Digital Camera Exposes Original Paintings

Digital cameras have come a long way in the past ten years. The quality of the pictures continue to improve. The number of megapixels continues to rise. But I read about a digital camera today that is truly mind-blowing. It shoots at 240 megapixels.

This camera was specifically developed to photograph "Old Master" paintings. You can read about how it was used to restore one of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings. The detail was so good that you can actually distinguish da Vinci's fingerprint in the paint!

What is truly cool about this is that the technology allows the painting to be virtually restored to how it originally looked. Colors that have been hidden for years will suddenly emerge. Dirt creating a haze can be removed and none of this poses any danger to the original painting.

You can read even more if you go to Lumiere Technology's Web site. For example, there is a press release describing the virtual cleaning of the Mona Lisa. If you go to the home page of the site, there is a twelve minute movie showing how the Mona Lisa was photographed and how the technology works. All in all, it is just fascinating. My only wish is that there was a way to download some of the restored, high resolution images. I'm sure that will be possible some day. Then we can all have some of the finest paintings ever created on our own walls.

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Flaws with RAW Files

If you've been reading our CorelDRAW Unleashed magazine over the past few issues, you've seen that we've had a running series discussing the usage of RAW files from your digital camera. There is no doubt that they give you the highest quality images.

The downside is that the camera makers have created so many different flavors of RAW that it can be difficult to have a single piece of software that can work with all flavors of RAW. Recently there was a post in the coreldraw.com discussion forums complaining that Corel PHOTO-PAINT X4 didn't support the RAW from a fairly new digital SLR model. The poster was correct, it was not supported. Given that it was a popular model, there is no doubt Corel will add support with the first service pack for CorelDRAW X4.

You might think that Corel just isn't keeping up with RAW. So what if a company with what seems to be an unlimited supply of money didn't support current RAW formats? That's exactly the case with Google's Picasa software as Stephen Shankland recently described in his blog.

The real problem is that camera manufacturers need to standardize on a RAW format. Even if each manufacturer would agree to a single format that worked on all of their models, the processing of the files would be much simpler. But when every new camera, and even every new firmware version, brings a new format; it is just impossible for software developers to keep up.

Adobe tried to propose a standard with its Digital Negative (DNR) format, but it has not gained any steam at all. We can only hope that some sanity appears soon and somehow the camera manufacturers simplify things.

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