Digital Imaging News - May 6th 2006

Mamiya to Sell Optical Equipment Division
Mamiya-OP is selling its Optical Equipment Division to Cosmos Scientific Systems Inc. Mamiya has been producing cameras since the late 1940's, but has failed to successfully market digital vesions of their professional photography equipment.
Hopefully Cosmos will be able to turn things around and make the product line a viable and successful business in the professional digital photography world. I'll be very interested in seeing what they do with the Mamiya ZD 'medium format' digital SLR and back.

Kodak EasyShare V6.0
Kodak's EasyShare digital camera and docking system is celebrating its fifth birthday. Kodak have released their new EasyShare V610 dual lens camera and version 6.0 of its EasyShare software. Version 6.0 features a new user interface, a photo card printing feature and will be available this month to download for free.

ACDSee Updates
ACD Systems has released updates to its two flagship products, ACDSee 8 Photo Manager and ACDSee Pro Photo Manager. ACDSee 8.1 Photo Manager includes more than 50 feature, performance and productivity enhancements and RAW support, and the Pro Photo Manager update offers improved speed and performance in RAW processing. Free upgrades are available now at ACD Systems.

Canon 5D CSPro Released for Mac
Fred Miranda has released the Canon 5D CSpro Plugin for Mac. The Plugin features new and improved sharpening technology (CS) specific designed to accommodate Canon 5D SLR files. New with 5D CSpro is the ability to work with layered files. So, if you are working on a image with layers, they will remain intact. Canon 5D CSpro provides everything from haloless sharpening, edge-sharpening, luminance sharpening, mode sharpening, and more with just the press of a button. With this plugin you can also choose from low or high ISO settings. Other options allow you to sharpen fine detail. There are pre-designed intensity levels, and options to reduce color noise from high ISO files as well. You can even create your own sharpening profiles, preview settings and tweak intensity results. For more information visit the product page at Fred Miranda.

Microsoft Launches Future Pro Photographers Contest
Microsoft has announced the inaugural Microsoft Future Pro Photographers Photography Contest, which is open to college photographers from around the world. The grand prize is US$20,000 in cash plus thousands of dollars worth of computer hardware and software. The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2006.

Aperture 1.1.1 Released
Apple have released Aperture 1.1.1 for Mac. The update features a minor update that fixes several bugs and improves integration with iPhoto.

Light Machine released for MacOS X
The Plugin Site released the MacOS X version of LightMachine, a plugin for performing all kinds of light adjustments in photos. LightMachine combines shadow/highlight, virtual lighting and color-based correction tools for performing sophisticated corrections without the need for time-consuming selections and layer stacks. It lets you selectively correct photos taken under bad light conditions or with inadequate camera settings and achieve results that rival photos taken under the best circumstances.
Additionally LightMachine can achieve special effects like glows, sunsets, high key and selective b/w effects, replace one color with another and simulate polarizing filters. LightMachine works in several graphics applications including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Illustrator, Painter, Canvas and Fireworks. LightMachine can be applied to 8bit and 16bit RGB images.