News

Japan’s CP+ show has seen a number of new cameras launched this week, and today was Canon’s turn. It has launched a solid upgrade to its now retired Rebel T3 with the new Canon EOS Rebel T5 – a 3 fps shooter with 9 AF points. At 7 ounces, and $550 retail price, it should be popular when it ships in March. Canon has also fixed the issues that plagued its original super-compact with the new Canon PowerShot G1 X Mark II – featuring a sleeker design and faster AF. You can order either camera now from B&H using the links in this article. However for $800, I’d rather get the new Sony Alpha a6000 (NEX-6 replacement) with kit lens (which we’ll be reviewing later this spring when it is available. Canon specs below the break…

Nikon is fond of providing some great deals for those purchasing a new camera with one or more lenses, but that leaves lens buyers out in the cold, or requires finding a buddy who needs the camera. Today Nikon is launching some pretty aggressive “lens-only” rebates across almost their entire line of lenses. If you’re looking to up your photo game for 2014, now might be a good time to snag the lens you’ve been envying Head over to B&H to check them out!…

Clearly its users aren’t lapping up Adobe’s new subscription model the way it wants. It has once again extended its olive branch Photoshop Photography program offer – this time until March 31st. For $120/year you can get Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, and in case you need another web presence, a 20GB cloud account on its Behance service. Further showing its enthusiasm, or desperation, this offer is currently available to anyone, whether or not you have ever owned an Adobe product! To sign up, head to the Program’s web page.

As if point and shoot cameras weren’t having enough trouble, Sony is now selling a mirrorless camera with an APS-C sensor for $350 with a 16-50mm lens. The Sony NEX-3N features a 16MP sensor and BIONZ image processor. You can jack the ISO up to 16000 (although with noise of course) and it shoots 60 fps video at 1080i.  

Especially with the popularity of mobile devices for viewing photos, slideshows are a perfect way to show off the best of your images – or simply to share the highlights of an event or trip. Creating quality slideshows can be a time-consuming process, so any tool that helps me make better shows, faster, is a good thing. Regular readers will know that I’m a huge fan of Proshow’s offerings – Producer and Gold on the desktop, and Web for when you’re mobile or on a Mac. However, I’ve struggled a bit with how to leverage Proshow’s powerful Wizard tool while still having customizations like beginning and end captions. Fortunately, the clever Remix command has come to my rescue…

Featuring an excellent 1” sensor and Zeiss f/1.8 zoom lens packed into a solidly-made black metal cylinder, the Sony QX100 is a nice piece of hardware. Unfortunately awkward ergonomics and seriously deficient software leave it adrift as more of a curiosity or a niche product than any type of segment-defining breakthrough. Let’s look at what it does right, and wrong, and whether it still might be in your future…

Sometimes you just can’t be where you want to get the right angle on a shot. Or maybe you thought you were, but later you need to use the photo in a different way and want to move your perspective around. Photoshop has always offered some tools to do that, but today Adobe added a powerful new one – Perspective Warp. Using it you can shift the apparent point of view of an image around, even creating combinations of perspectives that could never have been captured in a single photo…

I’ve been shooting almost exclusively with the Nikon Df DSLR for the last month. When I crouch behind the retro-styled body and snap off shots that will be captured on the excellent D4 sensor, I feel like it could be the ultimate street photography camera. It is quick enough (5.5 fps), has world-class image quality, and is about half the size and weight of a Nikon D4. Besides, I figure it looks cool, and I certainly get some odd glances as if to say “is that a film camera you’re using?” My euphoria lasts until I need to change a setting. That’s where the retro design gets in the way. Read on and I’ll help you decide if the Nikon Df needs to be in your camera bag or in your collection…

Happy 2014, everyone. I wanted to start the year off right, so for our first review I’m covering a really slick camera bag I had the pleasure of using for nearly a month on my Southeast Asia photo tour. (If you’re in Las Vegas, you’ll see me with it at CES next week too). It is the new ThinkTank Retrospective 7, although many of the points in the review apply equally well to its siblings like the ThinkTank Retrospective 20, or the variety of other sized bags in the product line…

Despite the power of post-processing tools, one area that has always been labor intensive and error-prone is correcting images that have multiple light sources with multiple color temperatures. Since white balance is best set on the raw image, correcting for two or more different light sources has required “developing” the image multiple times and then using layers and layer masking to composite a version that shows each area lit correctly. Fortunately Adobe has changed all that…

After years in the making, the new, sleek, and ultra-powerful Mac Pro units can finally be ordered. Starting at $2994 from B&H the svelte towers are everything Mac-using photographers have been dreaming of since the last Mac Pro models begin to show their age. As always, if you’start out your B&H shopping using our link as it helps support our free photo information site.

Urban legend has it that the women on the Chin underwent the painful process of having their faces t

In the bad old days of early DSLRs, noise reduction was a vital piece of every workflow. With modern DSLRs, and even many smaller cameras, low-noise is the norm for most sensors in most conditions. But no matter what camera you have, there comes a time when you have to push its limits and bump up the ISO until you get visible noise. That’s when a high-quality noise reduction tool is a must.

As regular readers know, I’ve been putting together the pieces of a easy-to-travel-with “digital darkroom” based on a tablet and software. I’ve written about how a tablet with Photoshop Touch can do a great job of processing images, but was still missing a good solution for creating awesome slideshows without a computer. Fortunately, Photodex, makeers of my favorite desktop slideshow software Proshow Producer, has been hard at work at an excellent version you can use over the web.

As a Nikon shooter, I’ve been both tantalized and frustrated for nearly a decade with Nikon’s on-again, off-again approach to WiFi connectivity for its DSLRs. The original WT-1A was an expensive boat anchor in practice. Four generations later, the Nikon WT-5A is a huge improvement, but it is $570 and only works with the $6K Nikon D4. Those with lesser cameras like the Nikon D600 or Nikon D800 benefit from the incredibly small, inexpensive Nikon WU-1b. It’s fun for remote shooting, but is crippled – deliberately or just because of its limited hardware – in not offering remote focusing or camera setting adjustments. Fortunately there is now a middle ground…