Just select a video, tap the pencil (edit) icon, and choose Stabilize. These videos (which you can play in sync here) demonstrate before & after results:
More examples can be found in this album.
[Via]
Around 2am in a long-past life, I terrified some young kids fishing for sharks off the end of their pier in Puget Sound. I was wearing night vision goggles in a RIB alongside a bunch of M16-toting Navy guys, and we’d been quietly paddling around the boys’ pier as we hid from our own ships while we stalked Rangers. But that’s a whole other story.
The X27 seems amazing & makes the goggles I wore look like Frogger by comparison:
Kottke writes:
The camera was developed for military use, has an effective ISO rating of 5,000,000, and has a comically long name: “X27 Reconnaissance Day/Night high Fidelity true real time low light/low lux color night vision Imaging Security / Multi Purpose camera system”. Pricing information is not available, but I bet you’re paying for every single one of those words.
[YouTube]
Back at Adobe, Aseem Agarwala was one of my favorite collaborators. He helped teams invent & implement everything from Photoshop’s layer alignment/blending & Perspective Warp to Warp Stabilizer in After Effects. For the past two years he’s been at Google, now teaming up with researchers to produce Video Frame Synthesis using Deep Voxel Flow. Here, just take a look:
[YouTube]
Check out this rather brilliant Kickstarter project from some Stanford scientists on a mission to broaden access to the wonders of exploring our world:
Foldscope is a real microscope, with magnification and resolution sufficient for imaging live individual cells, cellular organelles, embryos, swimming bacteria and much more. Because the Foldscope is so affordable and can be used anywhere, it brings science to your daily life, whether that means looking at what’s growing in your flower pot or watching bacteria from your mouth or analysing the bee stinger that got your thumb. Our goal is to encourage and enable the curious explorer in each of us and make science happen anywhere, anytime.
[YouTube]
Wanna actually go to Mars & feel perpetually jetlagged? Hmm—while thinking that over, take a beautifully painterly flight over the planet surface, courtesy of Jan Fröjdman working with real NASA data:
The anaglyph images of Mars taken by the HiRISE camera holds information about the topography of Mars surface. There are hundreds of high-resolution images of this type. This gives the opportunity to create different studies in 3D. In this film I have chosen some locations and processed the images into panning video clips…
It has really been time-consuming making these panning clips. In my 3D-process I have manually hand-picked reference points on the anaglyph image pairs… The colors in this film are false because the anaglyph images are based on grayscale images. I have therefore color graded the clips. But I have tried to be moderate doing this.
The team esta en fuego!. On the heels of recent releases that added sharable looks, curves, and more, comes some new hotness:
Snapseed 2.17 starts rolling out today and it brings you three new awesome tools:
- Double Exposure allows you to blend two photos and choose from blending modes that are inspired by analog film techniques as well as digital image processing.
- Face Pose lets you correct the pose of portraits based on three dimensional models.
- Expand allows you to increase the size of your canvas and fill up the new space in smart ways with content from your image.
Enjoy, and as always, please let us know what you think.
Hmm, interesting—I honestly had no idea that Sony cameras could install apps, but in retrospect the idea seems blindingly obvious: Why not be able to modify your light-capturing computer like this? PetaPixel writes,
Actually, it’s more than a grad. When you open up the app, you get several options: Graduated ND, Reverse Graduated ND, Color Stripe, Blue Sky, Sunset, and two Custom options for setting up your own presets. The presets will capture preset exposure and white balance values, and if you pick Custom, you can adjust the location and feathering of each boundary, the effect above and below that boundary, and more!
[YouTube]
“Days of Miracles & Wonder,” part 9,287:
PetaPixel writes,
There’s no longer any need to disrupt the animals’ habits and habitat using artificial light; thanks to advances in camera sensors and non-visible spectrum capture, the BBC is shooting the kind of wildlife footage that was simply unimaginable in the 80s and 90s. […]
The Vox video dives into the challenges nature documentaries like Planet Earth used to have back in the days of film, and then advances rapidly through the decades until we reach the jaw-dropping footage shot for Planet Earth II using infrared technology, thermal imaging, and incredible low-light cameras like Sony’s famed A7s.
[YouTube]
Photographer and educator Seán Duggan covers Google Photos in this week’s Mobile Photography Weekly, and he dives deep in Google Photos: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques:
Photographer and educator Seán Duggan shares a collection of power tips that can help you get the most out of Google Photos. Learn how to manage photo storage, use the stellar search capabilities of Google Photos, edit your photos, and make animations, slide shows, and movies from your images. Plus, learn how to share photos securely with friends and family.
Check it out—and thanks, Seán!
So, this happened. 🙂 In Snapseed 2.16 on iOS & Android, you can:
And on Android you can:
The QR-based sharing is a fun twist. The team writes,
You now can easily share these looks with your friends and followers. Snapseed will generate a QR code that embeds your look. Scan this QR code [below] in Snapseed to apply the look to the current photo. You can easily share it through social media, on your web site, or by email and instant messaging!
Whoa:
As PetaPixel put it when describing an older clip,
Since each frame has to ensure the blade is in the same position as the last it therefore needs to be in sync with the rpm of the rotar blades. Shutter speed then needs to be fast enough to freeze the blade without too much motion blur within each frame.
Here the rotor has five blades, now lets say the rpm of the rotor is 300. That means, per rotation, a blade is in a specific spot on five counts. That gives us an effective rpm of 1500. 1500rpm / 60secs = 25.
Therefore shooting at 25fps will ensure the rotor blades are shot in the same position every frame. Each frame then has to be shot at a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the blade for minimal motion blur.
Tangentially related: Lance Armstrong cycling without pedaling:
Cue Keanu-style whoa:
PetaPixel notes,
The technological magic behind this sensor—as Sony points out multiple times in the videos above—is the RAM built right into the sensor stack. This allows for 5x faster readout and a max slow mo capture speed of 960fps at up to 720p resolution. That is not a typo, and it makes 240fps looks like a sad joke.
Remember—if, like me, you’re about to turn to dust—when the mere existence of a “PHONE video” seemed entirely insane? Cue this Nokia ad from ~2002:
The show is (of course) a glorious feast for the eyes (and for various lions, serpents, and parasitic wasps; “red in tooth & claw,” man), and the tech and processes that go into making it are just as amazing:
[YouTube]
Combining swappable lenses with a choice of battery sizes, the Moment 2.0 case for iPhone 7 (currently Kickstarting) seems really thoughtfully designed (especially the two-stage, SLR-like shutter release button). I’m eager to try it out, but it seems compelling enough that I might sign on sight-unseen. [Via Josh Haftel]
The ever-custom Casey Neistat takes us on a 360º flight as he snowboards behind a huge bespoke drone:
Elsewhere, what the hell was I doing walking my bike through hundreds of yards of flooded underpass yesterday? Clearly I should’ve been surfing, pulled along my the invisible hand of the… what, exactly? I dunno, just watch:
[Vimeo]
“Yeah, but you know me,” I told my wife: “I’d be so entranced watching this stuff, I’d stare until the lava was oozing up my disintegrating leg.” Aaanyway…
The filmmakers write,
“Hawaii – The Pace of Formation” is a window into the creation of an island. The Kilauea Volcano’s continued flow of lava into the ocean is one of the few places in the world to provide a front row seat of an island’s formation. The Big Island is literally changing before your eyes. This vast island contains 8 out of 13 different climate zones in the world, each with unique ecosystems, making the Big Island one of the most ecologically diverse places in the world. To showcase its diversity, we wanted to slow things down and let its beauty speak for itself. Enjoy!
And here’s a peek behind the scenes:
Polar Steps is an app that promises to make interactive & printed travel journals by leveraging the data your phone captures. It looks very cool & I’ve turned it on, but sadly it seems unable to gather data from past trips.
Meanwhile Relive is a hosted service that can auto-generate movies like this from your Strava/Garmin data + photos:
[YouTube]
I’m suddenly having technicolor flashbacks to getting hosed on Holi by Nepalese orphans….
There’s lots of good stuff in this crazy vid from The Slow-Mo guys as they detonate 25 airbags full of colorful powder, but things largely get rocking around the 4:00 and 7:00 marks.
[YouTube]
Wow: Graphic design student Matteo Archondis labored to create this 2-minute tour of the planet using only images he snagged from Earth:
PetaPixel writes,
In all, the hyperlapse contains some 3,300 screenshots captured over the course of 2 days, and edited together in a grueling post-processing workflow that took another week after that…
“Thanks to the developer tools of Google Chrome, I was able to remove all the items that interfered with the user experience,” explains Archondis. “I also removed the labels so that the final image could be as clean and realistic as possible, so that I could concentrate on the camera movements as if it was in real life.”
[YouTube]
Recently appointed UN Goodwill Ambassador Nikolaj Coster-Waldau recently donned a Trekker backpack & walked around Greenland (his second home) to share its beauty and raise awareness about climate change. Check out the interactive 360º results.
Wow—this paper (don’t worry, I’m not going to read it either) promises to recreate face data from extremely low-res images. As Yonatan Zunger explains,
[I]t takes a pixelated image, and uses the fact that it knows it’s looking at a human face, and what human faces look like, to turn each pixel into a 4×4 grid of its best guess of which colors would have to have been there to both be consistent with a face shape and with the average color it saw.
On the right are the original pictures, at 32×32 resolution. On the left is what happens after they’re reduced down to 8×8, the sort of thing you would get when a camera is at the limit of its resolution. In the middle is what their algorithm recovered.
Photograph Seán Duggan has posted a great 5-minute overview on Lynda.com showing how to use Google PhotoScan to digitize your old snaps. It’s free for everyone through next Monday, then available only to Lynda subscribers.
Okay, my nerds, this one’s for you: You can now rock out with that original gangsta of color-correction, Curves.
You can also insert line breaks when adding text (you forgot that Snapseed does text now, right?). Oh, and in the new(-ish) Face filter, if face detection fails, you can tell it to try harder—by tapping a button that literally says “Try Harder.”
Enjoy!
Jorge Luengo Ruiz, whom we have to thank for pulling together yesterday’s Disney compendium, has culled nearly 50 years’ worth of Scorsese films into this supercut of a defining perspective:
I’m pleased to say that by very popular demand, you can now really enjoy the details of high-resolution images shared on Google+ by zooming in via your Web browser. This feature—previously available only via the classic Web experience—is now part of the new G+.
With large images (e.g. try these) you can start zooming in by:
Once the image is zoomed in, you can:
Enjoy—and “Enhance!”
Great GoPro work by Tim Humphreys:
[Via Rob Christensen]
Four years ago Adobe showed off a prototype of voice-driven photo editing:
Now they’re back, showing a slicker but shallower (?) version of the same idea:
Well, we’ll see. Hopefully there’s a lot more to the Adobe tech. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of various VR photo-related demos. After donning a mask & shuffling around a room waving wands in the air like a goof, you realize, “Oh… so I just did the equivalent of zooming in & showing the caption?!”
Who f’ing cares?
You know what would be actually worth a damn? Let me say, “Okay, take all my shots where Henry is making the ‘Henry Face,’ then make an animated face collage made up of those faces—and while you’re at it, P-shop him into a bunch of funny scenes.” Don’t give me a novel but cumbersome rehash, gimme some GD superpowers already.
But hey, they’re making a new Blade Runner, so maybe now Ryan Gosling will edit his pics by voice, and they’ll bring back talking cameras, and in the words of Stephen Colbert, “It’s funny because nothing matters.“
[YouTube]
I think you’ll enjoy David Drills’s 2-minute glimpse into the world of Gian Luigi Carminati, “a passionate and poetic 76 years old man who spent his entire life repairing cameras.”
In his small workshop in Milan, [Gian Luigi] takes care of old cameras with just a set of screwdrivers and a lot of patience.
We got the chance to spend some time with him and he was happy to share with us topics like why the analog is still better than the digital, his 50 years old long relationship with photography and how technology shaped the approach to this art.
We were deeply touched by these thoughts about photography coming from a self described ‘technician’ instead of a photographer.
With this two minutes video we had the ambition to tell his life through his memories.
Keep your eyes skyward tonight, children: We just may see Casey Neistat buzz by. 🙂
As they note, no one sells a drone capable of lifting a human, so they built their own. Here’s a peek behind the scenes:
If somehow—somehow—all this gets you thinking, “I wonder what it would look like if a Lego guy hacked his own drone to make it rideable”—well brutha, I’ve got you covered.
[YouTube]
Highlights:
I’m a big fan of Google Motion Stills for iOS, and the team has just added a bunch of awesome, machine-learning-powered tech that you can read about on their blog. It enables stuff like this:
And it lets me easily make stuff like this:
And this (by stringing together a bunch of Live Photos, letting me get a movie I’d never otherwise have shot):
[YouTube]
You know Photoshop’s in my blood (and vice versa), but wow, it looks like they’ve got some solid competition on their hands. Check out the new features in Affinity Photo 1.5 (including 32-bit HDR creation and editing, spherical photo editing (which has actually been in Photoshop for 8 years—though I guarantee that no one knows that), focus stacking (ditto), and more.
Do yourself a solid and enjoy the next two minutes:
The beams seek out and outline the vaults of the huge space using a custom system of 48 computer-controlled lights. Designer Adam Heslop, who helped visualize the performance, said it required the studio to develop a whole range of new techniques.
Here’s how it was done:
[Via]
Rob Whitworth has returned with another eye-popping hyperlapse of Turkey:
Experience the towering fairy chimney formations, immense subterranean cities, stone-carved mansions, and inimitable cultural energy that make Cappadocia one of the world’s most unforgettable travel destinations.
Shot in the filmmaker’s signature flow motion style, the video takes viewers on a time-distorting, gravity-defying tour of Cappadocia’s unique natural and manmade attractions, while immersed in a lyrical narrative of the region’s cultural and historical pedigree. Filmed in brilliant 4K resolution using cutting-edge hyperlapse techniques, the video presents one of Turkish Airline’s most amazing destinations as it has never been seen before.
[Vimeo]
The desktop app works only as a screen saver and features native Mac integration. Once installed, ‘Google Featured’ will appear as an option in the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences window… The 7.8 MB app is free and works with macOS 10.9 Mavericks and above.
And on Android:
Featured Photos can be accessed through the Google Wallpapers app launched with the Pixel. Available for all devices, an update rolling out today will add Google+ as a new source to select for your home or lock screen image. The Wallpapers picker will include attributions to allow for easy following in Google+ and allows for auto updating once a day.
[Via]
By day Googler Sriram Murali keeps spam out of your inbox; by night he captures thrilling images of the stars whirling past us—or rather, of us whirling past them:
He writes,
Lost in Light, a short film on how light pollution affects the view of the night skies. Shot mostly in California, the movie shows how the view gets progressively better as you move away from the lights. Finding locations to shoot at every level of light pollution was a challenge and getting to the darkest skies with no light pollution was a journey in itself. Here’s why I think we should care more.
The night skies remind us of our place in the Universe. Imagine if we lived under skies full of stars. That reminder we are a tiny part of this cosmos, the awe and a special connection with this remarkable world would make us much better beings – more thoughtful, inquisitive, empathetic, kind and caring. Imagine kids growing up passionate about astronomy looking for answers and how advanced humankind would be, how connected and caring we’d feel with one another, how noble and adventurous we’d be. How compassionate with fellow species on Earth and how one with Nature we’d feel. Imagine a world where happiness of the soul is more beautiful. Ah, I feel so close to inner peace. I can only wonder how my and millions of other lives would have changed.
On a related note, check out how two towns in Colorado have become a haven for star watchers.
Hats off to the clever & industrious Aric Guite:
The idea began with Aric making a list of his top 30 art directors. He combed through each of their Instagram feeds and selected one iconic photo. Using the photo as inspiration, Aric shot a second photo that complemented the subject matter. The two photos were then posted to Aric’s feed, with each art director tagged along with a caption asking to collaborate. Together, the photos create an entirely fresh and one-of-a-kind promo piece that is unique to each art director.
