Earlier this year I blogged about a free photo stitching application called Hugin, that combines multiple photos in to cool panoramas. It did a pretty good job but was not at all easy to use. Today I tried a brand new free photo stitcher called ICE that was just released by Microsoft last week as part of a research project. All I did was take 8 photos from my final pilgrimage to Shea Stadium this past August, dragged them into this program, and a minute later I automatically got this awesome panoramic photo. How cool is that.

I'm going to take more multi-frame photos now that stitching them together is this easy and the results this good. I don't usually recommend Microsoft software but if you're interested in creating stitched panoramic photos you should check this out.

http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/ice.html

Labels: photos

Today was full of Google tech news - exciting stuff for technophiles, but the rest of you can just stop reading now.

First, Google announced and released a new web browser to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. It's been rumored for years but today's news was basically a surprise. I've already downloaded and installed Google's new browser, known as "Chrome". It's only in beta right now but I was still majorly disappointed. Thumbs down for now.

Next from Google today was the release of Picasa 3, the latest version of their great desktop photo organizing and editing software. As a professional graphic artist, I've been a longtime satisfied user of Picasa for my home photos. It's quick, it's easy, and it's powerful (but not PhotoShop powerful). This new version 3 adds so many more great new features, including retouching (really impressive), automatic red-eye reduction, video editing, text overlays, and auto-syncing to Picasa Web Albums. Big thumbs up!

And speaking of Picasa Web Albums, Google just today introduced people tagging, just like on Facebook. That's cool, but the coolest part is Google's new face recognition software. Picasa went through all of my online photos and identified over 300 faces. Then Google grouped similar faces together so I could identify who the person was and tag them. It wasn't always perfect but it did a good job with recognizing similar faces (especially since Patty is a twin). It took me less than 10 minutes to tag over 300 faces.

Labels: internet, photos

I took 190 photos on our trip to New York (although a dozen or so were sequences meant for panoramic stitching later on). With the addition of photos I copied from my sister's camera, we came back with over 200. Here are 42 of them.

Labels: photos, vacation

We went to get new family portraits today. We took a family photo a couple of years ago but that was before Darah.

Even better than the photos we got is that in addition to those we bought, they gave us low-rez copies of every photo taken on a disc. Check them out in the photo album! Below are two of my favorites.

Labels: family, photos

We took a lot of photos this Thanksgiving week. We ended up with over 120 photos after combining everything taken among our three cameras, but I uploaded only eight to our online albums. Six new photos in the Darah album and two in the 2007 album (including one that Amy took of Maegan and I letterboxing). We took photos of Thanksgiving itself but I didn't upload any.

Labels: family, photos