One Too Many Gadgets...

My "on-line friend" Thomas Hawk as posted a nice review of the new Photoshop CS3 along with the included photo management application Adobe Bridge (shown below).

I've often asked Thomas for more coverage of how he post processes all those great photos he takes. Hawk is always upfront about the fact that much of the "awesomeness" of his shots comes after the shot is already taken by tweaking his photos later in an image editor (known as "Post Processing"). I'm certain that there is still an awful lot of talent to credit him for those at the moment he pushes the button on his DSLR. If you have never given his photos a good look over, I encourage you to do so. His photos can be found on Zooomr (where Thomas is currently the CEO) and on Flickr.

What clothing item do you wish could be banned?
Submitted by Mike E.

Flip Flops... Why should others have to Hear a piece of clothing. These rank right up with people who smack gum and crack their knuckles.

Google has updated its photo management tool, Picasa, to version 2.5. This update brings with it one important feature that I've been waiting for; saving of edits to the original files without having to export them.

What's that mean? Well, in previous versions of Picasa, when you made edits to your photos such as rotation from landscape to portrait, or red eye reduction, the changes where kept separate from the original photo. When you would view the photos within Picasa each time, those "edits" where automatically applied to what you were viewing. But if you viewed the actual pictures on disk, no edits where applied there. Red eye and rotation where the same as when you pulled the pictures off of the camera. That bothered me because I wanted/needed to view the photos over a network connection to my XBox 360 on my HDTV. Picasa had a way around this, but it involved exporting the modified photos to a new file. Fine, but that left you with two copies of the same file on disk.

SO, I'm greatful for the update. I appreciate what Picasas original intention of always keeping the original around was. Think of the advantages of something like auto-contrast or red eye reduction only being applied to the original photo and NOT saved out. If the algolrythms for doing red eye reduction or autocontrast were one day improved upon, ALL of your photos that had those edit features would automatically take advantage of those updates.

Picasa 2.5 also brings with it the addition of online uploads directly to the "Picasa Web Album" which is similar to Flickr in the sense that it is an online place to share your photos with friends, family, or the world.

I highly recommend Picasa to anyone out there that uses a digital camera. BTW: It's owned by Google, and its a free download. Can't beat that.

Welcome

Well this is my first venture into the world of blogging. I don't think I'll probably be posting every day as some do. Maybe once a week if I keep at it. I hope to use this as a place to talk about the good and the bad of all things gadgets, electronics and computers. When I run into something I personally find cool or useful to use, I'll try to tell you about it. Same goes for warning you about stuff you should avoid.

I also hope to bring some tutorials hand helpful hints on using computers, PDAs, game consoles, GPS, cell phones, home automation and all those other things that seem to occupy a large part of my interests.

Hope you come back from time to time to read and share.