Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 freed photographers to work in RAW without laboring in Photoshop, but its major drawback was that it limited you to global fixes. Not anymore. The biggest improvement in Lightroom 2 ($299/$199 as an upgrade from 1) is the local adjustment brush for working on one area of your photo at a time. This time, keywording and collecting are easier, a new gradient tool mimics a graduated filter, and sharpening is more useful — now you can sharpen on export, not just when you print. As with Camera RAW, Adobe will no longer be adding new cameras to Lightroom 1, so if you get a new camera, you’ll have to buy this upgrade right away.

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Panasonic HDC-HS100 : The camcorder market is moving swiftly to high definition. Superior image quality is now a must, and many consumers are also demanding higher-level features – such as image-creating capabilities that are a rank above the conventional. For these users Panasonic introduces a new full-HD 3MOS model – the Panasonic HDC-HS100 – with manual functions that give users the power to create dramatic, artistic images. The new Panasonic HS100 also features the world’s first 3MOS system, newly developed by Panasonic based on 3CCD technology that is renowned for excellent colour reproduction. With its expanded light-receiving areas, the MOS sensor is also significantly improves image quality, even in low lighting.

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Tightrope show : A tightrope walker, wearing a yellow jersey, performs during the 143 km twenty-first and last stage of the 2008 Tour de France cycling race run between Etampes and Paris Champs-Elysees. Spain’s Carlos Sastre won the race.

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Kyocera, the pioneer of the Contax and Yashica digital cameras that got out of the digital camera business in 2005, has developed a new fine ceramic with a color that closely resembles 18-karat gold. The new material is a beautiful reflection of development and manufacturing technologies that Kyocera has accumulated in its five decades of Research & Development in fine ceramics. Kyocera is still an active player in the digital camera segment, but has shifted its focus to the Mobile Phone and Automotive digital camera business…

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On the 50th anniversary of NASA’s founding, a small photo tribute to the unsung, furry pioneers who journeyed into orbit, paving the way for human spaceflight.

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