Nikon announced their new flagship SLR, the Nikon D4, to much anticipation made long unfulfilled by last year's tragedies (Japan earthquake, Thailand flooding). I would, of course, love one, but with a price in Japan close to US$8,000 and Santa not scheduled for another 11.5 months, it looks doubtful.

Anyway, I'm in the process of reading the D4 press release and am left in wonder by the ultra thick spread of marketing fluff that I don't recall in earlier Nikon releases. For example, talking about the low-light ability, they say:

which is just fine -- the use of phrases like [...]
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Rarely does a photo take my breath away, but this rendition by Paul Barr does it every time I come across it. I don't know what it is about it, but if you'll excuse the pun, I'm really drawn to it.

Paul recently got an iPhone 4s, and to complement its camera he loaded a few photo-processing apps, and spent some time over coffee futzing with the apps to get a feel for them. He ended up with a jumbled mix of results, almost all of which are interesting (though one really creeps me out), but the one above really [...]

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Adobe has just released Lightroom 3.6, a free upgrade for Lightroom 3.x users, which I mentioned the other day as having new camera-calibration profiles. In addition to assorted bug fixes, it also has new lens-correction profiles for more than 35 new lenses, and support for a bunch of new cameras:

Canon Powershot S100 Fuji FinePix X10 Leica V-LUX3 Nikon 1 J Nikon 1 V1 Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1 Ricoh GR Digital IV Samsung NX5 Samsung NX2020 Sony NEX-7

Details and download links available on the announcement at Adobe's Lightroom Journal blog.

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This is a followup to April's "Important Note for Nikon D3/D700/D300 Shooters Who Use Lightroom or Photoshop" post about camera-calibration profiles for Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw).

It seems that the Lr3.6 beta that Adobe recently put out includes a new version ("Camera Standard v4") for the Nikon D3, D700, and D300 that has been improved yet again. You can't blindly change from v3 to v4 because v3 is intended to be used with -0.5EV of exposure compensation in Lightroom, while v4 somehow gets around that. (I don't recall exactly why v3 required the exposure compensation, but I remember understanding [...]
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Not really, at least not completely.

A couple of months ago in "Saga of Frustration: Developing (and Abandoning) a Lightroom Plugin for 500px" I vented about my horrible experience with the folks over at 500px.com, and said that I would not be developing a plugin for their service (as I have for many photo-hosting services) until they got their act together. A lively discussion followed here on my blog and on Google+.

I noticed today that they finally released their long-promised plugin and I took a look. It seems that they use a bunch of my code under the hood, [...]
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