Welcome to Access Digital Photography, a site for digital photographers hosted by award-winning photographers, and best-selling authors Ken Milburn and Doug Sahlin. Collectively we have more than 80 years of photography experience. That’s right, we’ve shot film. But we embrace the digital technology and our digital darkrooms. We’ve written books and articles on digital photography, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, and other applications we use to edit our work.

About Our Site
As we write our magazine articles and books, we learn more information about digital photography, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and Adobe Photoshop and the other applications we use to edit our work. We share the information with you on this site. We also feature software reviews, and reviews about digital cameras and lenses. To see a categorized list of posts we’ve already created, click the Sitemap link. You can also find specific information by entering a word or phrase in the Search box, which appears with each post, and on the Blog page. You can also view posts made in a specific category by clicking a link in the Categories section of the sidebar. We also have a photoblog where we post our most recent work. To learn more information about your hosts, click the About Us link. Our most recent posts about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop CS3, digital cameras, lens, product reviews, equipment reviews, articles about digital photography and so on are listed below this post. You can view previous posts by clicking a link in the Archives section of Click a link to visit the site.

Our Podcast
We also have a podcast called Pixelicious. The podcast features audio and video episodes about our favorite subjects: Lightroom, Photoshop, and digital photography. We’ll have a new episode for your listening, and viewing pleasure. Our goal is to become your authoritative resource for Lightroom, Photoshop, and digital photography. To view the latest episodes of our podcast, click the Pixelicious logo.

Thank You
Thanks for visiting our site. Feel free to leave comments on any post. Please note the all comments are moderated. Comments containing SPAM, links to porn sites, or any offensive language will not be posted on our site.

The recent Photokina show in Cologne, Germany made numerous announcements that portend significant new trends in digital photography:

> More resolution with less noise

> More full-frame cameras at lower prices

> Movies from DSLRs and larger frame compacts

> Larger frame, interchangeable lens compact cameras

More resolution with less image noise

For 4/3d size sensor cameras, pixel count has increased from 10MB to 12. For APS-C size sensors, it has increased to nearly 15MB in some cameras (e.g. Pentax K20D, Canon 50D), and for full frame sensors to more than 20 MB (Canon 5D Mk II, 21MB, Sony A-900 24.6 MB)

More full-frame cameras at lower prices

Full frame cameras are becoming commonplace at under $3,000, even from the big names. The Sony A900 is 24.6MP full-frame with a CMOS sensor.  That is higher resolution than most medium-format sensors of a couple of years ago and even beats out the brand-new Canon 1Ds Mark III and 5D Mark II  (21Mp CMOS sensor) . The Sony will retail for $3,000 and has built-in image stabilization and dust removal, but no live-view and no hot-shoe. The hot-shoe’s no big deal because Sony’s hot shoes only work with Sony’s very expensive flashes, so thank heavens for the PC sockete. The Canon EOS 5D Mark II only has 3 ferwer megapixels and no image stabilization but does have a hot shoe and a very large audience of folks who own Canon lenses and who plan to keep their Canon DSLRs as back-up cameras that can use the same lenses. It’s about $2, 700 with no lens. Nikon’s D700 is full-frame, but only 12.1 MP for $3,000. At the same time, DSLRs with APS-C size sensors are giving us more megapixels (the Pentax K20D at 14.5 MP still holds the megapixel per buck record, but Canon’s new 50D has 15.1 and only sells for $600 more) and keeping the body price down to about half that of the three mentioned above.

Leica has also announced a new DSLR that is roughly the same size as most top-of-the-line full-frame DSLR cameras, but with 43-percent larger sensor and much more resolution (37MP). No price has been announced, but it will be definitely in the Hassleblad league.

Movies from DSLRs and larger frame compacts

Along with Live View, DSLRs are starting to offer very high-resolution movie making. This gives us a great new tool for expanding our ability to communicate with our cameras without having to buy and carry along a lot of extra gear. The first DSLR to shoot 24-frame HD movies is the Nikon D-90, shown below.

The new 4/3ds compacts (look elsewhere in this article) may be even more useful for this purpose because so many of them will be used by journalists. Sadly, the new Panasonic Micro 4/3ds camera does not shoot movies, though Panasonic has announced that there will be a movie mode next year. New storage cards are also being introduced that have super-high capacity and data transfer rates. That’s perfect timing for high-definition movie-making. Although these cameras don’t have microphones, it would be no big deal to sync up recording made with a pocket recorder.

Larger frame, interchangeable lens compact cameras

What we’ve been missing, so far, in digital photography that was considered essential in some fields (sports, entertainment, journalism) were professional-quality, interchangeable-lens camera’s without reflex viewfinders. Leica, Contax, and Nikon all made cameras that were considered classics in that era. The advantages are that they are much lighter, less obtrusive, and quieter than DSLRs. Loosing the pentaprism and mirror really cuts down the body size and makes it possible to make shorter, smaller diameter lenses that have the same focal lengths. So its fairly easy for the reporter or sports photographer who’s in a rush to carry at least of a couple of cameras with different lenses. That means using faster, smaller primary lenses that are likely to be sharper than zooms.

There are two different approaches to these new cameras. One is being pioneer by Leica with their newly-announced M8.2. The sensor size is roughly the same as a 4/3ds camera. Resolution is around 10MP and the camera has a rangefinder.

The big news comes from Panasonic, which uses Olympus’s 4/3d sensors and Olympus with the introduction of “Micro 4/3ds” camera’s. These are both interchangeable lens cameras and both have 12MP resolution. Both are just a hair larger than compact cameras that have roughly 1/10^th the sensor size and both use Olympus’ Live Mos sensors and have a pixel density of about 2.1MP/cm. So image quality should compare quite favorably with that of “semi-pro” DSLR cameras. The Olympus camera shoots movies. The Panasonic doesn’t, but has a super-high resolution LCD “reflex-like” viewfinder that everyone who’s used it raves about. It also comes in black and looks like a pro camera, so I’m expecting that it will be the one that makes a splash. It also comes in red. Oddly enough, if that makes it look more “amateur” perhaps it will be less subject to theft and less threatening to subjects. Here it is:

I became interested in this plug-in because I don’t yet own a 30MP digital camera, yet I really enjoy making very large prints for the simple reason that they have a lot of commercial appeal in fine-art venues. So far, I’ve been most successful at this by utilizing Fred Miranda’s SRI Pro plug-in, which is so excellent I would think it tough to beat…especially at anything close to the $24.95 that Fred charges for it. On the other hand, I’ve seldom been disappointed in Alien Skin’s products and I like their down-to-Earth and highly creative attitude. So I felt that I had to give BlowUp 2 a close look…It works with 16- and 32-bit files, as well as being able to take advantage of multi and multi-core processors. Since speed often equals productivity, this could be at least a good reason for considering it.

 First, I’m going to give you my initial impressions of the program and what I see as its most beneficial features. I’ll also show you examples of blow ups from small portions of images, so that you can compare them at 100% enlargement…even here on your monitor.

 BlowUp has recently become available as a “version 2.” What BlowUp 2 does that’s really promising is convert blown-up edges to vector geometrics…so there are never jaggies in the edges. This is true no matter what the magnification of the original resolution, so (at least, theoretically) you can gain edge sharpness even when making an enlargement that’s only 1.25 times the size of the original. Also, at least in theory, you can get very clean edges even when blowing up some very crummy, low-resolution web art. In the illustration below, you side two copies of an image of a lizard that has been enlarged 1.25 times. One the left is the Photoshop-only version, on the right, the default settings in BlowUp 2 for blowing up the same image to the same size. Both images were taken from a small portion of the image, so what you see is a small portion of a 14.5 MP image cropped to produce the exact dimensions seen here on screen.