Canon, a leader in photographic and imaging technology, today announces the Speedlite 430EX flash unit, replacing the popular Speedlite 420EX. The Speedlite 430EX improves on many specifications of its predecessor, and includes new features to maximise digital image quality when using a flash. These include automatic selection of camera white balance settings, and auto-adjustment of the zoom flash position to match the sensor size of the camera to which the unit is attached. The Speedlite 430EX has increased its guide number to 43 (m/ISO 100 at 105mm), and has approximately 40% faster recycling time than the Speedlite 420EX.

Website : Canon Speedlite 430EX flash Review at The Digital Picture

It’s an increasingly crowded photo browser landscape: Photo Mechanic these days competes against programs such as FotoStation Classic and FotoTrafiX, both of which are aimed at the working digital photographer. Plus, Photoshop’s File Browser has gotten better over time and is a good launching pad for batch processing, the low cost of ACDSee 7 for Windows make it an interesting choice for pros who need quick preview speed and little else while the duo of BreezeBrowser Pro and Downloader Pro from Breeze Systems have a depth of functionality that make them worth a look (the last two applications are Windows-only).

In short, there are a lot of ways to browse photos these days, and we haven’t even mentioned good image catalogers such as Extensis Portfolio and iView MediaPro that are designed to be pseudo-browsers too.

Photo Mechanic doesn’t do everything that all the other browsing applications put together do. But with v4.3, it not only continues to do what it does as well or better than anything else we’ve tried, its expanding feature set means it now does an awful lot.

Version 4.3 for Mac (OS X 10.2 and later) and Windows 2000/XP, when released later this week, will be a free update for licensed Photo Mechanic users that have purchased the program in the last year. A fully-functional trial demo will be posted at the same time. The program is US$150 direct from Camera Bits (and a similar price at pro photo retailers that carry Lexar products).

Website : RAW+JPEG handling get major boost in upcoming Photo Mechanic 4.3

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How to reduce size of photo for upload:

• The Best method to decrease file size for a WEB image is to decrease the quality. This does NOT mean the image will not look good on a computer monitor. Digitized images are normally at a much higher quality (resolution / dots per inch) than a monitor can display. This step alone will normally reduce the file size to 1/5 of the original. Physical size will not change (Avoid resize until final step)
• The Second best method (optional) is to ‘crop’ off any ‘dead’ area. For example, center the subject in the picture by cropping the borders.
• Using ‘resize’ to reduce file size is NOT very effective. (usually no more than 1/2 of the original size - even if you take the viewing size below 320 x 240. Resize should be used to obtain the ‘physical’ size you desire i.e resizing - Used alone results in an image that is not really optimized very well.

It’s amazing how many web pages (or other sites with photograph’s) contain images that have NOT been optimized for the WEB. One reason is that people do not understand that a digital camera and/or scanner - along with the fancy graphics programs (such as Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop) have default settings intended for a printer.

BTW: Here are some web page optimizing tips for Photoshop.The good news is that most people do NOT need the power of the expensive programs to optimize photograph’s for the web.

There are freeware programs such as ( Irfanview) that do a much better job of compressing a .jpg image for the web. This freeware program has the standard tools that help decrease the file size. And it has an excellent side by side comparison view when using ‘gamma correction’ or other enhancements. Allowing a quick ‘fix’ for those dark pictures (which are so typical of a digital camera and a scanner)

In most cases, the only required change will be to load the original image. Then Use ’save as’ to give the file a new name (and improve compression at same time). The freeware program (Irfanview) has default settings that do a ‘fair’ job of .jpg compression while maintaining WEB Quality.

Addendum / Footnote: The default quality setting is usually 80% for Irfanview; however, 70% or 75% quality still yields excellent WEB Quality. When using the program for the first time, just use the ’save’ or ’save as’ option. Then click on the ‘option’ button on the lower right. This displays the ‘quality’ setting that can be changed (again 70-75% will normally yield a quality higher than the best monitors on the market).

If using another graphics program, find the instructions on reducing the quality because most graphics programs are set at high quality (resolution) for printers (not monitors).

Some typical guide lines for optimizing images are shown below. These values are used by the professional webmasters (the code / layout people) that work on big business sites. In most cases, they will use the small to medium size images.

These are typical but will vary depending on the number of colors and the resolution of the original image.