Will Huey bring satisfaction?

As mentioned earlier, I am working on a book about printing photo with Kodak's Picture Maker. Publication has been postponed because Kodak has announced the G4 to replace the PM.

I need to wait for the G4 to know if there is any difference other than the speed.

Recently, Pantone has come up with the Huey, refer "In Photo Prints, Perfect Color In Means Perfect Color Out ". It is said that this is to calibrate the monitor so that we can have similar colors between the printed photos and the display on the screen.

From my work on this topic, different monitors are never be able to calibrate with similar result. Certainly, I am working from a photographer's point of view. It would be interesting to wait and see what Huey can do to solve this problem.

For the time being, I still believe that the color difference between the printed photos and the display would not be solved by a single method.

Should I continue to work on this topic? Will digital camera users give up the photos and enjoy the images on display? It may be too early to confirm, yet I think that photos will remain the choice for some if not all camera users.

From Corbis to Memories, will Bill Gate get it right this time?

Corbis is the online image library, a project of Bill Gate in 1989.

At that time, it was said that Bill Gate supposed that we would not take photos anymore. If we wanted images, his Corbis was the source.

Certainly, it may be good to have more online image sources for some publications or media. Yet, it is something that he might not understand. For most of us, the enjoyment is the photo taking process or some images that we can say 'my photos', even these photos may not be good in compare with those taken by others.

One thing we have to remember is the price of digital camera at that time was quite high and not affordable even by professionals. Many may not know about it because digital cameras we have today range from a few hundreds to thousands. Also, the camera phone is so advanced that some may prefer it instead of digital camera.

Perhaps, that is why Microsoft never offers us anything about photos for the past seventeen years. I do not know whether this is due to Bill Gate's concept about photos.

Recently, there is news about "Gates Pitches CES Crowd on Vista's Content Handling". The coming Windows Vista is said to have "photo editing and search features are combined in what Microsoft calls Memories". A term seems to borrow from Kodak that declared the photographic business was about memories some years ago.

There is a number of imaging software product. However, there are only two that I prefer to use, Photoshop and Irfanview. There are several versions of Photoshop, but I recommend to the participants of my online courses to choose the Photoshop CS only. Irfanview is free for personal use and my recommendation is not based on free. Irfanview has a few functions that we need.

As an add-on feature, we may not have full editing functions like Photoshop. This may be something like Kodak's Perfect Touch that let users to choose some preset enhancement. Of course, this is for general users who would not have the intention to learn about digital imaging and just need some easy steps to fine-tune their images.

What Memories will be remains to be seen and I hope that it would not lead users towards virtual reality and further away from the humanly photography. With digital camera, a lot of newcomers have failed to find their way to enjoy photography because they suppose that taking photo is just a click.