DXO is a software manufacturer based in Europe that sometimes slips by me, but I keep meaning to mention them on this site. DXO Optics Pro is their premiere application, having won an EISA (European Imaging and Sound Association) award for the best product of 2007-08.

The program version currently sits at 4.5, with version 5 coming out soon. The DXO package offers some neat things that aren’t available elsewhere. Specifically, DXO analyzes and quantifies the quirks, behaviours, and oddities of most major cameras and lenses and uses this product-specific information to correct images.

That means it will apply a certain type or amount of noise reduction based on your camera and the ISO used for that shot. It also means that flaws or “characteristics” of lenses are accounted for by applying optics and geometry correction specific to the lens.

I’ve heard raving reviews from pro photographers about the denoising and optic control on more than one occasion, and with the new release, DXO is primed to become a standard tool in the pro shooter arsenal.

Digital photography has certainly revolutionized a lot of the typical (read: film) photography workflow, but certain questions keep popping up. I’m often asked by photographers what the best method is for shooting in black and white.

While some cameras do have a black and white conversion mode, allowing you to shoot that way in-camera, it’s usually not the best choice. First of all – who knows what pictures you want in B&W and which you want in color at the time you shoot? Typically (or ideally) you want to make that decision after the fact, when you’ve had time to mentally process the image. Second, the conversion in-camera is essentially just a desaturation of the image, which is not the best way to get a good quality monochrome image. It will remove all the color, but those “greys” that result from desaturating usually have a lack of contrast or tonal panache.

Getting great black and whites is a matter of some subtle manipulation, and Adobe Lightroom is one of the best (and most straight forward) pieces of software with which to achieve this. I just love Lightroom.

Martin Evening is a studio and fashion photographer who works closely with Adobe, and over at the Lightroom News blog he explains (in video) how to best convert a color image to black and white. Check it out!

Microsoft has been working on popularizing their new file format for digital photographs recently. The new format is called HD-Photo (previously known as “Windows Media Photo”) and is aimed at replacing the common and long-since standardized JPG graphics format. The format is supported in Windows Vista natively, and with a plugin from Microsoft will be supported in Adobe Photoshop CS2 as well. Microsoft made this announcement last week at the PMA (Photo Marketing Association) Trade Show in Las Vegas, and they seem serious on taking this one all the way.

According to Redmond, the HD-Photo format is the ideal solution for digital image editing as the file sizes are smaller thanks to improved compression, but the resolution is greatly improved over JPG since said compression isn’t nearly as destructive. The format will allow you to decode only the information required at certain resolutions, and will allow you to manipulate the compressed image data. HD-Photo also offers increased image fidelity, preserving the entire original image content and enabling higher-quality exposure and color adjustments in the image, with a greater dynamic range.

With HD-Photo, we’re taking a new approach to creating and editing photos that simply isn’t available to photographers with today’s formats. HD-Photo fully preserves the original image fidelity with high dynamic range while still allowing for significant improvement in compression size. (Amir Majidimehr)

Basically – this means the image is better, smaller, and more flexible to editing than a JPG (which all digital cameras use)… and Microsoft has said that certain camera manufacturers have already stepped up to support the format on their cameras, though we don’t know who yet. This format would not be competing with RAW formats used by manufacturers on their cameras, but could very well take over from the deprecated JPG format.

If you’re a designer, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut when it comes to color. You find one or two color combinations that you really like and work for you, and it becomes difficult sometimes to break out of that habit. Most often, it just requires a little inspiration… which can come from anywhere. If you’re still having a hard time though, you may want to try Kuler.

Kuler (pronounced “color”) is a new online application from Adobe that let’s you browse popular (and unpopular) color combination choices for use in graphics or design projects. Most designers (ones worth their salt) will likely have a good concept of how certain colors compliment one another anyways… but it’s always nice to see what other people are doing to stay on top of trends.

If you shoot RAW files at all (they’re called NEF on Nikon cameras and CRW on Canon cameras) then you likely have a system for dealing with them. Because RAW files are unstandardized, the RAW format will vary from company to company, and from camera to camera. Nobody has really settled on a “standard” RAW file yet, which upsets a lot of photographers. RAW will continue to remain a non-standard format, so long as the camera company continues to stand behind the format, and there is no good reason to standardize.

But it would be nice to just be able to see those pictures in Windows, and open them in a preview pane without having to open Photoshop or Capture. That’s where the new Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for XP comes in. It’s a fairly small installation, which resembles the Microsoft Picture and Fax Viewer, but is designed for a multitude of RAW files.

You can download the viewer at the Microsoft site.