Compressor.io compresses your photos by up to 90%

There aren't many thing that annoy me (ok, maybe there are) but one of them is visiting a website that uses obnoxiously large images for no reason whatsoever other than making you spend more time waiting and possibly using up your limited mobile data plan. Sure, one can understand a full screen image to use up a few MB, but when you see small thumbnails that are actually ultra-large images weighing several MB, instead of just a few KB... they should be forced to use Compressor.io for the rest of their life!

Project Naptha allows you to edit text inside images on Chrome

If you ever spent minutes transcribing text on a image just because you wanted to send it as text on an email, or wished an amazing picture didn't have that annoying text over it, then you'll love this Project Naptha extension for Chrome.

Simply put, Project Naptha allows you to treat any text inside an image as editable text. Meaning you can easily copy-paste it to somewhere else, translate it - or even edit it or erase it! Just keep in mind that when you erase text that is overlapping an image, it will do its best to fill the missing parts... but it won't magically add details that were hidden behind the text.

Anyway, for internet meme artists wishing to quickly edit some saying over an image, people tired of opening up their image editor to translate titles and subtitles in graphs and diagrams, and lots others, this Project Naptha is simply a must-have extension that will make you love Chrome even more.

Paste Images Directly to the Web

It's kind of sad to notice that, even with decades of computer and software evolution, there are still so many "basic" things that make us perform dumb repetitive steps in order to do it. Take, for instance, the sharing of a simple screenshot of your desktop on the web.

You'll need to:
1) Press PrtSc to transfer your screenshot image to the clipboard
2) open a image editing program
3) paste the image into the program
4) save the image somewhere, with some name
5) upload the image to some web site to host it and share it
6) delete the temporary image on your computer

Is this really acceptable in our day and age? What if it could be done in a much simpler way?

Thankfully it can. Thanks to Snaggy you can paste your image directly to the web. Making the thing as simple as:

1) Press PrtSc (or copy any image from any other source)
2) Press paste on the Snaggy web page

... Much simpler, no? Kind of makes us wonder why doesn't every other image uploading service allow a similar way to upload images?

Easier Search by Images in Chrome

If you spend a lot of time working with images and searching similar images on Google, here's a Chrome extension that will save you valuable time: Search by Image.

On the surface, this extension doesn't look it does much - in fact, you won't even find it anywhere. But, it's magic is revealed as soon as you right click on any image in any webpage. In the context menu you'll find a new option: Search Google with this image.

Considering how simpler it is to search with just a couple of clicks, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the time savings this extension can provide! :)

Image Stabilization Lens

Ever wondered what happens when you toggle the image stabilization switch on your camera on? While some cameras use electronic image stabilization, the real deal is the optical image stabilization done in the lens (altough some systems use a moving sensor to achieve a similar effect - and therefore working with any lens).

But, that doesn't stop us from being amazed with what's going on inside a IS (Image Stabilization) Lens, like is show in the following video (a 18-55 Canon Zoom Lens).


Image Stabilization Revealed from Camera Technica on Vimeo.

Deblur your Photos

No matter how good image stabilization techniques are, it seems we cannot get rid of blurred photos!

But, thanks to some clever guys at Microsoft Research, things are about to get in focus.

Thanks to a motion tracking apparatus (6 DOF) that captures the movements made during the image aquisition thet can apply a corrective digital filter that can un-blur your photos.

Now, they only need to combine this with those "super-resolution" algorithms and I think it's safe to assume that will be the end of those blurry UFO/aliens/ghosts photos! :)

TouchRetouch for iPhone and iPad

Because we don't always have a computer around to do so photo editing on the move, how about doing it in your mobile device directly?

If you think mobile photo-editing software lacks advanced features, check out what this TouchRetouch for iPhone and iPad can do:



Now we just have to wait for it to show up in the App Store...

Photoshop turns 20

Time does fly. The world's best known photo/image editing program Photoshop turns 20 years today!

Though it remains faithful to its origins, every new Photoshop version introduces features that simplify and/or allow the creation of more amazing effects. It would be hard to find an image somewhere that hasn't been retouched in photoshop.

 Photoshop 1.0

Photoshop CS4

Congrats Photoshop. May we all be celebrating your anniversary 20 years from now.

Sikuli: Visual Image Search and Automation

Just found this amazing paper: Sikuli: Using GUI Screenshots for Search and Automation
From MIT's Tom Yeh, Tsung-Hsiang Chang, and Robert C. Miller.

The idea is simple: how often you wished you had the possibility to use images instead of words?
They say an image is worth a thousand words, and sometimes that is actually the case.

In the graphical computer world we live in, there are things that just can't be translated into words, and using images would greatly simplify some tasks.

From their abstract:

We present Sikuli, a visual approach to search and automation of graphical user interfaces using screenshots. Sikuli allows users to take a screenshot of a GUI element (such as a toolbar button, icon, or dialog box) and query a help system using the screenshot instead of name.

But that's not all... imagine you want to create a script to automate some task on your computer, and you have to press an icon that may be positioned in different places?

Something like... this:

Sikuli also provides a visual scripting API for automating GUI interactions, using screenshot patterns to direct mouse and keyboard events. We report a web-based user study showing that searching by screenshot is easy to learn and faster to specify than keywords.

This kind of tools would allow you to easily do some complex image processing tasks, such as - for instance - a baby monitoring script, that would check if the baby was sleeping face up.

A really interesting project we should all keep an eye on: Sikuli!

Adobe Photoshop CS5 Preview

The most popular image editing software will soon become even more powerful. See some of the things the new Adobe Photoshop CS5 will allow you to do:



Seeing is no longer believing! :)

Google News

Image Search with Google Image Swirl

Searching for images is becoming increasingly easy with these new features Google offers us from time to time. Now, they've introduced Google Image Swirl.

Stacking similar images that you can then easily navigate through, this new lab feature is certainly attractive.
This Image Swirl is an evolution of the similar image feature that also began as a Labs experiment and later graduated to "full feature."



Google Phone about to arrive?

Remember all the buzz surrounding the mythical Google Phone? It all quiet down when it was announced it was really a platform (Android) and that there were to be lots of different phones using it.
But now it all seems to be back. You might actually get a Google Phone, which would be a "high-end" super-Android phone made by HTC (or other manufacturer) according to Google Specs.

Considering MS has been pressuring manufacturers to keep having "appealing" phone models in exclusive "Windows Mobile-only" I think it's only fair for Google to do the same and offer us a mouth-watering device combining great looks with even greatest hardware!



Chrome OS details tomorrow!

We'll finally be able to know more about Google's Chrome OS tomorrow.

We're promissed a full Chrome OS overview that will keep us salivating till next year, when its finally launched.

(Hope they do let us use some beta version before that. :)

SnapIt Screen Capture for Windows

It's surprising to see how modern Operating Systems often lack simple features that we often need, and that force us to do laborious boring and lengthy work to get it done.

Remember my SenderClipboard program that easily allows you to past a list of file names into a document?

Today I'll be talking about a similar program but for screen captures: SnapIt.

It's incredible how - after all these years - we're still missing a tool to easily manage screen captures in Windows. Sure you can press PrtSc at any time to grab a screenshot of your current screen. But effectively using it is an entirely different matter. Usually it involves something like: opening an image editing program (like MS Paint), pasting it there, saving it somewhere, closing the program, going to whatever other program you wanted to insert it to, and finally embed it or send it.

If you happen to need several different screenshots, the workload becomes increasingly complicated, repeating most of these steps over and over again.

With a small program like SnapIt, this task is immensely simplified.
After installing it you'll get a new icon on your system tray.

After that you can adjust it to your needs, selecting the hotkey you want to use, if you want to save it to files, etc.

This allows you to easily capture a sequence of screen grabs just by repeatedly pressing PrtSc (or any other hotkey of your choosing) and then simply grabbing the resulting image files.

While it isn't free, you're free to try it for 14 days before making your own decision.

Similar Image Search with Google Labs

Google has been hard at work in image processing and image recognition. Today, we're able to use some of that expertise with a new service: Similar Images Search.

Using this Similar Images Search from Google Labs, you can easily find similar images to the one you're interested in. This is particularly useful, for instance, when you're search term represent several different items.
As shown on the following video, if you're searching for "jaguar", you'd be presented with images of bothe the animal as well as cars from that brand. Now, you can easily zoom in on the ones you really want.



... I imagine that, in a couple of years we'll be doing the same kind of stuff... with video! :)

JPEG Generation Loss

As most of you are probably aware, the reason why JPEG are usually smaller than other types of images is because it uses a "lossy" compression method that discards small bits of information (though there's also lossless Jpeg, but that's another matter.)

That's why you should always keep an original jpeg image when you plan to edit it, because each time you save it, reopen it, and save it again, the image will lose more and more details.

Well, here's a video that better shows what I mean. Opening and saving the same image... 600 times in a row.


Generation Loss from hadto on Vimeo.

Undistorted Wide Angle Security Camera

Whenever we talk about wide angle security cameras, one thing springs to mind: those dreaded fisheye images. But, Tenebraex is working on a new system that will enable us to have undistorted panoramic images.

It will make this:

Become this:

The concept isn't really new: instead of a single camera with a wide area lens, they use an array of low cost cameras to capture different angles.

Of course, everything must then be analyzed, processed, and finally stitched together to provide the high quality end-result, but as you can see... it's worth the trouble.

They even say such system is cheaper than a traditional motorized camera, and some even say this can soon find its way into the automobile market - I sure wouldn't mind having that.

As a side note, Tenebraex has some other interesting products in their portfolio: full-color nightvision systems, anti-reflection filters, and even some color-blind helping software (Eyepilot).

Fujifilm Super CCD EXR

Fujifilm has recently announced a new Super CCD sensor promissing the benefits of high resolution, high sensitivity and wide dynamic range.

Still using the traditional Super CCD hexagonal pixel pattern (on the left,) the new EXR offers a new color filter array (on the right).

This new pattern allows a better sensitivty and processing, and can be used to capture an image using different exposure times.

This allows it to capture detailed picture in both well lit and poorly lit areas - traditionally over/under-exposed in other sensors, requiring a second shot and later processing.

Now we just need to wait for the first cameras using this new Super CCD EXR to come out and see how they perform in the real world.

via [dpreview]

Interactive Video Cutout

Another demo of how much video processing has been evolving lately.

Everyone knows the popular green/blue screen effects used to insert someone in a virtual surrounding.

The problem is, doing the same kind of stuff with video captured without those uniform colored background is a lot harder, and usually involves going over each frame and manually cutting out the "foreground objects" from the background so you can then use it as you want.

However, this is now to become a lot simpler if this interactive cutout video process gets its way.



It still requires human intervention, but it can save hours of boring and error-prone cutting and allow anyone to create high quality video effects.



Interactive Video Cutout from pro on Vimeo.

[Interactive Video cutout]

Video Photo Processing

If you think you can believe what you "see" on a video, then check out this video showcasing some processing techniques.

From resolution improvement to high dynamic range images, and some amazing object patching and complete removal, as well as object replacement, it shows exactly why you can't believe what you see with your own eyes. :)


Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

via [Engadget]

Animated PNGs

As you're probably aware, the GIF image format is quite "old" - however, it's still widely used throughout the Internet because a very simple, yet valuable, feature: animated GIFs.

These animated GIFs are part of Internet's History (for both Good and Bad) and are used in millions of web pages. Just check any forum, and you'll find GIF avatars with feature-length duration weighing several megabytes.... but we'll leave that for another day.

Well, it time to move ahead. The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was created to overcome GIFs shortcomings, offering better compression rates, higher color depth, and now... animation as well. Soon, APNG (Animated PNGs) will replace current animated GIFs.

For now, just a couple of browsers support APNGs, namely FireFox 3 and Gran Paradiso Alpha 7, but other should soon follow.

Check more info and examples at AnimatedPNG.