshop Elements Techniques, Tutorials, Downloads, Videotips, Newsletter and more

Patently Obvious: Patent Law Blog: Next step in open source: Book Editing: "Next step in open source: Book Editing"

Uses wiki and Creative Commons License.

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

This useful link, allows one to hack Firefox to be much faster for broadband usage. Make Firefox Faster at Forever Geek

Friday, August 27, 2004

Creating a travelogue, by synchronizing GPS track data and digital image EXIF data.

Here are two example travelogues created using Microsoft Research’s WWMX Utilities. Travelogue 1: Driving to Boston. Travelogue 2: Quincy Market.

Most of the photos were taken using a Canon Digital Rebel, mounted up-side-down in the car from the rearview mirror, and fired manually using the IR remote control. The images were then rotated 180 degrees. The GPS track data was captured using a Garmin GPSMap 60C, and downloaded in GPX format using g7towin from Joe & Jack's incredibly useful GPSinformation.org site.

In order to create the travelogue, the images need to be cross correlated with the GPS track data. As both contain time stamp data, it is possible to synchronize the two data sources. Unfortunately the time stamps on the camera and GPS are often not synchronized, and the time offset between the two needs to be accounted for.

Tip: The easiest way to adjust the image timestamps to match the GPS time is take a photo of the GPS showing the time. Here is an example: GPS Image. Then open up the image in an image viewing software package (e.g., Adobe Photoshop Album 2) that can show the complete EXIF Metadata. Look for the EXIF field called “Date Time Original”. In this example, the EXIF Date Time Original had a value of “2004.08.25 15:42:18”, while the photo of the GPS showed “3:41:10pm”. The two values are 68 seconds apart. This value will be used to adjust the timestamps of the images, so that each image can be matched to the specific location.

WWMX Location Stamper allows you to adjust the photo time stamps for a batch of images, correlate with a GPX file from the GPS, and add the GPS location data into each images’ metadata. This utility also allows you to see track data overlaid on an actual map downloaded from Microsoft mappoint.net.

Now that your images have been geolocated, use the WWMX Travelogue Builder to generate your own custom travelogue.



Saturday, June 12, 2004

Looking for great mind-mapping software? Try FreeMind. A useful tool for managing your thinking.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

This is a fantastic site for up to date

Digital Camera Reviews and News: Digital Photography Review: Forums, Glossary, FAQ.