Mac|Life Design and Graphics RSS Feed

myPantone

Jon Phillips — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:18:56 -0500

We’ll get this right out of the way: Pantone’s foray into the App Store is a success -- myPantone is slick, clever and imminently useful. But we can’t describe the killer utility of the app without first getting into the whys and hows of Pantone itself. So, color experts, please excuse the preambling primer. We just want to get newbies up to speed so that they really understand what Pantone’s iPhone app does -- and does not -- have to offer.

The app includes nine virtual Pantone fan decks that allow you to search by name or Pantone number, or browse with finger-swipes.

There’s No “Sorta” In Perfect Color-Matching
Pantone makes color-matching systems that have become essential to the world of design -- from graphic design to clothing design to furniture design and more. Because accurate color reproduction on paper, fabrics, plastic and other surfaces can be so hit-and-miss, designers often need to work within reliable, never-changing “color spaces” to ensure that the color they want to see reproduced is actually the color that is reproduced. In practical terms, this means spec’ing the relevant elements in a computer design document with a specific Pantone color code.

Let’s say you’re designing the logo for a Fortune 500 company. Hell, let’s say the logo is for a local moving company, because companies of all ambition-levels want their logos to look consistent on letterhead, outdoor signage, T-shirts, everywhere.

When it comes time to decide on a specific logo color, you open up your Pantone swatch collection -- it may take the form of a splayed-out “fan deck” or a book of perforated paper chips -- and decide on the color you want. That color has a code. For example, 636 C for a particular variant of light blue. Now, when it comes time to have your logo printed in the real world, you define the blue in your document file as Pantone 636 C, and the reproduction service will use the precise mix of inks, pigments or whatever to achieve the exact color you specified as it appears on the medium they’re printing on. In short, the Pantone color-matching system ensures that 636 C looks the same wherever it appears, be it in your Pantone fan deck, or on a business card or billboard.

So that’s how Pantone color matching works. That’s why it’s so useful. That’s why Pantone has become the leader in color standards.

All of which leads us to a little irony intrinsic to the myPantone app: It shouldn’t be used for precise color matching. Color accuracy is not what it’s all about.

myPantone: The Color Fanatic’s New Inspirational Friend
Here’s the deal: The iPhone’s screen isn’t designed for color accuracy. It’s designed for the best possible display at a small size, low price, and modest power requirements. The upshot is that even though myPantone contains virtual fan decks of nine different Pantone color libraries, a designer could never depend on the iPhone to perfectly represent how a particular myPantone color swatch will print in a real-world situation.

In this screen you get to choose which color system you want to work in. Shoot, we get inspired just seeing the covers of the virtual fan decks! But we’re geeky that way.

Of course, this is also an issue when viewing Pantone colors on regular computer displays, because even the best displays have to be precisely calibrated for the best-possible color accuracy. But the iPhone’s innate screen color accuracy isn’t anywhere close to that of, say, a 30-inch Cinema Display, nor does the iPhone have any screen calibration control -- unless you count the Brightness slider.

But, hey -- whatever. The app is a virtual goldmine of incredibly useful tools and features, for professional designers and color-minded hobbyists alike.

For starters, the app includes nine complete virtual fan decks: Formula Guide/solid coated; Formula Guide/solid uncoated; Formula Guide/solid matte; GoeGuide/coated; GoeGuide/uncoated; Fashion+Home/cotton; Fashion+Home/paper; Pastel Formula Guide/coated; and Pastel Formula Guide/uncoated. Given that individual fan decks (the ones printed on paper) start at about $60, you can see how much value this app provides, even if you just use myPantone in a casual way, like surveying color options in a conference room with colleagues. Again, you shouldn’t use the app to make final decisions on one Pantone color versus another; it’s not a replacement for printed Pantone color guides. But myPantone can provide you with a huge head start in making color decisions, thanks to its wealth of helpful features oriented around color cataloging and inspiration.

Swatch Details Like You’ve Never Seen Before
Once you’ve chosen which virtual fan deck to use, you can opt to sort it in one of two ways: with either a Visual sort (with all colors arranged chromatically, like a rainbow, from red to violet) or a Classic sort (with colors arranged according to Pantone’s own rather scientific -- and obtuse -- numerical grouping system). This sorting feature is something that’s just plain impossible to do with a paper fan deck or chip book.

With your sort decision completed, you can finger-swipe your way through the fan deck to browse for a particular swatch. Once you find a swatch that suits your fancy, you can double-tap it for a larger-version swatch that consumes most of the screen. This larger view will also give you the color’s Pantone number code, along with the color values for RGB, L*a*b* and HTML conversion. Pro designers already know the convenience of having all this info by one’s side.

The largest swatch view possible provides a large virtual color chip – just don’t assume that what you see on the iPhone is what you’ll get on printed material.

If you want to save the particular swatch for future reference, or just want to explore more possibilities with that swatch, you can drag it into your palette collection at the bottom of the screen. The app provides slots for 10 different palettes, and each palette can contain five swatches. Even better, you can view and share your palettes in a bunch of cool ways: Email it yourself or a friend; upload it to your account on Pantone’s community website; beam it to another iPhone; or view it on an assortment of virtual wallboards. You can also tap into the iPhone’s GPS to define the location where the palette was created.

With your new favorite swatch snuggled firmly in a palette, you can tap it again to bring up its Color Details—another feature that just isn’t feasible with a real-world fan deck. Color Details shows you a medium-sized image of the swatch, along with a row of its closest color neighbors in the Pantone collection. This “color neighborhood view” is perfect for narrowing down the precise shade or hue that floating around in your mind’s eye. You also get notation on which page the swatch appears in the real-world paper fan deck, and a button that lets you record a voice memo about the color.

Hit another button under Color Details, and up pops a screen of more swatches that bear contextual relevance to the one you’ve been digging into. For example, the swatches under Cross-Reference show you analogue swatches in other Pantone color systems. Blue Coral 19-4526 TPX may not have a perfect (or even close) analogue match in every system, but this cross-referencing feature will be invaluable to pro designers nonetheless.

At the top of the screen, the Color Details feature give you the other colors that surround your swatch in the fan deck. Those swatches at the bottom of the screen are simply a collection of swatches we gathered by hand.

And then there are the Harmony groupings, which use Pantone’s own mathematical algorithms to reveal traditional color-wheel harmonies (complementary, analogous, triadic, etc) applicable to your swatch. This might be the single-best feature for folks intimidated by making color choices. Whether you want to explore “matchy-matchy” (analogous color combos, like Evergreen and True Navy) or “stark contrast” (split-complementary combos, like Evergreen and Pesto set against Oxblood Red), the Harmony choices will keep you moving around the fan deck like a free-associating fool.

The mathematically driven harmony suggestion under Color Details are great for color newbies. We just wish those crazy symbols were explained somehow.

Take a Picture, Extract a Color
So far, we’ve explained how myPantone works if you’ve already found a color you’re interested in exploring. But what if you want the app to tell you which colors to explore? Enter the color extraction tool, which is rather unceremoniously labeled Image on the app interface. Here you can either snap a photo with the iPhone’s camera, or grab a photo already in your phone, and then hit Auto-Extraction to set the magic in motion. The app will digitally dig into your image, identify its five most dominant colors, and then generate the five swatches that most closely map to those dominant colors.

Auto-extraction does a pretty fair job of identifying close Pantone matches for the colors in your photos. Just be aware that the lighting conditions in which you shoot will have a profound result on extraction accuracy (see the next set of screenshots for living proof!).

This little trick presents some interesting opportunities. For professional designers, myPantone color extraction can provide close (though not perfect) information for matching elements in a photo with colors in a Pantone library. This can come in handy when, say, you want your coverline type to be filled with whatever Pantone green most closely matches the grass in your cover photograph.

Color extraction also offers benefits to the aesthetically challenged color newbie. Let’s say you want ideas for colors that will be harmonious with your particular light-blue wall paint. You can take a close-up photo of the paint, hit auto-extract, and then receive not the single color that most closely matches the paint, but a group of colors that work with the paint in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. Did Pantone intend for a single color to generate four or five complementary swatches? We don’t know (more about that in a moment). But extracting multiple colors from what is ostensibly a single color is both a positive feature (because the harmonious color palette offers inspiration) and a negative feature (because these results remind us that the color extraction function is unreliable, and highly influenced by the light conditions in which photographs are shot).

The app doesn’t include any documentation on how color extraction works, and, in fact, one of myPantone’s very few faults is a lack of documentation and help screens. Pantone’s developers designed an interface that’s pretty darned intuitive, but we still encountered a number of features that deserved more explanation than, well, zero explanation.

The big field of green you see here is not a myPantone swatch. It’s a close-up photograph of the top of a Pantone Flight Stool spec’d in 15-0146 TPX. This photo was shot in poor lighting conditions. The app’s auto-extraction tool generated four color matches from an ostensibly single color, and none of the matches are 15-0146 TPX.

Here’s a wider-angle shot of the Flight Stool – we wanted to prove to you that it was indeed spec’d (and labeled!) as 15-0146 TPX. Again, Auto-Extraction couldn’t find this specific color in the photograph. But we blame hardware limitations, not Pantone.

While we really want to see documentation, help screens, and even color-theory reference materials in a version update, we really can’t fault Pantone for the app’s lack of color accuracy, either in the way it renders colors, or in its function for extracting colors (which, by the way, uses nearly the same algorithms that are employed in Pantone’s handheld Color Cue 2 extraction device, which currently sells for $249). The Pantone app developers did a stellar job in side-stepping the iPhone’s hardware limitations, and simultaneously making the best possible use of its unique hardware opportunities.

Pixelmator Team Ltd. Pixelmator

Arvind Srinivasan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:38:32 -0500

You know something is popular when its name becomes synonymous with an entire product category and people start using it as a verb. We don’t search, we Google. We don’t photocopy, we Xerox. We don’t eat gelatin dessert, we eat Jell-O--well, except for us vegetarians. Most importantly though, when we crop Dick Cheney’s face onto a picture of a quail and give it a witty caption like, “I didn’t miss,” we are Photoshopping. Though there are plenty of image-editing apps for the Mac, the unquestioned king of the hill is Adobe’s Photoshop, which can run up to $699 for a single license. It’s the most pirated software in history, and the vast majority of people use it to crop and resize pictures, which is kind of like using a chain saw to julienne carrots. Pixelmator offers a Photoshop-esque experience for those who don’t know the ins and outs of Photoshop. While it lacks the depth of niche features that distinguish Adobe’s offering, it matches, and often beats, Photoshop when it comes to interface, usability, and speed, offering an extensive feature list of its own.

Next time you need to make an LOLcat, ironic motivational poster, or add Megan Fox to your Facebook profile pic, don't Photoshop it, Pixelmate it.

Beyond its brand name, Photoshop sets the standard for image-editing interface and feature set, merely by virtue of ubiquity. In fact, this is where several competitors fail (cough cough, GIMP), simply because people used to Photoshop’s paneled layout have a hard time adapting to anything else. So it’s a welcome surprise when Pixelmator’s HUD (head-up display, basically transparent panes that overlay the main work area) layout mimics that of Photoshop, albeit with less customizability. In fact, we prefer Pixelmator’s dynamic panels, not only because they are prettier, but also because they are more functional. You don’t have to search for the correct panel to perform an action--it simply pops up with the appropriate tool. Along the same lines, the Pixelmator team has thoughtfully included compatibility with industry-standard file formats. You can edit layered .PSD files, import Adobe brushes, and even import third-party Quartz filters.

Pixelmator is also a layer-based editor, so it automatically offers more functionality than many simple image editors. Its tight integration with OS X and speed truly set it apart. We tested Pixelmator on a G4 Mac mini, a system that Adobe didn’t even support with CS3, let alone CS4. While large (40MB-plus) image files brought the G4 mini to its knees, it was able to handle basic operations just fine in Pixelmator. On a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, it often handled processes faster than Photoshop. Resizing and applying filters to a 100MB layered .PSD file in Photoshop CS4 heated up the Mac and took up 387MB of RAM, whereas the same actions in Pixelmator were nearly twice as fast--and only chewed up 120MB of RAM. Pixelmator fully leverages OS X’s Core Image technology to wring the best possible performance out of any Mac. The app is also fundamentally integrated with OS X. You can easily (and directly) import pictures from iPhoto or iSight, drag and drop images onto the dock icon from Safari, Quick Look any of your files, and even use included Automator actions to easily perform common image-editing tasks.

Though Pixelmator does an admirable job of creating a Photoshop-esque environment, it stops short of being a perfect clone. Photoshop staples like CMYK support are missing, the keyboard shortcuts aren’t the same as their Photoshop equivalents, and there isn’t a history panel. These may be forgivable, but Pixelmator’s biggest flaw is in the omission of a proper free-transform tool--Pixelmator’s tool only scales and rotates. But for many home users, these weaknesses are easy to overlook.

iPhone Helper Apps for Insanely Specific Scenarios

Leslie Ayers — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:06:00 -0500

Every day, life presents any number of problems that need solving—from settling bets to knowing which fish are OK to eat to remembering where the soupspoon goes in a formal table setting. Your iPhone or iPod touch can act as a digital Swiss Army knife, offering up the right tool to get you through almost any dilemma. We review and rate a collection of handy helper apps and ass-saving accessories that are sure to boost your rep as the consummate boy scout, always prepared for anything.

For Anyone Who's Ever Asked, "How?"

Howcast.com's free iPhone app puts the site's eclectic collection of how-to videos in your pocket

Think of all the things you’ve always wanted to know how to do: fold origami, set a formal dinner table, pick a lock…or maybe have sex in a car? Amazingly enough, you can learn how to do all of these things—and many more—with Howcast’s free iPhone app. This excellent freebie puts an iPhone “wrapper” on the mind-blowing array of how-to video content available on Howcast.com.

Click here to read a full review of this app

Search for topics in the search bar or tap on Most Recent or Featured to see a list of how-to videos on Howcast.

Howcast How-To Videos
Howcast Media
www.howcast.com
Free

Six More Ways to Skin a Cat (Not Literally, OK?)

These apps offer more practical solutions to real-life problems

Heads, You Win; Tails, You Win

Need to settle a bet but don’t have a coin to toss? If you spend a buck on My CoinFlip, you’ll never be without a way to force your friends to choose between two options. The app features 11 different types of coins, including a variety of euro coins.

The Vatican euro offers a nice option for your Catholic friends.

My CoinFlip 1.2.3
Sandro Stricker
www.software.sandrostricker.de
$0.99

Wait, How Many Spider Rolls Did We Order?

Ordering sushi for large parties can be an exercise in chaos—especially after a few sake rounds. Sushi Boat! presents a list of common sushi offerings—nigiri, sashimi, and maki—so you can you pass your phone around to capture a digital account of your order. When everyone’s weighed in, tap My Order to see the tally, which can then be read to the server by whoever’s most coherent.

Handy translations ensure you won't order hamachi (yellowtail) when you want maguro (tuna).

Sushi Boat! 1.0
Impresario Digital
www.impresariodigital.com
$0.99

Automatic Name That Tune

Can’t put a name to the tune that’s playing over a public speaker system or at a party? Shazam can ID the song, artist, and album—then let you buy it directly from the iTunes Store. Just tap Tag Now and hold up your iPhone so it can “hear” the music.

Shazam effortlessly recognized Len's "Steal My Sunshine," after only hearing the first couple seconds of the song, which is a bunch of talking.

Shazam 1.5
Shazam Entertainment Ltd.
www.shazam.com
Free

Wash and Wear

LaundryPal is exactly what college kids whose moms coddled them and newly divorced bachelors need: It deciphers the often mystifying care symbols found on clothes labels, ensuring that you don’t machine-wash a hand-wash or dry-clean-only item. Even better, it includes a laundry how-to, as well as tips in each symbol section (Wash, Tumble Dry, Iron, and Bleach, Dry Clean, and Dry). If only it could fold your laundry too!

The Do Not Dry symbol is presumably interchangeable with the symbol for Do Not Tumble Dry. Otherwise there will be a lot of laundry noobs walking around wearing wet—albeit clean—clothes!

LaundryPal 1.2
Hip Fire
www.hipfire.com
$0.99

You Go Green, Girl!

We debated including this, worried that the manly men out there would balk at the app’s title. This iPhone version of Sophie Uliano’s best-seller Gorgeously Green provides you with the core info from the eco-conscious lifestyle guide. What tipped the scale in the app’s favor was ultrahandy lists and tips, such as which types of fish are OK to eat, how to decode the numbers on plastic bottles, which produce you should always buy organic, and more.

Which produce should you always buy organic? The GG Survival Guide's got your back.

Gorgeously Green Survival Guide 1.2
Optima Drama
www.gorgeouslygreen.com
$0.99

Unlike Mace, It Doesn't Require a Permit

Panic Alarm is a personal alarm that can’t immobilize an attacker the way mace or pepper spray can, but could very well be all you need to scare off a would-be perp. The app consists of a large Alarm button that appears on launch, which, when tapped (or if you shake your device), sets off a very loud alarm. You can also set the app to call an emergency contact after the alarm sounds for a certain period before it’s turned off.

In the settings, designate a contact to call if the alarm goes off for a specified period without being turned off.

Panic Alarm 1.0
Adduce Studios
www.adduce.se
$0.99

Corel Painter 11

David Biedny — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:16:00 -0500

Painter has been around the computer graphics world almost as long as Photoshop and has always been the absolute leader in the realm of simulating natural media (paintbrushes, pencils, inks, and so on)—and retains the title to this very day. While this latest version of Painter continues to be the go-to app for painting on your Mac, this update is possibly the least exciting in the program’s history and doesn’t offer much in the way of upgrade incentive for existing users.

Let’s get right to the new features, the most prominent of which consists of new Hard Media options for pencils, pens, chalks, and markers, resulting in an impressive level of realism in the way the colors and densities of these tools build on themselves as you draw with them. This is especially nice when mimicking the look of magic markers, which gradually get darker as you repeatedly draw over the same area, just like their real-world counterparts. All in all, there are around 40 new Hard Media tool variants, and for some existing Painter users, these might present enough of a reason to spring for the upgrade. Corel also claims that overall brush performance has been increased by 30 percent, and while some of the brush tools definitely felt snappier on our MacBook Pro, large brushes still lag on the screen, especially on our dual-processor G5 tower.

Painter 11 has a new expandable Mixer Palette, for whipping up the perfect shade.

There are also some useful enhancements to the interface, such as resizable Color and Mixer palettes, which, while nice, are not exactly what we’d call groundbreaking. The new Polygonal Selection tool is OK—it’s been in Photoshop for over a decade, as has the combined Transform tool option. You can use the cursor keys to nudge color values, which is nifty when you’re busy painting. But it’s a minor addition at best. As we pointed out in our review of Painter X (4 out of 5 stars, May/07), the overall look and feel of this program is feeling dated and somewhat rough, with some of the interface design elements going back nearly 20 years.

Painter has never really tried to cover the same ground as Photoshop, and this continues to be the case, so we’re happy that Painter offers better support for bringing Photoshop documents in with all their layers and corresponding layer attributes (such as blend modes and layer masks), letting you apply some Painter magic to them and then opening them back up in Photoshop for further editing. While most layer attributes work across programs, we found specific holes. Photoshop’s Black and White adjustment layers and Hard Mix blending modes, for example, don’t come through when imported to Painter. Painter 11 also finally has some decent support for color management, which is another crucial puzzle piece for using it effectively within a color-calibrated workflow.

Our major gripe with this update to Painter is that it really feels like a 10.5 and should have been priced accordingly. To ask existing Painter owners to shell out almost two hundred bucks for (the admittedly-cool) Hard Media options, support for color management, and what we consider to be relatively minor interface enhancements, seems excessive at best and outrageous at worst.

Garden Gnome Software Pano2VR

Tom Lassiter — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:01:09 -0500

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. And now that multimedia has taken over the Web, flat 2D images sometimes just aren’t enough anymore. But going from a series of photos to an interactive 3D image can take a bit of work. After stitching the photos together, additional processing is required to turn them into interactive, virtual reality files viewable in a Web browser. Some stitching programs have the capacity to output QuickTime VR (QTVR) files. Flash developers, meanwhile, have made huge strides in coding Flash to display interactive virtual reality images, and a handful of dedicated programs now create Flash-based VR files.

Pano2VR is the one app that swings both ways. Just drop in your freshly stitched masterpiece, and it will output QTVR, Flash VR files, or both simultaneously. Pano2VR also can produce the necessary HTML, ready to cut and paste into your Web page design. Or simply upload the HTML and related .mov or .swf files to a Web server for a basic VR experience.

Pano2VR’s main user interface contains a panel for dropping in your panorama, plus four other panels to customize viewing parameters, metadata (such as title, author, and copyright info), and hotspots. Adjustments to default settings are accessed via buttons in each panel. Viewing parameters, which set the initial field of view for a panorama—plus pan and tilt—are set by dragging a low-res preview in a window until you like the results.

Pano2VR simplifies the process of outputting interactive 3D images for the Web.

Once a panorama has been transformed into the six-sided cube needed to create a 3D Web image, even the best photographers often need to bring a cube face back into Photoshop for cosmetic touch-up—to remove the last bits of the camera’s tripod, for example. Pano2VR’s Patch Input easily exports a cube face for retouching, then reimports the patched file into your project. For perfect alignment, be sure to note the pan, tilt, and field of view settings before exporting, and duplicate them for import.

Flash VR supports transparent button overlays, or skins, that place pan and zoom control buttons over a pano. Pano2VR offers a variety of menu-driven skin styles.

QTVR and Flash panoramas support hotspots, or areas within a pano that can be linked to any URL, including other pano images. They’re a staple of VR tours, in which multiple linked panoramas allow the viewer to explore a physical location. Pano2VR’s impressive hotspot tools access powerful coding features, including creating schematic maps showing the relative locations of linked images. These features require some study and practice to utilize fully, but the process is made easier by thorough online documentation and excellent screencast tutorials.

Connected Flow FlickrExport 3 for iPhoto

Ray Aguilera — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:16:00 -0500

FlickrExport adds ninja-level precision to your Flickr uploads, from within iPhoto.

Photography nuts love photo-sharing site Flickr.com. And for years, third parties have provided iPhoto plug-ins that let you export your images directly to your Flickr account. For ease-of-use, these plug-ins beat standalone apps--and Flickr’s Web-based uploader--for getting images from your Mac into your photo stream. And since most photo geeks frequent Flickr anyway, it’s always made the most sense to us to be able to post your stuff there from within iPhoto itself. In iPhoto ’09, Apple introduced support for uploading to Flickr. But in our tests, the power and flexibility of Connected Flow’s FlickrExport makes Apple’s efforts look like amateur hour.

iPhoto’s native support for Flickr is the essence of Apple simplicity. Select some images, and choose Share > Flickr. The first time you do this, iPhoto will prompt you for your Flickr log-in info, and iPhoto will ask you to set a privacy level for the uploads as well as relative sizes. Nice, but this doesn’t give you much control--even for Flickr newbies. FlickrExport, by comparison, offers tons of options for customizing and controlling your Flickr uploads.

FlickrExport installs as a plug-in, and in our tests, worked more reliably than iPhoto’s Flickr support. FlickrExport adds a Flickr tab to iPhoto’s Export pane (File > Export). From there, you can edit Titles, Descriptions, Tags, and Privacy settings for your photos--as a group, as well as individually. FlickrExport also allows you to add photos directly to Flickr group photo pools and add to your own existing photosets or create a new photoset as you upload images. And for users with free accounts, a handy status gauge shows how much of your upload quota has been used for the month. If space gets tight, FlickrExport can automatically resize your images to conserve bandwidth. Users of previous versions of FlickrExport will be interested in new features, including presets for uploads to Flickr groups and the ability to incorporate location data into your photos manually or via GPS track logs, perfect for documenting your travels visually.

We were able to easily import large and small groups of images to our Flickr account, and in all cases Tags, Titles, and other metadata were correctly applied, even when we supplied a complicated mishmash of data to certain images and not to others. Our exports were reasonably quick, and we didn’t notice FlickrExport bogging down our iMac while we zapped large groups of photos up to Flickr’s cloud. And for Aperture users, Connected Flow offers a version of FlickrExport tweaked to take advantage of Aperture’s features as well. For active participants in Flickr groups, the ability to save sets of groups within FlickrExport is a huge timesaver--although we had a few problems with presets selecting incorrect groups. And the only options for managing presets are deleting or renaming them--an editing interface to tweak presets would have been nice.

Eye-Fi Explore

Leslie Ayers — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:13:34 -0500

If you lose track of the photos you’ve uploaded, the Upload History in the Eye-Fi Manager can remind you at a glance.

Digital cameras have eliminated the need to get prints made from film negatives at your local Fotomat. But there’s still the matter of getting your digital snaps from your camera to your computer--then sharing them using one of any number of online photo sites out there.

To solve this problem and eliminate the need for a physical connection between camera and computer, Eye-Fi cards use Wi-Fi to transfer photos from an SD storage card directly to the photo-sharing site of your choice: Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, Costco.com, Walmart.com, MobileMe Gallery, and many others. Eye-Fi released its first Wi-Fi-enabled SD card a few years ago, and in January it launched the 2GB Eye-Fi Explore card, which automatically adds geotags to all of your photos, even if your digital camera doesn’t have geotagging features built in. It was a nice coinky-dink that at the same time, iPhoto ’09 also added the Places feature, which takes advantage of geotags and organizes photos based on where they were taken.

The Eye-Fi Explore card is a no-brainer to set up and use. Using the included USB card reader, you insert it into a free USB port on your Mac and follow the onscreen prompts to determine what happens to photos that are stored on the card from that point on. Once you take a sample photo and it uploads, the setup screen also tells you if you need to change certain power-saving settings on your digital camera, necessary to make sure the camera stays on long enough for the Eye-Fi Explore to detect a Wi-Fi network and upload your pictures.

We set up our Explore card to automatically post photos to our MobileMe Gallery, which were then synced with iPhoto ’09. The end result: fast, easy photo-sharing, and nary a moment wasted getting our photos organized and in sync.

While more and more cameras are adding geotagging as a built-in feature, there’s no need to own a cutting-edge digicam to take advantage of geotags, which are just another layer of photo metadata--in this case, latitude and longitude--you can use to sort the snaps in your photo library. Flickr also lets you use geotags to “map” your photos--perfect for photographers who are lucky enough to travel a lot.

Compared to a standard SD card, Eye-Fi cards cost a pretty penny (2GB SD card street prices run low as $5, compared to the $129.99 retail price for the Eye-Fi Explore). But in the case of Explore in particular, you get quite a bit for the price: Unlimited geotagging, Wayport hotspot access for a year, and free use of the WebShare service to upload your images to online photo-sharing sites--all services that existing Eye-Fi card owners can add to their cards for a yearly cost of $9.99 to $14.99.

iMovie '09

Helmut Kobler — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:16:47 -0500

When Apple introduced iMovie ‘08, it created a schism in the Mac video-editing world. On one hand, the new version introduced an entirely new interface that made editing quick, casual movies far easier than before. On the other hand, Apple was so busy implementing this new model that it didn’t have time to reimplement all the features of previous iterations, leaving a lot of iMovie users believing the new version was really a step backward. Now, Apple has updated iMovie for ’09, and this time around, it’s bound to please almost everyone.

iMovie '09 piles on the features without cluttering up its intuitive interface.

For starters, iMovie ‘09 offers most of the features found in previous versions. One of these sorely missed features is Themes, which lets you incorporate snazzy, broadcast-quality motion graphics into your projects (there are six customizable themes to choose from--fewer than previous versions, but more polished). Video effects have returned as well, including effects like Aged Film, Film Grain, Glow, Dream, and Vignette. You can also now speed up, slow down, and freeze-frame your clips, as well as separate audio from video within a clip. More importantly, iMovie now acknowledges the existence of iDVD. iDVD is apparently the black sheep of Apple’s iLife family, but iMovie nonetheless is deigned to let you embed chapter markers into your projects and export projects directly to iDVD.

But not only does iMovie ‘09 finally catch up on features from older editions, it also breaks entirely new ground…lots of new ground, in fact. A prime example is the new image-stabilization feature, which helps take the jitter and bounce out of your handheld shots. Of course, many video cameras today already offer image stabilization, and some models--those using optical stabilization--do a pretty impressive job. But iMovie can help even more.

We tested the feature with a number of shots--for instance, in one test, we walked down a long path while keeping the camera focused straight ahead, and in another test, we stood still while zooming in all the way on a distant object (the zoom magnifies any movement in your hands and arms). For iMovie to work its stabilization magic, it has to analyze y our clips first, which takes time--a 15 second clip took about 5 minutes on a 2.8GHz iMac.

Results weren’t miraculous, but in most cases made an appreciable improvement to our original footage. One downside, however, is that stabilized footage significantly loses sharpness. However, iMovie lets you control the level of stabilization (and by extension sharpness loss) with a slider, and fortunately, you can tweak that setting on the fly. But in general, k eep in mind that what you gain in a steady picture, you lose in resolution.

The Precision Editor lets you quickly and precisely change the start and end frames of two adjoining clips.

Another big addition to iMovie ’09 is the Precision Editor, which lets you fine-tune the precise frame your edited clips begin and end on.

Why the need for such precision? Say you want to cut from a close-up of a batter hitting a ball to a wide shot of the same action, but you need the two shots to end and then begin exactly when the bat makes contact with the ball. In iMovie ’08, this kind of control was possible, but time-consuming. Now, you can roughly edit two clips together in iMovie’s project window, and then open the Precision Editor. Here, you’ll see a magnified view showing the edited and unused frames of the two clips, and can then drag the bar to quickly change both the end and start frames of just one or both of the two clips (Final Cut users know these as Ripple and Roll edits). You can also edit the start and end points of a clip’s audio, letting audio from one clip spillover into the next. If you’re quickly throwing together clips for casual home movies, you may never need the Precision Editor, but if you’re a perfectionist, you’ll definitely appreciate the control.

iMovie also makes it easier to wrangle all the media files you may be keeping on multiple hard drives. A new Consolidate Project feature will copy or move that media to whichever drive your project file is saved on, so all the files related to a project reside on one drive. We wish it offered a few more options for how to copy and move files around, and that it was also more intuitive to use--we actually had to look it up in the Help system, which is rare with Apple software. But we’re glad it’s there.

You can apply multiple effects to a clip--timing effects, filter effects, and images stabilization--via one simple palette.

There are tons more useful new features in iMovie ’09. For instance, you can play a music track, and press the M key to place a marker on every beat of the music. Now, you can drag clips or photos to the music, and iMovie will start each element on a new beat. Another nice touch: If you’re shooting Star Wars fan movies or other special-effects extravaganzas that involve green screen footage, iMovie can key out the green from your shots. There’s also a unique map animation you can customize for travel videos. You can place an animated dot on a major city around the globe, and draw stylized lines between cities as well, creating a nice visual opener when your video moves to a new city.

Apple clearly spent a lot of time on small details in iMovie ’09--making one missing feature all the more strange. It’s not possible to change audio volume within a clip over time (earlier iMovie versions called this Rubberbanding). You can fade audio at the beginning and end of clips, but if you want to raise and lower volume selectively throughout the clip, you have to manually cut it up into small segments, and then give each segment a different volume setting. This is a pretty clunky solution given all the other elegance found under iMovie’s hood. Still, it’s by no means a deal breaker for the vast majority of projects you’re likely to tackle with the app.