In an affidavit to the court Marc Weinsweig, appointed as Chief Restructuring Office and COO as part of the Chapter 11 process, describes his actions as be aimed at ‘maintaining the day-to-day operations of the company’s business with minimal disruption’ in what he characterizes as ‘daunting economic times.’

Court papers suggest that Ritz Cameras owes over $40 million to its two largest creditors: Nikon Inc. and Canon USA, with a further $8.4 million owed to Fujifilm USA, a subsidiary of which owns around a third of the company. To put the $26.6 million owed to Nikon Inc. into perspective, it would represent somewhere in the region of 20% of Nikon Inc’s expected annual operating income.

Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code provides companies with protection from their creditors while they attempt to restructure. However, US retailer Circuit City, which filed for bankruptcy protection in November 2008 announced the closure of all its stores and the liquidation of its assets on January 16th.

Image Viewers

Here some popular image viewers, that support DNG file format.

FastPictureViewer Pro 1.0

Developer: Axel Rietschin
Official site: www.fastpictureviewer.com
OS Support: Windows XP/Vista

• DNG: Reads
• DNG Metadata: Reads, Edits (only in XMP files)

Picasa 3

Developer: Google
Official site: picasa.google.com
OS Support: Windows XP/Vista, Linux

• DNG: reads, edits (partially), converts (Jpeg)

Picture Information Extractor 4.80D

Developer: Picmeta Systems
Official site: www.picmeta.com
OS Support: Windows 95/98/XP/Vista

• DNG: reads
• DNG Metadata: reads, edits (some)

Breeze Browser

Developer: Breeze Systems
Official site: www.breezesys.com
OS Support: Windows 98/XP/Vista

• DNG: reads
• DNG Metadata: reads, edits

Support for the following cameras have been added in this update:

• Canon 1000D (Digital Rebel XS/EOS Kiss F)
• Canon 50D
• Fuji FinePix IS Pro
• Kodak  EasyShare Kodak Z1015 IS
• Leaf AFi II 6
• Leaf AFi II 7
• Leaf Aptus II 6
• Leaf Aptus II 7
• Nikon D700
• Nikon D90
• Nikon Coolpix P6000
• Olympus SP-565 UZ
• Pentax K2000 (K-m)
• Sigma DP1
• Sony A900

Here are just some of them:

Online help

Hugin now has comprehensive help documentation for the entire user interface, the manual now includes glossary items explaining many panorama stitching and related photography concepts.

Languages

New translations include Slovak, Korean, Bulgarian and Spanish. This means that hugin is now usable with a total of twenty languages.

New Assistant panel

Creating simple panoramas is much easier, hugin now starts showing an Assistant with a simple 1-2-3 approach for loading images, aligning and creating the final output.

The Assistant will estimate lens and camera parameters, then pick a suitable output projection and size, advanced options are still available for manual adjustment.

Photometric model

Previous versions of hugin and panotools had basic support for correcting vignetting and exposure differences between photos.

This has been completely overhauled, hugin now internally uses the EMoR model for representing exposure photometrically. This means that the camera response curve, vignetting, colour balance and exposure can now be optimised in much the same way as geometrical properties such as position and lens distortion.

The result is that blending between photos is better than ever before.

HDR

Previously hugin supported High Dynamic Range imaging solely by allowing stitching of HDR floating-point TIFF photos – These images themselves had to be created in another tool.

Now, thanks to the internal photometric model, hugin can now create HDR output from normal exposure bracketed photos. The photos don’t have to be perfectly-aligned, they don’t even need to be nearly-aligned or have consistent exposure differences – The hugin optimiser will sort all this stuff out, and the stitcher will create OpenEXR or TIFF HDR output files for later tonemapping or use as lightprobes.

Exposure blending

HDR and tonemapping isn’t for everybody, enfuse introduced exposure blending to the world, and hugin supports aligning and fusing bracketed stacks of photos, perfectly, all as part of the stitching process.

So now with hugin-0.7.0 and enblend-3.2 you can create realistic, photographic panoramas that have no over-exposed or under-exposed areas.

Makefile stitching

hugin-0.7.0 introduces a new stitching back-end: previously the various stitching tools were executed directly by the GUI, now all the commands required to generate the output are written to a Makefile which is then processed independently of hugin itself.

Aside from easier debugging and customisation; this background stitching allows you to get on with creating a new project while waiting for the previous job to finish – Stitching can also be deferred or shifted to another machine, even ‘headless’ servers can now be used.

Projections

Hugin has always had the ability to save panoramas using simulated normal and fisheye lenses, or 360 degree cylindrical and spherical projections.

Now a whole series of alternative cartographic mappings are available, of particular interest are the ‘conformal’ stereographic and Mercator projections which can be used to show extremely large angles of view with no local distortion.

Project templates

Hugin project files can now be used as templates for new panorama projects. This is useful if you take a lot of panoramas with exactly the same camera positions.

Other improvements

There’s a whole lot of other new stuff in this release: numbering in the control-point editor, straight-line control-points, numeric transform, clicking to rotate the preview, a straighten button, cropping of the output and probably more.

I can’t tell you anything other than Adobe CS4 will be the largest product launch in Adobe’s history. You can signup to watch a special web broadcast and be among the first to see what’s on offer.

• Website: Adobe CS4 Web Broadcast

Preparing photos for print can be tedious, often requiring calculations involving dpi, aspect ratio, and cropping sizes. New features in Blow Up 2 are designed to take the complication out of this process.

Over 100 presets for common output sizes are available that make cropping and resizing easy to do in one step. When you load a preset, Blow Up 2 makes a guess about where to crop the image using the Auto Crop feature. The Auto Rotate feature adapts the preset to match your photo’s orientation. Blow Up even applies the proper amount of output sharpening based on the paper type you choose.

Technology speed-up

Blow Up takes advantage of multi-processor and multi-core systems. The more processors/cores, the faster it runs. Even with just a plain old single processor, Blow Up 2 runs faster than Blow Up 1.

Nearly every color space is supported, including Grayscale, Duotone, RGB, CMYK, and Lab. Most image resizing software only supports RGB color space and you have to pay an extra $140 to get CMYK support from our main competitor. All bit depths are supported, including 16-bits/channel (for Raw images) and 32-bits/channel (for HDR images).

Blow Up is the first major Photoshop plug-in that will work in the upcoming Windows 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4.

Pricing and Availability

Blow Up 2 sells for $249 USD with an upgrade price of $99 USD for registered users of Blow Up 1. Online or physical delivery is available through the Alien Skin website at www.alienskin.com. A real live human (imagine that!) can take orders or answer questions at 888-921-SKIN (7546). Blow Up 2 is also available worldwide through stores, catalogs, and resellers. Free upgrades are available to purchasers of Blow Up 1 who purchased after July 26, 2008.

PRESS SUMMARY

New Photoshop.com Membership Boosts Capabilities of Desktop Experience

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 7 software with new Photoshop.com membership, a milestone release of the No. 1 selling consumer photo-editing software*. Available for Windows®, Photoshop Elements 7 makes it quick and easy to organize, edit, create and share amazing photos with others by leveraging the editing power of Photoshop software, the professional standard for image editing. For the first time, Photoshop Elements 7 customers will have the option to sign-up for one year of membership on Photoshop.com, extending the capabilities of the software by providing helpful templates and creative tutorials delivered on a regular basis. Other benefits include: automatic online backup and storage of photos and videos, access to photos and videos from virtually anywhere, and interactive options to share memories with great impact.

In addition, Adobe today announced Adobe Premiere® Elements 7 software, a complete video-editing solution (see separate press release). Available separately or together in a single retail bundle package, Adobe Photoshop Elements & Adobe Premiere Elements bundle give photo and video enthusiasts everything they need for a complete digital imaging experience.

“With Photoshop Elements our ultimate goal is to give people the ability to tell personal and high-impact stories with their photos,” said Doug Mack, vice president and general manager of Consumer and Hosted Solutions at Adobe. “We strike a balance between editing punch and ease, so a user doesn’t have to be a pro to produce impressive results. The new Photoshop.com membership takes Photoshop Elements to the next level – extending beyond the desktop – by giving our customers access to their photos and videos from virtually anywhere, providing secure backup, delivering inspiration to fuel creativity and enabling users to keep the photos and creations they share fresh and exciting.”

Create Picture-perfect Photos with Powerful yet Intuitive Editing Tricks
Photoshop Elements makes it easy to tell amazing stories through memorable photos. The new Scene Cleaner, based on Adobe’s innovative Photomerge® technology, creates the ideal photo by letting users simply brush away unwanted subjects, such as tourists in a vacation shot who may be impacting the main subject of the photo. The new Smart Brush helps users apply incredible effects to a specific area of a photo with a single stroke, making it a snap to improve lighting and add rich textures with access to more than fifty sophisticated effects. Common editing tasks, such as whitening teeth or brightening blue skies, are a breeze to fix with the one-step Quick Fix tools. Surfaces can be softened while retaining edges and details crisp with a new filter ideal for portrait shots. Also, a new selection of Online Albums, based on Adobe Flash® technology, offers users a richer interactive experience.

New Membership on Photoshop.com Inspires Users and Keeps Them Connected
Users can push their creativity even further with Photoshop.com membership, offered in two levels, Basic1 and Plus2. For those who want fresh, creative project ideas delivered straight to the desktop, the option to purchase an annual Photoshop.com Plus membership guarantees inspiration will come on a regular basis in the form of new tutorials, seasonal artwork, themed templates and more. In addition, Photoshop.com Plus membership provides 20GB of storage – enough for 15,000 photos, four hours of DVD-quality videos or a combination of both. Online back-up keeps memories safe from computer failure or natural disaster, with access from anywhere, via a personal account linked to the software. Photoshop.com Basic membership can be experienced for free, providing 5GB of storage, access to photos and videos virtually anywhere and online photo sharing in a fun interactive environment.

Photoshop.com members also will be able to upload photos directly from a mobile phone. The addition of Photoshop.com Mobile beta, a rich Adobe Flash® based mobile application, offers camera phone users the easiest way to upload, share and access photos using their Photoshop.com account. Photoshop.com Mobile runs in the background and allows consumers to take photos, send messages and run other applications while pictures are being uploaded to their Photoshop.com account. To learn more about Photoshop.com Mobile and for a list of supported phones, visit http://www.adobe.com/products/pscom/mobile/ .

Pricing and Availability

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Adobe Premiere Elements 7 for Windows will be available in local retail outlets such as Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco (Photoshop Elements 7 only), Office Depot, Office Max and Staples in October 2008. Consumers can pre-order the products at www.adobe.com, www.amazon.com, www.bestbuy.com and www.costco.com. The products will be available separately for US$99.99. Photoshop Elements 7 & Premiere Elements 7 bundle also will be available for US$149.99.

Photoshop.com Plus membership will be available for purchase from within the products for US$49.99 and Basic membership can be experienced for free. Information about other language versions, as well as pricing, upgrade and support policies for other countries is available at www.adobe.com/gophotoshopelements. Photoshop.com membership is available in the U.S. only.