| Take Encoding Up A Level (Part 1) |
| Desktop PCs today are saturated with video. It floods in from all ports, and the scary thing is, the machines seem to take the punishment with ease. Where once we were thrilled to see a quarter-screen VGA video streamed from a CD, we now tut and roll our eyes if YouTube can't offer 1080p, leaving our eyeballs to endure mere 720p. |
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| Philips 7000 Series 46PFL7007 |
| Also available in 40- and 55in, the 46in 7007 is two steps down from Philip’s flagship 9707 Smart 3DTV. It’s a beauty to behold, with a thin 5mm metal bezel and a smart wedge stand that doubles as a wall mount. |
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| Virgin Takes The Plunge On Internet Television |
| Virgin media has released an app for iPhone and iPad owners who use its TiVo set-top box. The app controls the TiVo remotely over a wifi network to schedule and delete recordings and allows the device to be used as a gesture-based remote control. |
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| Handwriting Input And Recognition (Part 2) |
| If you have installed a graphics tablet, the Ink pane in System Preferences gives rapid access to automatic conversion of handwritten characters into text. If that pane doesn’t appear, download and install the latest driver for your tablet. Test conversion by connecting your tablet, opening a word or text editor, and turning on recognition in the Ink pane. |
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| Handwriting Input And Recognition (Part 1) |
| If you’ve spoken with Siri or pecked out a few paragraphs using your iPad’s virtual keyboard, you’ll know that traditional keyboards are no longer the only game when it comes to text entry. |
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| Get Reflective With Photoshop |
| As painters like Constable and Turner demonstrated in many of their masterpieces, water can enhance a landscape. On a calm day the ripple-free surface of a lake creates a natural mirror that adds a pleasing sense of symmetry to a scene. |
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| Tasty Treatments |
| Colour photography is all about reproducing the colours that were in the original scene - except when it isn’t. It may seem a little perverse if you spend your time trying to capture sharp, detailed, accurate photos, but flaws hold an intense fascination for many people. |
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| Try Advanced Cloning Techniques |
| You could use Photoshop CS’s Clone Stamp and Healing Brush tools follow our previous 12-step walkthrough and tidy up the landscape in exactly the same way. However, the full version of Photoshop boasts some extra powerful tools that enable you to select and replace unwanted objects much quickly. |
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| Photoshop School: Use Cloning To Clean Up Coastal Scenes |
| When shooting a landscape at sunrise or sunset, you’ll have a small window of opportunity to capture the scene in the opportunity to capture the scene in the optimum light. This means that you have less time to compose the shot carefully so that you exclude distracting objects, such as the post on the right of our start image. |
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| Kensington ClickSafe Keyed Laptop Lock |
| The author of this review hasn’t knowingly suffered any malware in 20 years of computing, but he has had four PCs stolen in the past eight. Physical theft of your computing kit is as much a threat today as ever. |
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| Best Image Software Round-up 2012 (Part 3) : Night Camera, Sketch Camera |
| Usually the process of turning images into sketches is done with post-processing, but Paper Camera cleverly turns that convention on its head by using the live camera feed and directly displaying a paper rendering of it on the screen. Sketch Camera does exactly the same thing, but with sketches. |
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| FotoMagico 4 - Slick Sliding Away |
| FotoMagico has long been a popular photographic slideshow authoring tool, valued for its ease of use and professional results. Like the automated slideshow player in iMovie, it gives still images added interest using the Ken Burns effect, where the image is zoomed and panned to give the illusion of motion. |
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| Add Blur To Rivers And Waterfalls |
| We all have defining moments throughout our love affair with photography, when it becomes more than just a means for capturing a scene, when we realize that different combinations of shutter speed and aperture can open up endless creative possibilities. |
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| Create A Logo With Inkpad On The Ipad (Part 2) |
| To make the ‘Z’ crisper, add a stroke using the Stroke palette. This allows for dashed strokes as well as simple lines, and there are controls for setting the shape of corners and end caps, but those aren’t needed here. For now, a simple 4pt grey stroke is sufficient. |
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| Create A Logo With Inkpad On The Ipad (Part 1) |
| It’s all too easy, as we’ve repeatedly noted, to dismiss the iPad as a cute gadget but ultimately a device for passive consumption rather than content creation. Sure, the argument goes, there are apps for music and art and so on, but can you really do anything serious with a drawing program that only costs a few pounds, on a screen the size of a paperback, with no input device except your finger? And this is one of those arguments where the questions are strictly rhetorical. |
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| Magix Music Maker 2013 - Jazz Up Your Productions |
| Under normal circumstances to produce something acceptable you would need either your own studio, or the services of a professional studio. Not to mention some musicians, possibly singers and of course the ability to write music for the whole production. |
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| Yamaha PDX-11 - Well-Rounded Quality With Excellent Bass |
| The Yamaha PDX-11's title gives little away regarding this product's functionality; although the appearance of the Yamaha name should give the clue that audio will have a role to play. In fact, the Yamaha PDX-11 is a portable speaker dock designed to work with the iPod/iPhone family when connected to the mains or powered by batteries. |
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| Focal XS Book - Extremely Compact And Stylishly Simple |
| The Focal XS Book is a self-powered stereo system that sits on the desktop. It comprises two styled cabinets that stand around 11in tall, rectangular boxes that swell and flare toward the front to accommodate a mid-bass driver. |
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| Olympus SP 620UZ - Low-Cost Super Zoom Camera |
| The successor to the Olympus SP-610UZ bucks the recent trend set by the increasingly premium-priced super zooms trickling into the market by offering a big zoom lens for a surprisingly small price. On paper, this new super zoom looks set to offer some impressive features, with a 16-megapixel 1/2.3-inch CCD sensor matching up to the camera’s colossal 21x optical zoom lens, complete with Dual Image Stabilization technology to help combat shaky shots at longer focal lengths and/or in low light. |
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| Belkin @TV Plus - TV Streamer For iOS And Mac |
| Despite the similarity in the name, Belkin’s @TV Plus is almost the Yin to the Apple TV’s Yang. Where Apple’s device is all about bringing content from the web onto your big sceen, |
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| Macro Marvels (Part 5) |
| Given the dual role of these lenses for close-ups as well as for fast standard or telephoto use, sharpness is Important at both ends of the aperture range. The Olympus 60 mm is a clear winner for outstanding sharpness at its largest available aperture of f/2.8, and it still has plenty of resolving power at f/16, ideal for macro shooting. |
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| Macro Marvels (Part 4) |
| On Nikon or Sony bodies, the Tamron has a fairly conventional effective focal length of 90mm, and it works out to 96mm on a Canon camera. It’s only natural to think that the lens is an APS-C version of Tamron’s popular 90mm macro lens for full-frame cameras but it’s actually very different. |
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| Macro Marvels (Part 3) |
| Looking every inch a throwback to the last century, the venerable Nikon 60mm macro is a D-mount lens, complete with aperture ring at the rear of the barrel and another ring further forward for switching between autofocus and manual focus modes. The arrangement doesn’t find favour in Nikon’s more recent designs. |
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| Macro Marvels (Part 2) |
| For even lighting without shadows, which is often important in macro photography, the best solution is to use ringflash. Unlike a regular flashgun or studio flash, the main flash tube forms a ring that mounts to the front of the lens. Because the flash is effectively fired from all around the circumference of the lens, any resulting shadows are minimal. |
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| Macro Marvels (Part 1) |
| Macro lenses are close-up specialists, usually offering a full 1x magnification factor at their closest focus setting. It’s not always the case, though, as demonstrated by the Canon 50mm macro in this group, which only offers 0.5x magnification. |
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| Power To The People (Part 3) |
| Once again, iPhone 5 owners will need to wait a while for new iPhone cases which support the larger 4in display and new Lightning connector. For now a standalone portable charger with a USB port is probably your best bet. |
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| Power To The People (Part 2) |
| Topping up your iGadget’s battery when you’re on the road is another handy option for getting through the day, but once again the iPhone 5’s new Lightning connector makes life more complicated. |
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| Power To The People (Part 1) |
| The battery lives of our devices are certainly improving, but it can still be a struggle for your smartphone, notebook or tablet to make it through a busy day on a single charge. Thankfully there are plenty of options for people on the go who can’t afford for their gadgets to run flat. |
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| DSLR Test – Full Filling |
| A full-frame DSLR body has long been on the wish lists of many more photographers than could afford one. Now, both Nikon and Canon have announced cameras priced at about $2100 (street, body only), pitching them as “low-cost” full-framers. |
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| Learn How To Restore Old Photographs |
| There are very few people that can’t say that they don’t have a collection of ageing, dusty and damaged photographs from years gone by sat somewhere in their house, either in a drawer or worse still, wasting away in a box in the attic in too bad a condition to put on display. |
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| Promote Your Photography (Part 2) |
| Facebook is arguably the most famous of the big social networking sites. A few years ago, Facebook created business pages that you could keep separate from your personal profile – although a business page as such, it still allows you to communicate with people on a more personal level though. |
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| Promote Your Photography (Part 1) |
| As a photographer, one of the most important things that we all need are clients, or at least a way of getting our work out into the public domain. Gone are the days when you could place an advert in the local newspaper or in a shop window advertising your services. Times have changed immeasurably and everything has migrated to online solutions. |
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| Turn Your iPhone Into A DSLR |
| There are billions of camera phone images shared online across the numerous social networking sites that have worked their way into our lives. Another way of saying that would be: there are billions of really bad camera phone images shared online across the numerous social networking sites that have worked their way into our lives. |
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| Sigma DP2 Merrill - Biggest Sensor In Its Smallest Body |
| While most photographers think of Sigma as a lens maker, the company makes some genuinely unique cameras. Case in point: the Sigma DP2 Merrill ($1000, street), a compact camera with a fixed 45mm – equivalent (30mm actual) f/2.8 lens and 46MP (15.3MP for each color channel) Foveon X3 imaging sensor. |
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| Cameras Just Out – December 2012 |
| Panasonic’s Lumix GH2 is prized by videographers, not least for a firmware hack that boosted ISO performance and HD video quality with an absurdly high bit rate. So with the GH3, its latest flagship interchangeable lens compact, Panasonic baked the video boost into the stock firmware – providing an extended ISO of 25,600 (12,800 in the normal range) and 1920 x 1080p video bit rates up to 720Mbps. |
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