Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
AI text-to-image generators have been in full swing lately. Even text-to-video has become a thing, now Meta has introduced its own. Just like the rest of these generators, Meta’s Make-A-Video AI model lets you turn textual prompts into short video clips.
Make-A-Video offers three different styles of videos: surreal, realistic, and stylized. And while I still find it impressive that this technology even exists – even the “realistic” videos give me the creeps.
Earlier this year, OpenAI introduced an AI image generator DALL-E 2, and chose one million creators for beta testing. And if you’ve been eager to test it out yourself – now you can. From now on, OpenAI is removing the waitlist for DALL-E, so anyone can sign up and start playing with it immediately.
After Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, now it’s Twitter’s turn to copy TikTok’s short-form videos. That’s right, from now on, you can also go to Twitter and waste hours watching short vertical clips. And pretty much like Instagram, Twitter will also force its version of “Reels” upon you in the Explore tab.
It’s not every day that NASA sends a $300 million spacecraft to smash deliberately into an asteroid. But that is exactly what happened this week with the DART mission. Allegedly the mission was successful and we now know that science-fiction end of the world by asteroid scenarios could potentially be avoided in real life. And we don’t even need Bruce Willis.
Another first was made as well during the mission. It was the first time that telescopes Hubble and James Webb made observations of the same object simultaneously.
A bridesmaid shared the story of how her friend demoted her at the last second before the wedding ceremony and demanded that she become her unpaid photographer instead. The woman, called Aila (presumably not her real name) posted on the popular Reddit forum AITA to ask if she was correct to walk out on the wedding and her so-called friend at the request.
Allegedly, the professional wedding photographer had taken ill and had to leave while the wedding party was getting ready. That left the bride in a situation where she didn’t have a photographer at very short notice.
ACD Systems has announced its new version of ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023. As is the trend, it sees the addition of new AI-powered features, including AI Face Edit and AI Actions. It also offers a new Advanced Search feature with enhanced AND/OR logic capabilities as well as tighter integration with Microsoft OneDrive. A new simplified Photomerge feature allows for easy panoramic stitching, HDR and focus stacking.
Adobe has today announced their newest versions of Photoshop Elements 2023 and Premiere Elements 2023 with a bunch of new features to help make the photo and video editing process simpler and easier. The new versions include Adobe Sensei AI-powered features with step-by-step guided edits to help both beginner and advanced users. Elements 2023 also connects with new web and mobile companion apps for editing on the go.
Among the highlighted new AI features in Photoshop Elements 2023 is Moving Elements that you can add to photos, letting you create Cinemagraphs without having to shoot any actual video footage and it’ll export them straight out to social-ready formats. Premiere Elements 2023 also sees a hundred new audio tracks with 50% faster launch times and 70% faster launch times on M1-powered Macs.
It’s no secret that RED is very protective of its patents, particularly the one covering the internal recording of compressed raw video. They’ve pursued it pretty relentlessly over the years, stifling the competition and probably setting back camera development by quite a few years. DJI and Kinefinity are rumoured to have removed their internal raw capabilities over RED’s threats. More recently, however, RED’s sights have been aimed towards Nikon.
Nikon announced in April that the Nikon Z9 was going to gain internal 12-Bit ProRes RAW and 8K 12-Bit N-RAW in a firmware update. The very next month, RED sued them over patent infringement claims as a result. In September, Nikon denied that they’d done so and now we know why. They’re claiming RED should’ve never been granted the patent in the first place and this video from FrameVoyager summarises the whole saga in probably the best way I’ve seen so far.
Yesterday, we wrote about OG App, an Instagram clone that doesn’t look like a commercial break in the middle of your favorite TV show. But only a day after its release, the app was kicked out of the Apple store.
Instagram’s parent company, Meta, claims that it has taken “enforcement actions” against OG App. What’s more, one of the OG App’s founders claims that the personal Instagram and Facebook profiles of his team have been permanently banned. A coincidence? I don’t think so.
According to scientific estimates, more than 95% of Earth’s oceans have never been observed. As SciTechDaily points out, this means that we’ve seen less of our own planet’s oceans than we have the surface of Mars. The biggest challenge in exploring the oceans, though, is powering cameras, particularly for a lengthy amount of time. They typically have to be tethered to research vessels or require regular trips out to swap batteries.
Researchers at MIT, though, have taken a pretty big leap in overcoming this hurdle by developing a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that they say is around 100,000 times more energy-efficient than other underwater cameras. It shoots photos in colour, even in the deep, dark underwater depths and transmits them wirelessly through the water.
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