Worth 1000 Words : Geotagging and Color Calibration Tools
There is so much to love about cameras and photography. Nearly everyone these days carries some sort of camera around with them, even if it’s just a camera phone. Some of us invest lots of time and money in photography equipment, and some are quite content with a point-and-shoot to capture the special moments in life. Admittedly, most of us here at Truly Obscure fall into the former category, as we’ve been known to spend hours and hours playing with cameras and photos. Most cameras though still can use improvements, so we decided to check out some of the cool things to make life beyond the shutter click a bit more interesting. We put on our research hats for both the X-Rite ColorMunki and the PhotoTrackr, and learned a good deal about color and printing, as well as geo-tagging photos.
Color is a lot like sound, in that there is a lot more to it than meets the eye. Professional photographers and designers both spend a lot of time making sure they’re using equipment that has excellent color, and that it’s well calibrated. We’ve seen other hardware and software available to calibrate computer monitors and photo printers. The X-Rite ColorMunki is designed to do both, and thankfully for us it’s designed to do it in a way that makes a very complicated process much more manageable. The goal is to make sure that the color that you see when you take a photo is the same from your camera to your monitor to your printer (or projector). So what exactly is it?
The ColorMunki suite is essentially a spectrophotometer calibration device that does all of your device profiling in a compact, self-contained unit. Basically, what that means is that this gadget takes two separate readings, one of emissive color, which is the color that comes from your monitor; and one of reflective color, which is the color that’s on printed paper, or any other tactile source of color. Those readings combined create a cohesive color profile. A set of ICC (International Color Consortium) profiles are created that are used by your operating system as well as graphics and design applications like Photoshop. These profiles are what ultimately make it possible to have consistency between what you see and what you get. Colormunki is also software: the color palettes in both Design and Create include Pantone Goe, PMS and Fabric and Home sets.
Having accurate color between your picture source and the final product created, whether it’s a printed photo or a burned DVD, is essential for anyone operating on a semi-professional level or greater. We loved the DigitalPouch application, which allows you to share images and their calibration information with others, even if they don’t have ColorMunki installed on their computer. That way you don’t have to worry that your hard work will get lost in translation, as it were.
Previously, having all of the equipment and software necessary to calibrate your hardware was prohibitively expensive. Photographers and designers could easily spend $1500 or more to have a fully functional setup. At around $350, ColorMunki has brought the cost of professional-caliber design and photography tools into a price range that makes it possible for even causal users to participate.
Switching tracks slightly now, we’re going to look at the PhotoTrackr Mini from GiSTEQ. This device is roughly the size of a Bic lighter, and makes it possible to tag any photo you take within a few seconds and a few feet of where you are at the time. Digital cameras have the ability to stamp a photo with the date and time, and the PhotoTrackr utilizes a GPS technology that creates a record of your location coordinates and the time. The PhotoTrackr software merges the two sets of information and creates a single geotag for your photo. Of course just having that information is nice and all, but let’s face it, what we all really want to do is show anyone who will take the time to look how cool our vacation was, and how great our photo skills are. That’s why we love that PhotoTrackr is integrated with Flickr, locr, Picassa Web Albums and SmugMug, and also has Google Earth support. It doesn’t matter if you use a PC or a Mac, Phototrackr is compatible with both, and it works with every single digital camera out there. RAW format is supported as an optional upgrade.
The PhotoTrackr uses a rechargeable lithium ion battery. We found that ours held a charge for quite some time, only needing to be charged once a week or so. GiSTEQ says that it is likely to hold a charge for 17 hours of continuous use we have no reason to believe that isn’t accurate. Of course, we were also curious about accuracy- after several weeks of use, we found it to be quite accurate, traveling among recognizable landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and the TransAmerica Building along with random street corners. You have to remember to take it with you and to use it when you take photos- a bit of a pain- since the timestamps are what it uses to synchronized the information. That’s really the only catch though.
Overall it’s a really fun way to keep track of vacations, or even for more practical things like looking at apartments and houses. To think, you very own slice of the 21st century can be yours for only $70! Look for the PhotoTrackr directly on their website or through Amazon.
