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When you own an older home, it's common for aging insulation, warped windowsills, and other pesky problems to let the cool or hot air out and drive the energy bill up. To help homeowners locate these weak spots (and for many other uses), Mu Optics created a low-cost thermal imaging camera that allows users to see the world according to temperature -- anywhere in the range of -86 to 285 degrees Fahrenheit.

The thermal imaging device features USB charging and battery life of more than 3 hours (an hour for video recording). The optics offer 160x120 resolution -- which may sound very small, but most thermal cameras deliver a similar view -- for pictures and video up to 30 frames per second.

Five live viewing modes enable the owner to see things such as temperature information for a specific area, a thermal and regular camera view blend, and other combinations. Check out some of the neat thermal videos produced by the camera on Vimeo.… Read more

Bitbuster's EasyPhotoImager can resize, convert, and add watermarks to images, singly or in batches, and create thumbnails. While it offers no Help file, it's relatively easy to use, with all its settings on the front page. If you've used image-editing tools before, we doubt you'll have any trouble figuring it out. But true beginners may want to look for something simpler or with more support. EasyPhotoImager is compatible with Windows XP to 8. Recent updates include drag-and-drop capability, real-time preview, improved image resizing, and Windows Explorer-style folder navigation.

EasyPhotoImager's user interface opens on the Settings … Read more

Canon has developed a video sensor that can capture images illuminated only by a glowing incense stick or the light of a crescent moon.

The sensor gathers light by using extremely large pixels -- 7.5 times the surface area of those in the 18MP EOS-1D X professional SLR, whose 35mm full-frame sensor is the same size. In conjunction with that approach, "the sensor's pixels and readout circuitry employ new technologies that reduce noise, which tends to increase as pixel size increases," Canon said in its announcement. Check the link to watch Canon's sample video.

Canon … Read more

It's taken the company a lot longer than I'd expected, but Adobe has finally rolled out a version of its tablet-based Photoshop Touch for even smaller screens, Photoshop Touch for phone.

The most surprising aspect is that it's a feature-identical version of the tablet software; I'm not sure we need such a complete editor on anything even as big as a Galaxy S3. But if you have a yen to composite up to 16 layers (or 3 layers at the maximum file size of 12 megapixels), you'll be able to do so on any Android (… Read more

Researchers from the Institute of Computer Graphics at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, have developed a way to capture images on a flexible sheet of plastic. Unlike traditional image sensors that use circuits and other internal structures to develop an image, this new solution is fully transparent.

This is no ordinary sheet of plastic though. The sensor is a polymer film (luminescent concentrator) containing a multitude of fluorescent particles that absorb a specific wavelength of light. It then transmits this light at a longer wavelength to optical sensors at the side of the sheet, which captures it all, reconstructing … Read more

Apple's Preview program in OS X is a very convenient tool for quickly editing image and PDF files. It supports a number of options for annotating images and adjusting colors, cropping, and otherwise editing them, it can also be used to quickly convert an image to another format.

Preview supports reading most common image format types, and likewise allows you to export them to these same types, so even if Preview is not set to be your default program for handling images, you can still use it to quickly make an image conversion.

To do this, right-click the image … Read more

PicsArt Photo Studio is a popular, feature-rich photo editor that was formerly for Android phones only, but it's now available for iPhone.

There are several apps that let you add effects and edit your photos, but PicsArt Photo Studio does those things and quite a lot more. In fact this app has so many features it can get a little overwhelming -- particularly with the number of interface elements on the screen.

Like most photo effects apps, you can snap a new picture or pull one from your photo library. With an image onscreen, you can use the buttons … Read more

Google, which controls both ends of the Internet connection for a significant fraction of online activity, has a lot of power over the Internet. A little image-format tweak to one of its Web sites shows just how much.

Few others have expressed much enthusiasm for its WebP image format, an offshoot of the WebM project to promote a royalty-free video codec. Google asserts that its smaller file sizes would unburden networks and help Web pages load faster, but as Mozilla likes to point out when grappling with such matters, adding a new format to the Web means adding a requirement … Read more

With the release of its raw compatibility update 4.04, Apple software now can handle raw-format photos from two hot new cameras, the Nikon D5200 SLR and the high-end compact Sony RX1.

The D5200 is a relatively inexpensive SLR whose 24-megapixel sensor looks to have promisingly high performance -- the top rating for an APS-C-sized sensor, according to DxO Labs' DxOMark test results. The $2,800 RX1 has an even larger full-frame sensor, also with a 24-megapixel resolution, but its design uses a fixed 35mm lens.

Also supported in the Apple update is support for raw photos from Pentax's … Read more