The tone curve is one of the ways that Adobe Lightroom offers to adjust an image. It's basically a "brightness map" that normally indicates "dim parts of the image are shown as black, bright parts are show as white, and things in between are shown proportionally somewhere along the line between the two". The screenshot below highlights Lightroom's default tone curve, which is mostly a straight line (that is, "proportional") from dark to bright...

The idea of a tone curve is general to photo-editing applications; if you're not sure of what one is, you might take a look at this [...]

Adobe has released a second free beta for Lightroom 3 ("Lightroom 3 Beta 2" -- Lr3b2) with a lot of bug fixes and speed improvements, and a few new goodies not found in Lr2 or the first Lightroom 3 beta, including:

Basic video-file support.

Initial tethered capture support for recent Nikon and Canon SLRs.

New rendering engine, new sharpening, new grain, new noise reduction, new tone-curve control, etc. I used the new point-curve tone control to create the freaky rendition above, of a photo from February's ski trip with Anthony.

Unofficial support for Chinese (two flavors), Dutch, French, German, Italian, [...]

When I started to take photography somewhat seriously (circa January 2006 when I got a Nikon D200), a long-time friend who happened to work at Apple extolled the virtues of Apple Aperture, which had just been released. It was, he said, still a bit buggy, but even so was so much better than working with files one by one in Photoshop. He had a hard time constraining his excitement of the new workflow paradigm, even if the current implementation still needed the kinks worked out.

I wasn't sold on the whole new-paradigm idea, but when Apple announced their new line [...]

Apple has just released the first major upgrade in a long time to Aperture, its photo-workflow application that fights against Adobe Lightroom for market share in the pro / advanced-amateur photographer market. This is great news if you're into photography, even if, like me, you've never used Aperture.

The list of features in Aperture 3.0 shares many things with what Lightroom already has, but includes plenty that Lightroom doesn't have (geoencoding, video support, and face recognition are a few of the headline features, but it's actually in the small details that one often finds salve to a workflow irritation).

People [...]

Having mostly conquered the ability to drive in snow on our recent trip to snowy Toyama Prefecture, four hours' drive north of Kyoto, I thought to see whether I could enhance my ability to take photographs in the snow. At our first big stop in the snow, the historic Gokayama Village, while Anthony played on a slight hill covered with a lot of snow, I tried different shutter speeds so that I could inspect the effect they had in capturing the moving snow.

The results are not too useful in an absolute basis because snow falls at different speeds, ranging [...]